Sermon for Sunday, May 13, 2007

The Power of Unconditional Love

by

Rev. Dr. Harvey C. Martz

Scripture:  I Corinthians 12:31-13:13

31 But strive for the greater gifts. And I will show you a still more excellent way.

13 If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. ² And 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. ³ If 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. ⁴ Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant ⁵ or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; ⁶ it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. ⁷ It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. ⁸ Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. ⁹ For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; ¹⁰ but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. ¹¹ When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. ¹² For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. ¹³ And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.

Jeannette Walls grew up in a very dysfunctional family. Her parents did not do some very basic parenting. Her father was an alcoholic and her mother was a school teacher who often had to be forced by Jeannette and her siblings to get up and go to work.

Jeannette Walls was three years old when she was very badly burned while she was cooking some hot dogs unsupervised by her parents. That was just one story about how her mother and her father let her and her brother and sisters down.

She has written a remarkable book about her dysfunctional family-“The Glass Castle”—and our Monday noon book club was holding a lively discussion about it when I popped into that group this week. Jeannette Walls and her three siblings show remarkable resilience in surviving their messed up parents—parents in name only most of the time—but the scars that they experienced are deeper than even the burns she suffered.

Part of the tragedy of their story is that all the time the children were starving and scavenging for food and stealing food from other children at school, their wacky mother was holding on to a piece of real estate in Texas that was worth over a million dollars. If she had told them about it and had been willing to sell it, the children would not have had to go hungry.

Today Ms. Walls is a very successful writer living in Manhattan—and her mother lives in New York as well, but as a homeless person—choosing to live on the streets, choosing to refuse any help from her adult children because she wants to live as a homeless person.

This story is a reminder that for many persons the celebration of Mother’s Day brings a real mixture of feelings.

When we talk about mothers and fathers in the Christian community, we can start by talking about God as a parent figure. One thing I noticed in our overview of art in Italy three weeks ago is that Michelangelo is not the only artist who portrays God as the old man in the clouds.

What is your image of God? Is God the old man in the sky with a beard?  Is God like a scowling judge pointing a finger at you and condemning your life? Is God like a traffic cop watching you carefully and waiting for you to make a mistake? Does God want you to enjoy life or does God frown on laughter and enjoyment.

One of the actors who spoke last Monday at Nancy Goodwin’s funeral apologized to me afterward because he had talked about how attractive Nancy was— what an attractive woman she was.  He seemed to have this image that one should not talk about beauty and attractiveness in church as though God wasn’t the one who created people to be attractive to each other!

In the Bible God is featured mainly in two ways: God is seen as a parent figure—both father and mother, not just male but female as well. Jesus tells us in Luke 15 about a shepherd who lost a sheep and went searching for it, and he implies, God is like that shepherd.

Then he tells us about a woman who had ten coins and lost one of them and turned her house upside down until she found it. Jesus says, God is like that woman.

The prophet Isaiah says that God is like a woman, a mother, who takes care of her child.

The Bible says God is like a compassionate parent, a gracious and accepting mother or father. That is primarily the message of Jesus about God and it is a contrast to how many people see God still. Many people think about a God, in the terms of Dr Martin Marty in the words for meditation, as a being who is getting ready to whomp you!

Images of father and mother are just one way the Bible tells us about God. The second very important image of God in the Bible is in this statement from I John: God is love and whenever we experience love, we are experiencing God. Wherever love is, that is where God is because God is love.

So then we have another problem because we misuse that word “love”. We overuse it and sometimes it means we like something a lot and sometimes—especially when we are young—it means that our hormones are just over active.

We use “love” so casually. “I just love blueberry pancakes. I love Cameron Diaz or Meryl Streep or George Clooney. I love running or swimming or hiking in the mountains. I love getting a new pair of shoes.”

We misuse and overuse that wonderful word. You might think this week about all the different ways you use the word “love”.

The Bible has at least three different kinds of love—especially in the Greek language of the New Testament. The Greek word filia means one kind of love—brotherly love or sisterly love or filial love—the love between friends or siblings. A typical Bible story about this kind of love is the story of the deep friendship in the Bible between David and Jonathan. Jonathan was the son of King Saul and though Saul tried to kill David, David was very good friends with Saul’s son Jonathan. Filial love is the love between good friends.

The second Greek word used to talk about love in the Bible is the word for romantic love or erotic love, the Greek word eros.  This is the word and concept that people mean when they say they love each other romantically.

The third word for love in the Bible is the one that Paul uses throughout chapter 13 of I Corinthians. It is an unselfish, unconditional willing of the best for the other person. It is not a feeling but rather a posture of wanting what is best for someone. The Greek word is agape and it means putting the needs and desires of another on an equal level with my own or sometimes above my own. Agape is sacrificial love, unconditional love. It is not a feeling. It has nothing to do with whether we like someone—the first two definitions of love involve liking someone. Agape is doing what is good for someone regardless of whether we like them or not. Agape is the sort of love that the Good Samaritan showed toward his enemy lying wounded in the road.

Agape is the word that Jesus uses in the Gospel of John when he tells his disciples that he is giving them a new commandment now—the commandment is that they are to love one another. Jesus tells them this commandment right after they have been together in the upper room on Passover night and he has done something they did not want him to do: he has taken a towel and basin and he has washed their feet. Agape is a serving kind of love.

It is very appropriate that we read Paul’s words about sacrificial love, serving love on the Sunday that we recognize our United Methodist Women’s group because the mission work they sponsor is based on this Biblical concept of sacrificial love, love that does what is best for the other person. That is the basis that they make their mission awards each year—to lift up those who have acted in this other centered love.

And it is appropriate that we hear Paul’s words on this national day of honoring mothers since what we do at our best as mothers and fathers and as grandfathers and grandmothers is to love unconditionally, to love sacrificially, to say to our family members that we will do our best to be with them and stand by them whatever happens, whatever they do or don’t do to deserve our love. If we have had parents like that who have shown us even a bit of that highest kind of love, and if we have been parents like that who have made efforts to love our kids with that other centered sacrificial love, we have been very fortunate.

That is the love that God loves us with. It is the love that Christ asks us to show for each other. It is the attitude that really matters after all the things we think are important have faded away.

Carrie Newcomer sang about it last Sunday evening in her concert:

What we do in love and kindness is all we leave behind.

These three things will last: faith, hope, and love—and the greatest of these is love

  Sermon Library