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Today is the second part of our Advent series. Last Sunday we focused on the candle of HOPE. Today we ponder the candle of LOVE and what it means to live out Emmanuel: Love With Us. What does it mean to walk into our places of work knowing that Love is walking with us? How does the professional business person balance the values of love with profit margins? How is our home life shaped by the fact that we are called to act in love? These are some of the questions I’d like us to think about today. When first talking about love a great many people generally think of romantic love. I am not one to bash romantic love. I happen to be a great fan of romantic love. If you ask my wife she will tell you that I have a romantic side…I think. Let me tell you when it first started with us. The year was 1979. I was the new young youth minister in a large church in Ohio. Kim was the very young eligible college student. Once I had the nerve to ask her out, I was still pretty nervous throughout the date which consisted of dinner and movie. I can’t remember what we ate or the movie we saw. But I do remember the end of the date. I pulled into the driveway and checked the porch light. The fact that it was off was a good sign that I might be able to get a goodnight kiss. I jumped out of the car and ran around to open the door for her. We walked slowly up the walk to the front porch. That’s when my nervousness changed to cowardice. Not only did I know that I couldn’t kiss her, but I wanted to turn and run! At the door Kim turned around and looked like she expected something. My legs turned to rubber! I couldn’t go through with it! So I said, "Kim, I had a very nice time tonight and kissed her on the forehead." Before I could make my escape she said, "Dave, a little lower please." "Oh, no!" I was caught! What could I do? I had to comply with her wish. So I mustered my courage and said, (very low voice) "I had a very nice time tonight." When we hear the word love most of us think about romantic love. The truth is that the word, "love", is overused in our society. We use it to describe how we feel about spouses. But we also use the same word to convey our feelings about ice cream and comfortable blue jeans. We use it when talking about our feelings about God as well as when we speak of warm, summer days. Don’t you think it is time that we invent some new words to describe the many moods of love? I admit that I get tired of hearing about love all the time! It’s even in the Bible. In our epistle lesson for today the word, "love", is mentioned a total of 29 times! The ancient Greeks had the right idea. They had three words for love. Philios was a brotherly/sisterly love for other human beings. Eros was romantic love. Agape was a love that always involved God. I have a confession to make. The story I told you about our first date didn’t really happen that way. The truth is that our first date did not involve a dinner and movie, but a demolition derby. And there was no goodnight kiss, but that is another story. The truth is that Kim and I wanted to keep the word, "love," sacred and special. We did not want to use it frivolously. We knew that the day we both could say to each other, "I love you," it would be agape love, the kind that lasts forever. And many dates after the demolition derby, and our first awkward kiss, when we did finally tell each other that we loved each other, it was a foregone conclusion that we would get married. That was more than 22 years ago. Despite the fact that LOVE is mentioned 29 times in these 15 verses there is a great deal of truth about relationships here. The most important in my view is verse 18. "There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear." Now I don’t know about you but I quiver a bit when I hear the word, "perfect." Much of the love I have known has not been perfect. I have been loved imperfectly by others and I have loved others imperfectly. It’s called SIN, missing the mark. And I suspect that many of you have stories where you have experienced perfect love, a love without imperfection, without sin, without fear. But the sad reality is that most of the time we do not live with this kind of love. Perhaps what we ought to be doing is acting with a love that is less imperfect, less fearful that the love we acted on yesterday. Maybe it’s a part of what it means to be human, to know a love that still has some fear mixed in with it. Perhaps we cannot avoid all fear in our love. But I do believe that we can move towards fearless love. We can grow towards perfect love. We can experience agape love, the kind of love that will last forever. Here are some examples. You can see them alongside the shuffleboard courts in Florida or on the porches of the old folks' homes up north: an old man with snow-white hair, a little hard of hearing, reading the newspaper through a magnifying glass; an old woman in a shapeless dress, her knuckles gnarled by arthritis, wearing sandals to ease her aching arches. They are holding hands, and in a little while they will totter off to take a nap, and then she will cook