In the midst of the pandemic, our communities erupted over racial inequity. We learned that more black and brown people are dying from this pandemic than white people. There are medical deserts and food deserts and all kind of deserts where low-income people do not have access to the services that many of us take for granted. We are reminded daily that our health system has inequities – and I’m not just talking about race or income. How is an 85-year-old who doesn’t own a computer supposed to register for a vaccine? There has been an uptick in violence in Chicago with shootings and carjacking. We are fighting each other on all sides. Very few people think any of our leadership is handling this well – whether on the state level or on the federal level. We’ve had hard times in our country before and we’ve come together. The Great Depression. World War II. The 9-11 attacks. This time we are having a hard time coming together. The divisions just seem to get stronger and deeper. How are you? Really. Because I’m not very good these days. One day turns into another. Some days I feel like I’m in a trance. I have watched the seasons change and yet every day, every week, every month seems the same as the last one. You wake up one morning and you are halfway through February. The next morning you are at the end of March and Holy Week again! Things are hard – very, very hard. We are all getting very, very tired of all of it. Our tempers are short. Our patience is used up. Every time we get a cough we wonder if it’s Covid. Trying to get a vaccine is about as much fun as searching for a needle in a haystack no matter how old you are. How will we get through this? When will it end? What are we supposed to do about any of it? “Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God;” “God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them, male and female he created them. God saw everything that God had made, and indeed, it was very good.” Take a deep breath with me. Shake the despair and the anger off, just a little bit. Come with me back to two of the fundamental truths of our faith. I believe that it is these truths, and the practice of these truths in our lives and in our faith community that will give us the courage and the strength to see this Pandemic through to the end; to build a stronger faith community; and to begin the work of bringing God’s kingdom to our world. The work before us as Christian disciples is to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visits the prisoners, and recognizes Jesus in all of them. I believe the only way we will be successful in this is to know, practice, and live these particular truths of our foundation. First, we are made in the image of God. Imago Dei. Our Holy Scripture opens with this startling revelation. God created us in God’s own image – male and female God created us. We all have a tendency to anthropomorphize God – that is think about God with human attributes, like hands and eyes, and even at times, a gender. From the time we are small children in Sunday School we draw pictures of God and Jesus that look like our parents or grandparents. When we think about the fact that we are created in the image of God we might first think about things like eye color or hair or weight or some of the very human things we attach to our physical image. Being made in the image of God, however, isn’t about us. It is first about God. God created us co-equally – all of us. Black, brown, white, old, young, male, female, gay, straight – we are co-equally made in the image of God by God. The dignity of every human being is granted by God at the time of our creation. I really want us to think about what that means. Being created in the image of God means that our hierarchies are human institutions that we can let go of. Men aren’t better or stronger than women. Whites are not smarter than blacks. Rich people are not better than poor people. A doctorate does not give you more value than someone who left school in the eighth grade. Being created in the image of God is a leveling agent. We are all the same, bearing the image of God on the core of our being. We are God’s treasures. We are created by God, in the image of God, to be in relationship with God and with one another. This is our purpose. It is as old as the prayer known as the Shema in the book of Deuteronomy. “Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.” (Deuteronomy 6: 4) God creates us in God’s own image to be in relationship with God and with others. We love God with our heart, soul, and might because we God’s image is imprinted on the core of our being. The second foundational principle of our faith that will help us in these days is found throughout scripture, particularly the New Testament but I chose to focus on I John 4. “Beloved let us love one another, because love is from God, everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another.” William Sloane Coffin, Jr., a Presbyterian clergyman and a peace activist, writes this: Of God’s love we can say two things: it is poured out universally for everyone from the Pope to the loneliest wino on the planet; and secondly, God’s love doesn’t see value, it creates value. It is not because we have value that we are loved, but because we are loved that we have value. Our value is a gift, not an achievement.” God created us in God’s own image. God stamped the core of who we are with God’s image. Because we carry God’s image, God loves us and wants to be in a relationship with us. God relentlessly pursues us. God chases us. God doesn’t care where we are or who we are or where we are going or where we have been. Because we belong to God, Imago Dei, stamped with God’s own image, we are pursued by God always and forever. We are not loved because we have value. God’s love gives us value. Every. Single. One. Of. Us. God’s love gives us value. I wonder what kind of difference it could make for us as individuals, as families, as a church, as a community, as a state, as a nation, if we lived out these two fundamental truths of our faith. Everyone is created in the image of God. Everyone is loved by God. Leif Peterson, the son of Eugene Peterson shared a secret that his Dad had shared with him early in life. It was a message that Leif said his dad had whispered in his heart for 50 years, words he had snuck into his room to say over him as he slept as a child: God loves you. God is on your side. He is coming after you. God is relentless.” What follows this kind of understanding of being created in God’s image and being loved relentlessly by God, is that we, then, in turn, love others. When we don’t love others we are denying all of it – denying that we are made in the image of God, denying the love of God that gives us inherent value, denying the worth of other human beings. When we fail to love the other as God has loved us, we dehumanize them. As soon as we dehumanize them, we begin to treat them as “less than” or as “the other”. We find it easier to be rude to them, ignore their situation, find fault with them, blame them – and the list goes on. We find it easier to be smug and satisfied with our own life and our own behavior and we stop seeing or even looking for the injustice, the inequality, the fact that far less people live the privileged lives we live than what God intends because it is God’s intention that every person lives a privileged life. Warm. Safe. Free from fear. God made humankind in God’s image, loving us and giving us inherent value with that love. In turn, we are challenged to love others with the very same love. Unconditional love. Unending love. Steadfast love. Love that pursues the other. We are invited, even commanded, to work for equity and against inequity in all of our systems and institutions. This is a scary invitation. It can mean dismantling everything we know about how things are done now and finding new and different ways of doing them, so that everyone know they are made in God’s image. Everyone knows that God is pursuing them in love. Everyone knows they are beloved and they belong. Now, I hope you’ve stayed with me. This is a little shorter than Alex’s sermons! I want to take us back to where we started. How are we going to make it through this pandemic? How are we going to change the inequity’s in our systems? How are we going to begin the work of putting our very broken lives back together? What can we possibly do in the midst of all the fatigue and despair we feel in our own lives? We can dig deep and find the Imago Dei that each of us carry. We can dig even deeper and find the love with which God loves us. When we find those two things, we can reach out in love to everyone and anyone who has need. We can reach out in love, even if it means we risk our own privilege. We can reach out with love because we look at the other – the mentally ill, the transgender, the gay, the black and brown people, and we see the image of God. We see Imago Dei. And we love. That’s the only answer I know. We can and we must keep loving and love better and deeper because that love is from God. It is planted in the very core of who we are. Beloved let us love on another because love is from God.