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May 14, 2006,
6th Sunday in Easter, All Souls' Episcopal Church
Love one Another
John 15:
9-17
In
our Gospel, Jesus tells us to “Love one another”. Our
epistle’s central theme was also love. Jesus maintained that
God
is love. Life
is love. Eternal life
is love. The writer of the 33rd psalm says that
“The earth is full of the steadfast love of the Lord.” If
you seek solidity and consistency in your religion, I think
I have the time honored theme for you to grasp and clutch
real tight…It is, of course, …Love. Ancient and modern
thinkers, writers, theologians, or anyone who is seriously
concerned with finding a healthy
base
for human society agree that love is the great necessity.
Erich (Froooo-um) Fromm, the well-known and well- published
psychoanalyst, put forth that overwhelming premise like
this: And I quote,
“If
it is true…..that love is the only sane and satisfactory
answer to the problem of human existence, then any society
which excludes, relatively, the development of love, must
in the long run perish of its own contradiction with the
basic necessities of human nature. Indeed, to speak of love
is not ‘preaching’, for the simple reason that it means to
speak of the ultimate and real need in every human being” (end of quote)
Every one of us here has that
need for love!
So, “Let’s play it again, Sam”,
but let’s play this theme of love again in a different
way…an unusual way… I want to use a Broadway musical. I
think I can illustrate what Jesus is saying to His
listeners. The musical is entitled “I Promise to Love” and
it has a chorus that sings,
“Love
is something we feel. Love is something that’s true. Love
is something that’s real. But most of all, love is
something we do."”
Within these simple lines the
progression from the way most of the world interprets
love evolves to the meaning that Christ gives to the
word in today's Gospel.. The first line of the chorus goes,
“Love is something we feel.” Oh, yes, that wonderful
goose-bumpy experience that has happened to almost everyone
here; romantic love which makes our hearts pound and makes
us forget what time of day it is. But, you know, it is
surprising to me when some married couples have come in over
the years for counseling talking divorce after four or five
years of marriage. They say “the feeling is gone, or
different or changed”. This “feeling” kind of love is a
powerful and beautiful force in our lives, certainly, and I
don’t mean to belittle it but it is basically a
reaction
to another person, an emotional reaction to the way they
look, or the way they talk, the way they are. And when the
feelings change we feel something is wrong or lost.
I love the familiar story of a
young man who proposed to his girl one evening as they sat
looking over a beautiful lake. “Darling, I want you to know
that I love you more than anything else in the world. I want
you to marry me. I am not wealthy, I am not rich. I don’t
have a yacht or a Lexus like Kevin O’Neal but I do love you
with all my heart.” She replied, “Oh…I love you with all
my heart, too……but….(pause)… but……. tell me more about Kevin
O’Neal.
Yes, love is something we
feel and it can be fickle and it is a reaction. It is
generally directed to someone we feel lovable. It is a
conditional
love and when conditions change many times that “feeling”
love will change.
The
next verse from the song is that “love is something that is
true”. This goes a little further because we do talk about
“true love” as though there are many other feelings that
mimic the real thing which of course there are. Now, true
love may have feelings, but it also involves a
commitment
usually to stay with a person, to stick beside that person
through thick and thin, regardless of what happens. This is
the love that binds many together in a marriage relationship
for life. It implies giving
more than receiving. It also is the category in which
brotherly love and strong friendships appear. It is also
that sacrificial love that is expressed by young men and
women who have given their lives for their country and who
we will remember on our upcoming Memorial Day Weekend.
It is not until we reach the last
line of this little chorus that we have a definition that
comes close to the kind of love our Lord would have us
develop. The song goes “Love, most of all, is something we
do.”
Love for Jesus is a command to act, not a request for
a certain feeling. Jesus did not say, a new commandment I
give unto you, love one another with deep feeling. He was
giving us a command to do
something! He is telling us to become a “controlling”
thermostat rather than a “reacting” thermometer, which
is what we are when our love is based only on feeling in
reaction to another.
Now……..Jesus
would say we cannot produce this “doing” love by ourselves,
it is a fruit of the Spirit. This means we give power to
the Holy Spirit….we allow the Holy Spirit…. within us to
produce patience, compassion, sensitivity, forbearance a
thick skin! Fr. Bright covered this so beautifully last
Sunday. It is a conscious choice! Those of you who have
gone for a Marriage Encounter weekend might remember an
important statement you heard, “love is a decision.
