Imaginative, Creative Love

The sermon today at Trinity was on the Golden Rule, with a very inspiring interpretation. "So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets." That word wish has special meaning for us as Christians, according to my pastor. It means that love is about first using the imaginative and creative powers of our minds, to invent new ways in which to love others. This is the end to which we ought to commit our intellectual resources: spreading God's love.

And then as I was reading Orthodox Way of Life I read this beautiful quote from a homily given by Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh on Sunday of the Man Born Blind, May 14, 1972:

Now we live in another time, we live in the time with God truly having become man in our midst, and more than this: He has made us to be living members of His body, an incarnate, concrete presence of His Incarnation, the temples of the Spirit, the place of the Presence. Now any man who is in need should at the same time find in each of us a man stirred to compassion, taught mercy and understanding by God become Man, and at the same time, simultaneously, meeting with us, he should be able to see the love of God in our eyes and to perceive the active, imaginative, creative action of divine charity in our words and in our deeds.

It's amazing how ideas just come together like that sometimes. The more I learn about different theological perspectives, the more I think that, in our time, the most important idea for Christians to develop further is the idea of Incarnation--that is, not simply that God became man in Jesus, but that the Church is also his body, participating in the divine life of Jesus. It's that combination of the supernatural with the organic that makes Christianity uniquely powerful, and supremely important to the world in which we live.