A Mother's Love

Christians talk about love a lot. It’s a subject for any Sunday, any Monday, Tuesday or other day, for that matter. It’s especially a subject for Mother’s Day, because our moms are some of the people we think of first when we think about being loved.

It’s easy to talk about love as some mushy, sentimental thing, especially to talk about it as a feeling. But in the nitty-gritty of everyday life it’s not always easy to know what the loving thing is that we should do. And our world bombards us with different ideas about love. Just listen to some of the ideas about love that are floating around in our world….

Love

1. A deep, tender, ineffable feeling of affection and solicitude toward a person, such as that arising from kinship, recognition of attractive qualities, or a sense of underlying oneness.

2. A feeling of intense desire and attraction toward a person with whom one is disposed to make a pair; the emotion of sex and romance.

3. A zero score in tennis.

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language

“Much as we might wish to believe otherwise, universal love and the welfare of the species as a whole are concepts which simply do not make evolutionary sense.” Richard Dawkins

“Falling in love consists merely in uncorking the imagination and bottling the common-sense.” Helen Rowland

“Whoso loves believes the impossible.” Elizabeth Barrett Browning

“If somebody says, “I love you,” to me, I feel as though I had a pistol pointed at my head. What can anybody reply under such conditions but that which the pistol-holder requires? “I love you, too.”” Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

“I’ve only been in love with a beer bottle and a mirror.” Sid Vicious

“Love is a smoke made with the fume of sighs,

Being purged, a fire sparkling in lovers’ eyes,

Being vexed, a sea nourished with lovers’ tears.

What is it else? A madness most discreet,

A choking gall and a preserving sweet.”

William Shakespeare

“Love is never having to say you are sorry.” Eric Segal

“Love is often nothing but a favorable exchange between two people who get the most of what they can expect, considering their value on the personality market.” Erich Fromm

“The fate of love is that it always seems too little or too much.” Amelia Barr

“Love, love, love—all the wretched cant of it, masking egotism, lust, masochism, fantasy under a mythology of sentimental postures, a welter of self-induced miseries and joys, blinding and masking the essential personalities in the frozen gestures of courtship, in the kissing and the dating and the desire, the compliments and the quarrels which vivify its barrenness.” Germaine Greer

“Love’s like the measles—all the worse when it comes late in life.” Douglas Jerrold

“Madame, it is an old word and each one takes it new and wears it out himself. It is a word that fills with meaning as a bladder with air and the meaning goes out of it as quickly. It may be punctured as a bladder is punctured and patched and blown up again and if you have not had it, it does not exist for you. All people talk of it, but those who have had it are marked by it, and I would not wish to speak of it further since of all things it is the most ridiculous to talk of and only fools go through it many times.” Ernest Hemingway

“Men and women are not free to love decently until they have analyzed themselves completely and swept away every mystery from sex; and this means the acquisition of a profound philosophical theory based on wide reading of anthropology and enlightened practice.”

Aleister Crowley

“Love was as subtly catched, as a disease;

But being got it is a treasure sweet,

Which to defend is harder than to get:

And ought not be prophaned on either part,

For though ’tis got by chance, ’tis kept by art.” John Donne

“And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.” The Beatles

This morning I want you to hear that we learn about love by watching it, experiencing it. The all-time, most powerful demonstration of love was Jesus’ death for us on the cross. That’s the best place to see it and learn about it. But to bring God’s love into the here and now, the nitty-gritty of today’s world, most of us can also see a lot about love in our moms.

Our text for this morning is a short exhortation to live in love. Let’s read it and then we’ll talk about it. Please stand for the reading of God’s word.

1 Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children, 2 and live in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.