Easter 5 B - May 6, 2012

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Julian Mizelle, OHC
Easter 5 B - Sunday, May 6, 2012


Acts 8:26-40
1 John 4:7-21
John 15:1-8

Warning... God Is Love

Several weeks ago I peeked ahead to see what the Lectionary readings would be for today. And to my joy I saw readings that joined together beautifully about the Love of God. I thought “what wonderful readings to be given as sermon texts.” Then this week actually arrived and I began my process of Lectio Divina and praying with the text to discover where I would go with a sermon. Quickly a “sinking feeling” started to churn within me and with each passing day the idea of preaching on the love of God became more and more overwhelming. At one point, in a moment of desperation I turned to the “App Store” on my iPod. Steve Jobs legacy was that Apple would give you an “App” for absolutely everything so certainly there must be an app for God’s love, or abiding in Christ, or even the spiritual disciplines that develop God’s love within us. Well, guess what...there isn’t an app for that! Next I thought about Google. Google, the company that has gone from noun to verb, promises an answer to absolutely every question. So I googled the phrase “God is love” from 1 John 4:8. In less than a second I had over 99 million responses. But guess what...absolutely none of them even tried to speak to the subject about God defining himself as love.  Finally I turned to my trustworthy commentaries knowing they would directly deal with the scriptures at hand and the overwhelming topic that “God is Love.” The commentary begins (and I quote) “Caution: Handle with Care! Warning to readers, especially preachers. This text warrants that warning be stamped all over it.”

I really didn’t need confirmation that my queasiness over the text was justified but now I have it. The idea that “God is Love” is so big, so massive, so fraught with emotion, filled with our pre-conceived ideas about love, our concepts of love, how we love and how we long to be loved, how we were loved (or not loved) in the past, all make this dangerous territory to tread. But the text gives us an additional danger as well. John gives us in both his gospel and in this epistle a soaring testimony to the primacy of God’s love. In fact most would agree that the text of 1 John crafts one of the most powerful texts in all of scripture about the initiative of God’s love. But we live in a culture and time that has trivialized love, even trivialized God’s love, to the point when you proclaim God is Love it falls flat. Literally it becomes saccharine and overly simplistic. We hear it as a glib statement in a long list of glib soundbites: like “Jesus is the answer” or “WWJD”. God is Love...We’ve stopped believing it--or more accurately we’ve become unable to believe it. So the warning is justified at every turn of the text...Caution! Handle with Care!

With stunning brevity John tells us what God is and what God is not. We could have more easily heard that God is power or order or goodness. And if we had heard that God is judgement that would have been easier to accept. After all isn’t it God’s job to control the world and protect us from all harm. And if that is God’s job then doesn’t that mean God will lay down the law, hold everyone accountable, stop the cheaters, and reward the faithful—us. There are plenty in the church that stand ready to tell you about God’s judgment, God’s power, God’s moral authority, and how he plans to use it against those who are not aligned with his principles. But John avoided all of this in his description of God in favor of the simple word “agape” — self-sacrificing love that goes to the very core of God’s being and nature. In short, John shows us who God is, how God choose to manifest God’s self, and how we are strengthened and empowered to do God’s work, and what God’s work is for us. One word answers all of this—that word is LOVE!

Greek scholars will tell you John’s text is written in very simple greek. But its words are tightly woven, even complex. The passage must be taken in its entirety. But for us to better understand it, it needs to be broken down into its parts. And here is how I would do that:

