We tell ourselves many stories. Humans are story telling creatures. We make sense of our world and of our lives by telling ourselves stories. These stories take all sorts of forms, and refer to both our more immediate world and the world in general. They are stories we learn from our parents, or make up to counter our parents, or absorb by osmosis from the society at large. Here are some of the kinds of stories that we tell ourselves to organize our worlds and to give meaning:

All I want in life is to get a decent job, marry a nice person, have good kids, and retire early.

My oldest child is the responsible one, but my middle child really worries me. My youngest child reminds me of myself, which is a great comfort.

The important thing in life is facts. The rest is all nonsense.

I am no good. I am a loser. No one likes me.

I am the best. So there!

Science and technology will solve all our problems.

Our people were conquered and oppressed. We seek justice.

My ancestors were nobility. We have the coat of arms at home.

My ancestors came to this country with nothing. They worked hard and now we are well off.

The thing about our stories is that they are never really just our stories as individuals. They always spill over into our relationships and affect the people around us. The stories we tell ourselves influence how we relate to people, what we expect from people, and which people we will deal with and which we will avoid. By the same token, other people's stories play themselves out in our lives.

The stories we tell ourselves are very important; more important than we usually realize. It is good to think about the stories we tell ourselves, and to explore their inner workings, and spin out their logic. When you do this, you may notice that most of our stories are pretty small stories, that usually put us, the teller of the story into one of 2 roles: either the role of hero or the role of victim. We are either good and right, or we are hard done by and misunderstood. As hero, we might be more right than others, or we might be more sane, or more rational, or more compassionate, or more generous. As victims, we usually use our stories to blame others for all the things we don't like in our lives. Sometimes, though, we adopt another person's story about us, and then we're really in trouble. Often that story is one that makes us either try too hard to either compensate or to live up to the story, or we give up on ourselves.

God offers us an alternative story to our usual stories. It is the story of Jesus. But this is not the story about someone who lived a long time ago. Rather, it is the story of God in our world today and always. It is the story of God with you as an individual, and with all people as individuals, and with our whole human race all together, and with the whole universe. This is a universal story, that encompasses everyone and everything.

The story beings as a story of love: God so loved the world that God had made, that God came into it in the person of Jesus. Then the story says that Jesus took the flack for living love in the middle of hate. He was killed. He was buried. He went where all the dead go. Then God raised him up, and raised up everyone who is willing, to live life in its intended fullness, that is, to live love. The story says that this still goes on, and can also go on in your life and in all people's lives.

A long time ago, some people first experienced this. They wrote about their experiences. We heard from some of them today: Paul in his letter to the Christians in Corinth; John in his beautiful Gospel account; and through the pen of Luke in his “Acts of the Apostles,” we heard Peter proclaiming this story and its impact when it was still very new.

This story overrides, absorbs, and transforms all the other stories we tell ourselves. The stories of hard work are turned into stories of God's grace. The stories of self-righteousness are turned into stories of compassion for others. The stories of victimization are turned into stories of strength and inner power. The stories of hatred are turned into stories of forgiveness.

But first, you have to allow God's story to become your story. That's what happened to Paul. He kept telling himself the story of hatred for these people who follow Jesus. They were different. They were taking his precious religion and twisting it. They had to be killed.

Then the story of Jesus hit him over the head. Christ risen from the dead confronted Paul. After struggling for days, maybe even years with this encounter, Paul discovered that he had become a new person. He hadn't become perfect (being perfect is another story we tell ourselves), but he had left some very hateful and destructive stories behind. He had made Jesus' story his own story.

Mary Magdalene made the story of Jesus her own story. She first encountered Jesus when he cast seven demons out of her. This is the Bible's symbolic way of saying that Mary Magdalene had lost control of her own will, either through mental illness, or through addiction, or through some ailment. Jesus gave her back her own will. She was now truly free. She used that freedom to follow him and stick by him, even at the cross and at the tomb.

