Love in Action - 1 John 4: 7-21

When I was younger, one of my favorite books was Love You Forever by Robert S. Munsch. The story is told about a mother’s unconditional and unending love for her son, through his two year old trials to his adult antics. No matter what her son did, she rocked him and sang a song: “I’ll love you forever, I’ll like you for always, as long as I’m living, my baby you’ll be.” In the end of the book, as the mother is dying the roles are reversed; the son holds her and sings her song back to the old woman. “I’ll love you forever, I’ll like you forever, as long as I’m living, my mommy you’ll be.”

Reflecting back over the years on why I liked this book so much, I’ve realized that there is something pure about how this book describes love. In a culture that often substitutes the word “love” for “like”, this book showed what love is. What love looks like, even in the difficult times. This is not an “I love pizza” type of situation. This book demonstrated what the type of love in today’s scripture passage is - agape - the type of love that gives without expecting anything in return, sacrificial love at its best. The type of love that stands as a reminder that all things are rooted in love, find their beginning in love, are perfected in love, and are returned in love. In other words, the hard type of love. 

Today’s passage is not admonishing a simple romantic understanding of love. No, this is loving through all times and situations. Love that is a choice that is beyond our emotional draw. This is the type of love that God has for us, no matter how we stray or who we demand God to be. Have you ever noticed that the attributes that people ascribe to God tell you a lot about who they want God to be in their life at that moment? Sometimes people around us claim that God is the great healer, often when they are in need of deep healing in their own lives or their loved ones. Sometimes people proclaim that God is ordered, when their life feels like it is swimming in chaos. But the author of 1 John cut through all of these other attributes that God posses to say that God is agape, love. Here he is taking a Greek word rarely used in everyday conversation and claiming it for the Christian community - God is love because God has acted in immeasurable love through Jesus Christ.

Have you ever pondered how uncontrollable love is? It is radical when we love those whom others deem to be unlovable. It is creative in expressing itself, especially when love goes beyond the bounds of an emotion and becomes an action. It is self-giving, open, and fluid. It is so much more then we could ever try to define it to be - just like the essence of God. God is bigger then our definitions, just as God’s love is bigger than any of our explanations.

Have any of you ever heard of Gary Chapman? Or perhaps of his famous book, The Five Love Languages? The basis premise of Chapman’s work, which takes on many different forms, is that often we do not appreciate the love that others have to offer because we cannot recognize it. A few years ago Chapman expanded his research and writing into the area of God’s love for us in the book The Love Languages of God: How to Feel and Reflect Divine Love. In his previous writing about human relationships, Chapman supposed that most of us really only communicate love to another person one or two ways, with one being our primary form of expressing love. We, as human beings, like to receive love in the same ways that we most express it, in other words we stick inside of our love comfort zone. But in the Love Languages of God,  Chapman reminds readers that God is not limited in the expression of Divine love. In fact, God can express love in a myriad of ways simultaneously. God can speak words of affirmation to us through prayer. God spends quality time with us. God has lavished gifts upon us. God has sacrificially acted on our behalf. And God wraps us in the comfort of Divine presence, just to name a few. God can express love in countless ways, because God is the only being who is love. Love in its most unadulterated form. Love beyond measure or qualification. God’s love is perfect.

This passage, however, does start out by telling us to love God, the great lover of all. It starts out by tellings us to love one another, because love is of God. It tells us to love one another as a testimony to how God has loved us in the past and will continue to love us in the future. 

For a few years I attended a church where people went around proclaiming that they loved Jesus. Which was all well and good, except for the fact that they didn’t act like they loved each other. In fact, they didn’t even act like they could tolerate, let alone like or love, the other believers in their community. It was an extremely disparaging situation, and the church stagnated, wondering why it was not growing. Slowly but surely they started to realize that loving God requires is to love others. They are not two separate things. There is no way that we can love God who is unseen, without loving our neighbor who is right in front of us. Scholar Claudia Highbaugh expresses this sentiment by saying, “Perfect love is not the love of human beings for God, but the love of human beings for each other as representatives of the unseen God.”

Loving each other is difficult. Especially if we think that loving each other means that we are emotionally drawn to one another or that we even like each other all the time. We live in a world that likes to keep us divided by our race, gender, economic status, and social location among other things, and becomes a restless place when we practice true love, through action, that transcends these barriers. The kind of love that God models for us and has offered us through grace, is transformative for our relationships and our culture. In fact, those who say that they love God, but say that they hate their brother or sisters are liars.

Love is what we are universally striving for as humans. No one wants to go through life without feeling loved. If any of us should understand love, even a little bit, it would be Christians, because God demonstrated Divine love for us in the ultimate way. The way that we celebrate each and every single time we come to the communion table. But we are not called to just say that we love God, we are to act like it by loving our neighbor, even when it seems the hardest or we simply do not feel like it. Love is not simply an ideal for us, or even a fruit, it is a relationship. 

Do you know someone in your life who is yearning to feel loved? Needing to hear that God loves them and that then seeing that demonstrated by your attitude and actions towards them? Can you see yourself inviting them to this church as a place to experience love? Or is this a place where grudges are held, superiority is held one another, and people do not care about the feelings of others? I hope that this is a church where you can invite people to feel the love of God and neighbor, authentically. I hope that you can find a way in your daily living to let people see the love of God in you, so it can be revealing of the nature of God to them. For those who love God, must also love their brothers and sisters. Amen.