Last week in the Sunday Sermon – duh, duh, DUHHHHHH! We learned that Pastor Jon has a secret . . . (just kidding) . . . we learned that . . .
God loves you no ifs, ands, or buts. That’s the gospel! That God in Christ has reconciled you, death is defeated, the tomb is empty, and you are loved first before you say or do anything without any conditions because God has cancelled all conditions. You are beloved of God if you are a Christian, non-Christian, undocumented immigrant, face-masked ICE agent, angry Democrat, angry Republican, peace activist or autocrat.
God is love in person – Jesus is certainly not all that we might say about God but IS the clearest revelation and demonstration of what God’s love truly looks like. God is Christlike and in God there is no unChristlikeness. And we learned that when we look at Jesus, who is both fully God and fully a human being, love is a feeling of deep empathy and compassion as well as an act of self-sacrifice that aims to ease hurt and harm for others. This week the kids were taught a great definition of compassion: “I see your hurt. I feel your hurt. I ease your hurt.”
And today we are going to learn:
1) We are to love like Jesus – no ifs, ands, or buts. The message of 1 John 4 is that just as God is love in the person of Jesus “we are to be like Jesus in the world.” (vs. 17) AND
2) Love is a compass and not map. Once we have clarity on who we are to love like Jesus, which is the world, a difficult question arises, “How?”
First, we are to love like Jesus – no ifs, ands, or buts.
John’s whole project of love is twofold: to identify who God is, which is love, and who God loves, which is everyone. And in doing so, we identify who we are to be in the world, which is Jesus, and who we are to love, which is also everyone who Jesus loves, which is everyone. “Let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God” (4:7). “Beloved, since God so loves us, we also ought to love one another” (4:11) “Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them. This is how love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment: In this world we are like Jesus.” (4:16-17).
And yet recently some have sought to define love away from such radical inclusion and self-sacrifice toward a hierarchy of relationships in which you first love family, then friends, then your nation, and then others. And this belief has been used by Christians to explain why we can without remorse cut critical aid to countries in need or why we shouldn’t feel guilty for mistreating undocumented people.
This notion seems to think of “neighbors” in a literal sense, as particular people who live beside us, who we wave at on the way to work, who often look like us and shop at the same stores. Such a narrow vision does not connect with Jesus’ own expansion of the term to include all human beings. Jesus called all of the following “neighbors”: widows and orphans, the poor, the sick and other-abled, social outcasts and, yes, even all foreigners (Luke 10 and 14). In fact, what makes all of these noticeable is that they sit on the margins and outside of the normal web of family and friends. So if we are going to be Jesus in the world – to the world – for the world, John says, we must similarly love all without exception.
And yet, we keep trying to smuggle in the “howevers.” Sometimes even into the Bible itself. One of the translations I frequently look at is the New English Translation because they offer extensive footnotes about why they make the many translation choices that they make. One of the more astounding choices for me was their decision to translate “brothers” or adelphoi, in vss. 20-21, as “fellow Christians.” Is that right? Are we to believe that God loves the world so that we only have to love fellow believers? Is it only Christians who are “family” or worthy of being called “brother” or “sister”? I want to clear up how this family language in the Bible works because it shapes how we think.
Scripture reveals that everyone is a child of God, everyone is brother and sister.
Paul, preaching to non-Christians in Athens, says:
26 From one man he [God] made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. 27 God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us. 28 ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’ ~ Acts 17:26-28
And again to the Ephesians, Paul says, “For this reason I kneel before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name.” (3:14). So everyone has God as a parent and exists as one family. ALL are God’s children because he created us ALL in his image. Even in our rebellion, God never disowns us or kicks us out of the family. His forgiveness and love follow us out the door and his mercy pursues us all the days of our lives.
So child of God, who are you to love? All God’s children. And all God’s children are brothers and sisters. But once we figure out who to love we have to face another difficult question: How are we to love?