In John's Gospel, Mary is the first to see Jesus risen from the tomb because she is the one who “abides”, who remains, when all the others leave. At one point in John's Gospel, Jesus says, “Abide in me as I abide in you... so that my joy may be in you and your joy may be complete.” (John 15: 4,11 -- read entire section for context) Again, this is the Bible's symbolic way of saying that as this story enters ever deeper into your psyche, as you live with it, wait on it, breathe it, you will begin to sense that God is present to you in tangible ways. This is what some people call mysticism. Others call it having a religious experience. More generically you could call it, having a deepening relationship with the Divine. Really, there's no adequate name for it. But it is part of the story too.

Easter, the resurrection of Jesus, is really just one part of a longer story. It is the part about new life. Before this part, however comes the part about the crucifixion, which is the part of the story that tells about dying and death. Before that is that part about Jesus' teaching and healing, the part of the story about wisdom and compassion and integrity and simplicity. And so it goes, in both directions. God brings the universe into existence out of love. Love does not coerce. Love woos and teaches and hopes and sets a living example, and even in death embodies itself. As Paul writes, “Love never ends.” (I Corinthians 13:8). Love overcomes death and gives life.

We tell ourselves many stories. We are, after all, story telling creatures. God invites you to make the story of Jesus, the story of God, your own. Amen.

      Jesus said that we should have faith like children. In today's Gospel reading the risen Jesus says to Thomas, "Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe." The Epistle to the Hebrews has the statement, "...faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen." (Heb 11:1) In Paul's Letter to the Romans, he holds up Abraham as an example of righteousness because Abraham trusted in the promises of God, even though in his lifetime those promises had not yet come to fulfillment.

Again and again, scripture holds up faith, trust in God, trust in things we cannot see, prove, or make tangible. The testimony of those who wrote the Bible often encourages us to something that flies in the face of common sense and modern science. Perhaps this is one reason that in the scientifically oriented, well educated industrial democracies of the world, adherence to traditional religions has declined somewhat in the last 100 years.

As I have mentioned on other occasions, Christianity is seeing its greatest growth in Africa, a continent where education for most people is minimal, and where spirits and ghosts and demons are as real to most people as they were to our ancestors over 100 years ago. If we were to take all this information that I have just laid out, and make no further effort to explore the issues or examine the context more broadly, we could come to the conclusion that Christianity, along with all the other traditional religions, is simply an elaborate superstitious tradition that cannot stand when put to the test of modern learning.

Since I began with quotations from the Bible, and since we derive our Christian beliefs from the Bible, it is interesting to note what modern learning has meant for the Holy Scriptures. For about 200 years now, linguists, historians, archaeologists, and a host of other scholars and scientists have been scrutinizing the Bible, picking it apart, analyzing the language, content, themes, geography, historicity, methods of transmission, and so on. Some of these scholars have been people of faith seeking to understand the written basis of our faith more deeply. But some of them have also been skeptics looking for errors, shortcomings, and outright fabrications to affirm their own skepticism. No other set of sacred writings have been subjected to the same merciless examination over such a long period of time by so many people.

To date, the results have been mixed. Neither side has been able to prove conclusively that the Bible is either completely reliable or completely unreliable. There are amazing examples of historical and archaeological accuracy. There are ancient manuscripts that show that for over 2000 years the Bible has been handed on with great accuracy from generation to generation. On the other had there are also many holes in the Biblical story. Some details cannot have been as they are described, some figures cannot be confirmed from any outside sources, and so on.

After 200 years of scrutiny, those who don't like the Bible have to acknowledge its remarkable accuracy, while those who do like the Bible have to acknowledge it's shortcomings. But the Bible is more than a book of history and archaeology, it is a book about people's encounters with God. It is the attempt by people of old to recognize, interpret, and understand God in their history and in their own lives. The historical backdrop is incidental to the real interest of scripture. The real interest of scripture might be summed up as someone telling the following story: "My grandparents were in such-and-such place when such-and such happened to them; they say it was God; I think they were right." Or it might be compared to someone saying: let me tell you a story about how God works.

