In the name of the Risen Lord. Amen.
As our former Diocesan Bishop and current Presiding Bishop Michael Curry has said, “If it’s not about love, then it’s not about God.” Amen to that. Now, I realize that it can sound trite, simplistic, naïve, and saccharine, but love really is the name of the game. It’s all about love. We heard it in the reading from 1 John – God is love. Not God is loving. Not that God is like love. Rather, God is love. Now, we’re not saying love is God; we’re not reducing God into love. But we are saying that God cannot be understood apart from love.
You’ll
hear a lot of people talk about how God is all-powerful or all-knowing, and
those assertions may well be true. But such claims are philosophical. But here,
in the very words of Scripture, we have a statement about God that completely
fits with the God we have seen and known in Jesus Christ: God is love.
Those
who have heard me preach more than a few times know that love is a theme that I
repeat often. God is love, we are the beloved of God, and love is our source,
purpose, calling, and destination. Love is the raw ingredient of Creation. Love
is why God led the Hebrew people out of slavery in Egypt. Love is why God gave
the Law to the people so that they can live in the way of love. Love is why God
came among us and was born of Blessed Mary. Love is what drove Jesus to teach,
to heal, to forgive, and, ultimately, to die on a Cross. And the power of love
is stronger than that of death, and so on the third day, Jesus rose in love. He
would send the Holy Spirit to be with us so that the love would live within us.
And the reason why I so resolutely trust that, in the end, all shall be well is
because of the love of God. Love really is the name of the game.
But
we have to understand what we mean by “love.” We love a recipe or pair of pants
that fit us well, but we also love our church, our pets, our children, and we
are told that God loves us by sending Jesus to us. I’m not sure if we have
another word in English that goes from a trivial preference for something all
the way up to the love a parent has for their child – but we use that word
“love” to cover it all.
It
might be helpful if we, taking a cue from the Greek language, to consider four
different types of love. These aren’t rankings or progressions of love, rather
just different types of relationships that we’ve collapsed into the idea of
love. The first is storge and is sometimes called “familial love.” It’s
a powerful love – as many people will do anything for family. I’ve seen it
myself – people who, if they weren’t related to each other, wouldn’t care the
least bit about each other but they make sacrifices of love for one another
simply because they are aware of their familial connections. When that sort of
love is shared people who are not aware of such family ties but rather choose
to be in a relationship of mutuality with one another, we call it friendship.
In Greek, this is philia, as in Philadelphia – the city of friendly
love. There is then eros, which is the sort of love that we speak of
“falling into.” This love goes beyond friendship as it involves physical
intimacy in addition to emotional and social.
The
fourth love is, in Greek, agape. This love is unconditional and about
benevolence, sacrifice, and self-giving. We might say that this love costs us
something, as it opens us to not only the fullness and depths of love, but also
vulnerability. St. Thomas Aquinas said that this sort of love is willing the
good of the other as other. In that definition we see two important parts of
love – that love is about our will, not just our affection. Love is not an
emotion, a feeling, an inclination; no, love is action, love is about our will.
And love is also about the other, not ourselves. This sort of love happens not
because it is expedient, required, or even beneficial. But agape love is about
doing for others what is best for them on their own terms. So, it’s not about
loving them in the way that we think is best for them, it’s about what really
is best for them. And it is this kind of agape love which the New Testament
speaks. This is the sort of love at play when we hear that “God is love.”
And
the way that we know about this sort of love is, as we heard, “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. 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.” God’s love
was manifest in Jesus. If we say that Jesus is God incarnate and we also say
that God is love, then we can say that Jesus is love incarnate, love in the
flesh of a human life. So if we want to know what love is, we look to Jesus.
Love is about humility, love is about healing, love is about an orientation
towards God.
When
we look at Jesus, we see the truth that St. Paul expresses in 1 Corinthians:
“Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or
rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it
does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things,
believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.”
And in Colossians, we read that “love binds everything together in perfect
harmony.” When we look at Jesus, we can see why St. Paul wrote that love is the
greatest of things, greater even than faith or hope. Because it was love that
became flesh in Jesus. It was love that led Jesus to endure his Passion and
Crucifixion. As we heard, this was the atoning sacrifice for our sins. As I
preached on Good Friday, everything about the Cross was done for us and for our
salvation – it was motivated by this love of God and a demonstration of it. And
so we hear that love casts out fear – because on the Cross, love has looked Sin
and Death in the face. The symbol of love ought not be heart-shaped, which
looks nothing like a real heart anyway. Rather, the symbol of love is the
Cross.
