1-18-19 - The Way of Love: Learn

(You can listen to this reflection here. This week's Way of Love gospel reading is here.) 

My congregations are exploring the Way of Love during the season of Epiphany, with different gospel readings. On Fridays, Water Daily will take up the Way of Love topic for the week – today that is the second practice: Learn:

What do we do after we’ve turned to Jesus? We grow our relationship with him – or rather, discover a relationship that’s always been there. From God’s side, it has been.

Think back to a time when you fell in love. Didn’t everything about the other person fascinate you? You could talk endlessly about this new love; there was no limit to the time you wanted to spend with him, finding out everything you could, what made her what she is. That passion to know, to go deeper, is at the heart of the spiritual practice of Learn. It involves study, not in a dry or dutiful way, but the way we focus on something or someone that intrigues us to the core.

How do we get to know someone who intrigues us? We talk to them, to people who know them, perhaps google or read up on them. So:

• We talk to Jesus – This is prayer. To really know him, we have to talk to him... and listen for his reply.
• We talk to people who know Him. I cannot overstate the importance of spiritual conversation in the Christian life. If we keep our faith to ourselves, and never find out how other people experience God, we impoverish ourselves and limit our growth. 
• We read about him. We can’t take study and reading out of the practice of Learn – we are people of the Book. Our “book” is really two distinct collections of writings. The first, which we self-referentially call the “Old Testament,” is better termed the Hebrew Bible, as it has a full identity apart from us. This contains stories, poetry, drama, law codes, histories and prophetic writings conveying the history of God’s interaction with humanity from the beginning of time to shortly before the era of Christ. Some of it speaks to us directly, some of it reads like letters to our ancestors, but all of it is our root-stock. The shorter collection of stories, letters and treatises that we call the New Testament is the most vital for Christ-followers – the gospels telling of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection; Acts and the letters in which we witness early leaders struggling to articulate the beliefs and ethics of this new community of believers in Jesus Christ, as the movement became organized, systematized, ritualized and institutionalized.A serious Christ-follower will engage the Scriptures each day. It might be in a small way –a devotionwith a verse or two, short prayer or comment; a longer reading like Water Daily, in which we chew all week on the Gospel for Sunday; systems that guide us through the Bible in a year, or our own daily office lectionary; or just reading chapter by chapter. It is good to have a guide, even just a study bible with explanatory notes (ask your clergy leader to recommend a version with reliable scholarship and theology). Weekly engagement can include a group Bible study, where insights are shared and multiplied beyond what we glean ourselves.

An ancient and beloved way to Learn is called lectio divina, divine reading, a contemplative engagement with God’s Word in which you read a verse or paragraph and sit with it in silence, reflecting on it, noticing what word or phrase snagged your attention, what questions arise, what invitations from God you hear.

The daily-ness builds the relationship. Just as you crave daily interaction with your beloved, so God seeks daily encounter with us. God’s Word is not the only way to know Jesus more deeply, but we cannot know him without it.

Above all, this practice means cultivating an adventurous orientation toward learning, to know that we have never “arrived,” will never plumb the depths of who God is. Our assumptions about God can hold us back and keep us from being open to what God wants us to see and do. The more we Learn, the more we discover what we don’t know, and the more joy we experience in exploring this One who made us, knows us and wants so deeply to be known by us.

This practice is like one who found a treasure in a field, hid it and then bought the field so she could always go back to it. I wish for you tremendous joy and depth as you Learn and grow in this love affair with God.

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