Modern scrutiny of the Bible has neither given it scientific approval, nor has it been able to discredit it. So we are left with a set of writings that are best approached with the attitude which the Bible encourages to begin with: an attitude of faith. Interestingly, modern research has had to come to the same conclusion about God. While some scientists set out to find God in nature, and others set out to prove that there is no God, the end result is that the existence of God cannot be either proved or disproved. So God and the power of God have to be accepted or rejected on the same basis which the Bible suggests: as a matter of faith. One has to decide to either believe or disbelieve. No experiment can determine conclusively for you, what the whole truth is.

A theme that runs through the writings associated with the Apostle John (John's Gospel and the 3 epistles of John) is that the writer was an eye witness of Jesus, and is sharing what he experienced so that we, the readers, might believe. In today's reading from I Jn this is expressed in the words, "We declare to you...what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the words of life..." (I Jn 1:1). In our Gospel reading this is expressed in the story of the Apostle Thomas, who refused to accept the witness of his fellow apostles and followers of Jesus, but insisted on seeing and touching for himself.

The person or people who wrote these texts had the experience of being with Jesus of Nazareth, of hearing his teaching, seeing his actions, shaking his hands, and perhaps touching his wounds. They saw Jesus before the crucifixion, and after. What they saw convinced them that Jesus was the Messiah, the Son of God. We have the challenge that Thomas had. The witnesses are passing on to us their experience, and their interpretation of their experience. We have to decide whether we will accept their testimony or give it a pass.

There is nothing that I or anyone can do to prove to you the validity or the truth of these things. It is as modern research has had to allow: matters of the spirit are matters of faith. One has to step out into the uncertain world of believing and trusting in God; of accepting the testimony of others who have experienced God in their lives, and their interpretation of those experiences.

Very few there have been who have seen God face to face. They could believe because of what they saw. Blessed are those who have not seen, and yet have come to believe. Amen.

      Our second lesson for today begins with the words, "We know love by this, that [Jesus Christ] laid down his life for us -- and we ought to lay down our lives for one another. How does God's love abide in anyone who has the world's goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help? Little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action. And by this we will know that we are from the truth..." Then later it goes on to say, "And this is his commandment, that we should believe [i.e. "trust"] in the name of his Son Jesus Christ and love one another, just as he commanded us. All who obey his commandments abide in him, and he abides in them. And by this we know that he abides in us, by the Spirit that he has given us."

The First Epistle of John uses three key words over and over again: love (Greek: agape), fellowship (Greek: koinonia), and the verb "to abide" (Greek: menein). All three are closely related to each other. Each one is in some way contained in the other. Together, the three words describe a state of being which the author considers the natural outcome of what we would call the Christian life.

The author hints at some sort of spiritual process of transformation that goes on, but he does not explain or elaborate on it. Rather he tends to describe what the end result looks like, contrasting it to its opposite. What the end result looks like is, that the people who have thus been transformed live lives that are characterized by trust in Jesus Christ, love for God and each other, a sense of commonality with each other, with God, and the sense of the deep abiding of God in them and of their own deep abiding in God.

Notice that, except for the practical working out of love for each other, most of the rest of what the author is getting at has an interior quality. Most of the rest is something which is known more on the inside of a person than on the outside. This is not completely accurate, but I will say more about that later. For now, let's work with the largely interior aspects of love, fellowship, and abiding.

What John describes here, and what also has strong resonances with what Paul describes using his own terminology, is easily misunderstood or simply missed if you don't look on the inside of a person, into the heart, to try to get a picture of what is meant.

Jesus said that "it is from within, from the human heart" that our intentions come (cf. Mark 7:17-23). In saying this, Jesus was voicing the common understanding of that time, and of most spiritual traditions, that the heart is or represents the seat of the will. Spiritual work in the Christian context is always about turning our hearts toward God, and ultimately turning them over to God. In other words, this work is always about turning our wills toward God, and ultimately turning them over to God.