    The passage begins by telling us that love has its very origin in God himself. It is from God, who is love, that all love has its source. What we know as human love is simply a reflection of the divine nature itself. This means that when we love is when we are the closest to God. In a startling phrase by Clement of Alexandria he says that “Christians practice being God.” How? By loving and by being love.
    Love has a double, or twofold relationship to God. It is only by knowing God that we learn to love, and it is only by loving that we learn to know God. On the surface this sounds like a chicken-or-the-egg predicament. It isn’t. The truth being revealed about love and knowing God is that they feed each other. They are inseparable. Love comes from God and love leads to God. Just yesterday I heard Br. Robert share a quote from Alan Jones, former Dean of Grace Cathedral. Alan found that meditating on the phrase “you are my souls delight” gave him the deepest since of knowing God. This is a phrase that beautifully represents the double or two-fold relationship of love. As he prayed “you are my souls delight” he not only experienced God as the delight of his soul but he experienced God saying to him that he is the delight of God.
    When love comes fear vanishes. Fear cannot exist in the presence of love. If you are expecting to be punished, rejected, or shamed the characteristic response is fear. There is a very powerful reason that everyone of us here this morning knows the human emotion of fear. We know fear because we have known the absence of love. The presence of fear becomes the acid test, or the testing of the spirits if you will, to know if what you are hearing or experiencing is from God or not. Fear permeates our culture and is the driving force in our daily news. Look no further than the political dialogue going on in our country if you would like to test what I am saying. If fear is present love has vanished. If love is present fear has vanished.
    To know the love of God, to know that God is love, to know that perfect love that cast out all fear requires something. This kind of love requires Community. Loving God and loving others are inseparable. They are indissolubly connected. In order for the energy of love to freely flow it requires 3 things: God, self and others. Loving our neighbor, loving our enemies, loving our brothers and sisters, loving the other, no matter who the other is, is all part and parcel to loving God. John claims, with crude bluntness, that if you claim to love God but fail to love your brother or sister you’re lying. You’re lying to yourself and you’re lying to God. But John’s analogy goes further than this. It also means if you are not loving the “other” you are not loving yourself. Thomas Merton put it this way: “We cannot be at peace with others because we are not at peace with ourselves, and we cannot be at peace with ourselves because we are not at peace with God.” God, ourselves and others...3 inseparable relationships all wrapped up in knowing the truth that “God is Love.” No wonder this subject comes with a warning label.

Each of these four points about love that I have drawn from John’s text is telling us basically the same thing: Love is relational. Love is about relationship. Love is about relationship with God, relationship with ourselves, and relationship with others. Some see this as a triangle: God, ourselves, and others. Some see this as a tripod. If one leg is removed the other two collapse. However you picture the relationship of love, this is what is important. Our ability to understand, to comprehend, and grasp the truth that God is love is the quintessential quantum leap on the spiritual journey. When the truth that God is love becomes reality in your own life this is the moment when everything changes. This is the true meaning of atonement, which would be better pronounced as at-one-ment. This is the power of transfiguration...coming face to face with divine love. Look at all of the parables, look at all of the discourses of Christ recorded throughout the gospels. Their core, irreducible message is God is Love. This is the promise of the gospel because love is the gospel. It is not just the promise of the texts before us but it is the over-arching message of all scripture when it is understood in its entirety. No love, no gospel. Love is our starting place and love is our ending place. Love is why Jesus went to the cross and love is what brought about resurrection and new life.
The meaning of the empty tomb is love. Our doctrines, our beliefs, our theology and creeds, our moral codes can only support and sustain us when they recognize the primacy of God’s love. Under any other context they fail us. Which is exactly why we have such struggles in our churches today. To those who want to begin with a “correct theology” (which is always about their theology) or an adherence to a moral code are terribly upset by the truth “God is Love.” Theology, doctrine, moral codes, do’s and don’ts, none of these answer our human need for purpose and belonging. This is not the good news or the gospel answer to our anxiety, our mortality, or our communal felt meaninglessness. John is telling us, both in his gospel account and in his epistles, that God’s love is primary. Everything else is a distant second. The gospels answer is Love, God’s love.

The truth and reality that God is Love is way too big for Apple to put into an App. Not even Google can handle it. And it is a passage in scripture that rightly warrants warnings and cautions. But the real warning is this: that we not miss out on knowing the love of God.

He Is Risen...Amen!