The Challenges of Love – Sermon for Suites by the Lake – January 24, 2008
What is it that humans need in order to live? What do we need in order to be alive? You may have heard of something called Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. He said that what humans need is:
To breath, to eat, to drink, to sleep. We need a degree of safety and shelter. We need friendship, family. We need some way of understanding who we are…we need some kind of esteem, some way to value who we are.
And we need to have some way to express who we are…we need the spark of creativity in some manner.
We have a lot of needs, eh?...as members of this grand and glorious human race. Some may say we’re fairly high maintenance. Some higher than others!
And among our deepest needs, once our basic survival needs are met, is the need for love. And love is a tricky thing. It’s easy to take for granted when you have it. And it’s agonizing when you feel you don’t have it.
Love is a tricky thing. Often there is a lack of love that we feel…a deficit of human love. Often there’s a distorted idea of love as though it were in its truest form and best presentation pure romance.
But of course love is a verb. It may be something we feel, but if we don’t ACT on love, it’s actually not love…it is, rather, sentiment. Love must be enacted in order to BE love.
What are some of the challenges of love? What, for instance are some of the qualities of a really good marriage or deep friendship?
[Forgiveness, Daily Kindness, Self-evaluation – how am I doing? Caring for others as for outselves. Self-sacrifice – moms living for kids, dads doing same and/or working to provide, putting one’s own wants behind those of another].
Those are some of the challenges of love.
Now I’m rather taken with this book. It’s made tremendous sense out of life for me for most of my life. I started reading it 29 years ago, and I came to a point where I wanted to believe it, but in my head I could not, even though much of what I read here resonated with my heart, because it speaks so clearly of love.
So I began to ACT on it, and I found that action removed the doubts that thinking cannot solve. And I’ve found that to be true since…action removes the doubts that thinking cannot solve. [Thanks to Mike Lipkin for that thought]
We’ll come back to that later. Back to this book. This book says two things about love that have always left me thunderstruck. Gobsmacked.
The first is 1 John 4:16b “God is love...”
Now a lot of the time I spent in my adolescence, before I ever heard those three words, was spent looking for love. It wasn’t that I was without love. My mother and father, Eleanor and Lewis, have always been incredibly loving and supportive and caring parents to all four of us kids.
I had the love of friends. I had the love of female friends. But I was still, somehow, empty. I had this idea that there was something more, something that couldn’t be found in music or photography or art.
And at some point, some critical point in an unstable adolescence, I heard these three words: “God is love”…And I was both offended and intrigued. Offended because I had no idea really what “God” was, but I suspected at the time that it wasn’t good.
And I was intrigued because these three words suggested in themselves a definition of something for which I had been seeking an explanation. That was, as I said, love.
And at some point I began to wonder if this deficit I felt, this incomplete experience of life and love that I knew too well…I began to wonder if God’s love, in the absence or in the deficit of human love, could meet my need, the human need…for LOVE.
Now I tricked you a little bit. Preachers sometimes do that. I didn’t read the whole verse of 1 John 4:16. The whole verse says: “God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in him”.
That actually expanded the problem for me. This suggests that it is possible to LIVE IN LOVE. God is love, it says. And whoever wants to LIVE IN love, needs to live in God. You see how that takes things to a whole new level!?
This notion of love that I had, even as a teenager…that it was something more than I knew, that it was something great to be grasped. There was the suggestion in this and other parts of the Bible that I read that this love could be FULFILLED in a relationship with God.
So if any of this is to be taken even slightly seriously…this suggestion that there is a very high view of love that finds its HOME in God, leads me to another passage that, when I let it, also leaves me somewhat thunderstruck.
Now when this passage says “The Word”, it is, of course, referring to Jesus. It goes like this:
John 1:1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
2 He was with God in the beginning.
3 Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.
4 In him was life, and that life was the light of men.
5 The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it.
9 The true light that gives light to every man was coming into the world.
10 He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him.
11 He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him.
12 Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God--
13 children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God.
If God is love. If love in its most profound and authentic expression is found in God; and if living in love means to live in God, then THIS passage I just read expresses something that’s both profoundly meaningful and actually full of tension.
One of the reasons it’s profound is that it claims to go back to the beginning. The beginning of time. BEFORE there was any such thing as time. And it says that at that time, before there was time, was the WORD. “The Word” is actually one of the titles of Jesus.