Now, notice your internal reaction to hearing this. There is a good chance that you felt a little uneasy about turning your will over to God. Perhaps you thought to yourself, "how is that supposed to work?"; or maybe you had the emotional reaction of anxiety or fear, because at some level you worried what God might make you do. This is the place where faith in God confronts our own inability or fear of having faith. Remember, "faith" and "belief" are words which have changed their meaning a little over that last few centuries, but which were picked up by Christianity in order to mean "trusting God." The opposite of faith in this sense, the thing that traditionally is called "doubt", means not trusting God; not being able to trust God. It is not a doubt of teachings, it is doubting the trustworthiness of someone, in this case doubting the trustworthiness of God.

So the inner work of a follower of Jesus is always to trust God and to trust what God is doing in and through Jesus Christ. You see, our superficial and rationalistic idea of "belief," where we say, "Yes, I believe those descriptions of God in the creeds or in the church's doctrines," means that we can fool ourselves into thinking we have done the work, when in fact we haven't. The real work is the work of the will, not of the intellect. (Although for someone of our scientific and materialistic age, giving assent to the teachings of the Church can require some heavy duty mental work too! -- But I think this misses the point anyway.)

Through the centuries, Christians who have "gotten it" so to speak (as in, "Oh, I get what John and Paul are getting at"), have tried to describe their own journey on this inner path in their writings, to help others along their own journeys in the Spirit. They hoped to be guides to seekers, and also to lay bare the inner processes which to some may seem mysterious. In Christianity there are no secrets. Jesus said, "Ask, and it will be given you; seek, and you will find; knock and the door will be opened for you." (Matthew 7:7) The Christian mysteries are open to all who ask or seek or knock. So too the mystery of the inner relationship of the human heart to God.

St. Maximos the Confessor (580-662) in his Centuries on Love, shares his own insights out of his monastic and ascetic approach to this relationship. He found that as he surrendered himself ever more to God in Christ, immersing himself in a life of prayer and service, that love for God and love for others was the result. He found that in keeping the commandment of love, he knew God to abide in him, and he in God. In other words, out of his own experience, he corroborated in a more detailed way what the author of 1 John was getting at. At one point he makes the jarring and challenging assertions, "The person who loves God cannot help loving everyone as he loves him- or herself... If we detect any trace of hatred in our hearts against any person whatsoever for committing any fault, we are utterly estranged from the love for God, since love for God absolutely precludes us from hating anyone." (Centuries on Love 13-16)

It may sound extreme, but remember 2 things: 1) he is writing out of his own experience, and so would have had the inner experience of having hatred toward someone, and thus losing the inner sense of love for God; and 2) Maximos' statements merely echo what it says in I John 4:20, that "Those who say "I love God" and hate their brothers or sisters are liars, for those who do not love brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen."

Meister Eckhardt (1260-1327 or 1328) tried to share his own insights into this process of turning one's will over to God. In a sermon on John 15:16 he comes to the insight that "love has no Why". He says, "If I had a friend and loved him because of the benefits which he brought me and because of my getting my own way, then it would not be my friend which I loved but myself... It is exactly the same with that person who stands in God's love, who does not pursue his or her own interests with respect to God... This is real love." (German Sermon 3) Again, in his own way, Eckhardt came to a place where he realized the need to immerse oneself completely in God, to trust God completely. This is the place of love. Fellowship with God, abiding in God and God abiding in a person is love and gives rise to love. And love, as it is used in the New Testament, is an act of the will, in particular, of the will which has come to trust God completely, a will which has been turned over to God.

Jacob Boehme (1575-1624), the controversial German Lutheran spiritual teacher, whose works describe in great detail the process of conversion, uses our lack of love as an encouragement for us to return to God. He writes, "Let each of you merely do this... and look at the whole course of your life and hold it up against the Ten Commandments of God and against the Gospel that asks you to love your neighbour as you love yourself, so that you be a child of grace only in Christ's love. See how far you have wandered from this, and what your daily practice and desire is." (First Treatise on True Repentance 8 -- my paraphrase).

