Listen to Love

God invited Moses to the top of mount Sinai to visit him and asked him to be there (Exodus 24:12).  This is a peculiar phrasing.  Why would God ask someone to come to him and be there?  Isn’t this implied?  Why is the request to come and then be?  I imagine a parent asking their child to come over for dinner but he also requests that his son have the meal in the same room.  Isn’t the latter just understood?  It makes me wonder how many times we’ve been summoned by God to a place only to miss something truly spiritual because we didn’t mind the other part of the invitation.

 Now I could go on about the importance of being present, of how being still and listening to the space I’m in connects me to the living God in this moment, but I won’t.  Instead, I want to point out that perhaps God is lonely. 

In the beginning was God and then God created a creation and was together with that creation.  But then people began to rebel against God and this led to a separation and God’s been working tirelessly to be united with us again.  Generation after generation, people were called to help set things to right.  They were holy listeners going to mountaintops to relay a message from a disenfranchised deity.  A deity whose presence in the broken creation was so powerfully painful the very sight of God’s face could kill a man (Exodus 33:20).

Jesus calls Peter, James and John up to a mountain to come be with him.  Jesus transfigures and the three disciples find themselves in the midst of a moment of heaven and earth becoming one again.  Unfortunately, the focus shifts immediately to Peter’s distraction, making plans to stay a while.  And God, in an attempt to save this gloriously tranquil moment, blurts out from heaven, ‘this is my son, the beloved; listen to him!’  God’s outburst terrifies the disciples.  Face down on the ground they tremble, and in an instant, this precious moment of shalom has evaporated.

I am heartbroken for our lonely God, who longs to simply be reunited with us.  A God, who has every bit of strength to break through the invisible barrier separating our realms but cannot because it would be too much for our little frames to bear.  A creator, who has a plan to rescue us from a path of destruction and death but struggles daily to find a proper method of relaying the message effectively.  Yes, this is Yahweh and my heart wrenches when I try to empathize.

“This is my son, listen to him!”

God stepped out into our realm, risking the cosmos, to deliver this message: Jesus is my son, listen to him.  In fact it was so important he said it twice (Luke 3:23).  What does it mean to listen to Jesus?  In John’s epistles we are told that the only way for people to know God’s love is in the love we share with each other (1 John 4:7) because God is love.  To listen to Jesus, we listen to love.  

Author Gerald May says, that our true desire and reason for being is to love and be loved.  He says that love is the fundamental energy of the human spirit.  When we love and receive love we are whole.  Why?  Because if God is love, then when we have love, we have God.   

Unfortunately, we live in a world that causes us to become skeptical.  The voices in our world that tell us we are not beautiful and loveable creep in, get louder and louder and finally drown out the most precious sound of the voice of God telling us we are beautifully and wonderfully made.

Listen to love.  Ignore the voices of criticism and terror.  Stop giving power to the voices that only want to steal your goodness.  Surround yourself with people who love you and listen to them.  Be present to your loved ones, heed their advice, and learn their stories.  Share space and time with the ones you love in sacred ways.  When we allow the voice of love in and release noises of hate and fear, then we find ourselves with God on the mountain, being there.  And God is no longer alone.