William Tyndall, who
translated the Bible from Greek to English, was burned at
the stake for his so-called heresy in 1524…….burned along
with his good friend Carlyle whose last words to Tyndall
were, “Give yourself royalty!” “Give yourself royalty” is to
have a measure of “Kingly” control, discipline, rejecting
natural selfishness, using our lives for others, and not in
words but in practical day-to-day control of how you live
and in their cases, how they die. “Give yourself royalty.”
f
we do this, you and I show forth the characteristic Spirit
of Christ’s Kingdom. To produce this is the
aim
and point
and end
of Christianity. Fail here, and
we fail altogether and we have missed what is distinctive,
characteristic, original and beautiful in this teaching.
Christ claims that He lays on us a new commandment and He
literally does.
Another thought……one of the most
remarkable experiences for us who measure love and goodness
by and in the Person of Jesus Christ is that we sometimes
see it displayed in people who do not follow Jesus.
Our Lord once met a Samaritan, whose belief was condemned by
Judaism. Jesus so admire the man’s tenderhearted action
that he held him up as a model of compassion. Jesus didn’t
become a Samaritan, and he didn’t give up his passion for
the Jewish vision of God’s reign. But when he met love and
goodness, he simply rejoiced in it. In love, Jesus decided
to show love. And my friends you either decide to love or
you don’t. There is no neutral ground. Remember that
tremendously descriptive passage from Revelation,
“So
because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will
spew you out of my mouth,”
Lukewarmness becomes a mere
nonentity, not evil yet not good, doing no actual harm, yet
not telling for righteousness. This is of no matter or use
to God!
So, my sermon theme sentence is,
love in obedience to
Christ is a decision to act a certain way not a
response to the presence or absence of a feeling.
But you say, isn’t this
hypocritical to feel one way and to act another? I don’t
think so not in what Christ is asking us to do because I
think that most of us begin with our feelings in any
situation, then we decide what is real, and then our faith
is built on that reality. In other words, in the world, the
power of our faith is really built on the way our feelings
interpret reality around us. Now, Christ’s path is quite the
opposite. We begin by deciding with our will to
act as Christ would act in the situation, for instance to be
patient or forgiving, or to write that letter, or to visit
that neighbor, or to make that phone call.
As we begin to do this, we
build a form much like a contractor does when getting ready
to pour a sidewalk as he nails the 2x4s together in the
proper shape. Then as we have acted and given power to
Christ in the situation, acting as a thermostat not a
thermometer, that action becomes our reality. “We
give ourselves royalty”.
God fills the form we have built with His Grace and Power
and then we are filled with the appropriate feeling. You
see, the order is just the opposite from human nature.
Christ’s way is: first, faith: second, reality; thirdly, the
feeling. Thus we are not pretending we are something we are
not. We admit that we do not feel loving, or want to do a
certain thing, but decide
to act loving in obedience to Christ’s command.
Martin Luther King, Sr.
testified to the power of this kind of love when he said, (
and I quote) “I am not bitter. I do not hate the man who
took the life of our dear son. I do not bear ill will
toward the man who killed my wife while trying to shoot me.
I think it’s human for me every once in a while to ask God
how much more must I bear. For no matter what happens, I am
not going to lose my faith nor the decision to love as my
Lord loved. I am going on with the job of being every man’s
brother.” (end of quote) Martin Luther King, Sr. is
deciding to love. You and I must make similar decisions in
our lives.
So where
do we begin? Well, “tomorrow is promised to no man”. I
believe our Lord would suggest to begin now with our own
family, our own fellow “pew sitters”, our neighbors, our own
co-workers. Decide now
to be obedient to Christ’s command, maybe with just one
person. Fulfill this basic human need for this one person.
Vow to yourself that regardless of what that person did, or
does or says, you will act loving or patient or kind or
giving—building the form and trusting Christ to fill it with
His Grace and to provide the feeling. Understand, if you
have never done this before, you may have strange
reactions—but that is OK. Remember,
you are not doing this to get
reaction or feelings. You
are beginning the path of true love. You are “giving
yourself royalty” in obedience to the one who loved you with
this same kind of love
Jesus Christ
died for you; Jesus Christ died for me! …He really did! How
are
we going to return that love to Him and to our fellow
man?……….
Please……….Think
about it !!
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