Love Changes Everything for the Good, for God!

I don’t care who you are, how many times it has happened, or when it happened, but at some point in each of our lives we have encountered an experience where we were loved, where we were treasured, where we discovered that in another’s eyes, they were well pleased.

One of my earliest recollections of having someone well pleased with me, of someone who took delight in my soul, outside of my own parent’s love, came from my relationship with my grandpa Jensen.  He spent time with me, taught me my first card game (Cribbage), took walks with me, taught me to tie my first fly-fishing fly, listened with enthusiasm to my stories, and let me sit on his lap as we watched cartoons.  I anticipated the visits he had with me with great expectation.  
Sometimes it is in these relationships, where a grandparent of a parent loves a child, or a friend cares for a friend, or even in the compassion we have for one another here through our faith. In churches around the world in our own baptisms we see the face of God and the grace of the waters of baptism at work.  The wonderful and graced truth, found in the simple acts of love that we share with one another, often points us to the humbling, heart achingly joyful, yet deeply profound reality that is gifted to us in our baptism.

In the spirit and fire of that immersion, in that act which binds our life to God, we find ourselves divinely treasured, loved, and called to serve.  I just love, don’t you, how tenderly God speaks in our first heading from Hosea about God lovingly reaching out in care to the people of Israel, and through them, then does not God reach out to all of us as God’s own children.

The Lord is always with us, in and through his life with us, as well as through our sisters and brothers.  Present to us even when we feel like bruised reeds, where we experience oppression and discrimination, or when we sit imprisoned in some of life’s darkness.  Jesus the Christ is alive, in our hearts, in others, in the Spirit that lives on, healing our bruises, liberating us to new life, offering us freedom and a new way of being and behaving.

Jesus loves all of us no matter what we're going through offering love, healing, and new life just like he did in our Gospel for the official whose daughter had died and Jesus raised her back to life, or to the woman suffering from hemorrhages for 12 years healed her not just in body, but in mind and spirit as well restoring her to being one with her community. 

As we look outward seeking the face of God’s gaze this day we stand once again amazed at God’s gaze staring lovingly back at us.  Baptized into this life with God we find in that place the truth that we are indeed holy, we are indeed temples of God, we are indeed, each one of us, sacred churches of truth and love, treasured.