Love is a compass and not map.
The discussion of love in the Bible isn’t a detailed map. It isn’t a careful topography of the ins and outs of love in the world. And while this is kind of obvious it’s worth stating because it’s easy to feel discouraged. Even when we follow Jesus and believe in love, love is hard and scary. And while the Bible helps orient us toward the direction of God’s unconditional love through Jesus Christ, there are still dark forests to navigate, scary mountains to climb, and raging rivers to cross. The compass of God’s love will keep us oriented in the right direction, but it doesn’t tell us step-by-step what we should do in every situation.
You can’t see clearly and won’t always know in every instance exactly what you should do, but when you orient yourself by imitating Jesus, you are moving in the direction that God desires. When I refuse love, or refuse to orient towards love, then I am choosing not to know God, and not to move in the right direction. So you aren’t lost but you will have navigate the unknown and sometimes do the best you can and that demands a sense of realism, humility, and wisdom.
I would like to offer a few prayerful questions to help you calibrate your compass, that you might ask yourself when confronted with a situation which demands love and poses obstacles. If I’m oriented toward love, I will navigate by asking, 1) “Am I placing some other value in competition with love?” We can never say, “I can’t love this person because I don’t agree with what they’re doing.” We must never allow justice or morality to be a shield which would allow us to be indifferent to love. Jesus will always challenge the Pharisees when they seek to distance themselves by using the law as an excuse to not love (John 8). Paul will say, “While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” And that God’s kindness leads to repentance (Rom 2:4). 2) “What does this person need that I can give?” We must allow those in need to have a sense of agency. As children of God they must also be given the dignity to determine what they need. And yet, we must also recognize our own limitations. Always allow yourself to be present in the moment to give what you can. When you are confronted with a person who is houseless, you can’t fix homelessness, but you can respond to real needs in the moment. Marianne, Lea and love covering a multitude of sins. 3) I will navigate by asking, “If I were in this person shoes, what might I want?” Jesus said that “love your neighbor as yourself” and “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Compassion means to extend and feel a sense of empathy. You can be a barometer for discerning love. If you wouldn’t like it. Don’t do it. Do you like shame? Do you enjoy “I told you so”? Do you prefer to be treated as a child? No? Then don’t do those things. 4) Am I allowing the people I love to confirm or challenge the love that I give? You simply can’t always allow the intent to love to silence the perspective of the one supposedly being loved. Do my expressions of care make people more fearful or less? v18 – “There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment.” So we should be wary of forms of love that are built on fear or punishment. Listen, we all have to navigate a faithful perspective toward loving our LGBTQ+ folk. Wherever you land, affirming or non-affirming, you cannot dismiss their experience, if they say your love feels unloving. You simply have to look at the suicide rates of LGBTQ teens and notice that they are five times higher than the national average of straight teens. 5) Am I loving 360? Have I remembered that Jesus spoke of a God who loves both friend and enemy, the persecuted and the persecuting, two brothers – one wild, one self-righteous with one father? Both are loved but that love will often look and be experienced differently. Remember Jesus told a story of one father and two brothers. Both were very different, both were spoken to differently, but both were invited to the same party.
So you must love enemies in such a way that doesn’t excuse abuse. You must love victims in such a way that doesn’t wink at the real pain or fear that they are experiencing at the hands of others or even themselves. At my previous church I formed a team of woman to come around and support a woman who was being abused. They took her shopping, loved on her, and opened their homes to her when she was fleeing the all-too-frequent violence. Most people don’t know that it often takes an abused person seven times of leaving to finally stick. Well, in this instance, I believe we were on 10 and when I gathered the care team I was struck by how they had poured out themselves and how I had not cared for them as well. So we had to change how we were helping this woman so that she would know of our love without incapacitating the care team.
So who are we to love? Everyone.
How are we to love? By looking to Jesus and asking questions because love is a compass and not a map.
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