Love is Complicated. Love is Simple

sermon by Carrie Eikler

Acts8:26-40, 1 John 4:7-21

May 6, 2012

Love.

I love you. 

I promise to love you forever.

I love you man!

Oh my gosh, I love this sweater.

Try it…you’ll love it.

Have you seen the new episode of “Glee”?  I loved it.

I love Thai food.

I love my children.

I love my new washing machine.

Love makes the world go round.

Love the sinner, hate the sin.

Tough love.

Love hurts.

Beloved, let us love one another.

There seems to me a problem with either the English language itself, or our flippant and careless use of it when we can use the same word to describe the way we feel about our children, that we use to describe the excitement of a new appliance.  I love it! …Really? I love that high efficiency top loading horizontal axis Staber washing machine? 

Yes, I love my children…generally.  No, I know I don’t love our new washing machine.  But it doesn’t keep me from saying I do.  Our contemporary language is one in which free love is supreme.  Love abounds.  We throw love around like teenagers with low self-esteem.

So it makes sense that this verse may induce the yawn factor: Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God. Yawn.  Yeah right, let us love one another.  This verse doesn’t seem too radical, as far as words go.  We love lots of stuff, so why not each other?

Most of us know that when we say love, we don’t mean love, language is like that.  Maybe we’re just being “poetic” in our everyday parlance.   Maybe we’ll talk about that in Sunday School?!  But really, do you know what love is?  Can you define it, or do you just feel it?

 I mean, I know I love my husband.  I know I love my children, my family.  I know I’m supposed to love my neighbor, that I’m supposed to love you, as a community of faith, that I’m supposed to love God’s creation.  But I can’t put those things alongside the things that I know I love and see how my love for one thing should shape my love for something else, like my love for you, or my love for the earth.  

One of my favorite “feel good songs” is from the country-folky songwrite Iris Dement.  In her song Let the mystery be, she sings: 

Some say they're goin' to a place called Glory and I ain't saying it ain't a fact.
But I've heard that I'm on the road to purgatory and I don't like the sound of that.
Well, I believe in love and I live my life accordingly.
But I choose to let the mystery be.

Every time I hear this song I do my own little silent, preach it sister.  It seems to capture the scripture, live in love.  But the more I think about it, if I were to take Iris Dement’s lyrics as gospel…I think I would still be confused. 

So I guess, to be fair, we know there are many different ways to love, I’m not trying to play ignorant here.  I’m just realizing that love isn’t something that can easily be identified, just as God…can’t. be. easily identified.   To link God with love is…well…lovely, but…what does it mean, especially when we see around us abuses of love, things that are done towards others—children, spouses,  those we label taboo—horrible things done to them under the claim that it is done in love. 

There are two stories that each of our two scriptures for today made me think of.  And let me say that I love that these scriptures come together in the lectionary for today because if 1 John, about beloveds loving one another, is sort of the theoretical seminar on love, this story in Acts is like the internship.  One scripture seems warm and fuzzy, if not a bit elusive, the other seems a bit more challenging…

We watched the movie 50/50 this last weekend.  It’s  based on the true story of Adam, a young man who is diagnosed with a rare form of cancer on his spine when he is 27.   His chances of survival are 50%.  He can’t understand how this happened: he’s young, he doesn’t drink, he doesn’t smoke, his job as a radio journalist doesn’t expose him to toxins or harmful chemicals. 

As his disease progresses, and the treatments move him into new territories of real life and death questions,  we witness the multitude of love that surrounds him.

There is his mother, played by Angelica Houston: overbearing, worries too much, wants to move in with him and take care of him while she also cares for her husband with Alzheimer’s, who makes him green tea on the night she finds out he has cancer, because she heard it could reduce the possibility of cancer by 15%.  “But mom,” he says “I already have cancer.”

There is his girlfriend: he gives her an out, saying she doesn’t have to stick around to deal with this, but she says she won’t abandon him, she will take care of him…only to find it difficult to mix the world of his illness with the “real” world of her own life and ambitions and memories of how their relationship used to be.

