Library
Sunday, February 14, 2010
Love
By Rev. Jerry Herships
I Corinthians 13:1-3, 13
1If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 2And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. 3If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.
13And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.
Few tasks for a writer or speaker are more harrowing than to try to write or speak about love. The audacity! Who am I, or who is anyone else, for that matter, to try to explain (in under 15 minutes no less!) what love is and how we are to relate to it. I like what scholar and social critic Bell Hooks says about love, “The word ‘love’ is most often defined as a noun, yet…we would all love better if we used it as a verb.”
At first I thought I would speak on love regarding romantic relationships. After all, it’s Valentine’s Day. The problem with that is, if you aren’t in a romantic type of loving relationship, you can feel left in the dust. So I broadened the topic.
I want to talk about two ways to love. Ideally one mirrors the other. I am talking about God’s love for us and our love for others.
Our passage today comes from Paul’s letter to the community at Corinth. As we have mentioned before, Corinth was kind of a rowdy place. It was a port town. Think of it as New Orleans with a heavy splash of Vegas. Paul visited the city twice, in 51-52 AD and then again a few years later in 58. Our passage today comes from the first of two letters that we know that he wrote to that community. This letter focuses on how hard it is to be a loving Christ like person in a city like Vegas, I mean, Corinth.
Paul knew the people struggled with a lot of the same things that you and I do. A lot of it has to do with focus. What are we focusing on? Paul is telling us that it really doesn’t matter WHAT else you have if you are missing love from your life. Now I don’t mean romantic love, I mean love for all mankind. Brian McLaren has a great modern day paraphrase of our scripture passage in his new book, A New Kind of Christianity. Here is how McLaren restates Paul’s ideas.
Though I interpret the biblical text with state-of-the-art hermeneutics and preach sermons with flawless homiletics, though all my theologies are systematic, all my books, blogs, and podcasts scrupulously orthodox, and my books always best-sellers, without love I am static on a radio or an error message on a computer screen. Though I can show decadal church growth in the double digits and raise millions of dollars in building funds, though I have files full of testimonials from people saved, healed, delivered, and blessed through my ministry, without love I’m just another clever, two-bit purveyor of goods and services in the religious-industrial complex. Though I have worldwide impact, traveling by private jet and broadcasting on cable, satellite, and the internet, though my budgets balance and my seminaries are bursting with beautiful and handsome valedictorians (all of whom are above average in every way), and though presidents invite me to the White House and consider me a “key person,” without love I am nothing.
This says to me that we have one mission here on earth. I again steal the words of McLaren because I think he puts it simply and beautifully: Become Christlike people, people of Christlike love. When we do this, all the rest falls into place.
Christlike love is harder than it looks….and I think it can look pretty hard. Christ and through Christ, God doesn’t love conditionally. That means there is no specific way of “acting” to win God’s love and grace. If there were, it wouldn’t be grace. It would be as my dad, the lawyer, would say, “Quid pro quo” which is Latin for “something for something.” That’s not unconditional love. That’s a transaction, a negotiation, an exchange of goods. It is not unconditional love.
Actually as a result we are being redundant. True love, God’s kind of love, the kind Paul is talking about, is always unconditional. So really anything calling itself love that relies on certain behaviors of the other is not the kind of Love that God gives us. The kind of love God gives us is Christlike love. This is our goal as well. Isn’t it nice to be given something you don’t deserve? That you don’t have to work for? Something that feels like it just came out of the blue? What an awesome surprise. This is so contrary to the way of the world. But it doesn’t have to be. We can love like Christ if we get two things out of the way: Ego and fear.
Last week I talked a little bit about EGO standing for Edging God Out. Our ego wants desperately to keep us focused on anything BUT the love of God. Focus on our past, our future, our intellect, our accomplishments, our acquisitions. It wants us to focus on changing and controlling others, proving them wrong and us right.
It is, also, fine when we focus on what WE are doing wrong, our lack of accomplishments or acquisitions and all those stupid mistakes from the past, or how unsure we are of the future. In any way and every way we can find to condemn ourselves, the ego is all for it.
See it doesn’t matter to the ego if we focus on how great we are or how unworthy we are. Both bring about the desired result, not focusing on the love of God. When we let the ego lead this dance, the ego is fine with pumping more quarters in the jukebox.
The idea that God’s love is so great, that it is freely given, is almost beyond understanding. There might be some of you thinking, “well that’s great for most people, but I have done (or continue to do) some pretty rotten things.” Understand, God doesn’t “approve” of doing bad things; it is just that it won’t get in the way of God’s love for you. Paul tells us in his letter to Romans that NOTHING can get in the way of God’s love for you, even bad behavior, lousy thoughts, stupid spending and overeating. Nothing.
Also know that even though I preach it, I ain’t got it yet. Ask Laura, she’ll tell you. I beat myself up pretty good and pretty often. My friend Dave calls them Demon Committee Meetings. I want to believe all of this but it is hard. And when I catch myself thinking it is hard, I know I am leading with my ego. It is my ego that wants me to believe that God couldn’t love ME. The ego says, “Yea other people, I get that. But YOU??? Seriously? Come on. You know better.” Don’t… listen… to that… voice. You are loved by God, regardless of your job status, health status or relationship status or anything else.
Fear is the other biggie that keeps us from experiencing the love of God and sharing that love with others. In many ways Fear and ego are one and the same. Fear is one of the tactics that it uses to get us to stop looking to God.
We are fearful that we are doing SOMETHING wrong. The way we work, the way we worship, the way we eat, the way we live, the way we exercise. When we find ourselves focusing on our mistakes, we are living in fear. It can even extend to our relationships. If we have been hurt before, we, for some reason, believe it will be the same way next time. This often makes us afraid to even TRY new relationships. It is why people who have been hurt by the church hesitate to come back. They think it’s going to be the same old, same old. Sadly, many times they are right. But that is not reason enough to stop trying.
Many an author, much wiser than I, has said that fear is the opposite of love and I believe that. A lot of people believe that hate is the opposite of love but I believe hate is just the byproduct of fear. We fear something and as a result we want to get rid of it. Fear is the first step towards hate. Letting go of fearful thoughts and actions leads us to love.
And when we let go of Fear and embrace love, we are embracing the essence of God. 1 John 4:8 puts it exactly this way. In that verse it simply says, “God is Love.” Not God is like love or God looks like love. GOD IS LOVE.
My Valentine’s Day wish for everyone here, including myself, is that we can release our ego’s need to control and be right and keep us scared. We can escape from relying on our intellect and our actions and our materialism and our thinking that we are not deserving of God’s love. I wish that we can release fear, fear of the unknown, fear of failure, fear of not being enough, and instead receive the love that God has for us. The grace God has for us and the certainty that we are enough in God’s eyes and that in itself is enough.