More Than a Warm Fuzzy

What is love, anyway? We live in a culture that talks about love all the time. But what does it mean to Christians? I hope this sermon will get you thinking about that question.

Ah, love! What beautiful images it brings to mind! When love is mentioned, we imagine a happy couple standing at the altar ready to take their vows and begin their married life together. We think of a mother holding her newborn baby. We might even remember some relationships that we have experienced ourselves – relationships with people who meant the world to us! “Love makes the world go around” says the old proverb. And if it doesn’t really make the world spin, it certainly makes it a far richer place!

Love is one of the foundations of Christian understanding. The first letter of John is practically built on it! Love is a thread running through both Old and New Testaments. “The Lord your God is a loving God,” the book of Deuteronomy assures us. “He will not abandon or destroy you, or forget the covenant with your ancestors.” (4:31) Indeed, God has stuck by us through thick and thin. God sent prophets over and over again to remind us what love looked like. God reminded us more than once that love is far more important than all the religious ritual that we dream up. But we still didn’t seem to get it; and so, God came to us as Jesus Christ. As the gospel of John puts it: “God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son, that whoever believes in him will not perish but have eternal life.” Jesus showed God’s love by healing the sick, accepting the outcast, and even raising the dead! Love for us sent Jesus to the cross; and love for us raised him on Easter morning. That resurrection love is what Jesus offers to us, and what he wants us to offer to others.

These days, we cheapen the word “love” by using it for all kinds of things. We say, “I love your dress,” and “I love that TV show.” We love our food and we love our homes and we love our cars. But that isn’t really love at all. It’s affection, certainly. But love? Love goes way beyond a warm, fuzzy feeling for something. When we love, we enter a relationship that we intend to keep regardless of what may happen. When we love, we bind ourselves together to others in an unbreakable relationship. After all, that’s what God has done for us.

Maybe it will help us understand love if we look at what that word meant in Jesus’ time. There are a couple of Greek words for “love,” but the one that Jesus used most often is agape. Agape is a relationship that has obligations. In the Roman world in which Jesus’ lived, wealthy men often helped out others who had less social status than they did. The wealthier man took these folks under his wing, and helped them both financially and socially. He became their patron. Today, we would call him their mentor. The word that described their relationship was agape. It wasn’t just a warm, fuzzy feeling. A relationship of agape meant that the men were bound together in a special way. The wealthy patron would watch out for his friends, and in return, those friends would show him loyalty. It’s obvious that’s what our relationship with God is like. God watches out for us; and we are called to be loyal to God just as God is loyal to us! We are bound to God in a special way that we can count on!

So, what does it mean to have this kind of agape love for one another? At the very least, it means that we have obligations to one another. It means that we are bound together in a very special way. It means that if one of us suffers, we all suffer; and it means that if one of us celebrates, the rest of us celebrate, too. Over 400 years ago, author John Donne expressed agape beautifully in this poetic verse:

No man is an island, entire of itself.
Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less,
as well as if a promontory were;
as well as if a manor of thy friend's, or of thine own were.
Any man's death diminishes me,

because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls.

It tolls for thee.

The bottom line is that all people are bound together, whether we want to be or not! That’s why Jesus told us to pray even for our enemies. We are connected to them by his death and resurrection! And that’s a hard thing to hear! It’s easy to love our family and to our friends. We don’t mind being obligated to folks who are just like we are. It’s a harder to hear that we should be looking out for people who aren’t like we are – folks who have grown up in very different circumstances, or who have made choices that we consider to be foolish. And it’s almost unthinkable that we should care about our enemies! Thieves, murderers, liars, and cheats – why should we even give them the time of day? But if we take Jesus seriously, we are bound together by resurrection love even to them. As loathsome as it sounds, we even have an obligation to the thugs of ISIS! Now, we don’t have to believe what they believe. We don’t have to do what they do. We can certainly take a stand against them in order to protect innocent people from their actions. But Jesus tells us to love them because he does!

Here’s why loving them is the right thing to do. Resurrection love leads to resurrection. Jesus’ resurrection wasn’t just a one-time thing that took place early on a Sunday morning 2,000 years ago! Jesus’ resurrection was just the first of all kinds of resurrections that happen all the time! When a battered woman is able to move into the future with confidence despite her fear, she has known resurrection. When a bullied child is able to turn his painful experiences into empathy for other children who may be feeling the same way, he has known resurrection. When people who are filled with hate and greed and the lust for power repent of their past and change their ways, they have known resurrection. And the only way to help others experience the resurrection that Jesus offers us is by loving them! We can’t help them if we return hate for hate, violence for violence, evil for evil. Agape love is the only thing that will help bring about their resurrection.

Now, you may well be thinking, “But we have loved difficult people, and it hasn’t done any good!” Perhaps. But (in my opinion, at least) almost none of us really practice agape love very often. G. K. Chesterton once commented, "Christianity has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and not tried." And he’s right! Resurrection love is the hardest thing in the world to practice! But it’s the very foundation of the Kingdom of God.

Love. It’s more than a warm fuzzy. It’s the bond that holds us together with all of God’s children; with God’s whole creation, in fact. It’s difficult and it doesn’t make sense to us; but it is the foundation of our identity as the people of God. A writer from the early days of the Christian church said in wonder, “Look how those Christians love one another!”

May that always be said of us, too.