And then there is the best friend, Kyle, played by Seth Rogan.  Now if any of you know the characters Seth Rogan plays, you will expect him to be nasty, crude, offensive.  And he is.  He tells Adam that his prognosis of 50% has better odds than most casino games.  He uses the cancer to try to get girls, firmly believing in the sympathy factor to land women into bed.

But he’s also the one who takes Adam to most of his treatments.  He’s the one who helps Adam shave his head when he starts chemotherapy.  And when some of his shenanigans almost pushes Adam to the point of questioning his friend’s commitment all together, he find’s a book in Kyle’s bathroom called “Facing Cancer Together”, dog-eared and highlighted.

Each of these people, mother, girlfriend,  best friend…loving in the only ways they know how, many times failing miserably.   And yet entering into a place of pain and uncertainty to offer themselves, warts and all.

Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God.

[pause]

Nadia Bolz Webber is a Lutheran pastor, but you really wouldn’t know it to look at her: cause she has an armful of sleeve tattoos and self-admittingly swears like a truck driver.  She lives in Denver, Colorado where I guess it must be ok for pastors to do that sort of thing.  Nadia shared about one Sunday a few years back, and an experience with a man named Stuart. 

Stuart was a gay man who usually wore a Grease Monkey jacket and dirty pants.  This day he was dressed in a button down shirt and slacks, because he was becoming the godparent to the child of some friends, a straight couple.

Following the baptism, there was a reception, and the parents of the child got everyone’s attention so they could say a few words about why they had chosen Stuart to be their child’s godparent.  And they said “We chose you Stuart, because for most of your life you have pursued Christ and Christ’s church even though, as a gay man, all you’ve heard from the church is that there is no love for you here.”  They were saying to him “You, Stuart, convert us again and again to this faith.”

Nadia, the pastor, reflected on this as she recalls the story of the Ethiopian eunuch.  She remembers that in her study Bible as a child, this text was called “The Conversion of the Ethiopian Eunuch” and that the message was that “we should tell everyone we meet about Jesus because in doing so we might save them.  We might convert them.  We might change them into being us.”  But after this experience, she wasn’t so sure.

As Nadia points out, “if the eunuch was reading Isaiah as he returned from Jerusalem having gone there to worship, then I would bet he was also familiar with Deuteronomy, specifically 23:1—‘No one whose testicles are cut off or whose penis is cut off shall be admitted to the assembly of the Lord” (otherwise known as the very best memory verse ever,)” says Nadia.

“The law strictly forbids a eunuch from entering the assembly of the Lord.  [Their gender differences] do not fit them into proper categories, made them profane by nature.  They do not fit.  But despite the fact that in all likelihood he would be turned away by the religious establishment, the Ethiopian Eunuch sought God anyway.”

“I wonder if” Nadia asks “when the Spirit guided Philip to that road in the desert, if she guided him […Philip] to his own conversion.  When Philip joined this person who sought to worship God despite his exclusion, was it perhaps Philip himself who was converted to the faith?   The only command came from God and the command was go and join.”

Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows Go:  beloved since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another

Love is a complicated thing, no doubt.  And yet, it can be the simplest acts that can embody it.  It may be shaving the head of a friend at the scariest time in their lives, or it may just be holding their hand on a day like any other, a surprising, unexpected expression of connection.  It may be proclaiming a bold statement to a crowd that one who has been deemed unlovable by church or society has blessed you deeper into God’s love…or it may just be a note to someone telling them the same thing.

So we can’t define love, we can only feel it and express it.  We marvel how it can rise in us, unbidden.   And that is how we know it is not from us, with all our narrow and selfish ways.  We know it comes from God.  It came from God’s sending love to us, asking nothing of us but to receive that love, to go, and join. 

And undoubtedly we will fail along the way as we try to open ourselves up more fully to that love.  But like that couple who spoke of Stuart the godparent of their child, we will be converted again and again…saved again and again, by the surprising love…of others who will love us into God.

Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God: everyone who loves is born of God and knows God…beloved since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another.  No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us.

Let this be our prayer.