By recognizing the lack of love, says Boehme, and inviting God in to point it out, one is led bit by bit to a new relationship to God. God begins to abide, one begins to have fellowship with God, and out of this, love emerges. Much later in the process he describes, he offer this litmus test for someone on the journey: "If you want to call yourself a Christian, test what kind of characteristics drive and rule you: whether the spirit of Christ drives you to truth and righteousness and love of neighbour so that you would eagerly do good if you only knew how you could. Thus when you discover that you have a hunger for such virtue, you can certainly think that you are drawn. Then you are to direct it into work, not only to will and not to do. The Father's love to Christ consists of willing, but true life consists of doing." (The Fifth Treatise on the New Birth That Is, chapter 5, #6 -- my paraphrase)

Now what is interesting in all of this, is that all of these writers and people of faith acknowledge, each in their own way, that this place of abiding in God, having fellowship with God and with each other, and having love for all, is a fluid state. A person slides in and out. The giving over of the will to God is never total, never complete, but always a work in progress. But the danger is that because in this life there seems to be no final completion, that we pull the childhood logic of "why should I make my bed when it's only gonna get messed up again?" and we give up before we have ever started.

I said earlier that I am talking mostly of inner realities, but that there is also an outer component. The love for others in action is of course the most clearly external part. But the process of turning the will toward God and then over to God also has it's external components. These are essentially the practices of prayer, worship, and devotion which we all know either from growing up, or from hearing about or from watching other Christians.

In our own time, many have rejected these practices because they sometimes become associated with legalism or with spiritual arrogance, that "holier than thou" attitude which some of us have experienced from others. And of course, when these things are merely external actions, going through the motions, without the inner component I have been talking about, then they are hollow. Or, if they serve only to reinforce a person in their bad habits, then they are even counterproductive. But the inner component of turing the will toward God and over to God, because we are humans with biological bodies, needs the help of the body in gestures of prayer, in ritual actions of receiving God's Word through eating and drinking or through reading or through singing. Our bodies and our souls, brought together in our wills ever turning toward God, need to work together for the miracle of love in us and through us to begin to happen.

In Jesus Christ, God comes to us in love, seeking to abide in us and have fellowship with us, so that we might embody love to each other. Let us, then, turn ourselves to God, out of love, to abide in God, and have fellowship with God, and become love to each other and the world. Amen.

      In our Gospel reading for today, Jesus says, "As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love..." Then later he says, "This is my commandment: that you love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this: to lay down one's life for one's friends."

The divine love described in the New Testament is a love which flows out from God, through Christ, through us, to others. But it is also a love which flows back from us, through Christ, to God. The love which is described is a movement of something, a movement which goes back and forth from God to and through us and back to God, to return again to us.

As I struggle to get a handle on this love, I try to find analogies that will make it more understandable. I imagine this love to be a love which embraces without taking captive, and releases from embracing without rejecting or pushing away: a free receiving, a free letting go.

Jesus described this love poignantly in images when he told the parable of the Prodigal Son. A son disowns his father, takes his share of the inheritance, and leaves. The father does not force him to stay or threaten him, or reject him. At the same time the father in the story hopes for his son's return. When the son comes around and decides to return to the father, the father is ready to receive him.

There is a movement here: the father's love for the son releases the son, lets him go, does not cling to him; but the father's love for the son also waits with open arms to receive him back. There is no coercion. This reveals one important aspect of this divine love: freedom. God's love does not chain or fetter or force or capture or imprison. God's love frees. God's love operates within the parameters of free choice and free will.

