So this is the second assignment, and the first one was a story about Hannah. This writer chose four different points of view for the second story. He wrote brief talks from the point of view of Eli - the priest, young Samuel, Elkanah - Samuel's father, and an angel. And the angel says to God, "Oh God, please don't make me go back. It's just trouble. What can I do with these people? Please don't make me go back again, please! ... I don't have to? You mean I don't have to? Oh thank you! Thank you!... What? You're going!"

Even the angel was surprised. God coming to Earth. God caring enough about us recalcitrant creatures to come to us. It used to be taught that God has no need of us, that God has no needs at all. It was also taught that God is our loving parent. Those are two contradictory statements. If children have need of their parents, parents have need of their children.

My children are grown and out of the nest, and I try not to interfere, but I'm still part of their lives - even from a distance. I need to be in touch by phone and, as often as possible, in person. I need to love them. I care what happens to them. It is my belief that God cares what happens to creation, and all that happens to every single one of us who have been made. I don't really think God said, "Whoops!" What I believe God said is, "It is good! It is very good." Even after God had made the human beings who were going to betray him over and over again - and Judas' betrayal of Jesus is what we focus on. But it began with Adam and Eve.

There's a story that God made Adam and said, "I can do better." But did he? It seems to me we all trip over pride, arrogance, resentment, fall flat on our faces, regardless, whether we're male or female. And God still cares about us, loves us enough to come to us as one of us. God is here as part of the story all through Hebrew scriptures.

In ancient thinking, an angel was not only an aspect of God, an angel was God. So Abraham spoke with the angel at the time of the fall of Sodom and Gomorrah, "...suddenly he spake unto God Himself, 'Shall not the master of the universe do what is right?'" Bold words. But Abraham had learned to be secure in God's love.

Today it seems to me there's a great deal of insecurity about God's love. And a great fear of God's anger. Surely we give God cause for anger. But I think again of my husband, myself and our children. Sure, occasionally we got mad at our kids, but Jesus said, "If your child asks you for an egg, will you give him a scorpion? And you're only human parents! How much greater is the heavenly Father's love for you!"

We human parents love our children as best we can, and though it's often not enough, far more often we're grieved rather than angered when they do something they should not have done. I suspect we give our heavenly parent much cause for grief - and for grief more often than for anger. "My children, my children, how could you have done this? How can you behave this way?"

When Adam and Eve listened to the tempter, rather than to God, God came after them in the cool of the evening, calling them: "Where are you?" God calls us. "Where are you? Where are you?" Sometimes we reply, "I'm here. What is it?" And often we're reluctant.

Jeremiah said, "I'm too young."

Isaiah said, "I'm a man of unclean lips."

Gideon said, "I'm the least of all people; surely you don't mean me."

Moses said, "I stutter," and tried to get out of what it was that God was asking him to do.

The only one I can think of who said yes immediately was Mary, who, when the angel came to her with his incredible demand, replied, "Be it unto me according to your word." Mary had total faith in God and in God's love, and faith that God's Word was love. Could anyone who did not believe completely in God's love have given birth to God? God came to us as Jesus.

God always asks the impossible. If it's possible, if it's easy, we can be pretty sure that it's the tempter who's asking us, not God. God asked Abraham to leave his comfortable home long before retirement age, go to a strange land with his wife who was well past child-bearing years and start a family. He asked Gideon to free his people from a vast host much stronger than the poor little handful of Jews hiding in the woods. He asked the prophets not to foretell the future, but to tell the people where they were right then, where they had stopped listening to God, and where most of them had become far more secular than we are in our secular society today. And he asked Mary to give birth to Jesus, who was going to save us from ourselves and our sins.

And Jesus? What did God ask of Jesus? And who was Jesus? Well, Jesus was God, for starters. If our Christianity is trinitarian, then the second person of the Trinity left the Godhead to come to us as a human being, to show us what it is to be human. If we are trinitarian Christians, we are asked to believe that Jesus was totally human and Jesus was totally divine. That's impossible. Once again, God is asking the impossible.

We can be reluctant. Throughout history, most of God's chosen people have been reluctant. We can say, "It's impossible!" and turn away. We can, as some Christians have done, emphasize the divinity at the expense of the humanity, or as other Christians have done, emphasize the humanity at the expense of the divinity. It's lots easier. But God doesn't ask the easy things; Satan does.

When Satan was tempting Jesus after His baptism, all of the temptations were to take the easy way out. And Jesus, being fully human and fully divine, refused Satan's wiles. God does ask the impossible, and with God's help we can say with Mary, "Be it unto me according to your Word."

When I'm in a quandary about something, I usually ask, "What would Jesus do?" And often I don't know. Life is very different at the end of the 20th century than it was 2,000 years ago. But I know whatever Jesus' answer would be, it would be an answer of love. And love like Jesus' is seldom easy. When it's easy, it's sentimentality, not love. Love often causes us to say, "No," when we would rather say, "Yes."

