"Hesed/Aloha" - God's unfailing love! Sermon for July 5, 2015.

Sermon for Year B, Proper 9, July 5, 2015

Plymouth UCC, Eau Claire, WI

© Rev. David J. Huber

Focus scripture: Mark 6:1-13 Psalm 48

I’ve read this Gospel lesson many times over the years and don’t think I ever noticed this command from Jesus that is in there, “Stay there until you leave.” Anyway, that’s not the sermon.

I am going to talk about the Psalm we read. The ninth verse has this bit of poetry in it. As our translation read, “We ponder your steadfast love, O God, in the midst of your temple.” That is one thing we do when we gather here for worship, or are doing any of the business of the church. We ponder your steadfast love, O God, in the midst of your temple.

That also is the message of the Good News: God’s steadfast love. That’s what we proclaim in the church. That’s what we are to be out telling the world. To remind everyone that they are loved by God. God’s steadfast love.

We also printed this verse on the bulletin cover this morning, and I don’t know what translation it is. It reverses the order of the words and makes one change: “Within your temple, O God, we meditate on your unfailing love.”  

The translation we read used “steadfast love”, the bulletin cover has “unfailing love”. These are both an attempt to translate a really rich and full Hebrew word. I’ve talked about this word before, though maybe not in the past couple years, but it is in Hebrew the word Hesed (or possibly Chesed). It is an important word in Hebrew. We will often translate it as some kind of love. “Loving-kindness” is one that is used a lot. It is a word that emcompasses all of God’s love. Though it is not God-specific: we can also have hesed toward one another. It is an all-encompassing love. A steadfast love. An unfailing love. Loving-kindness. Compassionate love. Unmerited love. The love you have regardless of what the other person does. One could also translate it as a loyal love. Love that says, “Even when you have done wrong I will stand by you, I will remain with you.” A persistent love. An eager love. A sense that this is God actively seeking us, eager to love us. Hesed is all of that and more.

There is no single English word to translate it into. If we were to stick with just one word, I think “loving-kindness” is perhaps our best bet, though I love the including of the word “eager” in there somewhere.

It is akin to the Hawaiian word “aloha”, which means hello and goodbye, and also means love. But like hesed, it, too, is a word that isn’t about romantic love. Or even limited to a friendship love. It is an eager love, a loving-kindness love. A loyal love that wants the best for the other. Love as a way of life. Not just something that you have toward someone or something, but a way of life. A love to be lived. Not just for those you are romantic with, friends with, or related to. But an active love to show to all people. That act of love that forms community. The love that ties the community together. May even say the kind of love that binds the universe together.

A Hawaiian, Robert Nawahine, who lived on Maui and was active in the church, wrote a translation of First Corinthians 13, that passage on love about “If I have everything but don’t have love, I have nothing.” And which has, “Faith, hope, and love abide, these three, but the greatest of these is love.” He translated it as, “Faith, hope, and aloha.” And in a song, he wrote, “Faith, hope, and aloha, aloha is the best, and everything is blessed, and everything is blessed.” He repeats that line “Everything is blessed” to give a sense of the level of God’s love. It is in our hymnal, #496, if you want to check it out later.

Hesed. Aloha. Everything is blessed.

Steadfast unfailing persistent eager loyal loving-kindness. That’s who God is. That’s the kind of love that God shows toward creation, and that we can show to one another. That is also the manifestation of God in Jesus. He lived that. He showed that to us. He gave us the example of how to live in this hesed. Loving-kindness, compassionate love.

And it is God’s hesed, Jesus’ hesed, that sets this Communion table here before us. In his ministry he often brought people to the table or was invited to someone’s table. Jesus sets the table out of love for whomever the people were he was eating with. And he was often eating with the wrong kind of people, the people he wasn’t supposed to eat with: tax collectors, women, gentiles, the sick, whoever it was Jesus was setting the table out of love. This is God’s love manifest in bread and in the cup.

Even as the world around us often is erupting in violence, fighting, abuse, financial worries, financial anxieties, homelessness, crime, countries battling one another, the battling within our country and within our state, and so many other things that worry our hearts. Could be sicknesses, something happening to a loved one, a friend, whatever it is that might cause us hurt, that might haunt our sleeping or hurt our waking, even in the midst of all that it is because God has hesed, that God shows hesed to us in the midst of all that, that God can set this table for us to come and eat the bread of life and drink the cup of blessing. A reminder that God’s love doesn’t let us go, God’s love doesn’t abandon us, that God is always with us, and that however powerful the agents of destruction may seem, however bad the news might be that we hear on TV or the radio or social media, it is a message that even in the midst of that, God’s hesed is the ultimate reality and we can rely on it. Even as we fail one another, God does not fail us. God is the keeper of the covenant. We sang, “What a Covenant” to open our worship. God does not break the covenant, God does not fail us. God is always present, always here, God is always here showing us hesed. This unconditional love that never fails because it is steadfast, unfailing, loving-kindness, an eager love, a desperate love. God wanting to be in a relationship with us, a relationship built of love. That also then is a pointer to the kind of realm that God wants and which Jesus preached about.

Let’s build a world of love! Build a world that models God’s hesed. That’s the realm that we wait for, and the realm that we are charged to start to create here by following Jesus’ example. It is what we show in our street ministry. And when the quilters gather here on Tuesday to make blankets for people they don’t know, but who need warmth because they are homeless. Thats hesed. That’s a hesed kind of love. Or when we serve at Community Table, or our offerings to the St. Francis Food Pantry, whatever it is that we do as a church, whatever ministries we are about here in the community, they all are acts of hesed. Loving our neighbor. Not because they did something for us, or done something to earn it from us, or because they did something to make us think that they deserve it. Simply because they are our neighbor. And we are called to love. To live that love in the ministry of our lives, and in the ministry of this church.

So we meditate on God’s hesed in the temple.

So this morning, as we continue our worship through the offering and then especially as we come to our time of celebrating Communion and come to this table together as God’s family, I challenge you to meditate on God’s hesed. You are on the temple. Meditate on God’s steadfast love. Unfailing love. Loyal love. Loving-kindness. Eager love. Meditate on those phrases during the rest of this service. The love that says, “You have had a rough week: come in, shir down, rest for a while, have some bread and have something to drink. Be nourished. Be fed so that you can continue your journey. This table of love, is table of hesed, this is what it is about. God saying, “Let me feed you.” Jesus saying, “Let me feed you, let me give you drink for the journey to build you up so that my love will flow through you.” I show you this love, and then you go show it to others.

Meditate on that as we finish our worship here this morning.

Amen.