“If it’s not about love, it’s not about God.”
Unless you’re brand-new to the Episcopal Church, you’ve probably heard this tagline from our Presiding Bishop Michael Curry. Maybe more than a few times.
“If it’s not about love, it’s not about God.”
It’s a needed reminder in a society—in a world—where the God preached by Christians often has little to do with love.
“If it’s not about love, it’s not about God.”
It’s true. But if we stop there—if we treat this catchphrase as the sum of the Gospel—we run the risk of shrinking this love—God’s love—into something vague and abstract. What makes us Christian is not our belief in a God of love. We are far from unique in proclaiming that message. God is love… but that’s not what makes us Christian.
What makes us Christian—the Gospel we celebrate this morning—is the glad tiding that, in Jesus Christ, that eternal love…that “imprint of God’s very being”… has become truly human and is living among us. A call-and-response from the Eastern Orthodox tradition captures this sense of Christ’s presence quite well: “Christ is in our midst. He is and ever shall be.” Christ is in our midst. God’s love is in our midst, made one of us, made flesh and blood.
Our readings today emphasize that Jesus Christ, born this happy morning, is the eternal Word, who is with God and who is God, from the very beginning. Jesus is capital-L Love—the eternal Love—the Love who John says is “close to the Father’s heart”—nestled in the Father’s bosom. And that eternal Love—by whom everything (including us) was created—decided to become one of us in order to make us one with him. He became flesh and dwelt among us for the sole purpose of uniting us to God.
Love is in our midst as the person of Jesus Christ, so that we can be reborn as children of God, like he is born of a brave young woman in Bethlehem today. Love is in our midst to gather us up, like he is gathered up in the arms of his mother today. Love is in our midst to swaddle us in himself, like he is swaddled in strips of cloth today. Love is in our midst to nestle us in God’s bosom, like he is nestled to sleep in the manger today. Love is in our midst so that we can live with him and in him and through him, like he lives among us and in us and through us today.
Yes, if it’s not about love, it’s not about God.
But that Love is anything but abstract, distant, or impersonal. Love is in our midst in a human, vulnerable, and utterly concrete way,living among us in order to transform us. This concrete, incarnate love in our midst,holding, enfolding, and transforming us. That’s at the core of what it means to be Christian. That’s the Good News we proclaim and celebrate today.
Benedictine monk Father William Skudlarek once said that to be Christian is to affirm “that in Jesus Christ, God’s love became flesh and lives among us…that we are ‘in Christ’—that our love for God and others is nothing less than the ‘one Christ loving himself.’” That baby boy, swaddled and cradled by Mary today, is God’s eternal Love made flesh—here with us now in the midst of our lives, transforming us into Children of God; so that our love for God and for each other in God can echo through the world as a message of Good News.
So yes, if it’s not about love, it’s not about God.
But today we bear witness to something much more. If it’s not about Love made flesh—Love living among us—Love living in our midst and transforming us—if it’s not about that love, then it’s not about Christ. That’s the Gospel we follow as Christians. Christ is in our midst. Love is in our midst. He is and ever shall be.