This is not the
end of the story of love though, as it was in love, for love, and by love that
Jesus rose from the dead. Tucked away in a Biblical book that doesn’t get much
attention, the Song of Solomon, is one of the most important bits of wisdom there
is, that “love is as strong as death.” The Resurrection shows us just how true
this is – that love is strong as death. Some might say Christianity is just a
system of belief meant to assuage our anxiety about death. But the Resurrection
says otherwise. Our faith is a witness to this Resurrection power to conquer
even the greatest enemy, as St. Paul puts it, of Death. This is why we proclaim
that love is the most powerful force in all of Creation as God has created and
redeemed all things by love.
And so we might
think, “Well, that’s lovely that God is love, but what’s that got to do with
life for the rest of us?” This love, as we heard in 1 John, is to be perfected
in us. We heard that God first loved us. Before we asked for it or could have
done anything to deserve it, we were loved by God. It is a free gift and this
gift is given for the purpose of us using it and being transformed by it. Love
is to flow through us and bring us into the peace of God which passes all
understanding so that amid the chaos of this world, our hearts might surely be
fixed in this love that makes all things well.
This is what Jesus
speaks of with the I Am statement about him being the vine. Jesus is the vine
that connects us to God and to one another. When we abide in him, we receive the
nutrients of grace, mercy, peace, and hope, and what starts to show up in our
lives are the sweet fruits of love. This is what it means for God’s love to be
perfected in us. God is cultivating love in you and in me.
We are the
branches – meaning that we exist to be connected to the vine, and we become the
part of the plant where the fruits grow from. The branch, while important,
doesn’t actually do much of the work though – rather the branch receives and
transmits that which it has been given. We don’t have to manufacture grace, or
forgiveness, or love – rather we receive these things from Jesus, our true
vine. And as these gifts and blessings from God flow through us, not only are
we nourished by them, but fruits are produced beyond us
It’s a bit like
the Dead Sea in Israel. In the north of Israel, there is Mt. Hermon, which gets
snow-capped in the winter. Then, as spring comes and there is rain and snowmelt,
the Jordan River starts to flow more. It goes into the Sea of Galilee, and then
south towards Jerusalem. This water source is what gives life to the region.
This flow of water though ends at the Dead Sea, so-called because not much
lives in or around it. And this is because although the Dead Sea receives water
from the Jordan River, it has no outlet. Therefore, things just collect there
and along with evaporation, the result is water so salty that not much can
survive living in it. When we hoard the gifts of God as private treasure, the
blessings can turn to curses.
The metaphor of
the vine is that we participate in the fruit-bearing that God is doing. As we
pray in the Post-Communion Eucharistic prayer in Rite I – we are made “very
members incorporate” of Jesus. We are made a part of the story of love through
Jesus Christ who has grafted us into the vine. This love is a blessing for us
and beyond us, as it is intended to flow through us to others as a blessing.
This is why we heard in 1 John that because God has loved us, we are to love
one another. We love our brothers and sisters as a way of receiving and
furthering the love that God has given to us.
Love really is the name of the game. When love
is at the core of our identity, we are living in truth. Now, to be honest and
clear, this sort of love is not easy. Loving our enemies, forgiving those who
have wronged us, loving our neighbors as we love ourselves – these things are
very difficult to do and we will fail often. Where I find comfort and solace is
in remembering that I am not the vine, Jesus is. I don’t have to produce this
love myself. Rather, I need to spend time in prayer, Scripture, worship, and
rest to remember that God is love and that I am loved by God. From that place
of love, we can then let that love flow through us to others. Again, this is a
self-giving and non-coercive love, so it really does take some work to do. But
this love is nothing less than the very grain of the universe.
One way to abide
in this love is to tell yourself every morning and every night that you are the
beloved of God. Say to yourself “I am loved by God.” And then as you see people
throughout the day, even if it’s just in your head, you can say “Hello,
beloved.” I know we all have lots of adjectives that we use to describe people,
particularly those who annoy and anger us. Abiding in the vine would have us
always start with love, so that we can have the hope of ending in love.
And a place we see
this on full display is in the Eucharist. Earlier in John, Jesus said, “I am
the bread of life” and here he says “I am the true vine.” In the Holy
Eucharist, the love of God is presented to us in his Death and Resurrection and
we are given tokens of this love in the bread and wine, which makes us sacred
vessels that carry his Body and Blood into the world. And so our prayer for
this Eucharist, indeed for all of our life, is in, the words of St. Augustine,
that we might behold what we are, the beloved of the God who is love, and
become what we receive, the love of God given for the life of the world.
