Love in Action

Love in Action

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

“Love. It’s what makes a Subaru a Subaru.” Or at least it is according to an ad I saw on the TV this morning. This morning I want to talk to you not about Subaru but about love. You know, love is a really big deal. It’s a big deal in popular music for example. Nearly all of the songs that become popular are about love, romantic love that is, either requited or unrequited. Love’s a big deal in the movies. I’m sure thousands of movies have been made with the plot structure boy and girl get together, boy and girl separate (usually because of some silly misunderstanding), boy and girl get back together for a happy ending. Love’s a big deal in our personal lives too, or at least it is, thank you Lord, in mine and I hope in yours. Out there in the world love is a really big deal.

Love is a really big deal in the Christian faith too. The creedal confession of our mother faith, Judaism, contains the line “love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.” Deuteronomy 6:5. Jesus took that line as part of what we Christians call the Great Commandment. In the oldest form of it we have it says, among other things, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength,” and “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Mark 12:30-31. At 1 John 4:8 we read that “God is love.” Ask a lot of Christians what their faith is about and they might well say “love.” Christianity is founded in love. Christianity is grounded in love. Jesus, the one we confess to be our Lord and Savior, is all about love. You just can’t have Christianity without love.

Which all sounds well and good of course, and it is well and good; but here’s the thing. Christians as much as anyone else are unfortunately prone to throwing words around without being sure that they know what the words mean. We tend to assume what words mean, and we tend to assume that everyone who uses a word means the same thing by it. In reality when we’re pressed to define a word we’re using we often can’t do it. And another reality is that two people may be using the same word but meaning very different things by it. It may sound like they’re agreeing with each other. They may think they’re agreeing with each other when in fact they aren’t really agreeing with each other at all because they are assuming different meanings of the word they’re using.

Well, the same thing is true about the word love. What does that word mean? What is love? Those are really important questions for a faith that claims to be founded on and grounded in love. So this morning I want to talk to you about what Jesus meant by the word love, what the Bible means by the word love, especially the New Testament.

The New Testament was written in a particular form of the Greek language. That language had several different words for different kinds of love, but the one that gets used throughout the New Testament is the word agape. It is used both as a noun and in a different form as a verb. We are to live agape. We are to have agape for God and our neighbors. So what does that Greek word agape really mean? It gets translated as love, but love after all can mean several different things. Sometimes it means no more than “like a lot.” We may assume that we know what love is, but it really is a pretty vague word that we use to mean a lot of different things.

Well, that Greek word agape isn’t nearly as vague as our English word love. It means a particular kind of love. It doesn’t mean like a lot. It doesn’t mean have warm feelings about. It doesn’t mean be fond of. It doesn’t mean want to spend time with. There are all kinds of things it doesn’t mean. What it does mean is to sacrifice, to give of oneself, for another. One online definition of it I found says it means “selfless, sacrificial, unconditional love.” It is love that says at least I love another as much as I love myself, or maybe more so. It is love that cares so much for another that it will give up its own comfort, its own wealth, even its own life for the other. In the Gospel of John Jesus says no one has greater love than to sacrifice his or her life for a friend. In Matthew Jesus says we are to love our enemies, which I suppose means be willing to give up one’s life for one’s enemy, as hard as that may be to understand and even harder to do. It’s not that those other things that we mean by love are bad or wrong. They aren’t, or at least they don’t have to be; but Jesus means something quite specific when he says love. He means give of yourself. He means think of the other first. He means understand that other people, even people you dislike or even despise, are as important to God as you are and that God loves them as much as God loves you. Love is really big deal for Jesus. It’s what life is all about, and the love he’s talking about can be pretty scary stuff. Love like that people I think I hate? Really? Yes. Really.

Now, it’s actually pretty easy to look up the definition of the word agape and say what it means. It’s a whole lot harder to figure out what that kind of love means for us as we go about our lives. Our lesson from Luke this morning gives us a pretty good example of what living agape does not mean. The rich man in Luke’s story of the rich man and the poor man named Lazarus pretty obviously wasn’t living agape. He didn’t care that Lazarus was suffering. Lazarus, a poor man apparently of no worldly estate, was nothing to him. Lazarus was ill, hungry, thoroughly miserable. The rich man of our story didn’t care. He feasted on rich food every day and gave Lazarus nothing. Luke uses an image of a tormented or blessed afterlife to say that God condemns what the rich man did, or rather didn’t do, and loves Lazarus as much as God loves the rich man, or maybe more. Living biblical love is first of all not being uncaring. It is not ignoring the needs of those who suffer. By the way, this story is one of the very few places where the New Testament actually has an image of a blessed or cursed afterlife. Sadly, our faith has come to be largely about what kind of afterlife we’re going to have when in fact the Bible is hardly about that question at all.

OK. Fair enough. Love is not being uncaring. But what else does it mean? Well, what it means for us depends on what circumstance we find ourselves in. It applies to most everything we do in life. If applies to our personal relationships with our family. It means caring at least as much about your spouse and children, if you have them, as caring about yourself. It means not insisting on getting your own way all the time when disagreements arise. It applies to relationships in the work place. If you are an employer or manager of employees it means caring about their wellbeing as much as your own. It means not exploiting them. It means paying them a fair wage with fair benefits. If you’re an employee it means caring about your employer too. It applies to our relationships in church. Here it means caring about what others think. It means not insisting on getting your own way. It means taking care of those of us who may be in need from time to time. It means paying your pastor a fair compensation. It means resolving disagreements amicably and loving the people with whom you disagree. Living agape means all of those things.

And it means a lot more than those things. Agape applies to our relationship to the world at large as much as it applies to our personal relationships. In the context of the larger world agape means caring about social justice. It means being committed to social justice, because as a very wise man once said, justice is love in action; and agape is much more action than it is feeling. Being committed to social justice is really nothing more than being committed to the wellbeing of each and every person on the whole planet earth. It means caring for the earth itself, for the earth sustains the life and the wellbeing of every living creature on it. Agape in the world means being committed to ending oppression and discrimination against all people. We don’t want those things for ourselves, so agape calls us to work to end them for everyone. Agape in the world means being committed to peace. Peace in every context. Peace as the absence of violence and the presence of justice. We don’t want violence and injustice for ourselves, so agape calls us to resist them for everyone.

So Jesus calls us to lives of love, and he means by that lives of caring and giving not for ourselves but for everyone else. He means lives of action grounded in love, not lives merely of feelings. Few of us do that kind of love very well, myself included. That’s where God’s grace comes in, for God loves us even when we fail at living agape. But God’s forgiving us when we fail doesn’t mean we aren’t called to keep trying. To keep striving to live lives of true Christian love for the people we know and for all the people we don’t know. Lives of caring in personal relationships and lives committed to justice and peace in our larger relationships. That’s Christ’s call to each one of us, and God is there to help us do it if we’ll just open ourselves to God’s care. Can we do it? Not perfectly of course, but better than we have. With God’s help. Amen.