The School of Love
You’ve got to love that first big number from the musical “Annie.” You know, the full chorus of little orphans join Annie, dancing with their mop and bucket props singing “It’s a hard knock life, for us.” The choreography and lively musicality draw the viewers in and endear them to the orphans even as the lyrics paint a tragic reality. Did you get some principle education in the school of hard knocks? To one degree or another, I bet you did. And in the middle of it, you may have never felt a song and dance coming on. Life can put us in an extreme class of that school of hard knocks. Conditions can be just ever so difficult and may have no one to lift us out of the mess when it gets the messiest.
I would say my father matriculated in that school. The Little Orphan Annie daily comic strip debuted in August of 1924, a year before he was born. The stock market crash and all that went with it happened when he turned four. The “day that will live on in infamy” came when he turned sixteen. He was in basic training at age eighteen, and off into the “European Theater.” After his nineteenth birthday, he spent more than a year beyond V-E Day in a V.A. Hospital, surviving at length his land mine injuries, and reconstruction of his foot. By the time I was able to speak, He was just good old Dad to us, and Dr. Hermon T. Price, Jr. to his colleagues at Tucson Medical Center. It was much later in life that I became aware he had ever come through any difficulties.
When Jesus said that “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” I always felt that utterance pointed to the whole story of his school of hard knocks. We know he rejoiced, we know he prayed deeply, we know he ate and drank with his chosen dining companions. Even given all that, it was all going somewhere, and the Son of Man was not really to rest at home until he finished all of his work and had taught his strongest lesson of love from the cross. His school of hard knocks was really the School of Love. The lessons were taught in a thousand ways through his life, and one huge powerful feature of it was the love shown by laying down his life for his friends. You, his friends—all of us—live by that gift.
In articles this week I was going over elements of Lessons that go with the Revised Lectionary in most churches across the land, but come to think of it, at St. Francis Church and School this past Sunday, we had lessons tuning us into “Episcopal School Sunday.” In our Liturgy, the Lord is going to take us to school, so to speak. He is taking us indeed to the School of Love. And that love will not be a sentimental feeling, it will be a way of life, it will be the actions and decisions that demonstrate God’s loving heart. The message of Moses addressing the people is God’s heart of love moves his people to love:
So now, O Israel, what does the Lord your God require of you? … To love him, to serve the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, and to keep the commandments of the Lord your God and his decrees that I am commanding you today, for your own well-being…For the Lord your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome… who executes justice for the orphan and the widow, and who loves the strangers, providing them food and clothing. You shall also love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. You shall fear the Lord your God; him alone you shall worship.
—Deut. 10:12-13, 17-20
The message in the First Epistle of John is we belong to God in such a way that we discover the beautiful new life of abiding in love. What a lesson! Ours is a transformed existence—life in this world actually transitions to God’s life lived in us. Fear is tossed out and away from us. Love casts it away:
God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them. Love has been perfected among us in this: that we may have boldness on the day of judgment, because as he is, so are we in this world. There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. — 1 John 4:16-18
Most sublime is the school that teaches love, teaches that God is love…loves us and pulls us into this realm…so we fearlessly can love others. The hard knocks continue, the sacrifice will surely be central to our lives, but the reality in which we abide is love. The hard knock life would have had us cut off: orphans, strangers to God, but we are taken in. As 1 Peter 2:10 records for us, “Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.”
We live to serve others, do for others, love others, and thereby abide in God, experiencing the greatest power in the universe, the power of love.