June 7, 2026

Notes in the Margin: The Bottom Line

It’s hard to know where to begin an ending.  But, one thing I’m sure about: as I stand in this pulpit for the last time, I know that it matters most to me that I not talk around the edges of things.  As they say in the corporate world, let’s cut to the chase.  I want to give you the bottom line.

Today, in this “margin time” of our life together, I found myself discovering a couple of notes written in the margins of my study Bible.  The first one is next to the passage you heard from Paul’s letter to the Romans, and it’s one that I have used in just about every funeral service I have conducted.  It goes like this:

Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?  Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? . . .  No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.  For I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Next to this passage in my study Bible I have written: “The bottom line.”  The bottom line is this: As the great theologian Karl Barth is said to have responded when asked to boil down his entire theology to a simple answer, “Jesus loves me; this I know, for the Bible tells me so.”

I remember warm summer Iowa days, marching around the block with a hundred other children in vacation Bible school.  We carried a banner and sang, “Jesus Loves Me.”  I wasn’t sure how Jesus could love me, or why, but I felt a certain confidence about that love just as surely as I felt the warmth of that summer sun.  It was a child’s kind of faith, not very sophisticated, untried, unacquainted with what Hamlet called the “thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.”  I stopped singing “Jesus loves me” by the time I was twelve.  My guess is that most of you did too.

We outgrew such childish things when we caught on that love is not the order of things in the world.  We distanced ourselves from such simplistic “Jesus loves me” notions when we discovered that people could die by the score from fires and landslides, as well as from suicide bombers and machine guns.  When I was a teenager, “Jesus loves me” faded from my vocabulary when I discovered that the President of the United States lived only at the mercy of whoever wanted to put a bullet through his head.  And the eternal love of Christ seems even harder to reconcile with a universe which we discovered to be subject to random chaos, whether from a hidden genetic bullet buried in someone’s DNA, or from a stray asteroid or a thickening atmosphere of carbon that could extinguish human life on our planet.  Could it be that the created order reflects the same sort of careless indifference on behalf of the Creator that one might experience from a largely absent parent?  “Jesus loves me” is nice to hear children sing, but something deep within us has come to question it.

The hurts mount.  And when we lie in our beds hoping for sleep, and staring into the darkness, the worst terror, the dread that lies beneath the anxiety of living, is the unspoken but growing suspicion that what God there is, is unavailable, and maybe coldly indifferent.  And an indifferent God is even more horrible than no God at all.

But I wonder if perhaps most of us have grown up enough to cast off the simplistic world-view of our childhood, but not grown up enough yet to appreciate the wisdom of that simplicity.  We can be so sophisticated and wise in the ways of the world, and yet so oblivious to the deepest truths about our existence.

That reality was poignantly illustrated to me at the very beginning of Dadgie’s and my ministries.  We were in classes where seminary students engaged in evaluating one another’s preaching (something most of us preachers are happy not to relive).  In one session I remember one of the students took his turn in the pulpit and preached a very simple sermon on God’s love.  The class tore it apart.  “Frankly, I found it theologically naive,” said one student during the feed-back session.

“Yes,” said another, “why didn’t he deal with the question of theodicy – of the irreconcilable nature of divine love and power?”

“What about God’s judgment against the forces of injustice and oppression in the world?” asked another.

“It seems to me,” another student said, “that to simply say ‘God loves you’ without dealing with the impact of existentialism on the modern mind is to skirt the real issue.” . . . and on it went.  By the time it was over, the student who had preached this simple “God loves you” message had been thoroughly and eloquently put in his place.  At the end of the class session, the professor, who had been increasingly silent and darkened in spirit, finally spoke.  With the hint of a tear in the corner of his eye, he looked over this collection of theological students and said, “It is so hard for us to simply allow ourselves to be loved by God.”  With that, the class was dismissed in silence.  And none of us students forgot what had happened there.

There are so many reasons, I suppose, why we find it hard to be loved by the Eternal “Ground of All Being.”  Perhaps chief among them is that we often find it hard to be loved by ourselves, and therefore, by anyone else.  One of the more valuable emphases in psychotherapy has to do with “patterning” – that mechanism whereby we repeat throughout our lives the patterns of relationship, self-image, and views of others that we internalized at an early age.  In my own spiritual and emotional journey, I have learned that one of the “bottom line” issues of life has to do with not only how we project these patterns onto ourselves and others, but how we project them onto the very Heart of Being that lies at the core of existence.  The world can be a frightening and dangerous place indeed if it seems to be inhabited by a God who is little more than an omnipresent version of those who have failed us in the past.  It’s hard to be loved by the Almighty when we haven’t learned to be loved.

