6.22.25 - Sermon written and preached by Leigh Rachal @ FPC Abbeville

I wonder what image of God you first internalized.

Maybe it was from a song—

Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.

A melody you can still hum without thinking,

promising love at the heart of it all.

Maybe it was from a picture book—

Jesus with a lamb on his shoulders,

a shepherd, gentle and kind.

Maybe it was God as a parent—

arms open wide, waiting at the door to welcome you home.

These were the types of images that formed my understanding of God….

And they have served as foundational beliefs for who God is and who I am and who I believe that humans are called to be in this world….

This morning, I hope to set that foundation for us. And then over the next several weeks, I’m planning to explore more about what it means to worship and follow the God who is Love.

But we have to start with this foundation – that God is Love – because far too often, God is depicted as something else.  

And if we start with the foundation that God is anything other than Love, then we skew our images of ourselves and of the world and of our relationship with God and the world.

So maybe your first understanding of God was not that of love…

Maybe it was God as judge.

God as distant.

God as angry.

God as the one keeping score,

watching for you to trip up,

waiting to punish.

I remember a friend in middle school who came back from summer camp different.

My silly, happy go lucky friend was suddenly very serious. And Afraid.

She’d been told that unless a person “gave their life to Christ” in exactly the right way,

they were bound for hell.

She had said the words her summer camp leader had told her were necessary for salvation, but she was desperate to save us—her friends—

because her foundational image of God was like that of a cosmic bouncer,

standing at the gates, eager to turn people away.

It was during this time that I learned that I had other friends who also believed that God was keeping track of every wrong,

every tiny slip.

One told me that she would lie awake at night,

replaying the day in her mind,

trying to confess every little thing,

terrified that she might have missed one.

And I remember hearing that…

and feeling horrified.

Because that wasn’t the God I knew.

That wasn’t the God I trusted.

It felt a little like when someone the world had lifted up as a hero

turns out to have done something terrible.

It was disorienting.

Like you couldn’t trust what you thought you knew.

That’s how it felt to hear people speak of God that way.

It made me wonder—

Had I misunderstood?

Had I gotten it wrong all along?

But that is not the God I had been taught to believe in.

That is not the God who is Love itself….

When we look at what scripture we can find verses that can be used to support the idea of an angry, score-keeping, divine war-monger.

My friends were fond of quoting:

“Depart from me, you who are cursed…”

“Anyone whose name was not found written in the book of life was thrown into the lake of fire.”

“If you will not obey… all these curses shall come upon you.”

People have used these verses to paint God as harsh and cruel—

But those words were never meant to terrify us into submission.

They were meant to call us back—

to compassion,

to justice,

to love.

The sheep and goats?

It’s a parable about seeing Christ in the hungry, the sick, the imprisoned.

Revelation’s lake of fire?

It’s the destruction of evil so life can flourish.

Deuteronomy’s warnings?

A call to build a community where no one is forgotten, no one is crushed.

And this is not two gods—

an Old Testament God of wrath, a New Testament God of love.

There is one God.

The scriptures I picked for today are two well-known passages (one from the OT and one from the NT)

Psalm 23:

“The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.

He makes me lie down in green pastures;

He leads me beside still waters;

He restores my soul.”

That’s not a bully.

That’s not a bouncer.

That’s a shepherd—guiding, providing, restoring.

Even in the valley of the shadow of death,

the shepherd is there.

The rod and staff?

Not weapons to strike you down.

A Shepherd did not use those to beat his sheep into submission.

They’re for protection, for guidance,

for keeping us safe, for bringing us home.

And what follows us?

Not wrath. Not shame.

“Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life.”

In Luke 15:

The prodigal son, trudging home with a speech in his mouth:

“Father, I am no longer worthy…”

But before he can even finish—

before he can beg or bargain—

the father runs.

Runs down the road.

Wraps him in an embrace.

Celebrates his return.

The whole arc of scripture tells the same story of Love:

This is the God of creation—

who looked at sky and sea, bird and beast, and called it good.

Who shaped humanity from dust and breathed life into us.

The God of the flood—

not delighting in destruction,

but grieving over human violence,

and setting a rainbow as a promise: never again.

The God of the prophets—

who cried out for justice,

pleaded for mercy,

longed for the people to return.

The God of the psalms—

our shepherd, our refuge, our steadfast love.

The God of the gospels—

healing, feeding, forgiving, welcoming.

The God of Revelation—

making all things new.

Wiping every tear.

Welcoming people from every nation into the city where the gates are never shut.

From beginning to end, and all along the middle,

the story of scripture points to the God who is love.

God is not a cosmic bully.

God is not a divine bouncer.

God is the shepherd who seeks.

The parent who runs.

The healer who binds up wounds.

The One whose power is mercy.

The One whose glory is grace.

We hear again and again that Love is the way.

And that Love is the why…..

If it isn’t Love, it isn’t what God is.

As I look around the world today, I think that some of what we’ve gotten wrong is that we have the wrong view of who and what God is….

When we think of God as a divine bully, we end up living in terror.

But if we trust in the God who is love, we can lay down that fear and

rest in the love that has already claimed us.

When we think of God as a divine scorekeeper, we find ourselves scrambling to earn grace—

but if we simply receive grace as a gift of Love, that changes everything.

When we think of God as “Love that wilt not let us go”, we can indeed “rest our weary hearts in God…”

And we can trust that all our sins and wrong-doings are forgiven. We can extend that to others in the ways we forgive.

When we think of God as the King of Love (as we will sing later) we can imagine what a Kingdom built entirely on Love might be like.

As we wrestle with all the goings on in the world.

As we interact with friends and neighbors.

As we seek to find our place in this world and in our community,

what we believe about the God who created us, matters.

We have to get the foundation right or the whole building will crumble. Buildings can not be stabilized on shifting sands. If there is a crack in the foundation, then a building will crack or twist and distort.

But when we build our house of faith on the rock that is the God of Love, then it can withstand all the storms of life, our faith will not become twisted or distorted.  

The story of God – the story of God’s people – our story, and therefore what we based the entirety of our life and faith on is Love…

The heart of all things is love.

The ground of all being is love.

Love is the way.

And Love is the why.

May that love heal what fear has broken in us.

Love is the song that is leading us all home.

May we all listen to and, indeed, join into the singing of Love’s Song for us and for the world.

Amen.