With One Heart: Love and Faith
Rev. Mark Schaefer
Kay Spiritual Life Center
February 18, 2007
Deuteronomy 6:4-9; 1 Corinthians 13; 1 John 4:7-16

Deut. 6:4   Hear, O Israel: The LORD is our God, the LORD alone.   5 You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.   6 Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart.   7 Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise.   8 Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead,   9 and write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.

1Cor. 13:1   If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.   2 And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.   3 If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.
4   Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant 5 or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful;   6 it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth.   7 It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
8   Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end.   9 For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part;   10 but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end.   11 When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways.   12 For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.   13 And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.

1John 4:7   Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God.   8 Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love.   9 God's love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him.   10 In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins.   11 Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another.   12 No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us.
13   By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit.   14 And we have seen and do testify that the Father has sent his Son as the Savior of the world.   15 God abides in those who confess that Jesus is the Son of God, and they abide in God.   16 So we have known and believe the love that God has for us.
 God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.

What do you love?

Some people, according to the song. love a parade.   Some pizza eaters are "meat lovers" and others are "veggie lovers".   Faith Hill "loves the way that you love [her]".   There's a website called "ilovecheese.com" for people who, it seems, love cheese.   In Apocalypse Now, Robert Duvall's character claims to "love the smell of napalm in the morning."   And apparently, a lot of people love New York.  

According to the Beatles, "All you need is love (love is all you need)." But what is this love that everyone is talking about? What one thing are we describing that brings together individuals, cheese afficianadoes, lovers of a particular place, husbands and wives, and those who love God?

Love itself in many ways remains a mystery to us.

In the movie Contact, the tension between faith and reason is often the center of the drama.   When one character expresses doubt at the existence of God because God cannot be seen or empirically measured, the other asks, "Did you love your father?"   Jodi Foster answers, "Yes." To which, Matthew McConaughey replies, "Prove it."   There is definitely the sense that love is something that cannot be empirically measured.   That can only be experienced, the way God is. According to this view, love, whatever it is, is fleeting and beyond our material experience.

Love is the theme of the Scripture lessons we read tonight.   First is the lesson from Deuteronomy, the texts known in the Jewish tradition as the Shema and the V'ahavta.   Shema means 'hear' and refers to the portion that says "Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord alone." It is followed immediately by the V'ahavta which means, "And you shall love...", in which we are told that we shall "love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength."   This passage is the one that Jesus would quote when asked what the greatest commandment in the Law was.

And so we know that we are to love.   The heart of our faith is loving God and neighbor. But what is that love?   The author of 1 John tells us that God is love:

1John 4:7   Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God.   8 Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love.   ...   12 No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us. ... 16 God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.

"God is love" and those who live in love live in God, and God lives in them.   What do we mean by saying God is love?

When most people hear the phrase "God is love", I think most people think about a love that is warm and fuzzy.   Sentimental.   It's almost hard to hear the words "God is love" without imagine them being written in that big puffy lettering with tie-died colors and flower power in the background.  It is a safe, warm kind of love. A peaceful, easy feeling. A happiness that doesn't seem to require much but the sentimentality that comes from that feeling. "God is love" tends to evoke images of hippies promoting living in communes, at one with the earth.  

Many people have an idea that the idea of God is love means that God is fond of us. That God has a warm feeling toward us. And that's how we're meant to be with one another.

When we think of love, we also think of that kind of puppy love, that powerful infatuation that we get with one another from time to time. A love grounded in fantasy, not in anything solid that we can hold on to. Little grounding in anything that we might be able to get our hands on and say, "This is what we are meant to do."

Now, I want to make it clear that I am not talking about romantic love when I am talking about this 'easy love'. As we talked about last week, true romantic love is a lot of work. It requires an intentionality, and a seriousness, and a respect for the other.   Just because that love often chooses us does not mean it is any easier, nor does it mean that it will not be without hardship and suffering, or that it is a warm and fuzzy feeling.   There is nothing sentimental about romantic love.

But agape love is a little different from romantic love in the following way: Agape has little to do with how we feel. When push comes to shove, the love we're talking about is not a warm fuzzy feeling, it is not something soft and romantic. St. Paul makes that message for us very clearly as he writes in 1 Corinthians: 

4   Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant 5 or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful;   6 it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth.   7 It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Paul is talking about actions, not feelings. Paul is taking about a love that is not sentimental, but is active. Embodied.

If Paul were privy to that conversation between Jodi Foster and Matthew McConaughey in Contact, he would have objected to the notion that love could not be proved. He would have said that love can be seen, love can be known through the way we act toward one another.

V. CHANGING THE WORLD

Another thing that separates agape love from the kinds of love that we are accustomed to thinking about is that other kinds of love, such as romantic love, are not meant to be shared with everyone.  At least not if you plan on keeping your social life in some sort of coherent order. Romantic love is usually limited to (preferably) one person at a time.

Agape love reaches out beyond borders and boundaries.   Like the story of the penguins in the zoo that we read during the Children's message.   Two male penguins raised an egg not their own.   Showing love to one who is not one's own, or even, reasonably one's responsibility, is agape love.   To the Christian, family, and family love, has little, if anything, to do with biology.

And speaking of penguins, love is like that of a penguin's--who will go four months without food in order to shelter an egg until it hatches. Four months it will be by the time the male penguin can return to the see. Four months carrying the egg around on the tops of his claws and sheltered under a fold of skin, standing in the middle of the frigid 80 degrees below zero Antarctic. Say what you will, but that's love. Sacrificing one's self, one's well-being to insure the well-being of another.

Love is hard.   As hard as the romantic version is, the agape version is even more so.   Romantic love often catches us, often unawares.   It is driven on by impulses that are natural and biological.   We find our motivations for romantic love easy: we are attracted to someone, they make us feel good, we want comfort, familiarity.   And let's not forget the sexual/biological drive behind romance as well.

Agape love is harder.   Because it demands that we love those to whom we are not attracted.   Those who do not make us feel good.   Those who will give us nothing in return, those are the very people agape calls us to love.

It is a hard love.   It is counterintuitive.   And it demands our whole lives.

This is the last Sunday before Ash Wednesday and the beginning of Lent.   In Lent we walk the wilderness journey with Jesus.   It is a journey of hardship, of suffering. Of love.

It will be a journey through the wilderness, not only physically but spiritually.   Through those times of doubt, failure, and despair.   It will take us into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday with shouts of Hosanna! and the waving of Palm Branches.   It will take us to the Upper Room on Thursday night, for the celebration of the Last Supper, the original love feast, with the Twelve.   And then it will take us to the dark moments in Gethsemane, to the late night betrayal and arrest, the trial, and to the Cross.

Lest we doubt the existence of love, we need not rely on trite words or fuzzy feelings to prove its existence.   We need only look at the Cross. Only look upon the one who hangs there who gave his life for our sake--we, unworthy of the gift.   That's love.

And that is the love that we are called to share.  How will we respond?   In what ways will we give of ourselves freely and without fear for one another?   How will we as individuals and as a community take that love into our hearts and live it? How are we called to embrace this transforming love that destroys all our preconceptions of the world? A love that wipes out the barrier between us and God. When we live in that kind of love, we truly live in God, because that is the love of God in us. That is the love that we are called to share.

It would be nice if this love took hold of us easily the way that romance sometimes can, propelling us along of its own momentum. It would be nice if this love were harmless and fun.

But this kind of love is not something we are called to feel.   It is not even really something we are called to do.   It is something we are called to be.   As God is love, so too are we, made in God's image.   We are called to be love for one another as God is love for us.