Jesus did not allow all the people he cured to follow him as one of his disciples. He told them to stay where they were and to spread the wonderful news of his message. And often they were not believed. He didn't let the rich young man come to him keeping all of his money. Whenever Jesus calls us, something has to be given away - our self-will, our egoistic judgments about other people's sins. Whenever I do that, I can almost hear Jesus telling me to look at my own sins.

We're living in a judgmental era, particularly in the church, pointing fingers at other people's sins - and some of them indeed have sinned - but what about mercy?

Several years ago, I was speaking at an Assemblies of God college in the Midwest and during the question and answer session, one young man said to me, "Your books really do seem to indicate that you believe that God is forgiving."

I said, "What an extraordinary statement!" and he amended himself, he said, "What I really mean is that your books seem to indicate that you believe that ultimately God is going to forgive everybody."

Well, I give my best answers when I don't have to think and get in the way, and I heard myself saying, "I don't believe God is going to fail with creation. I don't worship a failing God. Do you want God to fail?"

And he said, "But there has to be absolute justice,"

And I said, "If you should die tonight - you're maybe 19 or 20 - if you should die tonight, is that what you want? Absolute justice? Don't you feel the need for the weensiest, teensiest bit of mercy? I mean, me, I want lots and lots of mercy. Don't you feel the need for any mercy at all?" Well, that had not occurred to him.

Mercy, like love, is not easy. As one of the characters in my new novel says, "Mercy and permissiveness are not the same thing."

God's love is totally free, but if we accept this love, it is also totally demanding. So do I understand the Incarnation? Of course not. I live by it, but it is far beyond my finite human comprehension. Scripture tells us that it is God loving us so much that he sends his beloved son for our salvation. It is an ultimate act of love on the part of the infinite God.

It is when we insist on understanding the infinite that we get into trouble. Trouble that caused the crusaders to slaughter Greek Christians. And a few centuries later caused the Inquisition Christians to burn Christians, and a few centuries later caused the Protestants to kill the Catholics and the Catholics to kill the Protestants, whoever was mostly in power. And each thought that his group had the truth and the other group was absolutely wrong.

It is when we insist on defining God's love or God's anger that we blunder into anti-Semitism, or join rigid sects which promise us all the answers. God did not give answers. God gave himself to save us, to free us from our sins.

When Jesus was born as a baby in a barn in Bethlehem, that tiny baby bore our sins. And he bore them all his life as he grew into manhood. How heavy they must have been during his last weeks, when he knew that nobody understood, that all his closest friends and disciples were going to turn away, abandon, betray him. How heavy they must have been when he hung on the cross. But, for love of us he carried them. How blessed we are.

Why can't we remember that his last commandment was that we should love each other, as he loved us? John, in his epistle, tells us firmly that if we cannot love each other, if we cannot love the people we know, we cannot love God. If we are truly able to love one another, then we will get a glimpse of understanding of the magnificent love of God. Amen.

Madeleine L’Engle: Bill knew that God loved him, and I knew that Bill loved me.

Herron: Yes. And he shared that love throughout the country, and actually throughout the world on all of his travels.

L’Engle: Bill bathed people with God's love. It would just come through him.

Herron: In all the books you've written, from children's books to books for the working adult, the non-working adult, to all of us, what are you really trying to say in those books?

L’Engle:: God loves us.

Herron: And that's vital.

L’Engle: Yes!

Herron: And you think that people have not been saying that as they should?

L’Engle: I think too often people have been afraid that God doesn't love us. And that we have to earn God's love. It's not earnable. It's simply there, given to us and our job is to accept it. To understand that just as we are, without one plea, God loves us.

Herron: Tell me now, Madeleine, you've written novels...

L’Engle: Yes.

Herron: Now, from your Christian faith, how can you write something that's just make believe?

L’Engle:: Jesus taught by telling stories. He made them up! Isn't that the perfect example for us?

Herron: Absolutely. Are you working on a new novel?

L’Engle: Oh, I have one coming out. I'm just about to get the galleys.

Herron: And is the theme the same: God loves you?

L’Engle: Well, yes, the title comes from a longer quotation written by William Langland in 1400. And he said, "But all the wickedness in the world that men might do or say is no more to the mercy of God than a live coal dropped in the sea." And the title of the novel is A Live Coal. And it's a book about people who need to give and receive a great deal of mercy.

Herron: Madeleine, the people who have lost a loved one - what word would you say to them today?

L’Engle: Well, I've written a book, Two-Part Invention, about my marriage and my response to my husband's life and death. And I'm just so grateful that I had a wonderful husband for 40 years.

Herron: You just say again that God cares for you and loves you through it all.

L’Engle: Oh yes. Particularly when things are difficult.