Reverend Marci Scott-Weis, MDIV

I have a few core beliefs that inform how I think about God and how I try to Minister and walk in this world.  They go like this:

• God is Present
• God is Love
• My Beloved, I Give Thanks

They are the key understandings of my belief or my understandings about God.  They ground how I try to walk in the world as a mom, as a partner, as a friend and as a minister.  I think of them as my pillars of faith.

The one that I want to talk about here is a foundational pillar for me and my understanding of the divine.  It goes like this… ‘God is Love’.  And just like I told you about my deep and abiding belief that ‘God is Present’, my statement that ‘God is Love’ is not a naïve, rose-colored-optimistic-glass half-full way of thinking about God. ‘God is Love’ for me is a belief that was born out of struggle.  It is a belief that has been battle tested.  And it is the deepest and surest witness that I offer in my in life.

Now, some of you have heard the story that I want to share with you all but my guess is a whole lot of you haven’t.  And since this story is so foundational to my understandings of God, and I really can’t explain how I know in my bones that God is love, without telling this story, I hope those of you who have heard it before will bear with me through the telling.

So, I think that most of you all know that I was raised Roman Catholic and that faith tradition was foundational to my upbringing.  Everything that I thought I knew about God came from the Catholic Church, from my parish, and from my weekly Catechism classes.  My Catholic faith was a huge part of who I was as a kid and as a teen.  I even remember thinking at sixteen that I would most likely become a nun when I grew up.  My future within the Catholic Church was a certainty, and a given.  And I rested in deep confidence in that future, in the power of that community and that embrace from the Catholic church.

That all changed for me when in my late teens, I was hit with what I can now look back on and say, there were just one too many hard life blows at a time when I was too young and too poorly equipped to deal with those blows. I unexpectedly lost a parent. I lost my social support network and the family structure as I had known it. I was dealing with the aftermath of experiences of violence and trauma. I lost all family financial support and at eighteen found myself 100% responsible for my schooling and all of my living expenses.  And I was coming out into the brutally homophobic eighties.  Everything around me felt like it was unraveling and I felt lost and alone with one exception, my Catholic faith and my Catholic community.

So, like I had done with many of the challenges that I had faced in life prior to that point, I went to my Priest and asked for help and support.  But, unfortunately instead of comfort or pastoral support, I was told, as many of you know, that because I was gay that I was no longer welcome in the Catholic Church, that I no longer belonged. And I was told that this fundamental and authentic part of myself that I had struggled so hard to accept and honor, being gay, meant that I was beyond salvation, beyond the arms of God in this life and the one to come.  That safety net and loving community that I had leaned on, depended on and so desperately needed in that moment, vanished.

When I walked out of that Priest’s office, I lost not only my connection with the Catholic Church but I also lost what I believed to be my connection to God. And that Priest’s words reinforced every shameful and awful image I had of myself.  The pain of those words and the perceived loss of my God and my faith community piled on top of so many other losses. It was the proverbial straw and it broke me. I felt my remaining fragile grasp on this world lessoning and all that held me here released.

I turned to all things that were about self-destruction and self-harm.  If there was a substance, a habit, a behavior, or a relationship that was toxic and destructive, I ran to it.  I could find nothing worth loving about myself and I could find no reason to stay in this world. I had been rejected by my God and my church and I believed that I wasn’t worth saving. It was a time of darkness and despair and sorrow and grief and aloneness. I remember thinking that my being, my soul, my heart and my body were made of millions of little pieces of paper and that they were all just blowing away.

My life was on a very clear path to destruction and that was the outcome that I thought I deserved.  Now, because I am standing here today, you all know that I did survive that very dark time in my life.  I did not survive that time, however, as a result of anything that I did or anything that I believed.  I did not survive that time in my life to be here today because I was courageous or I was strong or insightful or wise.

I survived because I was saved.  I survived because I was loved.

I came out of that dark time in my life, because I was blessed to have several different individuals walk into my life, in very different roles.  And, in their own way, each of these people offered me the gift of unconditional love, regardless of how hard I fought them or pushed them away.  It was as if they each, in their own unique way, grabbed onto a corner of my soul and my heart and they held tight.  And they wouldn’t let me leave. They anchored me to this world. At a time when I could find nothing loveable about myself, nothing worth saving, those dear ones unconditionally loved me and that love saved me. That love saved my life.

Those unconditional loving experiences offered me salvation, they saved me in the most literal life-giving sense of the word. Or to draw upon one of my favorite shows, Parks and Rec, their unconditional love LITERALLY saved me! From that dark abyss where they each found me, I was called back, I was loved back to life.  So, I know intimately what it means to be saved by love. Because it happened to me and it is my most powerful witness.  I know with all my being, down deep in my bones, I know that Love can save.

And through the gift of that unconditional saving love, I was able to leave that time in my life not only with my life but also with powerful new images and understandings of God. Understandings of God based on that unconditional love that I received from those people who loved me back to life.  Through their life-saving actions, I had experienced God as love, all through relationships. I had experienced and been saved by God as a verb, a radically action oriented verb of love! God is Love.

You all know about the rich yellow/orange/amber sunny honey colored Presence that has been with me throughout my life, comforting me, and healing me.  And I have told you how I believe with all of me, that ‘God is Present’ in our lives and in our world.  Well, that divine presence that I feel is Love. My understanding that ‘God is Present’ dances in deep intimacy with my belief that ‘God is Love’.  God is Present in our lives and in the world through Love!

My understanding of a Loving and Present God is one that is relational and engaged in our lives and in the world in deeply personal and intimate ways.  That God of Loving Presence was what I experienced during my darkest days through the loving hands of those who accompanied me.  It is why I am able to say with such deep belief that God’s Loving Presence has the power to heal, to transform, to call back and to save.  And that’s why I believe that God’s Loving Presence pours into the very fabric of all of us and into the world with such extravagant abundance.

And I believe that we are in turn, called to offer that extravagant and abundant Loving Presence to the world. We are called to offer Loving Presence in ways that heal extravagantly and graciously, in ways that bring about peace and justice in the world, in ways that offer radical welcome to and unconditional love of our neighbor, and in ways that stand with and for the lonely, the outcast, the silenced, the marginalized.  We are called to draw on that abundant wellspring of God’s Loving Presence and in turn offer that Loving Presence in our relationships, our communities, our nation and our world.

God is Present and God is Love.

Those beliefs are a part of the very fabric of my being.  My hope is that everything I teach, preach or do in this world gives witness to those statements.  The God of Loving Presence saved me and the God of Loving Presence continues to save me every day.  And I believe that the God of Loving Presence will work alongside us to save the world.

My prayer today is that we all can be witnesses to the abundance of the ever Present and Loving God.  And that we do that through the ways that we walk, through the ways that we talk, through the ways that we live and most importantly, through the ways that we love.

That is my prayer…. Amen