SunMay102009
Scripture: I JOHN 4:7-21
The most commonly used word in the English language—can you guess it?—is the word “the.” I’ve used it four times already. It’s followed in close order by “of,” “to,” “and,” and “a.” “The” is unavoidable enough that it appears six times in the reading we just heard from the first letter of John. You hardly had to be paying any attention at all, though, to note that “the” is not the most common word in that passage. The word that crops up over and over again, and that most grabs your attention, is “love.” Twenty-nine times in those fifteen verses, some form of the word “love” appears. “Love” may be only the 387th most common word in the language (it’s amazing what Google can tell you!). But today it comes at us in a virtual hailstorm: love, love, love, love, love.
Now to continue our grammatical analysis—which is, I’m sure, what you were hoping for today—as it happens, fourteen of the uses of “love” in that passage are nouns. It’s the way we often think of love. Love is a condition or a state. It’s that starry-eyed feeling we get when we see our new baby, or first run across the one who makes our hearts flutter. It’s the thrill we feel at watching an alley-oop pass to LeBron or digging our hands into the wet garden earth. It’s the smile or tear that appears when we remember someone we’ve adored and lost. Love is something we experience. It can be tender or electric or unrequited. But it’s something we feel.
So fourteen times love is a noun in that passage. It’s also used fifteen times as a verb, something to be done, something to act out. Love is not just a feeling. It’s getting up early on the only morning you have to sleep in to take your child to practice. It’s holding the door for the person behind you at the store. It’s spending an evening playing basketball with our IHN guests at the FLC.
I think that mix—fourteen times a noun, fifteen times a verb—is just about right. Love is a feeling that overcomes us and reassures us and takes away the sting of life’s many little arrows. When friends and family laugh at my jokes or throw a birthday party for me or tell me how much they appreciate me, there’s something about that care that puts me on cloud nine. God wants everybody to have that feeling. That noun, that state of being, is greater than, and unlike, any other experience in the whole world. I don’t know what or who I’d be without it.
It’s abundantly clear, though, that we have the noun because of the verb. I can feel loved only because someone has loved me. I can feel the warmth of acceptance and care only because someone else has given it to me. The feeling of love that I have begins somewhere else, with someone else’s decision to bestow it. I will feel loved if you greet me warmly at the grocery store, but it’s because you’ve decided to do that. You verb so that I noun. I verb so that you noun.
The temptation, so often, is to think “love” means “romance,” but for biblical writers, love means not only that great feeling we get, but also what we do with and for each other. A number of years ago, when I was leading a youth group, I asked them who they loved, and, to a person, they looked at me blankly. “Oh, my God! I don’t have to answer that, do I?” They thought I was asking who they had a crush on, who their boyfriend or girlfriend was. And of course they had not the slightest desire to share that with the group. What I was asking them, though, was something more like: where do you see care played out in your life; with whom do you share; to whom do you give?
When I John talks twenty-nine times in those few verses about love, the writer isn’t talking about romance. In fact, the only word that appears more than “love” in that passage is “God.” The writer is talking about that amazing force that begins with God and flows through us—that energy and acceptance, that embrace and care. There can be no love without God. We weren’t born with the sense for how to love. That had to be given to us. It had to be a gift. It may have come directly from God, it may have been transmitted through people in our lives. But it’s always something that begins outside of us—with God. And it only finds its fruition when we share it. What our writer is saying is, “God adores you and me. Our role in life is to give that affection away.” Simple as that.
And difficult as that. Because it’s not always easy, is it? It’s a piece of cake to love some people, of course. But others are an unbelievable challenge. The whiny co-worker, the sadistic boss, the scheming in-law: what do you do with them? Sometimes even the people we’re closest to we can’t stand. I remember, as a child, being sent to my room for some obviously minor offense (!), and, in my fury, shadow boxing as though I were punching my parents. Not especially affectionate of me! I have argued with and been hurt by and resented people for whom I care immensely. As I know you have.
