Tuesday May 15, 2007

Today’s text

1 John 4:17-18

“We love because God first loved us. Those who say, ‘I love God,’ and hate their brothers and sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not see. The commandment we have from him is this: those who love God must love their brothers and sisters.”

Prayer

I wake in the morning and begin the day with you for you make the morning. And when the sun lies low on its evening horizon, you are there. May my heart praise you then, too. And when the Earth’s good star fades and grows cold, when the sun’s golden rays wane and blink out, when it collapses and is a dark hole in infinite space, long after we and the stars of night have exhausted our substance and Earth’s fair beauty, too, is forgotten, even then you will be there, and you will be love. And you will not forget.

You are first, the love from which all things come and to which they go. You are the love who creates in joy and saves in holy passion. Your love is first in all things, setting life in motion and calling us to yourself in our brother Jesus who wore our mortal flesh and the eternity of your love.

Apart from you nothing is, for you are first, and you are love, a love that is the last word, too, the final reality into which all that is--and I--shall disappear, becoming one, at last, with the love that is the first movement in all life and creation.

Against your eternity it is hard to see that I and anything I do should matter. But it does, you say. The command you write on my being is be the love I receive, the love in which you fashioned and made me, the love that meets me in the morning and will awaken me to eternity, the love you are.

You are first; you are love. Let us know and be that love in our little moment of time. We will pass away, but the love we live will endure for eternity. Amen.

Pr. David L. Miller