But this also reveals* another aspect of divine love, the one I was getting at earlier: it is a movement of something from God outward, through Christ, through others, and then through Christ back to God. It is like breathing. A breath is taken in. It brings with it necessary oxygen, life sustaining oxygen. Then the breath is released. Out go the waste products of the respiratory system, most notably carbon dioxide. Oxygen in; carbon dioxide out. Life in, death out. This love is neither the oxygen nor the carbon dioxide. Rather this love is the process, the respiration which is necessary in its totality for health and life. To hold in the breath, to cling and capture it, would lead to asphyxiation. To breathe out and then keep out the breath, reject it permanently, would do the same.

To take it a step further, the divine love might be compared to the circulation of our blood. The red, oxygen rich, blood flows out from the lungs, pumped along by the power of the heart. The blood does not stay at the extremities, but returns, carrying with it the waste products, back to the lungs, so they can dispose of them. At the outer end of this circulation loop something important happens: an exchange happens, a life giving exchange. The cells receive life and wholeness, and surrender that which would lead to toxicity and death if it were not released.

Divine love, the love which the New Testament calls agapé, functions in a similar, analogous way. So often we make the mistake of thinking that when Jesus tells us that we should "love one another" as he "has loved us", that this refers to liking each other, being nice to each other. So we imagine it as something which we produce ourselves. So we try to become self-generating fountains of God's love, and we fail.

Quite the contrary, what this love means is that we open ourselves up as channels, first to receive God's love (Jesus said "as I have loved you"), and then to let it flow through us to others. We are instructed here to become part of a respiratory system, a circulatory system. When we make ourselves vulnerable to God's love, an important thing happens. Life giving spiritual oxygen flows into the cells of our spirits, and finally, after having held our breath for such a long time without the breathing of God's love, the toxic, spirit killing contaminants can begin to be carried away.

When we try to produce this love on our own, we too often simply dump our toxicity on others. Our love is a clinging, controlling, demanding love. It makes prisoners of others, or we make ourselves prisoner to others. Freedom and free will are shut down. Or, it is a toxic love, a love which ultimately serves itself, or rationalizes itself. It is a love which becomes confused with all sorts of instinctive reactivity, unresolved family of origin issues, addictive behaviours, and so much else. It is a love in name only.

When we allow the divine love to flow into us, and then through us, the toxicity flows, not out to others, but back to God, who cleanses it and washes us. God heals our brokenness of spirit. God washes us of our spiritual uncleanness. Then agapé can flow from us: the love which frees the captives, breaks the chains, embraces as a free, no strings attached gift, and releases as a free, no strings attached gift, can flow to us and through us.

If you sense that you are sometimes toxic to others, biting, blaming, snapping; or that you are defensive, self-justifying, then I suggest that God's love is in short supply. Not that God's love is not available, but rather that you are not letting it flow in, to wash and cleanse you, and then letting it flow through in what Paul calls the fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (cf. Galatians 5:22-23).

If, on the other hand, someone else is toxic toward you, then open yourself to God's love, and pray for that person to also come to know God's love. In this way you will do what Paul suggests in another place: not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good (cf. Romans 12:21). Amen.

*[The proponents of certain ancient philosophical systems (Neoplatonism, Hermeticism) used by many of the early Christian theologians, would have seen in the respiratory and circulatory systems, a physical analogy to a spiritual process. They believed strongly that the natural world, the world which God created, echoes or mirrors on a subtle physical level, processes which exist on a spiritual plane. While in the Hebraic thinking of the Old Testament, one simply named that God had created all and stood in wonder at how marvellous it is all made, for these early Christian thinkers, the fact the God made it meant something. It meant that the creation meant something, and that by way of analogy, one could perceive certain things about God and the realm of the Spirit. Even the Jewish thinkers of Rabbinic Judaism have an ancient tradition of a similar bent in Cabbala. Indeed, Jesus' use of parables could be seen as a species of this as well.]