Deep hurts and betrayals can undermine the most intense love. It’s been grimly captivating to watch the publicity surrounding the publication of Elizabeth Edwards’ new book, Resilience, in which she details her reaction to the devastating revelation of her husband John’s infidelity. She still, understandably, feels shredded by that betrayal.
And if we can be that angry at the people we love most, think how difficult it can be to love those who are in different worlds, who stand for values we abhor, or whose personalities simply rub us the wrong way. Much as we might like it otherwise, God’s injunction is to love not just those we like, but to love everybody. This is our vocation, as disciples of Jesus Christ. The task that faces Elizabeth Edwards, and the task that faces us all, is: how do we love someone we can’t stand—someone who may have hurt us badly or lied to us or cheated us in business? And how do we do so without saying, “What you did was OK,” when it wasn’t?
The short answer, and maybe the only answer, is that we’re bound to keep working at it, and there’s One who promises to give us aid. When it’s really difficult to love someone, we can pray for help, pray for the power to do what we may not be able to do on our own. I saw recently, in that journal of deep theology and spirituality Sports Illustrated, this little item. The world’s greatest surfer, Kelly Slater, had a long dry period in his surfing success. He was obsessed with beating everyone, and he kept falling short. He was angry at his competitors, and wanted to crush them. It gradually dawned on him, though, strangely enough, that he could treat even his most serious competitors with love. What changed his approach was that he heard “the story of tests conducted on Aussie rowers in the ’90s, showing how much longer their strength lasted when they let go of their old hatred of their English rivals and replaced it with supportive thoughts” (May 4, 2009, p. 64). Isn’t that amazing? Approaching even your bitterest rivals with a sense of profound support? Slater did, and he returned to peak form.
That’s a version of the sort of prayer that can be freeing to those of us who are mired in resentment or hatred. We can pray for goodness to surround our rivals. We can imagine them surrounded by the warmth and love of God. We can pray for a blessing that will make them whole. And we can decide that, whatever a person may have done, there is always something there to love. Hard as it sometimes seems, that’s the good news of God.
In Lorraine Hansberry’s gem of a play, A Raisin in the Sun, a young man, played in an early film version by Sidney Poitier, and in a later version by Sean (P. Diddy) Combs, loses all his family’s money. They’re a poor family living on Chicago’s South Side, and the young man’s indiscretion undoes all their dreams and fractures their future. With bitter resentment, his sister Beneatha says of her brother Walter, “That is not a man. That is nothing but a toothless rat.” So Mama says to her, “You mourning your brother?”
“He’s no brother of mine,” says Beneatha.
“What you say?”
“I said that that individual in that room is no brother of mine.”
“That’s what I thought you said,” says Mama. “You feeling like you better than he is today? Yes? . . . I thought I taught you to love him.”
“Love him? There is nothing left to love.”
And Mama says, “There is always something left to love. And if you ain’t learned that, you ain’t learned nothing. Have you cried for that boy today? I don’t mean for yourself and for the family ’cause we lost the money. I mean for him; what he been through and what it done to him. Child, when do you think is the time to love somebody the most; when they done good and made things easy for everybody? . . . that ain’t the time at all. It’s when he’s at his lowest and can’t believe in hisself ’cause the world done whipped him so. When you starts measuring somebody, measure him right, child, measure him right. Make sure you done taken into account what hills and valleys he come through before he got to wherever he is” (pp. 124-5).
That’s a great love, a full love, a holy love. It’s the love of a mother for her son, and for her daughter. It’s the love of God for you and me. And it’s the love to which we are all called. Easy? Hardly. But pure and holy and undefiled says the scripture (James 1:27), it’s a love that cares for all. May we be blessed to receive such love, from God and from each other. And may we be profligate in our giving of that love, that all might know that blessing. “We love because God first loved us” (4:19). “Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another” (4:11). This is the Word of God. Thanks be to God.