Rivers of Love

Steven Doss

16 September 2007

16+ Pentecost, C

"Better Than Paige's" or "Rivers of Love"

When a river begins at the top of the mountain, it has only one purpose, to get to the ocean. Many different things try to impede the process of that river as it makes it’s natural journey towards that ocean. Trees fall into the river, creating a natural dam that disrupts the natural flow in a vicious struggle between two opposing natural forces. Not only does the river have to deal with nature attempting to block its passage to where it needs to go, but mankind also places barriers to keep the river from it’s place. Though the river has all these barriers, it ultimately will reach its goal. The flow of the river will push the trees that block its path away. It will find the holes that are placed in the man made dam, so that it can get to where it needs to be in the quickest time possible.

The gospel lesson for this evening is one we have heard ever since Sunday School. It is the story of a woman who has 10 coins and loses one. Rather than be content with the 9 she already has, she struggles to find the coin that she has lost. Being poor college students, struggling so that we can pay our bills and needing all the money that we can get, this story relates to us in a better way than the story that comes later. A shepherd has 100 sheep and again, he loses one. He spends as much time as needed so that he can find the one he lost. In both these cases, we are given a glimpse into the love of God. Even when we are “lost,” God will try and find you. This is further exemplified in the parable that follows: The Story of the Prodigal Son. We all know the story, a young man wants to leave his father with his inheritance to go to the big city and live it up. He blows all his money on the pleasures of life, but ends up living destitute. He returns to his father a humble and broken man. The father comes to his son with open arms and an open home. Again, the moral of this story is that God’s love is all encompassing. No matter how “lost” you are, God will always look for you, and when you return, God will take you in no matter what. It’s nice to know that God’s love is always there, and that is a good lesson to take home from these texts. However, one thing that many people overlook is the reasons that people get “lost” from God’s love. We love looking at the ocean that the river flows into, but we fail to understand the what the trees that lay across the path that the river flows through.

To begin with, we have the natural blockades that slow us realizing that God loves us. The human condition is one of our greatest assets. It allows us to do wonderful things. It allows us to have wonderful feelings of love, compassion, and hospitality. But, with that we also have the not so wonderful things. Grief, fear, despair: all those human emotions that can cause us to become lost. In my life, I’ve had many opportunities to show both aspects of our natural condition. For instance, as many of you know, I had to hear about the death of a close friend via instant messenger while I was in Korea. I remember how it felt as I was riding to work that day. I thought that I could handle it…I thought that I could just “play through the pain” as my high school soccer coach would put it. I broke down many times that day. It was the first time I had ever really drank either. I told my friends there that I was in no condition to go out with them for the weekend, but I did anyway, thinking that would help. 80,000 Won later, I did not feel any better. Through all this, I had in the back of my mind that God was not there anymore. I thought God had sent me to this place where I was completely alone, and did this to me as a cruel test, a test that I did not want to take at all. I knew all my friends were hurting as well, but for the first time I did not want to put them first. I felt a different aspect of the “personal relationship with God” that I heard so much about…I felt that God had a vendetta against me. God sent me to Korea just to turn around a kick me in the butt. This is an extreme situation, but it tells us of a universal truth. God’s love towards me had “hit a snag” in my mind. It was my own humanity that caused a blockage in God’s love getting to me. I had reached a pit of despair. My own psyche had told me that God had left me. I was the lost sheep. I was the lost coin.

We also have worldly barriers that prevent God’s love from reaching us as quickly as it should. We live in a capitalistic society. Many of the people in this world require only one thing to be, in their minds, happy. Money. The almighty dollar. While it is nice to have enough to get by, many of us take it to the extreme. We feel that getting money is the only way to fill the voids in our life. We have to have the newest electronics, the flashiest car, and the nicest clothes. Without it, we feel like less of a person in the grand scheme of life. We shun friends, family, and God as we strive to make a little more in our pay check than the next person. We become lost when we place the love of our worldly above all else.

Now, we’ve talked a good bit about why we become lost, but there is good news. Even though we place barriers, God’s love will always try to reach us. What we need to realize that even though it hits some snags along the way, God’s love will constantly flow from God’s self to us here in the world. It will try to reach us, but we do have to try and meet it half way. Even though it is hard, we must realize that the end of a part of our life is not the end of all of it. Also, we must realize that this world is fleeting. We cannot shun our responsibility to our world and all it’s peoples because we wish to have it a little better than the next person. If we constantly look to keep up with the Jones’, we miss what is passing us buy, which is the essence of God’s love. The world’s barriers will get in the way, but God’s love will try and get by them. If we help it out a bit, then it will get there faster.

When a river begins at the top of a mountain, it has one purpose, to reach the ocean at the bottom. Along the way, it gets slowed by the trees and rocks that block its path. But, the river’s flow will smooth and erode the rocks to dust. It will push the trees that cross the path out of the way. The natural barriers will all succumb to the flow of God’s love. The dams that we put up in our quest for worldly significance will fall, just as long as we leave some pathways in our hearts for that river to flow. In the end, God’s love will prevail…it will never stop trying to get to us. We will all have many times where we are the lost coin. We will see many days that we are the lost sheep. We will always be searched for by God, no matter what. The river will reach us, and it’s up to us to try and make the flow come to us as easily as possible.