To Love Like God Loves Us

1 John 4:7-21 (NRSV)
Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love.
God's love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins.
Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us. By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit. And we have seen and do testify that the Father has sent his Son as the Savior of the world. God abides in those who confess that Jesus is the Son of God, and they abide in God.
So we have known and believe the love that God has for us. 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; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love.
We love because he first loved us. Those who say, "I love God," and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen. The commandment we have from him is this: those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also.

This week I found unconditional love. Some of you hear that and you think…I knew it. I knew that Emmaus weekend was going to turn him into a love-addled fool. But that’s not where I found unconditional love. It wasn’t at a weekend retreat or at a clergy meeting in Parksley…Lord, help us. We didn’t get a puppy and my mama didn’t come to visit. I found unconditional love…online.

I need to tell you about this because the California Astrology Association is offering The Unconditional Love Spell online. I was doing research for this sermon and I ran across this advertisement:

Receive the love you’ve always yearned for!...Do you want the love of your life to have a strong desire to make you happy, desire you, take care of you? Do you want them to be deliriously happy and want to be with you night and day – forever?
You deserve to have the love of your life feel that you are the best thing to ever happen to them. You deserve to be happy, to feel wanted, cherished, adored.
You are not asking too much to want to see a spark in their eyes whenever they look at you. To be crazy about you. To give you their friendship, their lust, their love. And you want it unconditionally! No strings attached. No hesitation, no remorse, no doubts about you whatsoever.

So all you have to do is to send off for this love spell from the CAA and the best news is that it’s only $19.95. Who says money can’t buy love? And my favorite part about this deal? The spell comes with an unconditional guarantee…for one year. After that…some conditions may apply to your unconditional love. Act now and they can throw in a voodoo doll, too, in case the love thing doesn’t work out.

I’m struck by this advertisement because I know how many people want desperately to believe in it. There will be people who will send in their money because they want to believe what it says…that someone could love me enough to be “deliriously happy” whenever I walk through the door…that I deserve “to be happy, to feel wanted, cherished and adored…that all of this could be mine with nothing asked of me, unconditionally.

It is a wonderful dream because we know that love too often comes with conditions. Children hear messages from their parents, either spoken or unspoken, that tell them they are only loved as long as they conform to an ideal they find hard to meet. Husbands and wives vow impossible things to one another and fall short and the marriage is challenged by how they deal with the expectations that were unspoken. Church members hear messages of love from the Bible and the pulpit and the liturgy that say, as 1 John says in our passage today, that God is love and so we also love one another. We Christians loooove each other. But how often do our actions match our fond professions? Churches are measured, perhaps in this way more than any other, by how well they live up to the commandment to love.

But we are so often disappointed. Love, that almost ecstatic experience of feeling accepted just as we are…with no strings attached. That wave of emotion we associate with teenage summer romances and bad Danielle Steele novels…that mountaintop experience that we have at a church camp as a youth or at an Emmaus event as an adult…that sort of love is so fleeting, so ephemeral, so hard to hold on to, and so much to be desired. So much to be desired that we might be tempted to send $20 to California for some magic words that might restore it to us.

But I hope you know that there is no spell, at any price, that can create the kind of love our needy, searching, achey-breakey hearts desire. Having said that, though, I have a hard job this morning because what I have to say instead is something so common-place, something that has been said so often, something that we see on bumper stickers so much that we may not be able to really hear it. All I have to say today is what 1 John says: “God is love.” And because God loves us we also ought to love one another.

That’s it. And I realize that it’s a tough thing I have to do today because a preacher telling you to love ought to be about the most stereotypical thing we preachers do. I know we usually get your attention when we say things you don’t expect us to say like, “God wants you to floss.” Or when we say things that seem to ask a lot from you like, “The model for God’s giving is a tenth of your income.” But when I say something like, “God is love and we ought to love each other”…well, of course, preacher. Of course we’re supposed to love. But how’s the world going to change if we do that?

That’s the rub, isn’t it? Love is patient, love is kind. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. But love doesn’t change anything. Where is the power in love? The heart that has grown hardened to a world without love wonders these things and the preacher who talks about love has his work cut out for him. But a heart that is broken knows that there is no power on earth greater than a love that can enter my despair and my deepest longings and my secret desires. Who am I talking to today?

Thomas Merton was a 20th century Trappist monk who lived in Kentucky. He was a prophet in many ways, challenging the way that the world and Christians talk about God. In a book called The Spring of Contemplation, written in 1968, he wrote, “People don't want to hear any more words. In our mechanical age, all words have become alike.... To say `God is Love' is like saying, `Eat Wheaties.’” Eat Wheaties. It’s a good thing to do, but why should we? Because an advertiser tells us to? We should love because the good book says we should?

If we’re going to talk this way, suggesting that people love because God loves us, we had better make it clear that we’re talking about something more than just a healthy, lifestyle choice. We had better make it clear that love is more than just the easy acceptance of everything that comes along because ‘it’s all good.’ We had better make it clear that the love we receive from God is not only about welcoming us in, but also about transformation. And the love we show each other should be about the same thing. We had better make it clear that love is what God does and it’s not only a warm, fuzzy but a universe-altering total makeover.

