May 18, 2003 - Fifth Sunday of Easter
1 John 4:7-21
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John 15:1-8
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“The Love Connection”

“Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God.  Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love.”

If you’ve ever stayed up past your bedtime and flipped through the television channels you will learn, as I have, why commercial television is referred to as “the great wasteland.”  Between the infomercials touting kitchen devices that look like small versions of medieval torture instruments and talk shows there are the strange game shows.  I came across one called “The Love Connection” that turned out to be a very strange form of dating game.  I didn’t watch for long.  Now, don’t worry, I’m not going to present a screed against television programming – I assume you are all quite intelligent and moral enough folks to know when to turn the doggoned thing off.  Nor am I going to talk about the current state of morals in the United States – because that is a discussion best done in another venue.  Rather, I am going to address love.  Love is one of the most abused and misused words in the English language and the title of that television show really shouldn’t have been “The Love Connection,” it should have been “The Lust Connection” or something to that effect.

We talk about love fairly easily.  We’ll say that we ‘love’ everything from baseball to hot dogs, to our dogs, or our spouses, or our mothers, or God.  However, what this demonstrates is how the English language, rich and varied as it is, is impoverished when it comes to love.  The Greeks are able to talk about eros, which is the fleshly or romantic love that grows between two people, which is not a bad thing at all, unless it degenerates into lust.  It’s the source of our word ‘erotic,’ though now that word has gathered all sorts of connotations that may not have been originally part of it.  When it comes to the love of family and friends there is philos/philia; it’s particularly appropriate to the love between brothers or sisters.  Thus, Philadelphia is literally the ‘city of brotherly love.’  The third word the Greeks can use for love is agape, and this is the word that we heard again and again both in the reading from John’s letter and from his Gospel.  Agape denotes the kind of love that God has for us, a love that is unselfish and self-giving.  Sometimes this type of love is described as “one way street love,” because it loves never expecting a return.  The one who loves in this way knows God because he or she loves as God loves.

As some of you know, I’m a great lover of musical theater.  One of my favorite shows is “My Fair Lady.”  There’s a song in it that has been running through my head all week long as I prepared this sermon.  It’s the song that Eliza sings to Freddie in response to his wooing her with “On the Street Where You Live.”  He may be “stories high,” but that’s not what she’s looking for.  Her response?

…Don’t talk of stars, burning above.  If you’re in love, show me!
Tell me no dreams filled with desire.  If you’re on fire, show me!
Here we are together in the middle of the night!  Don’t talk of spring!
Just hold me tight!
Anyone who’s ever been in love will tell you that this is no time for a chat!
Haven’t your lips longed for my touch?  Don’t say how much!  Show me!
Don’t talk of love lasting through time.  Make me no undying vow.  Show me now!

Believe it or not, there is theological wisdom in those words and it fits the theology of agape.

God demonstrates love for us, shows us, in the very act of creation.  The world around us, “All Things Bright and Beautiful/All Creatures Great and Small,” are a sign of God’s love and care for us.  Our being, made in the image and likeness of God, with memory, understanding and will, reflects God’s very being, God’s love for us, and God’s desire to share life with us.  God shows us love in our very being.  As you’re also discovering, Julian of Norwich is one of my favorite people.  Someone said of her that “it’s strange to fall in love with a six hundred year old woman, but there you are.”  I know that feeling.  Why?  Because she understood, and in a powerful way, that God wants to show love for humanity.  Listen to this:

For He does not despise what He has created, and He does not disdain to serve us even at the simplest duty that is proper to our body in nature, because of the love of our soul which He has made in His own likeness.  For as the body is clad in the clothes, and the flesh in the skin, and the bones in the flesh, and the heart in the breast, so are we, soul and body, clad in the goodness of God and enclosed – yea, and even more intimately, because all these others may waste and wear away, but the goodness of God is ever whole, For truly our Lover desires that our soul cleave to Him with all its might and that we evermore cleave to His goodness for all things that heart can think, this pleases God most and soonest succeeds.  For our soul is so especially beloved by Him that is Highest that it surpasses the knowledge of all creatures (that is to say, there is no creature that is made that can know how much and how sweetly and how tenderly our Creator loves us.)
[Julian of Norwich A Lesson of Love: The Revelations of Julian of Norwich Fr. John-Julian, OJN, trans., p. 20-21]

Every time you look at yourself, look at your world, there is God saying, “I love you.”

