The Unconditional Love of God

I wonder if you can call to mind a time you remember experiencing this rich, unbreakable and unconditional love of God that Paul ends this chapter of Romans with. Not only when you were simply able to acknowledge it but when you felt it deeply. It might have been when you first realised how much God longed to be with you and said ‘yes’ to following Him. It may have been in time of quiet prayer, an interaction with a friend or merely sitting in silence feeling the presence of God. As we go through the next 10 minutes or so, hold that memory in your mind.

For me, many of the memories that spring to mind include me, alone in my room in moments of silence probably pondering this passage of scripture. When I have experienced the deep love of God, these encounters certainly feel profound, but their significance often isn’t realised until I look back and perceive the deep inner change I’ve gone through. Much of this deep change has occurred within me over the last 18 months and as I began to sit in silence, I felt the Holy Spirit suggest three types of reconciliation.

•   Reconciliation to God
•   Reconciliation to self
•   Reconciliation to other

Pondering what these three reconciliations meant for me has now completely shifted my understanding of God, myself and the world. But what does each one of these actually mean?

First let’s define reconciliation, if we’re looking to a dictionary, it would be “the process of making two opposite beliefs, ideas, or situations agree.” Which can work, especially if it is a ‘coming into agreement’ with something. In our case, we come into agreement with the reality of the love of God and what that means in relation to ourselves and to others. However, I think reconciliation can also be a sense of coming home.

Better put by Egyptian writer, Naguib Mahfouz “Home is where all your attempts to escape, cease.”

The language of being reconciled to God then, I’m sure it now feels second nature to many of us now. However, for those of us who grew up in a tradition with a theology that was essentially ‘humans are bad, God is good, and we can only be good if we follow God’ it can take a lot of time and effort to undo this narrative. This description can often be a misrepresentation of God and an oversimplification of a much deeper reality. Being reconciled to God is moving towards the place we were always meant to be in, our homecoming. To be in a rich and nurturing communion with God and knowing the fullness of how loved we are. It is not as simple as being good versus bad. It is in this acknowledgement of how loved we are that arguably we also slowly become who we were always meant to be. The more time we spend doing the things Jesus did, we see a slow change within ourselves. We see the goodness within us get better. Our old ways of living seem unnecessary to us now. We move further away from selfishness; our anger and irritation seem to subside. We recognise and ‘come home’ to our ‘belovedness.’

Often this sense of ‘belovedness’ starts to diminish as we journey through the world. Things said to us by parents, friends, and even the world can begin to create false narratives and chip away at our true identity – a person deeply loved by God. We can then begin to slip into either rejecting God’s love completely or feeling we must earn the love of God. We start to become motivated by the wrong question asking, ‘how am I to love God?’ Rather than ‘How am I to let myself be loved by God?’ Within this posture, we’re not only asking the wrong question, but we’re also perhaps reinforcing false narratives about ourselves and God. The soundtracks that play in our minds matter. Rewriting our personal narratives can be a powerful thing.

Many of us may have observed the power of naming false narratives recently at Kwame Kwei-Armah’s autumn lecture in which he asked the room ‘what is a false narrative you have rewritten about yourself?’ And something moving began to happen, we heard stories of people being told they’d never amount to anything, their voice didn’t matter and how society’s negative perceptions of them had kept them from living a life they’d always dreamed of. As people were sharing, the atmosphere of the room began to shift. There was a palpable sense of hope, restoration and even love.

False narratives, however, can’t be identified as such until they’re named but also as followers of Jesus, until they’re viewed through the lens of his love. You can’t detect a counterfeit unless you’ve seen and experienced the real thing. When God created us in His image – he saw this it was ‘very good.’ The more we move away from this reality, the more we forget what we were made for. Or as Dutch theologian, Henri Nouwen puts it “As the beloved I can confront, console, admonish and encourage without fear of rejection or affirmation… but somehow I have become deaf to the voice that calls me beloved.” By meditating on this truth, we recognise the voice that says not only are we loved, but perhaps everyone else is too.

So good news, we recognise how loved we are by God, and he begins the deep work within of realigning our inner world to the outer reality of his unambiguous and unbreakable love for us. Or rewriting our internal narratives. We are then able to move towards being reconciled to others. We are social creatures; we were made for both the surface interactions and the deepest interactions. In a world that can feel increasingly isolated and lonely, moving towards community becomes an act of resistance. Because “Real loneliness comes when we have lost all sense of having things in common.” When we lose the sense of a shared humanity.

One of the ways I’ve been able to be reminded of our shared humanity is on Tuesday mornings at the connection when alongside Father Richard, we host spiritual space. A time to be with our homeless sisters and brothers, enjoying often profound discussions. Recently we were exploring the question ‘what does your soul deeply long for?’ One of the members, who often speakers with a captivating and disarming

honesty, shared how he simply longs for peace with God and himself. In that moment of his sharing, it felt like all of the things we didn’t have in common simply disappeared and we were all brought together by this simple moment of vulnerability. There was then a consensus around the room that peace is what we all longed for too. Realising and naming our deepest longings might be the things that bring out our shared humanity.

Another member of the group later shared that what his soul deeply longs for is kindness, to receive it but also to give it. Saying that kindness draws us into other people’s stories, granting the gift of a deeper understanding of one another. As followers of Jesus, we’re called to look beyond the surface and enter into our shared humanity.

But equally, for this community in this room, we need each other. We need to look around and witness the tangible reminders of what we’re meant to be reflecting out into the world, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. To hold each other when we don’t feel strong enough to do anything except simply show up. When we live into and out of Jesus’ vision of discovering our shared humanity, we thrive. Or as Professor Steven Reicher summarises, “when we have a shared identity, we begin to stop seeing people as ‘others.’ They’re like us, they’re of us, they’re with us.”

Lastly, what does it mean to be reconciled to ourselves? This is one that personally have found the hardest. Accepting God’s love and loving others can feel easier because they’re not necessarily about me, it’s all slightly removed. As mentioned earlier, some of us in this room may have ‘come up in the faith’ in harsher more legalistic environments, and perhaps feeling like all we internalised was that we’re bad. We can’t cultivate a sense of self so we become fabrications of what we think those around us may want us to be and thus our true selves become unreachable. But God in his deep love for us and through others, slowly begins to draw out our true self.

We can feel there are certain parts of ourselves we must ascend before God can truly embrace us. A false narrative some may say. But these parts of us are not things to ascend or escape but to nurture, and to be cultivated under the loving gaze of the Father.

Thankfully, Jesus knew what it meant to be wearied, worn thin and overwhelmed by simply being a human in the world. He knocks on the door of our hearts longing to be with us but patiently waiting until we’re ready to open it.

As advent approaches, may we recognise our true belovedness in being reconciled to God, to one another and replace the false narratives and come home to the truest and purest narrative there ever was – we are unconditionally, unambiguously and unbreakably loved by God.

Amen.