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.
Jesus showed us what love is by giving himself, sacrificially for us. We can see many of the same things in our mothers.
I’d like to start out talking about love by saying what it is not. The New Testament uses several different Greek words for different types of love.
Eros is one of those words for love. The word eros has come into English in our word ‘erotic,’ which is usually a selfish love. It uses other people for its own pleasure.
There’s a place for getting pleasure. I might say that I love Big Macs with this kind of love. They taste good. I like good taste. So I might buy one from time to time, just for myself, although my doctor would warn me not to do it very often.
That’s appropriate for Big Macs. But I have absolutely no commitment to Big Macs. If it’s two whoppers for $3 across the street, I’m going to Burger King.
But that kind of love, like loving Big Macs is totally inappropriate for people. God’s love is never fickle like that.
Now, Moms get some good returns out of being Moms. They get something back. They usually get a nice card for Mother’s Day. Some might get breakfast in bed, although maybe the milk has spilled a bit out of the cereal bowl on the trip up the stairs. Mom’s get crayon pictures to put up on the frig. And they love those things.
But a mother’s love gives far beyond what it gets back. A mother’s love will wake up in the middle of the night for a crying baby, making a terrible noise. I think God designed the cry of a baby as a pretty jolting alarm to call us to step in and help. Moms will change the most disgusting diaper. (Dad’s will too, I hope.) They’ll drag through a day on a half of a night’s sleep because of their baby’s disruptions. And they’ll never complain? Well, they might. But they keep giving and giving and giving. It is the sacrificial, giving, giving, giving love of God that we see planted in mom’s hearts when they do that. It gives far more than it gets in return.
That’s the way God loves us. And why does he love us like that? I can’t think of any logical reason. He doesn’t get much in return. He just loves us because that’s who he is. And he calls us to love one another like that, not for what we get in return, but because we are created to be like him. It’s who we are.
You see a lot of eros kind of love in churches. I’ll come if it’s entertaining. I’ll come if you don’t ask me for much. I’ll come if everybody is nice to me. That’s a self-centered kind of love that falls far short.
I’ll drink my coffee after church with that person who makes me feel good, but not with that other person who costs something, who’s going through a rough patch right now, and it makes me a little nervous because I’m not sure of what to say. It’s me, me, me. God’s love forgets about self and gives. It goes far beyond eros love.
There is another Greek word for love in the New Testament, ‘philia.’ You hear it in English in the name of the city, Philadelphia, or the word philanthropist. It’s a friendship kind of love, where I’m not just always receiving. I’m willing to give some. But I expect to get something in return. A lot of friendships are like that. It’s a kind of love that will go 50-50, give some and take some. And that has a place.
But where would you be today if your mother only gave you as much love as you gave back to her? No, she loved you when all you could give her was a crooked little smile and she couldn’t even be sure whether it was a real smile or a burp. She loved you when you could give almost nothing back. But it made her day.
Where would you be today if God only gave to you as much as he got back? For most of us, God spoke his love to us through our baptism when we were still very, very small. Jesus died on the cross for us centuries before we were even born. For most of us there have been periods, sometimes long periods, when we were so caught up in ourselves that we hardly thought about him. But did he give up on us? No, like the father of the prodigal son, he was waiting with open arms.
Fair weather friends will stick with you as long as everything is easy and comfortable. But suggest something they don’t really enjoy doing, ask them a favor that’s a bit inconvenient for them, and they back off. That’s not the love of God. Eros love and philia love have a place in this world, for things. But they are no foundation for a family or a church, either one.
But our text for this morning uses still another Greek word for love, agape. It’s a word that the Greek world didn’t use very often. But the Bible uses it over and over and over again, for the way that God loves us and for how we are to love one another.
Agape love is a love that doesn’t keep score of how much it is getting in return. It just gives.
I have memories of some of my growing up years feeling like a coyote in a desert, starving as it limps from meal to meal. But it wasn’t that my mother didn’t feed us. She fed us generously, creatively, good healthy food and lots of it. I have three brothers and we’re all either 6’ 5” or 6’6” And it wasn’t far from a full time job just to keep us all fed, and in clothes, too. I remember the grocery store clerks commenting on all the milk she carried home every week.
God is like that. He put us in a world that is filled with bounty, with amazing abilities to grow crops and so many different kinds of fruit trees and animals and vegetables for our good. Agape love is generous like that.
My mother was very wise about how it feels to be a little kid. You know, sometimes kids behave horribly, but it’s not because they want to be bad, it’s because they are overtired or stressed or bored. I have vague memories of what today we call ‘time outs’ in my room, to just unwind and slow down. I remember being bored in the house and pestering my brothers and she was wise enough to kick us all out of the house to go and find something active to do. There were times when we were a real pain to our mother. But she understood our childhood weaknesses and she responded, not out of her own irritation, but out of what kids really need in each circumstance.
God understands our frailties. I’m sure there are many times when we are harder on ourselves than he is. We drive ourselves hard, and he calls us to slow down. He knows the times to lead us beside the still waters or make us lie down in green pastures. He understands us. He cares about us, not just how we impact him.
When I was pretty young I remember a family, in a neighborhood near ours, that we had to drive through to get to the store, a family that had a lot of problems. They had a lot of kids, maybe 7 or 8. Their house wasn’t very big. They just sort of poured out into the yard and the neighborhood a lot. And then the father was killed in an auto accident. And they didn’t have much money even when he was there. And the mother was about at the end of her rope trying to hold it all together. And I remember it was a bit ragged down there.
Once, when my birthday came, I remember my mother insisted that I invite the boy from that family who was about my age. I don’t think I had ever played with him. Mostly we just drove by their house on the way to the store. But my mother hurt for them and wanted to do that little thing for them.
I remember that some of his Kool-Aid went down the wrong pipe and he sprayed it all over my plate. But that was OK. He needed to be there.
And the kids I liked to be with, who lived close by, the Shelhamers and the Faulkners, my Mom almost adopted them. They were her kids, too.
God’s love is like that. He loves it when his family gets together like we are here. And it can feel so good to get a bunch of friends at church and visit every week. But then we are just here for us. God’s heart breaks to broaden the circle, to bring others into the blessing, people whose lives may be a bit ragged, or people who share different tastes. But they are precious in God’s sight. And if we are learning to live in agape love, they’ll be precious to us, too.
But I also remember that my mother knew how to let us know when we misbehaved. I remember the evening I punched my little brother in the mouth. She figured I was too old to spank, but I got sent right to my room and I knew I had done wrong. She loved us so much that she worked very hard to teach us boundaries.
God’s love is like that. We call it covenantal love. He is very up front about how much he loves us and what he wants to do for us. But he also is very clear about what he expects of us. And it’s not that he is only demanding for his own sake. He has high hopes for us, the highest. And so he disciplines us when we stray, not to hurt us, but to teach us. Agape love works for the best.
God’s love is nothing like the insipid tolerance of our world today that just sits back and lets everybody do their own thing, even when it’s a destructive thing. God loves us enough to tell us when we are wrong, to even get angry when we hurt ourselves. He wants the very best for us.
And so he gave us our scripture for today, calling us to be like him, to walk in love. Eros love, which only asks ‘what’s in it for me’ is an unstable foundation for a family or a church. Philia love, which says ‘I’ll go halfway, I’ll give, but only if I get something back’, is better, but falls far short. God calls us to a love like a good mother, a love like his own, agape love, which gives without keeping score, which is always looking to expand the circle of love, which gives wisely, maintaining the boundaries of what behavior is really constructive and avoiding behaviors that hurt. Brothers and sisters in Christ, “be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.” AMEN
