Love is a rebel's song.

     I have been listening to U2's rousing rebel songs from Rattle N Hum all morning.  It is an album written at the height of the resistance to Apartheid in South Africa when I was in high school.  My five-month-old daughter is familiar with those songs because they are the embodiment of what love can do in the world.  They talk about Rev Martin Luther King and Bishop Tutu and death on the green battlefields of the new United States in the 1700's and that world-changing death on the cross. Love is not some nice touchy-feely feel-good emotion you keep for a time and then discard.  The best definition I have ever heard of love is also the most succinct: unconditional positive regard. Doesn't sound like much until you think of how hard it is to always see someone through rose colored glasses. But how can all of this come from love?  How does changing the world by throwing off the shackles of the repressed and the downtrodden and the poor come from love?

     Love does not just happen.  It is a seed planted in the heart.  And I believe the only one who can plant that particular seed is the Great Eternal Gardener.  Real love is born in humans because God first loved us, and showed us how to love.  God has unconditional positive regard for us.  He is always on our side, even we we have strayed down a path so dark that no human would follow us there.  No human is capable of that kind of love.  Only God's love is perfect.  But we are made in his image, the sons and daughters of God - the second-borns after Jesus. And our older brother knew something about love.  He was brutally tortured and murdered because he was driven by love of his people and love for all of us to upend the apple cart, or more poignantly, smash it on the walls of the religious institutions that had grown up to separate people from God's love.  He is the original rebel driven out of pure love.  He was driven out of love - unconditional positive regard - for the people in his neck of the Roman Empire.  And because he was also divine, it was unconditional positive regard for all the generations that were to come. 

     Let's ask ourselves: what do we love?  What are we doing with the seed God planted in our hearts?  Do we love status? friendship? Wealth and security?  Or do we love ourselves?  This is key - one cannot love others unless he first can love himself.  And that gift is given by God, sometimes through peoples' parents, but sometimes, as in my case, on a long tortured and lonely road that left me no choice but to respond to the love that God lavished on me. I am slowly learning to love myself as that self-loathing is being painfully ripped from every fiber of my being by my Father, because he loves me perfectly.  And in this painful process my eyes are opening up to true love for those around me, the institutions and the people I come in contact with every day.  But more so for people who are stuck, repressed, hurting.  People who are at the end of their ropes, in pits of despair and self loathing like I was, and sometimes still am, in.

     We are all acquainted with suffering.  It is a fact of life on this planet.  But unconditional positive regard for ourselves and its result: unconditional positive regard for others, left to its own devices, will unleash a firestorm of action by each loved individual for the people he loves.  All people.  But the people who most need love are the hurting, repressed, downtrodden masses, the victims of the institutions of the world that are not set up under a guiding principle of love. Every one of these institutions will be torn down as the kingdom arrives in the hearts of her lovers.  Every single power in the human world that is not set up on the guiding principle of love, will be ripped asunder by the Beloved of God. This is the coming of the kingdom.  And it will come.  Love always wins.

     So where does this leave us?  Certainly not in the pew, browbeating non-believers with a system that will do more to separate them from God than to bring them too it.  The only way to bring a new convert into the fold is, you guessed it, to love them. 

     And when they find the love of God planted in their hearts, you love them and get to watch them grow into a new skin of love.  For most of us, this takes a long time, often a lifetime.  But sooner or later love will birth in them a rebel heart.  The heart of Jesus.  And they will go about the work of bringing the kingdom through acts of love, directly opposing the powers of this world.  The Kingdom of God won't come in like a quiet whisper.  It'll come in as love does, a burning flint at the core of the heart.  Love is the core of the true rebel, the saint.  We are all slowly becoming saints, all slowly becoming rebels against the powers of repression in this world.  Let's not waste precious time.  The more love we have to give, the faster the change in this world will happen.  The more we step out in love, earth-shattering rebel-hearted love, the more we will bring comfort to people who have no one to love them.  We will bring it to people who have no one to give them unconditional positive regard.

     And we will find ourselves burning against hate and oppression and injustice.  This is the Kingdom way of life.  Find your God-given gifts.  And use them to bring in the Kingdom in whatever way God calls you to do.  If that's writing like I do, or singing or writing your congressman, or flying to Ghana to build houses for the poor.  Do it.  It is your commission as a Christian.  It is your purpose.  You are a rebel in this world.  Love like one.