Oak Chapel United Methodist Church

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    This letter we call "I John," comes very near the end of the Bible and is only five chapters long.  So it's easily overlooked.  Which is a shame, for it teaches wonderful things about God, and Jesus and us.  My Bible gives the letter a sub-title: "Back to Basics."  The author, apparently a Christian pastor, sees his people going astray -- not rejecting the Gospel outright, but becoming more interested in theological debates and theoretical questions and not in living as Christ would have them live.  The two "basics" he calls his people back to are God and love.  And here is the point this pastor made to his people many centuries ago: you cannot separate the two, God and love are in essence the same thing.  And it is that unity of God and love that we see in Jesus.

    This was the claim, the radical gospel claim, that enabled Christianity to stand above all the other religions of the day -- still is.  All the others boasted  about their gods' power, their gods' wisdom, their gods' craftiness, their gods' furry.  But Christians boasted about their God's love.  In fact, they said, God is love.  Period.  And love was the aspect of God that the followers of Jesus could imitate.  In fact, must imitate.  In fact, will imitate, if they are truly God's children.  We are called to reincarnate God through our love.  I John is the same letter that says," Beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God" -- the same letter that says, "If anyone says he loves God, and hates his neighbor, he is a liar."  And in another place, same letter, in Peterson's paraphrase, "The command we have from Christ is blunt: Loving God includes loving people.  You've got to love both."  And in this morning's lesson, turning it around somewhat, "If we love the one who conceives the child (God), we'll surely love the child (our neighbor)."  John's formula, "God equals love, love equals God " goes both ways: loving God means we do, indeed, love our neighbor; loving neighbor means we do, indeed, love God.  Our ability to love each other is proof that we love God.  Our inability to love each other, is proof that we don't love God.  That's tough.  But that's what it says.

    But love is a puzzle for modern men and women, a dilemma.  We're just not very good at it.  For all our knowledge and all our sophistication, we can't seem to put loving relationships together, at least not for long.  In the century just ended, human knowledge grew by leaps and bounds, but the divorce rate also rose a thousand per cent, and we murdered each other, in wars and in our city streets, in huge numbers.  Why?  We have the Bible.  We have the teachings of Jesus.  Why should we hate so?  Why should we be so dysfunctional?  If God equals love, and love equals God, what does all this mayhem say about our relationship to God?

    Can't say much about love in twenty minutes.  In practical terms, it seems to me, love means two things.  First it means not to hate.  Before we can learn to love we must rid ourselves of bitterness and resentment and anger.  That, in itself, doesn't make us loving people.  It just gets us out of our own end zone,  makes love at least a possibility.  For ridding ourselves of anger we have forgiveness.  Many there are who cannot love and be loved because their hearts are deformed with hatred and bitterness.  It can take many forms.  Bitterness against parents, employers, children, spouses or former spouses, races, nations.  Sometimes it's ill defined; a person's  "mad at the world," we say.  Whatever form hatred takes, it twists the heart and makes love impossible.  People who have this problem, who can't forgive or be forgiven, feel love but can't make it happen.  They try to initiate love, but it always goes astray.  This is a very sad picture.  It constitutes ninety percent of psychotherapy and counseling: people who can't get their acts together, can't love and be loved, because of some anger (usually hidden or denied) that is poisoning the soil so love cannot bloom.  The first thing we must learn, then, in this primmer of live, is not to hate.  That, at least, gets us on the field.

    When we have gotten there, when our hearts have been cleansed of anger and bitterness, through repentance and forgiveness (experienced as conversion and symbolized in baptism) -- when we have accomplished that much, as Christians, we work to love one another actively.  And that's not easy.  Feelings won't cut it.  Even words won't cut it, unless they are words of kindness and compassion.  I don't preach as much as I should about love, because the word has been destroyed in our time: love has become mushy sentimentality, too often it is a spineless, jelly-fish love, a love without commitment, without responsibility, without deeds.  Just good feelings for someone, some kind of interpersonal high.  The love Jesus taught, and the love John is talking about in his letter, is action-love, sacrificial love.  I read this quote recently, from Mariah Cary, and I hope she didn't really say it: "Whenever I watch TV and see those poor starving kids all over the world, I can't help but cry.  I mean I'd love to be skinny like that, but not with all those flies and death and stuff."  M-TV love.  Maudlin.  Self-absorbed.  Feeling sorry for people but not doing anything about it.  You don't score any points for that.  Remember, John says we see God's kind of love in Jesus, and the amazing part of what we see there, the part that knocks our socks off, is not what he felt for us but what he did for us.  God's kind of love is doing not feeling.  It is sacrificial, not self-serving.  Like parents who give up so much freedom to be good moms and dads, or nurses who bypass softer jobs, with better hours and more pay, just to tend the sick and clean up after them.  Or hospice workers who, I'm sure, have better things to do with their time.  God's love is all around us.  Let's not mistake that other stuff for the real thing.  Let's call attention to the sacrificial love which, wherever it occurs, is Jesus.

    The Harvard psychotherapist, Dr. Henry Grunebaum, says something very interesting about true love.  He says it binds the lover completely, and looses the beloved unconditionally.  When we truly love someone, we bind ourselves in obligation and commitment to that person, and the other person is freed by that: free from any obligation to pay us back, free from guilt strings, just free.  That's what we do for others when we truly love them.  That's what Jesus did for us.  Paul says, "We are freed from everything, bound by nothing, yet a servant to everyone."  Christ binds himself for us (becomes a "bond-servant," to use the Bible's word), and we thereby are free.  We bind ourselves for others, and they thereby are free.  Now suppose everyone did that for each other.  Wouldn't that be a party?  Wouldn't that be the Kingdom of God?  Isn't that the world we want to live in?  Isn't that what's missing?  Love that binds the lover and looses the beloved.

    Start close to home.  You won't have to look far to find someone who needs your love.  Do something for that person.  Maybe it's just a smile and a cherry "good morning."  Maybe it's a concerned, "Can I help you?"  Love is scary, for we might be rejected.  We have to step out in faith, binding ourselves to another before we know if he or she will accept the freedom our love makes possible.  We can get hurt, that's for sure.  But our job is to respond to God's love and offer that love to others.  Don't be afraid.  For us and our salvation, it's not important what others do with God's love or with ours.  We have only ourselves to answer for.  "Beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God."