MUMC Sermon-05/21/06

Last week I began my sermon at the eight o’clock service by admitting that I often sound like a broken record. Today is no exception. For the sixth week in a row we’re talking about love. I guess we talk about love every week in church, but in the season following Easter it’s been more explicit. Although we all probably think we know what love is, the Church seems to saying to us: rethink it; talk about it; learn about it; you haven’t perfected it yet.

One evening, the great Swiss theologian Karl Barth was spending some time relaxing with a group of his closest friends. In the course of their conversation, Barth—whose insights concerning God and the life of faith had a greater influence in the twentieth century than almost any other theologian—was asked by one of those present: “What is the most profound thought that ever entered your mind?”

After a few moments of reflection, Barth replied, “The most profound thought I have ever known is the simple truth: Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.” The most prolific theological mind of the twentieth century concludes that his most profound thought is this line from a children’s song. But if we allow ourselves to sit with the truth of this statement, pushing aside all sentimentality and images of playful children picking flowers in an open field, we too will be overwhelmed by the profundity of that simple truth.

To say that God is love is an amazing statement. It is almost incomprehensible, since it contains the two deepest mysteries of life: the mystery of love and the mystery of God. In our Old Testament lesson Isaiah reminds the people of this truth. “People of Israel, your God is a mystery, although he alone can save.” the prophet says. In other words, we can’t say anything about God and can only know God as God makes Godself known.

How does God do this? Elsewhere, in another equally profound statement, Karl Barth claims that God is known in God’s actions, and God’s quintessential act is Jesus, the ultimate expression of God’s love. (If we had more time, I’d want us to sit with that claim and ponder it deeply. However, since we don’t have the luxury, let me unpack it.)

First, love is in a sense a definition of God, an analysis of God, a description of God. It means that God is essentially love, that love is a necessary part of divinity. It means that love is so central to the being of God that love is another name for God.

But as you heard me say a few weeks ago, love is only rarely a noun and almost exclusively a verb. And thus the nature of God is a verb, an action, and as Barth has said, God is known in God’s actions. If God is necessarily love by nature, God is so because God has chosen to be so. So, God freely loves by choice. God could have chosen any other way to be, after all God is God; but God’s choice was love. Perhaps God figured, if not love then why create at all? What would be the point?

And consider something else, if love is a choice, a choice God freely made, then love is something that most be chosen over and over and over again. Therefore, God’s love even to this day is a choice God is making and re-making. But that shouldn’t surprise us, for God’s love has a history. And that history is the drama between God’s choice to love us and our response to that love. The Bible is the story of that tumultuous love.

From the beginning God loved, and God loved all. But the story as the bible tells it is that God has to start somewhere. A general love that wasn’t embodied in a very specific way didn’t seem to make much sense. So, as the Bible tells us, God chose to grace one particular person, Abraham, with a personal disclosure of that love. Abraham believed that God loved him personally, and thus became the parent of all future lovers.

Again, God always loved all people, but God had to start somewhere specific. As the Bible tells it, God chose to love a particular people. The Jews believed that God loved them personally and thus furthered the divine-human love affair throughout the centuries. And God’s intention was that through them we would come to know that God loves us personally too. The love revealed in the Old Testament with all its beauty and violence, is essentially the story of two lovers, God and Israel, making their way through a romance that will never end. At times that romance is intense and filled with grace and loveliness; at times what the two lovers do to one another is awful and shameful. But throughout it all they learn to love one another better and the point is that they choose to stick it out, even when the ground of their love seems shaky at best.

Through their love affair with God, the Jews came to believe that God would reveal even more of God’s self to us. And a small band of the Jews came to see in Jesus the fullness of God’s love, for he was the perfect lover of God. And even today this perfect lover of God says to us in our gospel lesson: “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one's life for one's friends.”

And therein lies the paradox of love. If God is love both by nature and by choice, then that is our nature also, for again, the Bible tells us that we were created in the image of God. Do you think of yourself in that way? Are you by your very nature an expression of love? But, perhaps more importantly, do you choose love over and over and over again in all that you do? If someone were to describe you to another would they say, “Name, she is so loving. He is the essence, the epitome of love”? Or would they say something else? If so, what is it they would say?

A few weeks ago I ended my sermon with a directive, “Choose love!” And here we are again. Is it any wonder I feel like a broken record? But if I’m going to sound like a broken record I hope it is on this, the matter of love, because nothing else matters more. It is God’s nature. It is our nature. And the choice needs to be made over and over again.

It’s a tremendous decision actually, fraught with danger; full of risk. But friends, I ask you, what is our alternative? Are you going to choose not to love? I know many do, but will you? It’s your choice, but I warn you that the choice not to love is a grave one; the loss is grave. Are you going to live your life as a small and pinched person always afraid to take a chance, always unwilling to make yourself available, always choosing the narrow, cold, lonely road that leads to nowhere? It’s your choice, but why make that one? What does it really offer you in the end?

The Bible tells us that at our end is God. God in God’s love chose to be our beginning and our end, and everything in between is love. That may be hard to believe, especially given the hardships of life, but it’s what the Book says and I for one am willing to risk it all for that. What other choice do I have, really?

St. Augustine came to this realization late in life. After living what was by all standards a very good life, he discovered something profound was missing. He was a famous scholar, a wealthy man, a man who enjoyed the amorous company of many lovely women, and yet his prestige, celebrity and sexual liaisons left him cold when all was said and done. When he finally gave himself over to the love of God, he wrote these words:

“Late have I loved you, O beauty, so ancient and so new; late have I loved you. For behold, you were within me and I outside; and I sought you outside and in my ugliness fell upon those lovely things you have made. You were with me and I was not with you. I was kept from you by those things, yet had they not been in you, they would not have been at all. You called and you cried to me and broke in upon my deafness; you sent forth your beam and shone upon me and chased away my blindness; you breathed fragrance upon me and I drew in my breath and now I pant for you. I tasted you and now I hunger and thirst for you. You touched me and I now burn for your peace.”

That sounds beautiful; and hot. But more than anything it sounds true. The longing to love deeply and to be deeply loved rings true to my experience, and I suppose yours as well. Augustine discovered something we all should: God’s nature is to love; your nature is to love. Isn’t time for these two lovers to meet once more? It’s truly a match made in heaven.