It says then that the Word, Jesus, was with God and actually WAS God. The quality and intimacy of the relationship between Jesus and God was such that Jesus is described as BEING God.
Then it reinforces this deep relationship or community of God the Father and God the Son by saying that the Word, Jesus, was the One through Whom everything, without one exception, was made.
Then this unpacks a bit more. In Jesus was ‘life’ itself. Life as it is intended to be lived is somehow IN Jesus, and that life that is in Jesus is the light of humanity. The path is lit for humanity in Jesus.
But then we get to some genuine tension. That light that’s talked about made its entry, made its presence felt in the darkness. Kind of like a blank canvas receiving a magnificent SPLASH of colour on it that clarifies and expresses and defines.
But the darkness, we’re told, didn’t understand.
This grand story says that this light that came into the world was this world’s Creator. And yet this world couldn’t figure out who He was.
He wasn’t recognized by the very creatures whose existence He authored.
In fact it says that His experience of coming here was that He was rejected. His own by and large, did not receive Him.
There’s a lot of pathos in that story. There’s a level of tension and, sadness frankly, that’s contained in this narrative.
How…could…this…be? How could this be the story of God? God who is love and communal in His very nature and seeks to extend that love and community by coming to be with the people He created out of love…
He does so because…that’s what love does. It gives. It includes. Love embraces. Love enfolds. Love reaches out, pours itself out.
And this is God? The story of God.
I thought I knew sadness as a messed-up teenager FRUSTRATED by the promise contained in the idea of love. [Pause]
Mercifully. That’s not the end of the story. That’s not how things wrap up.
[Quickly] 11 He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him.
“YET”:…Gotta love that word. Yet…
12 Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God--
13 children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God.
Ah…there’s the rub. Despite this unseemly rejection by His creation, despite this blindness, this inability or unwillingness to recognize its Creator…
Despite all this, …there’s a “YET”!
Despite that most would reject Him, to THOSE WHO DID actually receive Him, invite Him in, so to speak when He knocked on the door…to those who received Him, Who BELIEVED IN HIS NAME, He gave what?
This is perhaps the only ‘right’ that the Bible speaks of. He gave us the RIGHT to BECOME the children of God, to be BORN of GOD.
So the fact that He was rejected did not leave God dejected. Instead He did what He came to do with ALL humanity, with whoever would receive Him. The ones who opened the door. The ones who said, upon opening the door,
[looking like one who is inspecting a stranger at the door and then warming to him and choosing to welcome him]
“Come in!”.
I started by talking about human needs, and then the challenges of love. The challenges you and I know are very real, very deeply felt.
And most of us carry some of the wounds of love. Some who we have loved most profoundly have rejected us.
Or worse, some who we’ve loved and invested our whole lives in have died.
And we carry those deaths around with us as deep and profound wounds because we have, in fact, truly loved with all our being. The depth of wound we feel reminds us of how deeply we loved.
That in itself illustrates the quality and depth and importance to us of love.
And we’ve seen as we’ve taken just the smallest glimpse into God’s story how it is that He has loved and how it is that He, in the Incarnation we mark at Christmastime, reached both into and at the same time stretched His arms AROUND humanity with a stunning invitation INTO His love, into the life of God. “Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in him”.
So I encourage you, as you consider some of these things, as you struggle perhaps with doubts that thinking on its own just can’t seem to solve, to consider that even what we do next in celebrating and receiving Holy Communion, is ACTING upon a thing that we are wanting to believe, wishing we could, perhaps, believe.
And perhaps we shall receive some gift, some grace today, that will advance our faith, that will strengthen our suspicion that God may indeed be love, that He may indeed be among us now, loving us. Inviting us. Welcoming us with arms stretch wide.
You know, what’s required of us is not GREAT faith. It’s not absolute resolve. What God asks of us, (and it is an asking), is for the faith a mustard seed. A little-bitty seed of trust is all that God needs to begin a relationship with us.
Let’s pray.
Let’s pray. Wow. What a story God. And what an invitation…You come to us in the flesh and though rejected and scorned and crucified, you extend a hand of friendship even to those who gladly oppressed and persecuted you. How did you do that, Jesus? That’s a kind of love that interests me beyond words. And that’s the love that we say ‘yes’ to today as consider Your kind invitation to us to live in Your love. Bless each one here and all who live in this building, we pray. And may the blessing and invitation we receive from You be extended through us to those we meet today. In the name of Your Son, our Lord, the Word made flesh. Amen.
