The Boundless Love of God: The Sixteenth Sunday After Trinity (September 15, 2024)

For this cause I bow my knees unto the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ that Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith; that ye, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all saints what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and heaight; and to know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge, that ye might be filled with all the fulness of God.

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be alway acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, our Strength and our Redeemer. Amen.

God is love. That’s one of the most profound truths ever expressed. But we can gravitate towards two errors when we talk about the love of God. On the one hand, we can think of his love as competing against the various divine attributes: God might be love sometimes, but he is also angry, judgemental, or even cruel other times. On the other hand, we can speak of God’s love out of pure sentimentality, lacking specificity. God’s love becomes synonymous with warm fuzzy feelings, but ultimately lacks substance. Today, our readings pull back the curtains and reveals that God’s love is an essential part of his nature; it’s not in competititon with divine attributes, whatever we assert about God, it must be filtered through the fact that he is love. But this is not a helpfulessly vague assertion; God’s love is more than sentimentality; it’s a person, and that person, Jesus Christ, demonstrated God’s love for us by going all the way to the Cross for us and our salvation. Therefore, we should conclude that God’s love cannot be contained; it’s boundless.

When you read the Old Testament, the nation of Israel seems to constantly disobey God’s commands. God tells them not worship idols, and sure enough, they go an worship idols. God says not to intermarry with the Canaanites, and sure enough, they go and intermarry with the Canaanites. God says to care for the poor and vulnerable, and sure enough, they go and exploit the poor and vulnerable. Isaiah 12 most likely takes place before the Israelites were invaded by the Assyrians and picks up where God is angry with Israel because of their disobedience. Now, I do think we need to understand that God’s anger doesn’t denote a change in God because the divine nature cannot change; rather, when we talk about God’s anger, we’re talking about our posture towards him. But in this passage, the prophet anticipates a day when God’s anger will be turned away; and why? It doesn’t seem as though Israel does anything; rather, divine initiative seems to heal whatever has gone wrong with Israel. And we should point out that it’s not just that God removes his anger and punishment from Israel so that they slide into a state of neutrality; no, he lets them draw from the water of salvation, and even more, the Holy One of Israel will dwell among them. Now we can’t know exactly how clearly Isaiah saw the future; but, it does seem clear hear that this can be about no one else other than Jesus Christ.

And so the same divine compassion that was on display towards Israel in the Old Testament reading is shown in our Gospel reading this morning where our Lord deals with the widow of Nain. Fr. David pointed this out to me this week, and I think it bears repeating. Our Lord performs three resurrections besides his own: first, there’s the young girl, the daughter of Jairus, who is raised shortly after her death; second, there’s the resurrection of the man from Nain who is being carried to his grave through the city gates; and finally, there’s Lazarus who is in the tomb for so long that “he stinketh.” In each case, we’re shown that Jesus has power over death. And of course that Jesus is moved to compassion here as he sees the widow and her only son is no surprise because he knows his own mother who was also a widow is about to loser her only Son as a sword pierces her soul. And so the Most HIgh of Israel, seeing this widown ad her son, touches the bier and hte man is raised again and dleivered to his Mother. This foreshadows the divine power at work in the resurrection of Jesus, heralding the fact that there is a love stronger than death.

“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” Indeed, for St. Paul in our Epistle reading this morning, one goal of a Christian who has Christ dwelling in their heart through the Holy SPirit is to understand the breadth, length, depth, and height of God’s love. Really, this isn/t an assignment or a task so much as a process of going further up and further into the inexhaustible love of God. Love is stronger than death because God is stronger than death as he’s demonstrated in the Resurrection. And the love that he pours out becomes active in us and accomplishes “exceeing abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to hte power that worketh in us.” God’s love is participatory. We are loved into becoming a people who love.

The same love that defeated death is the same love you experience at the Altar and that is working in you this morning. At baptism, death was defeated as you were made regenerate to live for God. In your ongoing sanctification, God’s love is transforming you into who you’re supposed to be. And one day, ath te final judgment, we can have faith that God’s love will seal our final salvation. And so what does love demand of us? That we love the Lord our God with all our heart, and with all our soul, and with all our mind; and that we love of our neighbors as ourselves.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.