When I was a little girl going to Sunday School, and used to come home with questions, my mother was in kind of a dilemma. You see, she didn’t believe in God. She thought there was a lot of good stuff in the Bible, as long as you left God out of it. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” was worth keeping, and so was “a soft answer turneth away wrath,” and “in all things give thanks,” although she was a little shaky about who you were supposed to give thanks to. But topping the list was “God is love.”
“Who is God, Mom?” “God is love, dear,” my mother would reply, “When you love you are experiencing God.” And of course, this is true. It’s right here in the Apostle John’s first letter. God is love.
We learn in basic algebra that if A = B then B = A.
Does that work here, too? God is love. Does that make love God?
Sometimes. Sometimes we worship love instead of God. Sometimes love becomes an idol. In this culture idolatry-love encourages people to pursue maximum self-fulfillment; it tends to be romantic or sexual. But at other times, in other cultures, love was measured in terms of self-sacrifice. In those times love of country, or love of family, sometimes became idolatrous. Because, you see, love is one of the most elastic concepts we have, it can mean almost anything we want it to mean, and we can use it to excuse almost any kind of behavior in the book. Love is about attachment, love is about aspiration, love is about appetite, love is about admiration... love makes the world go ‘round... Love means never having to say you’re sorry... All you need is love. If you loved me you would... whatever. Love is a very frustrating concept to try to talk about.
Which is why I had more trouble trying to write this sermon than you would believe. Because we know what love is, right? We may not be able to define it in a single pithy sentence, but we know it when we see it, right? So it should be very easy to figure out what John is trying to tell us here, right?
Wrong.
Because all of us, when trying to define love, start with people. We start with human experience. Once upon a time my godchildren were joined in one of our regular Saturday afternoons at the pool by their friend Laura Rose, who didn’t know how to swim. Laura Rose is a brave, adventurous, confident little thing but this was just too much for her to handle. We put water wings on her arms and a swim ring around her tummy and my three showed her how much fun it was to jump in and bob around but she wouldn’t budge until her mother Susan got into the pool and invited and coaxed and reassured her for 15 minutes. Maybe more.
That’s a good illustration of love as trust.
“Perfect love casts out fear.” Because Laura Rose loved her mother, she trusted her, and jumped into the pool. But is that what it means? Who is it that has the perfect love? Laura Rose or her mother? Is it our perfect love for God that is supposed to cast out fear, or God’s perfect love for us? I know whose love I’d sooner trust; mine is exceedingly far from perfect. But John goes on to say in v.18 that “The one who fears is not made perfect in love.” So since that can’t refer to God, who is already perfect in love, it must mean us.
But wait a minute. John also says, in the same verse, that “fear has to do with punishment.” But that wasn’t what was going on in the pool between Laura Rose and her mother. Laura Rose’s fear had nothing to do with punishment. So maybe it wasn’t such a good illustration, after all.
But every illustration that I came up with had the same sort of problem. And I finally figured out what was wrong with the way I was going about it. I was starting with people. I was trying to explain God’s love in terms of human love, and it doesn’t work. Because every kind of human love pales in the light of God’s love. Even the most noble and selfless kind of human love is inadequate to define God’s love. Human love gives us glimpses of God’s love, yes. Human love introduces us to God’s love, yes. But in order to grow into a mature understanding of God, at some point we have to let go of human love and make a leap into God’s love.
Because human love and divine love are different.
God loves us because of who God is, not because of what we are. God loves us out of His own fullness, because it is God’s nature to give. God’s love is most completely displayed in his gift of Christ: as our Scripture says, “he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.”
We love God - when we love God - not out of our fullness, but out of His. It is our nature as human beings to take, not to give. When we have anything left over for others, it is because we have received love - and continue to receive love - from elsewhere; only God has enough to keep it going indefinitely. We receive our ability to give - and to forgive - only by “know[ing] and rely[ing] on the love God has for us.” The kind of self-giving that does not reckon up debts and look for repayment is only possible insofar as we are continually refilled by God, who is love. When John says, “Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in him,” he is pointing out the fact that attachment to God is a prerequisite for living in love. And living in love is more than just a gift for us; it’s a vital ingredient in the God’s work. When we love one another, “God’s love is made complete among us.” Remember that God has shared the work of building the kingdom with the disciples of Jesus Christ. God’s love, although complete in itself, is not complete among us until we do our part.
But when we become uprooted from God, when we try to manufacture love out of our own essence, it becomes a distortion of God’s self-giving, rather than a reflection of it. Any time we take one of God’s commandments and try to live it out of our own strength, it becomes a mockery, a caricature, of the original intention. Giving turns into buying, nurturing turns into manipulation, teaching turns into controlling.
Because, you see, in addition to the fact that we’re not capable of loving under our own strength, we don’t even know what love is apart from imitating God’s character and actions. God’s aspirations for us are much loftier than what we dream of for ourselves. God’s ambition for us is to grow into people who love as he does - with vision and courage and self-discipline and reckless abandon. The kind of love that is God’s essence is not bland, or inoffensive, or indulgent. It is bracing, challenging, sometimes shocking. God’s love is powerful, it transforms and redeems; it brings life. But it is not easy. It is not the well-traveled road, the downhill path, the conventional wisdom.
Misguided “love” is responsible for a lot of suffering. Compassion that is not informed by a sound Biblical perspective on creation and fall and redemption is not redemptive at all; it is corrupting. The notion that people are inherently good, and that everyone should be given maximum freedom of choice to pursue their own concept of fulfillment, has brought our society to the brink of self-destruction. The kind of “compassion” that insulates people from the consequences of bad decisions is not compassion at all; it is laziness. As any parent knows, it is easier to let a child do whatever he or she wants than to exercise consistent and loving and formative discipline. Love includes setting and enforcing limits.
A prime example of the destructive effect of misplaced compassion is our society’s treatment of illegitimacy. I don’t think any of us would want to return to the days when children born outside of marriage were shunned, scorned, and denied full standing in society. The Church’s response to accidental pregnancies was often a gross distortion of Christ’s teachings. But by overreacting to past faults, we have raised up a generation of children who don’t even know what a lifetime commitment looks like, much less know how to make or keep one. It used to be said “It’s a wise child that knows its own father.” Today it’s a lucky one.
Most of us are familiar with what Paul said about love in 1 Cor 13: “Love is patient; love is kind. Love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude.” But love is also demanding. Love demands the best from the beloved.
God does not let his garden grow any which way. God is not content with mediocrity, with second-best. He is patient. He loves us even as we stumble, and Christ’s sacrifice covers all of our sins. But he also has very high standards for us. And sometimes the process of conforming us to the image of Jesus Christ can be painful. Sometimes life can be very hard, sometimes God asks us to give up things that we hold very dear. Sometimes God asks us to wait for what seems like an unbearably long time for answers to prayer. All of us here have suffered losses of various kinds and degrees. There are as many sorrows as there are people, and we have all, one way or another, struggled with God over our response to them. Most of us - even if we have not done so ourselves - know people who have cried out to God, “why have you done this to me? are you punishing me? what have I done that was so bad?”
And it is to these people that John speaks when he says, “Fear has to do with punishment.” When we understand and rely on the love of God who sent his son to be the Savior of the world, we realize that the bad things that happen in life are not punishment. Being human and weak, none of us welcome pain or loss. But there are two things that we can be sure of. God will not stop loving us. And God’s love can redeem anything. When we finally come to confidence in these two things, that is when we are freed to love. “The one who fears is not made perfect in love.” When we are afraid we are not free to love. When we are afraid we act out our fear in many ways, including “hating our brother.” When we are afraid we are not living in God.
