I want to know what love is

In 1984 Foreigner asked, “I want to know what love is.”  In 1995, John Elefante replied:

Endless days and long hard journeys,
Mending hearts forever yearning,
This is what love is.
Healing blind men by his touch,
Knowing that he cares so much,
This is what love is.
And teaching us to love each other as we love ourselves,
And laying down our lives for someone else,

And even when we fall, he loves us through it all,
His gentle guiding hand keeps understanding.
He knows the tears we cry.
He knows our hearts may lie.
For us again, he'd die.
That's what love is.[1]

While I admit I’m biased, I can’t think of a better example of love than the Christian God.  Here we have a being who, despite being ridiculed, rejected, misquoted, misunderstood and outright ignored, continues to reach out to us.  What wondrous love is this?

Here we stand, rebels before a holy God and not realize the extent of our offenses.  We look at each other and think, “I’m not that bad, I’m just like most other people,” yet we don’t understand that we are not being graded on a curve but against absolute righteousness.  And yet, this God would offer us pardon, restoration and renewal.  What wondrous love is this?

Here we are, living our lives as we think is best yet making a mess of it.  Unintentional hurts, unplanned events and uninformed decisions result in unsatisfying results, depression, anger and resentment.  And God offers to clean it up, put it back together and, take all these bad things and somehow, miraculously, bring something good out of it. What wondrous love is this?

Does this sound too good to be true?  It is easy to write all these things.  How do we know it is true?  Where is the evidence?  Who gave the testimony?  I am persuaded that this reflects reality.

God wrote it in history.

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[1] John Elefante "This Is What Love Is" © 1995

Christian Unity?

Recently, two items came across my reading that, while were related, reflected opposing realities.  The first is from the book “”The Anglican Tradition : A Handbook of Sources”.  It is an except from The Chicago Quadrilateral, which was a resolution from a meeting in Chicago, 1886, by the Bishops of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America.  The second is a letter to the editor by Rev. Sara Fisher, an Episcopal priest, as publishe in The Oregonian on May 3, 2011.  Below are the relevant quotations.  I leave you to draw your own conclusions.

The Chicago Quadrilateral

General Convention of the Episcopal Church in the United States of America,
A Communion of Communions (1886).

Whereas, many of the faithful in Christ Jesus among us are praying with renewed and increasing earnestness that some measures may be adopted at this time for the re-union of the sundered parts of Christendom … we Bishops of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America, in Council assembled as Bishops in the Church of God, do hereby solemnly declare to all whom it may concern, and especially to our fellow Christians of the different Communions in this land, who, in their several spheres, have contended for the religion of Christ:

1.   Our earnest desire that the Saviour’s prayer, ‘That we all may be one’, may, in its deepest and truest sense, be speedily fulfilled;

2.   That we believe that all who have been duly baptized with water, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, are members of the Holy Catholic Church;

3.   That in all things of human ordering or human choice, relating to modes of worship and discipline, or to traditional customs, this Church is ready in the spirit of love and humility to forgo all preferences of her own;

4.   That this Church does not seek to absorb other Communions, but rather, co-operating with them on the basis of a common Faith and Order, to discountenance schism, to heal the wounds of the Body of Christ, and to promote the charity which is the chief of Christian graces and the visible manifestation of Christ to the world;

...

Furthermore, Deeply grieved by the sad divisions which affect the Christian Church in our own land, we hereby declare our desire and readiness, so soon as there shall be any authorized response to this Declaration, to enter into brotherly conference with all or any Christian Bodies seeking the restoration of the organic unity of the Church, with a view to the earnest study of the conditions under which so priceless a blessing might happily be brought to pass.^[1]

The Q Movement[2]

In response to Steve Duin's May 1 column, "Culture, Christianity and Q": It will be interesting to see which group has more resistance to the Q movement: spiritual-but-not-religious Christo-phobic Portlanders, or mainline denominational groups. Some of these won't even use the word "Christian" to describe themselves, for fear of being mistaken for a conservative evangelical.

As the pastor of an Episcopal church, I know whereof I speak. We are proud of our denominational identity as sacramental, incarnational, progressive and justice-oriented. But despite our talk of tolerance and inclusivity, many of our members exhibit an abiding prejudice against evangelicals, "conservative" or not. Yet imagine what good we could accomplish if we all moved beyond ideology toward the gritty edges of real life, where the guy we claim to follow hung out.

I am excited by the work being done and the work being dreamed of by people of faith in our city. This Christian looks forward to working alongside them.

REV. SARA FISCHER

Southeast Portland

Fischer is rector of St. David of Wales Episcopal church.

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^[1] Evans, G. R., & Wright, J. R. (1991). The Anglican tradition : A handbook of sources (345–346). London: SPCK.

[2] The Oregonian, May 3, 2011, Letters To The Editor