Sermon for 5 Easter B

May 14, 2006

St. Luke’s Church

The Rev. Eric M. Williams

“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.”

The first lesson I learned in kindergarten Sunday School was this:

God is love.

That was the Gospel in a nutshell,

the summary of the church’s understanding,

put in language even a child could comprehend.

Since then I have spent roughly 1872 Sundays in church.

I have studied the Bible in high school, college and seminary.

I have read many books on theology, church history and ethics.

I have even studied other religions.

But despite all I have read and learned,

so far nothing has been able to overturn that first central truth.

What’s interesting is that while my view of God

has not changed fundamentally since then,

my view of love has.

I grew up listening to top 40 radio during the 1970’s.

This was the golden age of sappy love songs.

There were so many of these songs

that Paul McCartney even wrote a song about them.

“You’d think that people would have had enough of silly love songs.

But I look around me and I see it isn’t so.

Some people want to fill the world with silly love songs.

And what’s wrong with that, I’d like to know.”[1]

All of these songs led me to believe a couple of wrong ideas.

First, I believed that “real” love was romantic love.

Second, I believed that “real” love was a feeling,

the warm and exciting feeling of attraction and falling in love.

Now there is nothing wrong with romantic love

and nothing wrong with being “in love.”

It is a wonderful gift that makes it possible for us to meet our mate

and to create families.

But the thing is, love, real love, has nothing whatsoever to do with a feeling.

Falling in love is about hormones.

Practicing love is not about how we feel,

it is about how we act.

And that is a very good thing.

Today on Mother’s Day I give thanks for my mother.

She has shown me all my life what love looks like,

and believe me there have been plenty of times

when her feelings have been anything but warm and fuzzy.

Over the years I have found plenty of occasions

to make her angry, to hurt her feelings

to give her grief of one kind or another.

And if her love for me depended on how she was feeling,

I would be in deep trouble.

But instead she has shown me love by her actions.

She and my father both cared enough for me

to work and act for my well being

no matter what they were feeling at the time.

This is a lot closer to the love described in the Bible.

This is a lot closer to the love of God.

The most famous verse in the Bible is John 3:16

“God so loved the world….”

Think about that for a moment.

How was God feeling about the world?

This was the world that so far had ignored his commandments,

stoned his prophets and generally been unfaithful.

The emotion most often mentioned for God in the Bible is anger,

followed closely by grief and anguish.

And yet God does not stop loving.

Even the death of Jesus cannot break God’s steadfast love.

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.

That is the amazing central fact of the Christian faith,

the same truth I learned in Kindergarten.

It is this love that we are called upon to share as Christians.

As John says, “We love because he first loved us.”

There is a lot of ungodly stuff that masquerades as love.

Sometimes it’s hard to know the difference.

What we call love often has more to do

with our own needs, our own selfishness.

Do I encourage my daughter to play the violin

because it is truly good for her

or because I am living out my own dreams through her?

We are a hopeless muddle of competing emotions,

of mixed motives.

Not one of us is pure.

We are fallen, sinful and so our love is often twisted and imperfect.

We hurt those we love.

We control. We smother. We betray.

And if we are brutally honest with ourselves

sometimes even our best actions

are driven by fear and guilt.

And yet, by God’s grace we have the opportunity

to step outside of ourselves

and to learn to love as he loves us.

John says that if we love one another,

God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us.

This godly love is seen every day in the actions of ordinary men, women and children.

It is seen in the care given by an elderly wife for her dying husband,

in the work of an exhausted AIDS worker in Africa

in the anonymous gift of a playground for a community park.

Here at St. Luke’s this godly love is shown every day, in simple acts like

chopping wood for the winter, working all day on a funeral reception,

making meals for those having a hard time,

and on and on.

So where does the power come from to love in this way?

How do we learn to overcome our selfish needs

and love with this divine love?

It is not through our own power or wisdom,

but from being connected to the source.

I am the vine, you are the branches, Jesus said.

Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit,

because apart from me you can do nothing.

Love is the sap that gives life to the tree.

I have mentioned it before, I’m sure,

but mother’s day (and father’s day) have special significance for me

because I am adopted.

When I was adopted I was grafted on to my parents’ vine,

given life, a home, a name and a loving family.

I was given a foundation of love to carry me forward in life.

And so it is with God.

When we were baptized, we were adopted into God’s family.

We were grafted on to the vine of Jesus,

so that the sap of his love might flow through us

and so that we might bear fruit.

And the fruit we are to bear

is to grow more and more loving,

to grow more and more to look like the God

in whose image we were created

and whose name is LOVE.

[1] Paul McCartney “Silly Love Songs” in http://www.lyricsfreak.com/p/paul+mccartney/silly+love+songs_20105859.html