“Just Love, Just Trust, Just God”
I love pizza! I love movies. We love to quilt! Love is a many splendored thing. We love our dogs and cats. We love our children and husbands and wives. We love our grandchildren and our parents and grandparents. We use it to describe many kinds of relationships truly marked by real affection and real connection, but that feel very different from one another. The word love means so many things that it has come to mean very little on a daily basis.

Last week was the traditional theme for the fourth Sunday in Advent—Love. The fourth candle is lit for love. And each Christian can say, however they believe it, that God sent Jesus because God loves us—and because God loves the world. Yet the love of which we speak on this final Sunday before Christmas means so much more than any of the loves that I’ve mentioned. It is the love of God for all the world. It is the love that inspired and encouraged Jesus’ life of mission and his willingness to live that mission until his inevitable death on the cross. Yet God didn’t just start loving through Jesus, God has loved the world since creation—and we have scriptural witness to reveal that to us.

God has loved men and women who obeyed God’s will for their lives. Many were men and women who were living examples of how God desire humanity to live. Yet God also loved men and women who lived lives that were often in defiance of God’s will for them . . . they were disobedient, disrespectful and downright naughty. But God’s love for them never wavered—God was angry and God disciplined, but God never stopped loving.

David led quite a life. He spent his youth warring against Saul. He proved his triumph by taking Saul’s wives and concubines. He took Saul’s daughter as his wife, though they had no feelings for one another. Despite his friendship with Saul’s son, Jonathan, he fought Saul and his family until Saul and his family were destroyed or under his power. He stole Bathsheba’s honor and her husband Uriah’s life. He then enjoyed in the peace that eventually filled his governance. David, in my opinion, didn’t merit much from God. He flaunted God’s blessing and the leading of God’s spirit. And though he was thrilled with his accomplishments and God’s actions in his life, he didn’t always understand how to live within God’s will.

And God continued to bless him according to biblical witness. In 2 Samuel, we read that David would not be allowed to build God a temple, but that God would bless David’s lineage with everlasting rule. It hardly seems right. Why and how has David earned this honor? I have no idea.

Yet God stayed in his life, blessing and accompanying him. God stayed with him despite his lack of merit. God loved him through it all and called him to account when necessary. “16Your house and your kingdom shall be made sure for ever before me; your throne shall be established for ever.”

God’s love is just. God doesn’t love because we earn it. God doesn’t stop loving us because we have defied God—God loves humanity by equal measure because it is God’s nature to love humanity. We are God’s very image in some nonphysical, maybe spiritual, definitely mysterious way. God has covenanted; God has eternally promised, it seems, to love us individually and as a whole forever. I say that because there is no other way of understanding God’s continued and continuing attempts to draw us into relationship from the beginning of time until all of our tomorrows.

The story of David exemplifies how much we often don’t deserve the love that God offers and how much God continues to love in spite of the lives we lead. We often imagine David to be the young gentle shepherd boy, caring for his flock; but the story of his life contains very little of the young shepherd and much more of the warrior, womanizer and emotionally immature king who misused his power. He may have been the leader that Israel needed at the time and he seemed to be God’s choice, but for the life of me, I can’t understand it.

If God’s love for each one of us can be seen in this light, we might begin to understand how God’s love is given before we deserve it and even if we don’t. God’s love exists in eternity. . . God’s love exists beyond understanding or logic.

Yet the story of David’s eternal lineage is told this morning to introduce Gabriel’s annunciation of the birth of Jesus . . . a story about a baby who became the man whose life, we have come to understand, was lived completely within God’s will for him. It introduces us to Luke’s description of Jesus’ mother. Mary was a young woman in the backwater village of Nazareth, in the backwater Roman district of Galilee. She was engaged to a man named Joseph, who we are told was of the family of David.

Before their official wedding feast, while their formal betrothal stood, Mary received the news that she would have a baby—a son who would be the Messiah that the people of Israel had awaited ever since the line of David had been corrupted by exile and almost disappeared from any hope of sovereign rule.

Her response to the word that Yahweh God would be their sovereign through the person of her son, according to Luke, provoked her to lift her voice in poetry—and possibly in song. Her words reveal hope, not for her own participation, but for the salvation of all people.
I'm bursting with God-news;
I'm dancing the song of my Savior God.
God took one good look at me, and look what happened—
I'm the most [blessed]* woman on earth!
What God has done will never be forgotten,
the God whose very name is holy, set apart from all others.
His mercy flows in wave after wave
on those who are in awe before him.
He bared his arm and showed his strength,
scattered the bluffing braggarts.
He knocked tyrants off their high horses,
pulled victims out of the mud.
The starving poor sat down to a banquet;
the callous rich were left out in the cold.
He embraced his chosen child, Israel;
he remembered and piled on the mercies, piled them high.
It's exactly what he promised,
beginning with Abraham and right up to now.
The love of God, revealed through the annunciation to Mary and fulfilled in the birth of Jesus Christ, is not about being soft and fluffy about love. It’s not so much about the swaddled infant in the manger whose birth we will celebrate this week—the love of God revealed in Mary’s song of celebration and triumph is just love. It is a love that makes all things equal. It is a love that says that ill-gotten gains, no matter how well justified will be taken and poverty, no matter how well rationalized will be eliminated. Israel—representative of all humanity—was to be the recipient of mercy and the bearer of that mercy into the entire world. The promise God made to all of Abraham’s descendents, physical, spiritual, and in all other ways, would to be made real.

Love, just love, is the agent that God uses to make real the promises that God has made. Love, just love, is the tool that God has chosen to create the world that God has envisioned for us all. Love, just love, is the person that God has given to rescue the world from the pit into which we often stumble and fall. Love, just love, is the redemption we need to see ourselves through the eyes with which God, who loves us, sees us each day and each moment.

Justice isn’t an easy thing for humanity to accomplish alone. We often get caught up in merit as the basis for justice. In my reading of scripture, God doesn’t always take merit into consideration when loving humanity. We often get justice and punishment all mixed up in our minds—justice devoid of love simply means vengeance. Justice does imply discipline—loving parents and others in authority must love to discipline others well—as the love of God characterizes God’s discipline.

Just love isn’t just love—it isn’t desire for particular material things or affection for some kind of object or person. It isn’t even always the affection we feel for those to whom we are attached, though that should be there, too. Just love is only possible when God guides us—just love is made available to us, for us and with us as we step out into the way of life that God offered Mary. Mary was given the opportunity to carry love into the world in the particular way that God chose for her. Let us listen to God’s call of annunciation in our own lives and carry love within us—giving birth to love, to just love, as we walk, talk and live in this community, in this time—and in this world, now and every more. Amen.