Sermons from the Pulpit

John 15:9-17, Acts 10:44-48

    I wonder if anybody has ever been able to adequately define love. If we allow it, love can be a very powerful, inviting and creative word. The scriptures tell us that God is love. In first John it says, "Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love."¹ That causes me to pause and think about the title of the photo exhibit that's downstairs, "Love Makes a Family". I suppose we could say, then, that "God Makes a Family."

     When I think about God as love, I realize that I can certainly never specifically define God. Therefore, I can't really ever give an adequate, limited definition of love. Well, some words, some things just aren't meant to have a textbook definition attached to them. We can certainly engage in a faithful exploration of who or what God and love are through theological reflection and discourse. And, we can employ our intellectual prowess to gain understanding of what we perceive to be significant attributes of our God of love. We can even talk about how we know love by our actions and how we feel toward other people. But, I think most of us like to have our lives well defined? That may be why the word love has become so trivialized and taken for granted. What we know of love is from our own experiences of the here and now, and we limit our definition of love to our own most immediate, lived experiences.

     If love were so easily defined then it would make sense that Jesus' commandment of love would be easy to live by. Quite the contrary, since love is not easily definable - especially the mystery of Jesus' love. This great commandment of love is not easy to live by. We might think that we know love by the loving relationships we have with family and the people we choose to befriend, and to some degree we do. Some of us might say, "Well, of course I love my family and friends. We show our love by how much we care, our kindness and generosity, our patience and just being there for one another." We might say, "I'd do anything for the people I love! That's what love is all about!"

     Well, I think that's wonderful and I affirm those kinds of relationships and those attributes of love. But, this great commandment of love isn't just about loving family and those we choose as our friends. Jesus' commandment isn't for us to pick and choose who we would enjoy loving. That's what is so difficult about this commandment. It's a very difficult thing to love the people we would prefer not to love. Now, of course there are people we will build long-lasting, deep and loving relationships with, but this commandment of love calls us to search deep within ourselves to discover how to show our love even as Jesus loved. This is a love that is built on the inside so that it will spill over to the outside. It's about reaching beyond our insider relationships and opening ourselves to the possibility of finding love where we never thought love could be found.

     Jesus was the embodiment of God's love, and that's a tough act to follow. Jesus didn't approach people with suspicion and presumptions before he offered them his love. Jesus didn't discriminate. As a matter of fact, he made it clear that he didn't come for the righteous. You know to whom he ministered most. He ministered to those who were outcasts, the unloveables of society. He showed them that God's love is a regardless kind of love. Regardless of who you are, God loves you. I believe our calling is to work toward having that regardless kind of love for others as well.

     Liberation theologians say that the current day unloveables of society have a special relationship with God because God is love for them when love is found nowhere else. Dietrich Bonhoeffer said that he had to learn to view life and the gospel from below.² Most of us probably need to learn to view life and the gospel from below too. If we work at viewing the gospel from below, we might discover the gospel anew through the eyes of those who are weak and who don't count for much by the standards of so-called successful people and institutions.

     It's our human nature to love who we want to love because we think we have love figured out based on our own limited experiences of what we can see, what we can touch and what we can hear. And, most problematic, we sometimes don't love because we believe what others tell us without checking it out for ourselves. I believe that's why, according to John, later on in his farewell discourse, Jesus went on to say that he gave these commandments to keep [us] from stumbling.

     I sometimes work from my limited experience and I stumble. There was more than one time in seminary that I struggled with this command to love. One of the most difficult times was during my clinical work at Saint Elizabeth's Medical Center.

     Part of my work there involved doing theological reflection in a small group setting with other seminarians. One of the members of my group was a young, Roman Catholic seminarian. He was quite dogmatic about his religious convictions and he was very opposed to welcoming gays and lesbians into the life of the church. Well, I guess I was kind of dogmatic in my own way at the other end of the spectrum.

     I remember one day when the issue of homosexuality came up during our small group. Very quickly the dialogue turned into a very heated debate steeped in theological certitude on both sides of the issue. I don't think either one of us was feeling a whole lot of love for the other at that point. But, I do think we were learning to confront in love, regardless of where we came down on the issue.

     I had to ask myself, how do I love someone like this with whom I would vehemently disagree with on the inclusion of gays and lesbians in the life and leadership of the Church of Christ? Well, learning to love takes a great amount of work, and I continue to work on it.

     I'm more certain now that laying down one's life doesn't necessarily mean a total and complete sacrifice of one's self. Laying down one's life might mean being confident enough with who God created us to be that we don't find it necessary to oppress someone else to lift up what we believe to be truth. Or, laying down one's life might mean allowing a haunting prejudice to die so that we can bear new fruit. Jesus' did not suggest that we love one another, he did not recommend that we love one another, he commanded that we love one another as he loved us. And aren't we followers of Jesus Christ? Actually, I think the starting place for a lot of us may be in opening ourselves to actually receiving a command.

     God does indeed work in mysterious ways. I developed a close relationship with my fellow seminarian at St. Elizabeth's over the final weeks of our training. We've met for lunch and we've written to each other a few times since then. We still don't agree on the issue of gays and lesbians in the church, but that doesn't get in the way of the love we finally found for one another. We finally found that our dignity and worth as children of God transcends all else.

     Claiming to be a Christian puts us all in the inclusive circle of friendship that today's passage speaks about. Each day brings a new opportunity to grow out of our prejudice and fear of loving the unloveable into a faithful existence that deepens our faith in a loving God. If we strive to love as Christ loved, we will be friends, we will experience the love of God, we will know that we are chosen and we will bear fruit that will last.

Amen.