Jennell Mahoney, a California pastor, writes about some findings from a sociologist named Robert Bellah. “Bellah did some research in the 1980’s about why people go to church, and found that the number one reason was to feel good about themselves. He found church members often spoke of their need for self-preservation, self-aggrandizement, self-gratification, and self-love—not God’s love at all.” In other words, people were coming to church for felt personal needs. We sometimes feed this notion by talking about marketing the church as a place where you can be a better person.

The message of the gospel is much deeper. Jesus didn’t call the disciples away from their nets so that they could be better people. He said, “Follow me. Leave yourself behind. The one who would be the greatest must be the least. Take up your cross. Lose your life and you will find it.” These messages are counter-intuitive to our culture. Who’s going to respond to that?

But they were no less strange in Jesus’ world. By the time the early Church was a few decades old, they were already struggling to understand what Jesus was trying to say to them. What did it mean to love as Jesus loved? For some it meant self-aggrandizement. For some it meant becoming the best person in the group. For some it meant loving Jesus better than anybody else and being recognized for that.

John says something different in this passage. He is trying to set his community straight and he tells them that love looks different than they have been expressing it. Love is not a competition or a series of acts designed to earn the love of God…it is a response to what God has done for us. Love is lived out in the relationships of people who have had their lives turned upside-down by what God had done for them in Jesus Christ. God is love. But we don’t know this because God sent us a Hallmark card on our birthday and told us so. We know this because love was revealed in a human body. Love was a baby in a borrowed shed. Love walked among us by a Galilean lakeshore. Love was stretched out on a criminal’s cross. Love was rejected by a world that could not stand what it meant. But love rose again. Jesus rose again. We know love because God loved us in Jesus…loved us enough to take upon God’s own self the sins of the world.

There is a new life in those words, “God is love.” There is death, but there is life and the word for us is so much more than “Eat Wheaties.” For those who have had their lives transformed by an encounter with this living Christ, ‘God is love’ is not a nice bumper sticker but a launching pad for a whole new life. When you’ve experienced that love, love doesn’t mean what it used to mean.

When we live in Christ, love takes on an entirely different character. There is a lot of anxiety in love the way we usually talk about it. If we go to church because we want to feel better about ourselves (and that is true of most of us)…if we crave romantic relationships and deep connections with a ‘soul mate’ because we want to know the thrill of being cherished (and that is true of most of us)…if we seek our parents’ approval because we want to prove that we’re worthy of affection (and that is true of many of us)…if we do these things, we know the anxiety of love because we are anxious about who we are if we fail in these things.

The love offered to us in Christ is not the same thing as this anxious love. Christ doesn’t offer us salvation because we deserve it somehow, because we have made ourselves ‘loveable.’ You look pretty great to me, but God’s love came to us, not when we looked our Sunday best, but when we looked our worst, when we were still sinners. God’s love doesn’t set conditions for what we look like when the invitation is sent out. God expects us to be at our worst.

But God also doesn’t expect us to remain unchanged. There is a tradition in Christian theology that talks about salvation as if God only sees us in Jesus and that somehow all of our flaws are hidden behind the merits of Christ. Don’t settle for a Jesus like that. As Methodists we believe that God loves us too much to leave like that…hidden and unchanged. God gives us a grace that gets into our lives and reworks us. For those who claim the love of Christ, who invite Jesus to continue the work of grace in us that began on the cross, there is a lot to be done. When we allow God in unconditionally and begin to love God, the work of sanctifying grace takes hold…making us more holy.

Part of that love is the love we show each other. God is love and so we should love each other. We should love like God loves us. Loving one another even though we know there are things that we don’t like about each other. Loving one another even when we know there are things in our brothers and sisters that don’t deserve loving. Loving one another because we know that God loves our neighbors and that gives us hope that we may be loved, too. And this love will transform the world.

Nobody said that unconditional love is easy. No, I take that back. The California Astrology Association said that love is easy but they are wrong. Love comes at a far dearer price than $19.95. It comes at the cost of the cross. But when we love as God loved us on that cross, oh, the things that will change!

I know we have a mixed bag of experiences with our mothers. We’re celebrating them today knowing that they are human and subject to all the flaws and failures that all of us are subject to. Even so, mothers are a sign to us of God’s love because when they are being what God called them to be they show us love in human form. That’s incarnational love of the best sort.

We could compare stories of who has the best mother or grandmother. But that’s really not called for. I had the best one in my grandma.

My Grandma was not one for words. She was very quiet. But she had a heart as big as Texas. She was always interested in what I did and always let me know how much she cared for me and the other grandchildren who loved her. If every person in this earth knew how much they were loved and lived like loved people, no one would ever send $19.95 to California again. But people will keep sending money and looking for love in all the wrong places until they know that God is love and that God’s people love each other like God loves them. That’s the work of grace we have been given. Who’ve you got to tell? Thanks be to God.