Margaret (5)

“Margaret,” I said, “I don’t pretend to know why you and your family are going through this, but I do know this, that Jesus loves you and wants to walk with you and Frank and the children through it. He wants you to know His love and how much He cares for you.”

“One of the images I have of the relationship Jesus wants with us is that of a loveseat, kind of like the sofa you’re on right now, but instead of being a long sofa it is an image of a small loveseat. Of course it’s called a loveseat because only two people can sit on it and when they sit on it they are close together - it’s the kind of furniture that lovers like to sit on because they’re close, they’re touching, they can look into each other’s eyes, they can feel each other’s skin, they can whiff each other’s scent, they can even feel each other’s breath. The man can put his arm around the woman and hold her close.

“This is want Jesus wants, He wants us to sit on the loveseat with Him, He wants us to be close to Him. He wants us to know how much He loves us, He wants us to allow Him to love us, to receive His love, and to love Him, to know Him.

“The Bible tells us that God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, God loves us. The Bible also tells us that the greatest commandment is that we are to love God with all that we are - so you see God wants a love relationship with us.

“But sadly there is another image that a lot of us have about God, I used to have it and in listening to you it looks like you’ve also had it - it’s an image of a ladder that we can never climb, at least not to the top to get to God. We climb a few rungs and we slip down, we climb a few more and we slip again. God is at the top of the ladder and it is as if He is saying, ‘You aren’t good enough, you don’t measure up, you will never measure up, you will never be accepted. Keep working, keep working, I am not pleased with you, keep working.’ Nothing we can do can ever please Him. It is like He has a big wooden spoon looking for us to mess up so He can hit us with the spoon.”

As I shared my thoughts Margaret kept eye contact with we, listening to every word; I could tell she was thinking, processing, considering.

“Margaret, Jesus died and rose again to bring you to Himself, He loves you, He wants you on the loveseat with Him, He wants to hold you, He wants you to know His love. He has His arms out for you and He is saying, ‘Come Margaret, sit down here next to Me and know My love.’ ”

I could tell Margaret was getting tired so I asked, “Can I pray before I go?” She said I could and after a short prayer I said goodbye to her and Fran, saying that I hoped to see her at ALPHA the following week and Margaret saying that she looked forward to it.

The image of a ladder and a loveseat came to me a couple of years before Margaret and Frank moved to Cat Mountain. I was preaching through the Gospel of Mark on Sunday mornings when I came to a passage that was one of the first that I’d learned as a new Christian, Mark 12:28 - 34, what we know as The Great Commandment, to love God with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength; with the second commandment being to love others as ourselves. I don’t know about other pastors or preachers, but with me often the most familiar passages are the most difficult for me to preach or teach because I need to step back and approach them anew and not assume that because I know them so well that I really know them. I wrestled with this passage - so simple on its surface at first glance, but what does it really mean?

It dawned on me that God wants a love relationship above all else, otherwise why is this the Great Commandment? Jesus didn’t say that the foremost commandment was to learn the Bible or the catechism, or preach or teach Sunday school, or learn all the doctrines of the church, or to dress a certain way or talk a certain way or any number of other things - He said the first and greatest commandment was to love God with all that we are...that means we are in relationship with Him, intimate relationship with Him.

For sure we can’t love God unless He first loves us, and the Good News is that He loves us; He gave Jesus for us, and Jesus gave Himself for us - to bring us from spiritual death to spiritual life, to wash away our sins and give us new life in Himself...to give us His very own life living within us.

The Sunday I preached on Mark 12:28 - 34 I moved the pulpit away from the platform and placed a loveseat on one end of the platform and a step ladder on the other end. As we as a congregation worked through the passage I moved from the ladder to the loveseat and back to the ladder and then to the loveseat, concluding the message on the loveseat. I knew that most of us lived on the ladder, thinking that we’d never measure up to God’s expectations and that therefore we lived in insecurity, not being sure of where we stood with God, not being sure if He really accepted us. Images can be liberating or they can be debilitating, many of us live with debilitating images, images that cripple us, sometimes crushing us.

We can’t do anything to earn God’s acceptance, this is why Jesus Christ came and died and rose for us...we just can’t do anything. We are incapable of loving Him or others in and of ourselves, but when we open ourselves to Him a miracle happens, yes it is a miracle, we are given new life and life goes from black and white and gray to Technicolor. The trouble with many Christians is that they climb down from the loveseat and climb back up on the ladder - no wonder people become disillusioned - it is like clipping the wings of a healthy eagle so it has to live with chickens, pecking feed from the ground. Then those who don’t yet know Jesus see professing Christians on a ladder, often a ladder of self-righteousness and judgmental attitudes, or a ladder of despair, and a ladder of contradictions, and they think, “I’m not getting on that, I’m out of here.”

I wanted to give Margaret an image that she could ponder, an image of hope, an image of life, an image of love...the image of a loveseat.

What about you? What is your image of your relationship with God in Christ? Are you on a ladder or a loveseat?