The Greatest Love Letter of All Time – Homily for Word of God Sunday

About five or six years ago there was a poll
to discover the world’s greatest love letter.
After all the votes were tallied,
the overwhelming favorite
among all the love letters ever written,
was a letter from country music singer Johnny Cash
to his wife June Carter Cash for her 65th birthday.
The letter was published in a book by their son about ten years ago,
and it’s just a beautiful letter, brief, simple, and heartfelt,
and it goes like this:

Happy Birthday Princess,

We get old and get used to each other.
We think alike.
We read each others [sic] minds.
We know what the other wants without asking.

Sometimes we irritate each other a little bit.
Maybe sometimes take each other for granted.

But once in awhile, like today,
I meditate on it and realize how lucky I am
to share my life with the greatest woman I ever met.
You still fascinate and inspire me.
You influence me for the better.
You’re the object of my desire,
the #1 Earthly reason for my existence.
I love you very much.

Happy Birthday Princess. – John

Now there are many things to love about that letter.
First of all, I love it because it was written by Johnny Cash,
and I happen to be a fan.

But aside from that, there’s a real honesty to the letter,
a simplicity that gets right to the point,
a heartfelt sincerity.
Johnny Cash doesn’t try to gloss anything over,
he’s not trying to hide anything.
They sometimes get on each other’s nerves,
and take each other for granted.
But he ends with a beautiful tribute to how important she is to him,
“the #1 Earthly reason for his existence.”
You can tell that this is a letter
from someone who’s been in a relationship for a long time,
with its ups and downs, its tragedies and glories.

It’s just beautiful, and it’s no wonder that it was voted
the greatest love letter of all time.

Now I bring this up today
because this weekend is Word of God Sunday.
Every year on the Third Sunday in Ordinary Time
we celebrate the Word of God, God’s love letter to us.
The Word of God is God’s love letter to us.

Love seeks expression.
Love, true love, almost demands to be communicated,
to be expressed to the beloved.
And so God, in his infinite love for us,
gives us his Word as a love letter to us.

And what is the Word of God?
If we look at the very beginning of the Gospel of John,
we can see exactly what the Word of God is:
“In the beginning was the Word,
and the Word was with God,
and the Word was God.”
“And the Word became flesh and lived among us.”
The Word of God is not a what, but a Who,
the person of Jesus Christ.
Jesus Christ is the Word of God.
Jesus is God’s love letter to us.
“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son.”

Out of love, the Father gives the Son as gift to the world.
Jesus, the Word of God, is God’s love letter to us.
And it is up to us to read that letter,
to receive Jesus into our lives, into our hearts.

Like all married couples,
Brenda and I have exchanged love letters over the years.
And I don’t think it would ever have occurred to us not to read
any of the love letters that we had written to each other.
To receive a Valentine from Brenda and say,
“Oh, thanks, honey, I’ll read this later,” and set it aside?
Or, “Let’s put this anniversary card on the stack
with the bills and junk mail,
and all the rest of the stuff that we need to go through this week.”

No, when we get love letters from our beloved,
we set everything aside to read them,
whether they’re from a fiancé, a spouse, a