      The Psalm for today, Psalm 1, is considered a "wisdom Psalm." The wisdom tradition of ancient Israel comes down to us in such books of the Old Testament as Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Job, and in many of the Psalms. In the New Testament, Jesus is the main representative of this tradition when he says things like, "Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal, but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven..."(Matthew 6:19-20); or "No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth." (Matthew 6:24).

The wisdom tradition seeks to give practical advice for daily living. Psalm 1 is a meditation on the contrast between two ways of living, or to be more precise, two choices in how people focus their attention and allow their minds to be shaped.

"Blessed are those who do NOT follow the advice of the wicked, or take the path the sinners tread, or sit in the seat of scoffers; but their delight is in the law of the LORD, and on that law they meditate day and night."

The "law of the LORD" can refer to several things. For a person singing this Psalm before the Babylonian exile, it would have meant specifically the legal injunctions we now find in the first five books of the Bible. For someone singing this in the time of Jesus, it would have referred more generally to the first five books of the Bible as a whole, legal sections and narrative sections taken together. For us who are followers of Jesus, we can understand it to move into the New Testament. Jesus says to his disciples, "I give you a new commandment: that you should love one another. Just as I have loved you, you should also love one another." (John 13:34)

This Psalm asks the question: Where do you focus your attention? What do you allow to come in and shape your consciousness? The things we think about or see or read have a shaping effect on our consciousness.

If you watch the news all the time, you are engaging in a sort of meditation on crisis, calamity, conflict, danger, and human suffering. Over time this begins to shape a consciousness marked by cynicism or pessimism or dismay or disengagement (as a coping mechanism). If you spend large amounts of time playing computer games that feature a lot of violence and killing, these images begin to work their way into your conscious and subconscious minds. They probably produce a kind of indifference to suffering and violence, or may even evoke elements of aggression that otherwise might have remained less developed.

Similarly, someone who enjoys mocking and belittling and scoffing, creates a feedback loop which reinforces the sense of the silliness of anything that is contrary to one's own preferences. One loses the ability to hear where others are coming from. One's compassion mechanisms atrophy, and so on.

This Psalm invites us to spend time thinking about God's law. For me as a Christian, I take that to mean, thinking about the New Commandment which Jesus gives: to love one another. If filling our minds with all that other stuff has such a deep and subtle impact on our psyches, imagine the impact of filling our minds with thoughts of love. Imagine what it means for us to make it our daily practice to think about, to meditate on love: God's love for us, and our calling to love each other.

Imagine how this would slowly begin to shape the way you thought about everything. And as your thinking about your relationships and your role in the world, and your choices for how you spend your time and money became increasingly influenced by images of love, and impulses to love, imagine how this would begin to change your actions: first in little ways and then... who knows?!

So the Psalm says, "They are like trees planted by streams of water, which yield their fruit in season, and their leaves do not wither. In all they do they flourish. The wicked are not so, but are like chaff that the wind drives away." Jesus said to the Samaritan woman at the well, "Everyone who drinks of this [well] water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life." (John 4:14)

The images here suggest that, what God has to give us is something that will have a lasting, life giving impact on us, while the ordinary things to which we usually turn, have only a temporary, passing value. In fact, these ordinary things we usually fill our minds with even produce a kind of spiritual death; in the long run they deaden and then kill our spirits.

Consider again the ongoing meditation on love. The long term impact of this is to move all of our relationships toward the positive, toward the life giving, toward the life affirming. It has the long term impact of promoting positive community and positive relations with those outside of one's community. And the more intentionally and continuously this meditation on love takes place, the deeper and more significant will be its impact on one's entire life.

For us who seek to be followers of Christ, I would like to offer a paraphrase of the concluding lines of Psalm 1. It is based on the understanding that the term righteousness, as it is used in the Old Testament, refers to being in the right relationship to God, to people, and to God's creation. For those of us who seek to follow Christ, I see righteousness as being summed up in love. So I offer this:

"Therefore hatred will fail when the judgment comes, and indifference and abuse will collapse in the gathering of those who love; for the path of love leads to God, but the path of hatred leads nowhere." Amen.