HOW TO CONNECT WITH GOD

Dr. Richard J. Henderson May 14, 2006

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John 15:1-8
1 John 4:7-21

Introduction

Did you read the story in the paper recently about the wife of the man who was gunned down at the Wixom Ford plant? It's hard to believe it's been ten years since that man went into the plant and began shooting wildly. Her husband was killed in that gunfire. He was an active man, a dynamic father, and one day he is shot - gone in an instant. We can only imagine the heartache the family went through.

The story in the paper was about how she had gotten to the place where she could forgive the man who killed her husband.

She and her husband were very active members of Milford Presbyterian Church. After his death she eventually went to the University of Michigan and got her Masters in Social Work. Now she counsels people who are grieving at her church and in the community. She helps other people heal. Sometimes she's able to help other people forgive as she has.

It takes a lot of love to forgive something that awful - something as senseless as that killing. But the closer we are to love, the closer we are to God.

I

This passage from 1 John is one of the most fascinating in the Bible. It says God is love, and, of course, God is love and a lot more. But if you're a pilgrim trying to find your way, there is no better place to start than here. If you doubt, if you have questions about whether God exists, try being more compassionate than you have ever been before - odds are you'll begin to sense God in your life.

We don't have to have a complex theology of the Christian faith to be a good Christian - we do need to love. 1 John says if you love, God is living in you whether you know it or not. "If we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us."

II

The flip side of that is also true. Those who don't love find themselves furthest from God. The one who hates pulls away from God. The person who demands revenge not only continues to hurt himself, but also finds himself drawing back from God. The person who refuses to forgive continues to live in his pain, and feels an absence of God. When we refuse to be compassionate we turn away from God.

The definition of sin is separation from God. When we hate, when we demean other people, when we allow prejudice to harbor within us, we separate ourselves from the God of love. When we see people in need and we turn away, we turn away from God.

In the midst of all this preaching we need to remember that love, compassion, and forgiveness are not easy. I read recently of an Anglican priest in England who stepped down from her position because she could not forgive the London bombers who blew up the transit system killing more than fifty people, including her daughter.

The killing was a horrible act, and her pain must be unbearable. She did the honest thing in removing herself from her parish. I believe that knowing the Christian faith as she must, that one day she will be able to get to the place of forgiveness.

III

When we stand before God at the end of our days I believe God will not ask us to write an essay explaining the trinity (I certainly hope not!), but ask what we did with our lives. I don't think God is looking for the right answers, as much as God is looking for the right life: a person who cared about family and friends, about employees, about the people lined up in the soup kitchen, about the woman suffering with cancer.

Some are able to see evil and attack it with love. Jimmy Carter once said of Martin Luther King Jr.: "He was the man, more than any other of his generation, who gazed upon the great wall of segregation and saw that it could be destroyed by love."

Our love doesn't have to be dramatic. We don't have to take on some social evil and change the world forever. The love God cares about is also the small acts of kindness, the little sacrifices, the hour given here, the person cared for there. These are the small actions that define who we are.

I can still remember that in my senior year in high school my parents went out of their way to let me have the car. We only had one car so my parents would call friends for a ride if they were going to a group event. I'm sure that sometimes they didn't go out at all because I needed the car. Nobody ever said anything about this, but we all knew what was happening - and I remember it still.

Conclusion

Bob was a 56 year old priest and rector who was dying. He had served his parish faithfully for many years, calling on them in the hospital, counseling with them in his office and at their homes, sitting by their deathbeds, helping them say good-bye. Now he was dying.

At church one of the members brought in a quilt. She spread it out on the parish hall floor and each member of the church traced his or her handprint on that quilt in indelible marker. The members of the congregation waited in long lines for the honor of being able to trace their hand.

There were tiny prints of sleeping infants, large prints of grown adults, the handprints of gnarled great-grandparents, the strong hands of high school athletes. Some families traced their prints overlapping each other. In all, the hands made a pattern of the whole faith community.

The members then took the quilt to Bob's bed and gently laid it on him. As he lay there dying he received the laying on of hands of every member of the church he served.

The closer we are to love, the closer we are to God.

Amen.

©Richard J. Henderson 2006