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The Rev. Frank
Logue
All whom God loves Yesterday, I stood right here in this pulpit and preached to two optimists who were probably not fully hearing me. I’m not just guessing, here about how much of the sermon got through to the couple. Yes, it was a wedding and there was a larger congregation than just the bride and groom. But I could see what none of the rest of the congregation could see as I preached. I saw their eyes, which were looking a bit starry and quite a bit misty all at once. In my brief sermon, I reminded all gathered here for the wedding of what had transpired the day before. For on Friday, the wedding party had gathered. I was here, the bride and groom were here, the parents and the attendants were in place. And with some solemnity, the bride and groom repeated their vows one to another. They said all the right words and they left unmarried. It was a rehearsal, a dry run, practice. We didn’t mean it yet. They knew it. I knew it. God knew it. The words were all right, but the commitment was not yet there. Then, about 25 hours later we did it all again, this time with feeling, this time with a commitment to last a lifetime. These were the vows that were real. These were the vows made to last. Looking in one another’s eyes, the bride and groom pledged their undying love to one another saying it was “to have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, until we are parted by death.” Given the statistic that half of all marriages end in divorce, it was an exercise of utter optimism flying in the face of a much more stark reality. For better for worse, yada, yada, yada, really? But the bride and groom and I knew what the statistics did not. We had met and discussed at length that the secrets to a long and flourishing marriage are not passion and hope, but friendship and love. Passion and hope will get you through a few years. But your friendship for one another coupled with a mutual love of God can get you all the way to “until we are parted by death.” The key is to continue to put God in the midst of the marriage, seeing the other as God sees him or her. Perhaps this is why TV psychologist Dr. Phil could write of seeing “sincerely God-centered relationships withstand all manner of attack.” But this is not a sermon about marriage. It is a sermon about love. And the two are not necessarily the same thing. Love might not even go along with friendship and it certainly doesn’t always apply to co-workers or the boy that sat behind you in math class this year. As G.K. Chesterton put it, “The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people.” Nevertheless, Jesus told his disciples, “As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love.” Abiding love. To abide is to live somewhere, to hang out somewhere. Jesus wanted his disciples to hang out in love. This could sound like pie in the sky, feel good philosophy unless you realize that abiding in love got Jesus nailed to a cross. So, Jesus wasn’t just talking some feel-good line. Jesus meant real abiding love that can get you through the toughest time life has to dish out. The word in Greek here for Love is agape. You have probably heard before of the four Greek words for love: Sturge—affection Eros—erotic love Philos—friendship or brotherly love Agape—self-giving love Agape, that self-giving love that is more concerned about the other than ones own self, is the love Jesus showed and the love Jesus taught. More than the others, agape love is an act of will. One does not fall in agape love. You have to choose to show self-giving love to another person. Jesus did not say Love one another as you feel like it. Or Love one another as it seems convenient, or rewarding. Frederick Buechner has written, “In the Christian sense, love is not primarily an emotion but an act of will. When Jesus tells us to love our neighbors, he is not telling us to love them in the sense of responding to them with a cozy emotional feeling.” In another book, Buechner wrote, “And then there is love for the enemy—love for the one who does not love you but mocks, threatens, and inflicts pain. The tortured’s love for the torturer. This is God's love. It conquers the world.” This is loving one another as Jesus loved us. As C.S. Lewis has put it, in God there is no past, present and future tense. All time is present to God. So God is always in the now as Lewis wrote of
Love Himself as C.S. Lewis calls Jesus is exemplified in a love that is willing to lay down one’s life for a friend. Yet, Jesus held himself to the higher standard of laying down his life for his enemies, right? Didn’t Jesus also die for those gathered round the cross? After all, Jesus called out from the cross, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” But perhaps he could still say that he was giving his life for his friends for Jesus saw those who were killing him as God sees you and me. Jesus saw even those who hated him and he called them friends. This was no mere feel-good moment. This was real love more concerned for the other than for one’s own self. This is why the specific commandment Jesus gave was, “Love one another as I have loved you.” Jesus says that this path of loving as he loves is the path that leads to complete joy. But the path is not merely love. The path toward joy is to love another in the same way that Jesus has loved us. How can anyone get to that point? How is it possible to even glimpse this sort of love, much less express it? Jesus said the answer was to hang out in his love. Remember, he said, “Abide in my love.” We can’t possibly have that godly agape love for another person unless we tap into that self-giving love of God. Agape is not a love we posses, but a love that passes through us. It is only in establishing a connection to God that we have any hope of tapping into that deeper vein of love. Then knowing that God calls on us to share this love, we make a conscious choice, an act of will, to share that love with others. Now I opened by mentioning marriage, but agape love is certainly not a choice confined to wedded bliss. Jesus told his disciples that if they would do this thing that he commands and love others as he loved them, then the disciples would be his servants no more, they would be his friends. Jesus’ friends are those who reach out in love to the unlovely. Sometimes the unlovely person is the stranger in need. Sometimes the unlovely person is the co-worker who drives you crazy. Maybe the hard to love person is your brother or sister or someone else close to you. It doesn’t matter who the person is. What matters is how you see him or her. For once you see that unlovely person through God’s eyes as just another fallen, hurting person trying to get by the best way he or she knows how, everything can begin to change, a different picture comes in to focus. One example of what that looks like comes from Jen, who wrote online of her first visit to an Episcopal Church saying, I went by myself. I was 12. Two things happened that Sunday. One, a homeless woman came into the church after the service was well underway. She shuffled up the center aisle with her bags, looking pretty scruffy. I held my breath, wondering what people would do. I guess I thought they would throw her out. Everyone else looked pretty smart. Instead of throwing her out, a woman in the pew ahead of this woman turned around. She was tall, thin, wearing a nice dress, pearls, coiffed hair —really, a classic WASP. I remember watching all this agog. She turned to face the bag lady and her face lit up! She smiled and threw her arms around this homeless woman and hugged her as if she were an old friend she hadn't seen in years.
I was hooked from that moment on. I couldn't have articulated it at the time, but I was watching the very essence of Christ in both these women. It was absolutely compelling. Sitting in a rather upscale church in one’s Sunday best, it would be easy to forget the Gospel long enough to hope the disheveled homeless woman would shuffle on out, preferably before we go forward to receive communion. Instead one woman with much embraces a woman with little. The act is a much more significant sermon than any words the preacher spoke that day for this was love in action. In the same way the well to do woman reacted to the homeless woman in church, we are called by God to go through life choosing to see others as God sees them. We are not called merely to love those who seem lovely to all. We are called to love all whom God loves, for we are to love one another as Jesus has loved us. Amen.
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