Just love

My Dad used to get grumpy around church people - he had the normal string of complaints about having to give money and people not behaving the ways they talked and linked to this was a very common comment which he made - it is just a meal ticket.
What he meant of course was that going to church was a sort of insurance payment against eternity - to make sure we would end up where we would want to. The problem with the accusation is that, I suspect in all of us, from time to time, we have a moment of self-doubt (or God-doubt) in which we wonder whether that is exactly what we are doing - simply buying in by attendance at Church.
Of course, keeping God sweet, is not really the point of Christianity. There are those who interpret the Bible to say that if you butter God up and live in obedience (often to a very conservative interpretation of the Bible) you will prosper. Then there are those who hold off this prospering to after death and hold eternity as a sort of voodoo doll over our heads, threatening that not conforming (and it is often about conforming and not really about sin) will invoke a divine pin to stick us which will send us really into the firey arms of Hell.
This morning I was pondering this hymn:
My God, I love thee; not because
I hope for heaven thereby,
nor yet because who love thee not
are lost eternally.
Thou, O Lord Jesus, thou didst me
upon the cross embrace;
for me didst bear the nails and spear,
and manifold disgrace,

And griefs and torments numberless,
and sweat of agony;
yea, death itself; and all for me
who was thine enemy.
Then why, O blessed Jesus Christ,
should I not love thee well,
not for the sake of winning heaven,
nor any fear of hell;

not with the hope of gaining aught,
not seeking a reward;
but as thyself hast loved me,
O ever loving Lord!
So would I love thee, dearest Lord,
and in thy praise will sing,
solely because thou art my God
and my most loving King.
It is a complete antithesis to the whole pie in the sky when you die theology - our sole motivation in this life is to respond to God's love for us, and specifically for this writer, to respond to the love which God has shown for us in Jesus Christ and his suffering on the cross.
I remember as a child not understanding this at all, how could you simply ignore the threat of Hell and not strive after the promise of Heaven. There are probably a lot of people who struggle with this hymn along the same lines but somehow to me it is a very liberating thing - not to be worrying about eternal consequences but simply to trust in the love of God for now, for today and know that that love is eternal and really is all that matters.
Of course, there is some practical worrying about the future in everyone's life - but the really substantial worrying is taken out of the equation if we remove that elementary school aspect of being a good boy or girl for God. That is not to say we live in a free for all, but that we know that the only response to love is more love and that is where we truly find ourselves.
To love God as God loves us is a small set of words but it is a lifetime's work and it is enough to occupy ourselves with. I am not saying that we will never have moments of fretting about things which seem so much bigger and more frightening but that in those moments we return to love, we remind ourselves who we are and where we are already held.
Perhaps having a few readings from Luke's Gospel at services recently has helped this - for Luke the kingdom of God is not just something which is coming, something to be striven for, but it is something which is here, made real in Jesus and in the Church. Luke has the advantage of the span of a Gospel and Acts to work out the idea of the end times being both future and now - and there is a continuity between those two things, which somehow binds them together in one, and that is God loves us enough, and calls us just to love back.