Another reason that we find love so hard to receive is that we tend to regard the world in general as undeserving.  We often see divine judgment as more appropriate than love.  This is surely the case for progressive American Protestants over the past many decades.  The operative word in our tradition has been “justice.”  We demand justice for the oppressed people of the world and look to eradicate any vestiges of our own complicity in injustice.  All in all, it seems most fitting for the Almighty to be righteously indignant in the face of our human tendency toward evil.  Those, like myself, who stand in the tradition of Christian liberalism are reluctant to let ourselves or anyone else off the hook long enough to allow room for love.  If our perceptions and inclinations were all there were, this would be a cold universe indeed; one in which mercy drowns in a sea of judgment, and hope is obliterated by divine indifference.

All this talk of Divine Love can begin to seem like so much preacherly Pablum.  Most of us haven’t a clue about God – what to think of whatever we mean by that word.  But there’s great help for us in the first letter of John.  He writes: “. . . everyone who loves is born of God and knows God.  Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love.”  In the margin next to this verse I have written, “Best definition of God: Love.”

The bottom line is: whether you understand it or not, God loves you because God is Love.  The undeniable and consistent theme that runs through the Bible from Genesis to Revelation is that, whoever, whatever God is, that Divine Heart of Creation truly loves every little speck of creation – every unimpressive and stumbling one of us!  God loves this tired old world – in fact, so much so that a man who was the greatest embodiment of this divine Love the world has ever known would give up his own life so that you and I could know what Love is.  And if you know what Love is, you know what God is.

Don’t ask me how all this works.  All I know is this: Love is never wasted.  The Divine love made real in the person of Jesus was not wasted.  That Divine Love made real in the unique individual creation that you are is not wasted.  That Love made real in our relationships here over the past many years is not wasted.  And that Love made real in your efforts to brighten one little corner of the world, the labor you put into growing in love, the years of your life and the toils of your journey are not wasted.  Love holds you close, and will not let you go.  The Heart of the Universe cherishes you and will not allow your living and your loving to be in vain.

Too many people manage to go through their entire lives without ever having felt truly loved.  Sonia Weitz was one of the fortunate ones who have known at least a moment of the rarest and most beautiful kind of love, even in the very depths of humanity’s darkest hour.  Sonia was a survivor of the holocaust.  She told a story from her days in the Plaschow concentration camp.  One night in the barracks, a little boy began playing the harmonica.  He was either a very brave or very foolish youngster, because playing the harmonica was a crime punishable by death.  In fact, another boy had been hung the day before for singing a Russian song.  Sonia went over to her father’s bunk.  In that magic moment, her father looked at her and said, “You and I never had a chance to dance together.”  He took her hand, and, in the middle of that death camp, beneath the very hand of the executioner, to the tune of an illegal harmonica, they danced.  Shortly after this her father was taken away to Mauthausen where he was killed.  She may have learned as a little girl that the world can throw more evil at you than is imaginable, but she also learned what it is to be loved, gently and courageously.  And somehow, that love was even stronger than all the death around her.  Such love, such a life, is not wasted.

So here we are; I’m about to leave you all.  That’s painful for many of you, and it is for me as well.  But it’s also part of the truth about living that we have all learned: people come and go.  Friends move on; beloved relatives die; the sea of life keeps rolling and folding one generation after another under its waves.  The pattern of beginnings and endings is pervasive.  In the vast reaches of the universe, stars are born and then grow cold.  Nothing seems to abide.  But something does.  Know this: in God’s economy, love is never wasted.

And so today no Red Sox analogies, no West Wing stories, no Frederick Buechner quotes.  Just this: for those sleepless nights when the ocean of the universe seems too large, and your own boat too small – when the futility of life seems too real, and God too distant – when your own world seems too lonely, and love too impossible – I leave you with this, the bottom line:

God loves you, and so do I.

Thanks be to God, “most of all that love has found us.”

Let’s sing it together.