"Granny, didn’t God like you very much when he made you?" my grandson asked me the other day.

"Well, yes, Trey," I responded. "I’m sure God loved me very much when he made me. Why?"

"Well, because he made you with bad eyes!" Trey responded.

Most of us don’t articulate our reservations about God’s love in quite that way, but I think there is a level at which most of us believe something akin to that: If God really loved me, God would have made my life different – made my life easier, created me thin and rich and beautiful, given me perfect parents and musical ability – or, God would have intervened somehow – God wouldn’t have let this or that happen…whatever…

We’re only slightly more sophisticated versions of the foot-stomping child who says, "If you loved me, you’d…" allow me to have that cookie, extend my curfew, buy me that trinket, let me stay up an hour later, not make me clean my room…

"Love," as we often experience it, comes with qualifications, conditions, proofs; it has more to do with having been earned, with what we do than who we are…

I think it’s hard for us to conceptualize being loved for no other reason than that we are God’s creation, and that God binds us together in love, in God’s love for all of creation.

Jesus must have realized how we would struggle with unconditional love, how difficult it is for us to know that love of God, for Scripture reports that he holds us up to God, praying into the future, into your future and mine, that we might know that God loves us, even as God has loved him.

God loves us, even as God loves Jesus.

God loves us, even as God loves Jesus.

Why is that so hard for us to know, I wonder?

Why is it so hard for us to believe? To keep right here – in our hearts? To know in such a way that it infuses our bodies, our lives, with the warmth and wonder of God’s love?

I think it’s because we have become imprisoned in our own world view.

I think it’s because we so easily get lost in the jungle of our own lives.

We find ourselves living in an isolation of our own creation, walling ourselves off from others, believing that we’re "in it" alone, that everything is up to us, that we’re victims of our own busy-ness, or circumstance, or fear; that it’s "us" against "them," and that the Lord helps those who help themselves…

We know better – here – in our heads; we know God loves us – but we live as though we don’t really believe it; we don’t really trust it to make a difference in our lives.

The great poet Robert Frost has wisely written:

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.

Before I built a wall, I’d ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out,

And to whom I was like to give offense.

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall

That wants it down.

Is it God we’re walling in or out? I wonder…

In, because somehow then God belongs to us. When we domesticate God behind our walls, God becomes a God we can know and understand and control.

Out, and we deprive ourselves of the many surprising ways in which God can come to us.

Is it God we’re walling in or out?

Are we walling in or out our ability to know and to trust that love of God for us?

Increasingly science has shown that we are all connected. For as much as they have both theorized and proved that all of creation is broken into fundamental parts far more numerous than the neutron, electron, and proton of my own school-days, they have also postulated an invisible field, the "Higgs" field akin to a "cosmic molasses" which holds together everything, in all its diversity. The "Higgs Field" is a fact central to modern physics, even though it has never been found, and it has variously been described as "the rug under which the discipline sweeps its ignorance, the "toilet" into which physics flushes its inconsistencies – or the ‘God particle.’" ("Crash Course," by Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker, May 14, 2007, p. 71)

Yes, the "God particle."

Physics and its minions notwithstanding, Jesus tells us what that "God particle" is: it is love.

It is love which binds all our fragmentary parts together, all our bits and pieces, our brokenness, our differences.

It is love which gathers us up, in all our diversity, and makes us one.

It is love which makes us whole.

If only we could remember…

"Abba, Father," Jesus prayed in this morning’s lesson, "I will make it known, so that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them."

"Abba, Father," Jesus prays today, "Help these your people to know that you love them, as you have loved me and I have loved them!"

"Abba, Father," we pray, "help us to receive and to know your love!"

St. Athanasius advised us always to breathe Christ, for what we breathe in, we breathe out. If we can take in that love of Christ, we can live that love in our relations with others.

Jesus loved his followers, and gave himself to them.

They breathed in his love – and were able to breathe it out to others.

The result was the exponential growth of the church in the last 2,000 years.

The result has been you and me, as Christians, lo! these many years later, Christians who have been touched by the Christ-breath in those who have gone before us; you and me, Christians ourselves, who are breathing – and passing on – that love of Christ.

Kallistos Ware suggests that the "whole person" is a person "who is on the one side open to God and on the other side is open to other human persons."

That is Jesus’ prayer for us today: that we his followers may be made whole – open to the love of God, and a conduit for that love to flow through us to others.

Abba, Father, we pray; help us this day to receive, to know, and to share, your love!

Amen.