That wasn’t enough, though.  God wants to show love for us even more intimately than our very selves do.  How was that accomplished?  Well, John, the apostle of love, tells us it is through Jesus Christ.  “God’s love was revealed among us in this way; God sent his only Son in to the world so that we might live through him.  In this is love, not that we loved God, but the he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins.”  God shows us that he loves in the person and the work of Jesus.  What is more, this love is not only shown toward us, it is shown within the lives of those who come to follow Jesus.

The apostle says, “God abides in those who confess that Jesus is the Son of God, and they abide in God.  So we have known and believe the love God has for us.”  That word ‘abide’ is a very powerful one.  It’s the same word that John has coming from the lips of Jesus when he says, “Abide in me as I abide in you.”  The German theologian, Hans Kung, says this about ‘abiding”: “’Abiding’ in Christ means faithfulness and perseverance in the constantly renewed decision of faith, by which man puts himself entirely in the hands of God.  The branch clings to the vine, because it is entirely nourished by the vine; and so the believer remains faithful to Christ, because he is supported and embraced totally by Christ.”  [King The Church, p. 258-9]  So there is reciprocity here, we abide in God and God abides in us and through us God comes in fresh ways into the world God has made.

By acknowledging who we are, children of God, people ‘oned’ with God, as Julian would say, we come not only to self-knowledge, but also to the knowledge of God.  Where this becomes evident is when we begin to live it out, as John says, “everyone who loves is born of God and knows God.”  So the love connection is the communion of the individual believer with God through the living Christ.  And then that love connection expands to encompass all of the other believers who, like us, abide, who cling to the vine.  Kung says, “The believers ‘abide’ within the fellowship of the disciples, within the church, but they do not abide in the Church, they abide in Christ: ‘Abide in me and I in you.’”  [Kung, p. 259]  The Church, the gathered covenanted community, is the body of Christ and not merely an institution.  This is a living organism that loves as God has loved us in Christ and who then bear the fruit of loving actions.

Here at First Congregational Church we are rather intentional about what it means to be a loving community.  When we ‘own the covenant’ here we say that we are going to “treat each other with love and understanding.”  We covenant, we bind ourselves to being loving people.  Our every thought and action toward each other, then, must be reflective of the same self-giving love that God has demonstrated for us in the creation of the world, of ourselves, and in the offering of Jesus Christ.  If we Christians, we followers of Jesus Christ, took our covenant promise seriously, abided as we should in the love connection God offers us, our world would be a different place.  It’s up to us to begin to make that difference.

John says, “perfect love casts our fear.”  As we grow in our understanding of what it means to “abide in Christ,” to experience the love connections between vine and branches we are able to move away form fear.  It is fear that keeps us from reaching out to others because we might have to be vulnerable, or to lose control of a situation.  When we live in love – as the Father does – we can function fearlessly, openly, loving with abandon.

When the church is together, God’s children gathered for worship and service, that love is to be evident.  As God has wrapped us – remember Julian’s words – in goodness, we are to embrace, enwrap others.  What this implies, I believe, is a willingness to extend ourselves for others.  No longer do we think first of our ourselves, our agenda, our comfort, our convenience, but we look to the other.  The common good and the growth of the body of Christ – of which we are a living part – becomes far more important than just ‘me.’

Beloved, if we’re suffering from ‘I strain,’ -- as in ‘I,’ ‘me,’ ‘mine’ – then we need to cure it.  Perfect love is fearless and other-centered, other-focused.  It is the cure of ‘I strain’ and anything less borders on the inauthentic.  The love connection we experience here must be real and the goal of our life together the task of ongoing transformation in perfect love.

God took the first step.  God didn’t just “talk of love lasting through time,” but showed us that love and continues to show us that love every day.  The love connection, the agape that defines the very nature of God, continues to be made when you and I stop talking about it and start doing it.  Jesus tells us, “My Father is glorified by this, that you bear much fruit and become my disciples.”  It’s time for us to show God how deep our love is by loving one another.  Don’t talk of love….  show it ....  show it now.