The love of God includes all and excludes none. So teaches Jesus.

[The Great Open Dance]

The unifying love of God strengthens us. God has chosen to be a “plenitude of longing love,” writes Sarah Coakley, who invites us into “full and ecstatic participation in the divine, Trinitarian life.” Life arises when we love God back and participate in the archetypal Love of which all worldly love is an expression. Paul prays that:

God, out of the riches of divine glory, will strengthen you inwardly with power through the working of the Spirit. May Christ dwell in your hearts through faith, so that you, being rooted and grounded in love, will be able to grasp fully the breadth, length, height, and depth of Christ’s love and, with all God’s holy ones, experience this love that surpasses all understanding, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. (Ephesians 3:16–19)

To be filled with the fullness of God is to live according to the intention of Abba, as exemplified by Jesus and inspired by Sophia. Together, the Trinitarian persons elevate us out of our selves into their selves.

Our parishioner Nicole Lawless had a very powerful experience of this elevation. Struggling as an adolescent with a potentially lethal illness, she received direct, concrete intervention from God:

I went through so much growing up—it was some tough stuff. I also had a severe eating disorder. In bed one night—I thought I would die—for real. I swear that God, Jesus, the Holy Ghost came to me—told me to get up and go eat a piece of bread. I was to think of myself as a separate person—step outside myself and see myself as a child and take care of her. This was God’s will for me. No one was going to take care of me, but it was an insult to God for me to disrespect myself. This is God’s child, I heard, I felt or sensed. I think of that a lot. It’s tough love, but it works for me whenever I want to give up. God says no—I made you—I want you to keep trying. And when you learn how your pain can help others, then there is hope, there are reasons to stay open to life’s challenges.

The psalms refer to God as “our refuge and strength, a very present help in times of trouble” (Psalm 46:1). For Nicole, this passage offers a concrete description of God’s activity, not an abstract idea about the divine nature. God will help us to do what we can’t.

Openness to divine assistance does not imply weakness. Jesus, the Child of God, had a very strong sense of self that he placed in service of others. The authorities feared him because he was strong, not because he was weak. Even more dangerously, he shared his strength with others. The powerful, sensing an increase in power among the powerless, responded with violence. They do the same today because tyrants always want us to have a weak sense of self. Unsure people are easily controlled, while confident people can disrupt the tyrants’ systems of privilege.

Healthy self-love is distinct from pathological self-love because healthy self-love opens us up to the other—divine or human—while pathological self-love closes us off. The true self wants to live and give life, and it does so by giving and receiving love: “We know that we have passed from death to life because we love our siblings; if we refuse to love we are still dead,” writes John (1 John 3:14).

Too often we fear the wrong death. We fear the death of the old self for the new because we are the old self, and we are attached to ourselves as we are. To avoid transformation, we restrict ourselves to a love that we can manage. We are like caterpillars that are perfectly comfortable with their familiar tree branch and resolve never to fly.

Who, beyond ourselves, does God invite us to love? An expert in the Jewish law poses this question to Jesus:

“Teacher, what must I do to inherit everlasting life?” Jesus answered, “What is written in the law? How do you read it?” The expert on the law replied: “You must love the Most High God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.” Jesus said, “You have answered correctly. Do this and you’ll live.” But the expert on the law, seeking self-justification, pressed Jesus further: “And just who is my neighbor?” Jesus replied, “There was a traveler going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, who fell prey to robbers. The traveler was beaten, stripped naked, and left halfdead. A priest happened to be going down the same road; the priest saw the traveler lying beside the road, but passed by on the other side. Likewise there was a Levite who came the same way; this one, too, saw the afflicted traveler and passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan, who was taking the same road, also came upon the traveler and, filled with compassion, approached the traveler and dressed the wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then the Samaritan put the wounded person on a donkey, went straight to an inn and there took care of the injured one. The next day the Samaritan took out two silver pieces and gave them to the innkeeper with the request, ‘Look after this person, and if there is any further expense, I’ll repay you on the way back.’ Which of these three, in your opinion, was the neighbor to the traveler who fell in with the robbers?” The answer came, “The one who showed compassion.” Jesus replied, “Then go and do the same.” (Luke 10:25–37)

The expert in the law wants Jesus to provide him with a categorical grid, a map of humanity that will tell him who is an ally and who is an enemy, who is in and who is out. Jesus, the preacher of the cosmic Creator who loves all their children, turns the question on its head. For the protagonist of the story, he selects a despised Samaritan, a resident of Judaea to whom many in his audience would have denied the status of neighbor, yet who acts neighborly. The villains of the story are the indifferent priest and Levite who are too rich, important, and busy to dirty their hands helping the unfortunate man.

Jesus’s atypical cast of characters obliterates the questioner’s preexisting categorical grid and denies him the usual markers of ethnicity, religion, and social status by which to determine human value. But Jesus isn’t simply trying to transform the man’s categorical grid. Jesus is trying to transform the man himself by inviting him into the mind of the universal Parent who deems all humanity their children, who wants us to treat one another, not just as neighbors, but as family. John sums up the teaching rather bluntly: “If you say you love God but hate your sibling, you are a liar. For you cannot love God, whom you have not seen, if you hate your neighbor, whom you have seen. If we love God, we should love our siblings as well. We have this commandment from God” (1 John 4:20–21).

As the symbol of God, Jesus loves those whom society deems unlovable, thereby restoring the unloved to society. At the same time, he frees society from its anxiety-producing stratifications and exclusions. In a world that declared some people pure and others contaminated, Jesus heals through touch (John 9:2–3; Matthew 8:1–3), defying contamination to reveal mercy. In so doing, he erases the false boundaries of inclusion and exclusion that have no place in the Vision of God, and he places everyone at the center of a new commonwealth that has no boundaries.

To be clear: in his healing, Jesus is not condemning disability. Jesus is condemning our rejection of the disabled. Jesus heals, not to show that these persons should be accepted now, but to show that their exclusion was always wrong. First and foremost, it is the self-righteous judgmentalism of the abled that Jesus is treating in these stories. God is love for all, as they are—not as we demand that they be. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 188-191)

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For further reading, please see:

Coakley, Sarah. God, Sexuality, and the Self: An Essay “On the Trinity.” Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

Voss Roberts, Michelle. Body Parts: A Theological Anthropology. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2017.