May 5, 2024
Acts 10:44-48
John 15:9-17
Last week it should have been simple. Believe in Jesus. Love like Jesus. Right?
This week… It’s Love. Again.
I sympathize if you’re thinking, “Seriously, preacher. You’ve made your point.”
But here I am, here we are, with love. Again.
Why?
I suppose I could be wrong, but I don’t think the inhabitants of the world are loving one another as Jesus loved. Or as Jesus loves (present tense). After just a week, the human family seems like it could use a reminder.
Love. Again.
It’s hardly a new message. Rabbi Hillel and Rabbi Shammai lived about a hundred years before Jesus. They were both great teachers but also theological rivals. The Talmud and the Mishnah, the great compendiums of rabbinic thought from the centuries just before and just after Jesus, contain a number of saying and stories about them. This one, for example, from the Talmud:
“It happened again that a certain stranger came before Shammai and said to him: ‘I will become a proselyte providing you teach me the whole Torah while I’m standing on one foot.’ (Shammai) knocked him down with the builder’s rule in his hand.
“(The stranger) came before Hillel, who made him a proselyte. He told him: ‘What is hateful to you do not do to your neighbor. That is the whole Torah. The rest is commentary. Go, learn (it)!’”
Jesus’ teaching sounds like he’d learned from followers of Hillel.
Speaking of love again I could emphasize its importance – God asked us to do it – or reflect on the things that make it difficult – like how annoying people can be – but what I can’t do is simply make it easy. It’s not. It never has been. Jesus showed us just how difficult loving other people can be.
But what, I wonder, can make it easier? Not easy – easier?
The first step, I think, is to realize that when Jesus spoke of love, he did not speak of feelings. We are not in the business of persuading ourselves – or others – to feel in certain ways. I won’t say that’s an impossible task, but it’s an extraordinarily difficult task. A lot of people go to mental health therapists because they feel in ways that they don’t want to feel. They spend a lot of time and effort to change that. Jesus didn’t do it in three years of near-daily conversation with his closest followers; I’m not going to do it in a sermon.
The first step is to set feelings to one side as you do the things that you know are loving to someone else.
Reflecting on a scene in the series Queen Charlotte, Cheryl Lindsay writes at ucc.org, “The scene is set. An obedient son waits for his bride. His nervousness emerges as he approaches his mother, the queen, who has orchestrated the match. She thinks he comes to her with an objection or scheme to avoid his impending nuptials. Yet, he surprises her. He has reconciled himself to his fate. Rather than advocating for a reprieve, he seeks her counsel. He does not approach his ruler, he comes for his parent. He confesses his fear that he will not be able to love his wife. The queen visibly shifts from monarch to mother and reassures him that, ‘Love is not a thing one is able or not able to do based on some magic, some chemistry. That is for plays. Love is determination. Love is a choice one makes.’”
Love is a choice, a choice one decides to make, a choice one makes, a choice one follows through on after making. You and I don’t have to feel good about it. It’s love when we do it.
Second, I think there’s a lot to be said for practice. Habit. Reflex. Some of you know that I trained as a challenge course facilitator for a summer camp. When people were moving along high rope bridges strung between two trees, I was on the ground at the other end of a long rope that kept them safe. One of the tasks we did as facilitators was… to tie knots. A knot that won’t pull out, a knot that won’t overtighten, a knot that won’t speed the wear on the rope.
I got some rope like what we used and I tied those knots and tied those knots and tied those knots until my fingers remembered what my brain didn’t always.
Practice is how people tie knots reliably. Practice is how a noio learns to feed itself. Practice is how we steer a car. Practice is how we make the choices to love.
Practice doing loving things over and over again and you’ll find that it’s easier – not easy – to do the loving things the next time.
Decide. Practice. Prepare. Look around for people who might need support from your love. And please, people – don’t mix this up with romance or sex. Who needs to learn something you can teach? Who needs to be comforted because they’re sad? Who needs a hand up, or a leg up, or an advocate, or a silent supporter? Who needs your aid?
Prepare the words you might say – and prepare to change them when they don’t work as well as you hoped.
Prepare your courage, because some of the people who need you are in risky places. You may need courage to accompany them through their challenges.
Do not forget that Jesus went all the way to the cross, and if that isn’t all that common in these days, plenty of Jesus’ friends have loved all the way to the end of their lives. Prepare your words and resources. Prepare your courage.
Augustine of Hippo wrote, “And so, where there is love, what can be wanting? and where it is not, what is there that can possibly be profitable? The devil believes, but does not love.”
If it makes it easier to know that when you love, you are setting yourself apart from the devil, then remember that.
Or you might follow the advice of Kent M. Keith, author of the Paradoxical Commandments, the first of which is: “People are illogical, unreasonable, and self-centered. Love them anyway.”
I also think that besides decision, practice, and preparation, there’s nutrition in love. That’s one of the things that church is supposed to be about. We feed ourselves on the Word; and we feed ourselves at the Table. I hope you’ve been fed in the Word this morning. Let us bring ourselves in a few minutes to the Table, where God’s love is poured out for us in bread and cup, and refresh ourselves so that we may go forth and Love. Again.
Amen.
by Eric Anderson
Watch the Recorded Sermon
Sermons change in the delivery, so what Pastor Eric read does not precisely match what he wrote.
The image is Christ Washing the Feet of the Apostles, (11th cent.) among the mosaics in the monastery of Hosios Loukas, Distomo, Greece. Photo by Ed88, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2543263.
