When Love is a Verb
Franz Hal, St. John the Evangelist, about 1625-1628, Getty Center, Los Angeles, public domain.
Sermon Series “Through the Bible,” № 85, 1 John 3:16-21
Little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action. –1 John 3:18
Our journey through the Bible arrives at the letters of John – 1, 2, and 3. Whenever I’m in this part of the Bible, I can’t help but remember the Christmas parade in downtown Springfield, Illinois, in which the bell choir from Westminster Presbyterian Church joined with a Methodist Church to march and play. They were “The Marching Metho-terians.” Some people were needed to carry the banner identifying the group, so three non-bell-ringers were recruited for the job. We all wore red Santa-Claus caps, and green sweatshirts. Coincidentally, we all were named “John,” so the director had our shirts labeled in sparkly gold paint, “First John,” “Second John,” and “Third John.” I might have recreated the costume for this morning. But it would be a little too warm for the weather.
Back to John’s letters. Early church tradition connected these letters with the region of Asia Minor, especially Ephesus, where it is believed Jesus’ beloved disciple John lived for many years. John was writing during a time when open hostility was less a threat than false teaching. While there are more elegant ways to describe the false teaching, I think it would be fair to say that it placed too much emphasis on beliefs, and not enough on behaviors.
One quality we associate with these letters a little bit more than others is John’s emphasis on love. “Let us love,” says John — connecting the behavior part — “in truth and action.”
We know that the word “love” can mean many things:
· It can mean a liking or fondness, “I sure love pizza from Peel”
· A deep friendship, “I love him like a brother”
· A passionate romance, “I’m madly in love with her”
· or a loyalty to the death, “No greater love has one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.”
The biblical witness to love makes it clear that love is active, not passive. We see it in the gospel reading, where Jesus connects love with keeping his commandments. We see that love is active in John’s description of love made visible in sacrificing for others, giving help, offering our time and resources in mission and service.
Remembering that Christian love is displayed in sacrifice and service can be helpful when we’re not feeling a lot of positive emotional reinforcement. It’s a difficult thing to give of yourself as an elder, a deacon, a teacher, a musician, a mentor, a leader or servant in any capacity, then experience negative feelings and feedback. Many Christian leaders and servants can share stories of following Christ in the way of active love, but not experiencing feelings of love in return.
Frederick Buechner, in one of his books, has a wonderful paragraph contrasting emotions with the exercise of Christian love. He writes, “In the Christian sense, love is not primarily an emotion but an act of the 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. You can as well produce a cozy emotional feeling on demand as you can a yawn or a sneeze. On the contrary, he is telling us to love our neighbors in the sense of being willing to work for their well-being even if it means sacrificing our own well-being to that end, even if it means sometimes just leaving them alone. Thus in Jesus’ terms we can love our neighbors without necessarily liking them.”[1]
Sometimes, though, if we express love in sacrifice and service, then good feelings will follow. As Buechner says, loving someone in the way that Christ calls us to love does not exclude liking them. If you spend some time actively working for another person’s well-being, you may end up liking them too.[2]
Retired pastor Joanna Adams once pointed me to wise words that have been attributed sometimes to Mother Teresa or other well-known Christians. Digging a little deeper, it seems like many attribute the original writing to a Christian scholar named Kent Keith, written during his student days in the turbulent 1960s. His words are helpful to all of us who, despite our faults and limitations, try to practice Christian love. He said:
People are unreasonable, illogical and self-centered.
Love them anyway.
If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives.
Do good anyway.
If you are successful, you will win false friends and true enemies.
Succeed anyway.
The good you do today will be forgotten tomorrow.
Do good anyway.
Honesty and frankness make you vulnerable.
Be honest and frank anyway ….
People favor underdogs but follow only top dogs.
Fight for a few underdogs anyway.
What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight.
Build anyway.
People really need help but may attack you if you help them.
Help people anyway.
Give the world the best you’ve got and you’ll get kicked in the teeth.
Give the world the best you’ve got anyway.[3]
Kent Keith offers a blueprint, I think, for living the kind of love described by John. That love is defined by what one does at least as much as by what one says. That love is more than a feeling; it’s seeing the hand of someone reaching out in need, and offering a helping hand in return. When you do that, Christ’s love has the power to transform the world.
NOTES
[1] Frederick Buechner, Beyond Words: Daily Readings in the ABC’s of Faith, HarperSanFrancisco, pp. 231-232.
[2] Buechner, p. 232.
[3] https://www.kentmkeith.com/paradoxicalcommandments
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