supper, not a very good supper and they will watch television, each knowing exactly what the other is thinking, until it is time for bed. They may even have a good, soul-stirring argument, just to prove that they still really care. And through the night they will snore unabashedly, each resting content because the other is there. They are in love, they have always been in love, although sometimes they would have denied it. And because they have been in agape love they have survived everything that life could throw at them, even their own failures. In his book Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis wrote, "Do not waste your time bothering whether you 'love' your neighbor. Act as if you do. As soon as we do this, we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you love someone, you will presently come to love him. If you injure someone you dislike, you will find yourself disliking him more. If you do him a good turn, you will find yourself disliking him less." A life lived with God is a life that moves away from fear and towards love. And many times it is a love born more out of a commitment of our will than an emotion of our heart. I like the first three words of Scott Peck’s book, "The Road Less Travelled." LIFE IS HARD. And this means that, YES, sometimes love is hard work! Peck wrote, "Genuine love is volitional rather than emotional. The person who truly loves does so because of a decision to love. This person has made a commitment to be loving whether or not the loving feeling is present. It if is, so much the better; but if it isn't, the commitment to love, the will to love, still stands and is still exercised. Conversely, it is not only possible but necessary for a loving person to avoid acting on feelings of love. I may meet a woman who strongly attracts me, whom I feel like loving, but because it would be destructive to my marriage to have an affair, I will say vocally or in the silence of my heart, "I feel like loving you, but I am not going to." My feelings of love may be unbounded, but my capacity to be loving is limited. I therefore must choose the person on whom to focus my capacity to love, toward whom to direct my will to love. True love is not a feeling by which we are overwhelmed. It is a committed, thoughtful decision." The act of God in coming to this world as a fragile baby in Bethlehem was motivated by much more than a sentimental, warm and fuzzy feeling. It was a committed, thoughtful decision on the part of our Creator God whose very nature is love. The question for us is: Will the love we receive and give to others be solely based on how we feel or our commitment to God? One of the aspects of acting from a commitment is that we will develop patterns and habits of love. A father took his 8 yr old daughter Helen, and his 5 yr old son, Brandon, to a mall. As they drove up, they spotted an eighteen-wheeler parked with a big sign on it that said, "Petting Zoo." The kids jumped up in a rush and asked, "Daddy, Daddy. Can we go? Please. Please. Can we go?" "Sure," Dad said, flipping them both a quarter before walking into Sears. They bolted away, and he felt free to take his time looking for a scroll saw. A few minutes later, he turned around and saw Helen walking along behind him. He bent down and asked her what was wrong. She looked up with those giant brown eyes and said sadly, "Well, Daddy, it cost fifty cents. So, I gave Brandon my quarter." Then she said the most beautiful thing a dad could ever hear. She repeated the family motto which is "Love is Action!" She had given Brandon her quarter, and no one loves cuddly furry creatures more than Helen. She had watched her parents do and say "Love is Action!" for years around the house. She had heard and seen "Love is Action," and now she had incorporated it into her little lifestyle. It had become part of her. What do you think this father did? Well, not what you might think. As soon as he finished his errands, he took Helen to the petting zoo. They stood by the fence and watched Brandon go crazy petting and feeding the animals. Helen stood with her hands and chin resting on the fence and just watched Brandon. The dad had fifty cents burning a hole in his pocket but he never offered it to Helen, and she never asked for it. Because she knew the whole family motto. It's not "Love is Action." It's "Love is SACRIFICIAL Action!" Love always pays a price. Love always costs something. Love gives; it doesn't grab. Helen gave her quarter to Brandon and wanted to follow through with her lesson. She knew she had to taste the sacrifice. She wanted to experience that total family motto. Love is sacrificial action. I assure you that God is calling us to put love into action this Advent season. God wants us to let go of our addictions and give ourselves to the power of love. God desires that we love with a little less fear this year. What is it that you will sacrifice in order to live out Emmanuel: Love With Us? What will you give so that you and someone else might be loved this season? |
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12/09/01 - Emmanuel: Love With Us (1 John 4:7-21)
