In the name of the Risen ☩ Lord. Amen.
When it comes to Biblical passages about love, the most well-known is probably 1 Corinthians 13. You know, the one you’ve heard at nearly every wedding that you’ve ever been to: “Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious, or boastful, or rude.” And I have nothing against that passage, it’s a wonderful exploration of love. The passage that we heard today from the first epistle of John though is one that should be a part of our understanding of love, perhaps even more than the one from 1 Corinthians.
Love, certainly, is central to the Christian message, but we have to be clear on what we mean by “love.” We use the word “love” so often and in so many contexts that love has essentially become a word without meaning. “I’d love to have coffee with you,” or “I love these new socks,” or “I love you, my dear, will you marry me?” We use the same word to express how we feel about our children as we do about paint samples when we find the right one for the kitchen renovation. So if we then want to say “God is love,” what does that even mean?
The Greek word that is used here is agape, which is a higher sort of love than other types of love. This is more than erotic love, more than affinity, more than friendship, more than kinship, more than fondness, more than affection, more than really liking. Agape is the highest and purest form of love. This sort of love is not transactional, it is pure grace. Sometimes this word is translated as “charity” because this sort of love is ecstatic; that is, it calls us beyond ourselves. In the Church, we view this as the sort of love which flowed out of God at the moment of Creation, it is the sort of love by which Jesus offered himself upon the Cross, it is the sort of love which sanctifies our lives through the Holy Spirit being within us. This is the love that we are to have for our enemies, it is the love in which we are held at all moments of our lives, and even into our deaths.
A simple way to think about what love looks like is to say that “To love is to do as God would do.” It’s really not hard to know what those sorts of actions look like – love is making the most gracious, most generous, least selfish choice. Figuring out what the loving thing to do isn’t the hard part, actually having the will to do it and carrying out that love is the challenge. When we think of Christian love, it’s helpful to keep in mind that love is being true to God’s vision of peace and justice.
Don’t be discouraged by, or make an excuse out of, the use of the word “perfect” throughout this passage. The task is not to be perfect in loving, that’s impossible and God knows it. “Perfect,” in this sense, does not mean “without error” but rather “achieving its purpose.” In this usage of the word, we’d say that an acorn is perfected when it has become an oak tree. A perfect acorn isn’t one with a fully symmetrical shape or exactly the right color, but a perfect acorn is one that has found its purpose in becoming what it was destined to be. That’s what perfect love is. Perfect love is not about never making a mistake, rather it’s about movement towards the love of God. Perfect love is loving the things that God loves.
As 1 John notes, this love is central to God’s very being. God could have been described in many ways – God is power would have worked. Or might, or majesty, or goodness, or order. The claim is that love is the foundation of everything that God is and does. The way to experience this love is to let this love flow through us to those around us. If we are to live Godly lives, then we must live lives rooted in love.
Being rooted in the love of God is an image used by Jesus in this morning’s passage from the Gospel according to John. Jesus says, “Abide in me as I abide in you… I am the vine, you are the branches.” Now, just as the branch has no life if it is not connected to the vine, we have no life if we are not connected to the love of God. The first thing that we might say about this image is that abiding matters. There isn’t much, though, in our society that abides. We get new gadgets every few years and far fewer people live in the towns where they grew up than they used to. We are often obsessed with what is new and get excited about everything from new shoes to new politicians. Perhaps some of that is rooted in the false hope that if we just make this one change that our lives will suddenly all snap into place. But the point is, in our consumeristic society, there isn’t much that abides. This becomes a serious problem when it comes to faith.
Ours is what you might call a voluntaristic society. Membership and involvement in any organization, whether it’s the PTA, YMCA, Rotary, Scouts, or church is up to us. We decide that we’ll join, what events we’ll support, and when we end our relationship with that organization. And this attitude keeps us at an arm’s distance from truly belonging. We have the attitude “I can come and go as I please” and we use the phrase “You’ll get out of it what you put into it.” And that may well be true for things like a book club, but it simply doesn’t work for the Church. You might be able to quit a club, but when it comes to Jesus, our Vine, you can only cut yourself off, which is going to lead you to wither and die.
This is a deeply un-American message and so it can be difficult for us to accept. There is no “Manifest Destiny” or “life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness” in this. No, life in the Church is about finding that your identity is connected to the Vine; it’s not the life that you curate for yourself. There is no such thing as liberty or freedom when you’re connected to the Vine, as you simply go where the Vine takes you. This is what it means to abide in God, to see yourself as connected to something that is not only larger than you, but something that gives you your very meaning. So abide in God by rooting yourself in prayer, in worship, in service to others.
Love is the nutrient that flows from the Vine and gives sustenance to the branches. Abiding in the Vine certainly is important, as is letting this love flow through us. It’s quite interesting that the exhortation in 1 John is not “Beloved, let us love God, because love is from God.” That would actually be so much easier – if all we had to commit to was loving God, we might be able to manage that. But no, we are told to love one another. Let’s be honest – we don’t like most people, loving them seems beyond us. But 1 John makes it unambiguous: “The commandment we have from him is this: those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also.”
There’s an approach to love that comes from South Africa known as ubuntu. The word doesn’t translate into one English word, but rather is the understanding that “I am because you are.” Ubuntu takes seriously the idea that we are the branches connected to the Vine; that we’re all in this together. If you have blight, then so do I. My salvation is rooted in your salvation and yours in mine. So the fact that the people of Flint, Michigan still don’t have clean water is a problem for me. Sure, I might have clean water coming out of my pipes; but their suffering, in one way or another, is and will be my suffering. And by the same token, when St. Luke’s has thriving ministries with children and youth, that vibrancy will flow into us all of us as well. We are all the branches, connected to each other in love. And because Jesus is the Vine, there is no shortage of love if we’ll just let it flow through us.
Why then are we so afraid? 1 John notes that “love casts out fear.” But we are paralyzed by so many fears. And we are never at our best or most loving when we are afraid. The Resurrection of Jesus Christ is our grafting into the vine of the New Creation. So what are we afraid of? God, who is love, created out of love. God so loved the world as to take on flesh and become human. Out of that deep and constant love, God endured the Cross when we rejected that love. Then on the third day, love sprang forth again in the Resurrection. And not wanting to leave us comfortless, God then sent the Holy Spirit to always be with us as we grow in this love. So, literally, what in the world do we have to be afraid of?
It’s only when we cut ourselves off from this story of God’s love that we have a reason to be afraid. You probably noticed, but there was a lot of “love” in the passage from 1 John. “Love” was used 29 times in just 15 verses. We need to reminded over and over again of this message – that God is love, that God loves us, that we are to love one another. An African-American preacher was once asked why he preached such long sermons; didn’t he know that an hour and a half was too long? He responded “Look, I get two hours a week with these people, the world gets the rest. And the world tells them everything except ‘You are worthy of being loved.’ So I’ve got to drill that message of God’s love into them because the world is going to beat it out of them for the rest of the week.”
My beloved brothers and sisters, with every fiber of your being, know that you are loved by God. You might have some doubts, you might have some questions, you might have some fears – but know that God loves you. If you’re not sure that you really believe in God, God loves you. If you don’t think you’re worthy of being loved, God loves you. If when you try to love others you always seem to make a mess of it, God loves you. God loves you so much that you’ve been grafted onto the Vine – you are a part of God’s very being. Abide in this love. Let this love transform your doubts and fears into faith and trust. Experience this love by having that love of God flow through you by loving one another, by desiring for them what God desires for you. Never make faith more complicated than this: God is love, so abide in this love.
