Sermon: “God Is Love”

This passage from the First Letter of John is such a well-written sermon on the topic of love, I probably don’t need to preach anything else.  But for the sake of you kids who came to church today with your mother… don’t get too excited now …I will.  I will preach a few words.  I will try.  Some think that the author, the original preacher, was actually John, the “beloved disciple,” but other scholars tend to think it was more likely written by the elder of a “Johannine community” – some of those first Christian churches of the Gentile territories.  Either way, the preaching is from a pastor who here in this letter attempts to articulate for them a powerful theology of God as a verb – as love incarnate in Jesus Christ and now alive with us as the Holy Spirit, love in action.

Listen again to the beginning of this text again as a sermon, as it would have been heard back then (1 John 4:7):  “Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God.”  “Everyone who loves is born of God and knows God.”  That is some radical theology!  Think about it:  For some of us it forms the very foundation of our United Church of Christ “Open and Affirming” statements, the verse that trumps all of Paul’s preaching against homosexuality and all those Levitical codes that would stone a daughter to death for loving a boy her father didn’t choose.  It breaks the Old Testament covenant of law and ethnicity wide open and says instead that it’s not as important who you love, or how you love but that you love and that you love thoroughly, gracefully, and well – as God has first loved us. 

“⁷Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; [and] everyone who loves is born of God and knows God.”  It’s so simple.  Believing that Good News is all we need to be “born again,” to be adopted into the New Covenant of grace in Jesus Christ.  It’s so simple even a child can qualify.  Even a tiny baby who reaches out and first squeezes that big fat human finger of his daddy qualifies as a loving child of God, admitted to Christ’s church in baptism.  Even before Confirmation classes, before Sunday School, before first Communion – before eating any solid food, before understanding much of anything at all… the child knows the love of God.  Don’t we Moms and Dads sense that right away?  That child doesn’t know much yet, but he does know Love. 

That amazing fact flies in the face of the Gnostic heresy that most scholars believe John’s letter is preaching against.  Gnosis is the Greek word for “knowledge.”  Gnosis… “to know.”  In Greek it has a silent G; in English that silent K.  In John’s time, teachers were going about claiming to have special knowledge – secret, insider knowledge – for converts to learn to qualify for salvation.  But God had already said “no” to that idea (that the high priests and Pharisees of Judaism were teaching), “NO!  You have the love of my only son to teach you – no books are needed.”  And John preached that Good News too, saying, “NO!  The loving grace of Jesus Christ, poured out for us on the cross, is enough.  God is love and that your belief in that love is what saves you.”

One of the saints of my last church taught what every teacher agreed was absolutely the most unruly class ever to pass through that congregation’s Sunday School – it was legendary.  Three of the most rowdy boys had come to be known as “Terror, Mahem, and Destruction” – and that teacher, who had them now in 4^th grade, came to my office to talk, and maybe to cry.  He was a big man, a strong man, but he was ready to quit.  He confessed to me that he thought they never would sit still or open up their minds long enough for him to sneak any Bible knowledge into them.  So I asked him how he learned about God’s love.  And this great smile began to spread across his face. 

He told me about when his first child was born, a son.  And out of the blue he had gotten a phone call from his childhood pastor, the saint who had taught him back in his own Confirmation Class.  “So Bob, you get it now?” he asked.  “Get what?”  “God’s grace, Bob.  Redemption through grace – you told me once it didn’t make any sense.  It was ‘stupid,’ I think you said.  And he quoted from John’s Gospel, chapter 1, verse 14:  “And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.”  Oh!  Sometimes God’s amazing grace has to be seen to be believed.  God knew that about us, we skeptical and hard-headed human beings.  Love has to look back at us sometimes, from our own two arms – embodied in real, living flesh.  “God is love.”  That’s the Good News right there.

That is the “perfect” love, the “complete” or “fulfilled” love that is written about here in First John, the “perfect love” that “casts out all fear.”  Lutheran theologian Paul Berge writes that this is what “Jesus’ final word from the cross in the Fourth Gospel [John’s Gospel] expresses: ‘It is accomplished/completed/fulfilled.’” [1]  The word we translate as “perfect” has a quality in the Greek root, tetelestai, that draws us toward a love as far above our human capacity as we are below the heavens.  It draws the image of the magnificence of the Divine far closer to us – like its related word, “telescope.”  The love of God poured out for us in Jesus Christ – the tiny homeless infant, the stripped and beaten man on the cross – the stark and messy reality of that love is very real and powerful.  Flesh magnifies God’s love, as Mary says when she learns she bears a child of the Holy Spirit. Through the telios of “perfecting love” human souls are drawn to heavenly places where no human love has gone before – yes, my friends, the Gospel According to Star Trek (“Live long and prosper…).  Through the telios of “perfecting love” human souls are drawn to their utmost fulfillment, to their “completion” – even into the very heart of God, where energy and matter meet and the universe turns inside out.  It is there, beyond time and eternity, that we emerge transformed – no longer approaching God, but absorbed entirely into God’s own body, becoming one substance with God. 

Our transformation, our conversion, makes us capable of feats of loving far beyond our mere human capacity – such as loving our enemies.  How hard it is to love those who “revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely,” as Jesus says (Matthew 5:11).  And yet, the power of God’s love makes it all possible.  It leads little country churches like ours to reckless outpourings of amazing grace – as we welcome with love strangers from a nation where our troops are at war, as we resettle Iraqi refugees.  It’s the kind of love the world needs now more than ever – in our post-9/11 world of terror and economic collapse and threats of epidemic disease.  Through God’s amazing grace, we ordinary Christians become capable of Olympic feats of love, lighting the world with love and bearing witness to God’s extravagant love for us. 

Remember these words (1 John:17-19)?  “Love has been perfected among us in this: that we may have boldness on the day of judgment (even on Judgment Day, when the sky turns black, people of faith are at their bravest and best) … so as love is perfected among us, so are we in this world. ¹⁸There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love. ¹⁹We love because he first loved us.”  This is what makes human friendship so important, and so sacred.  This is what makes the work of ordinary churches like ours so important, and so sacred.  This is what makes parenting so sacred.  We love because God first loved us.  We love because we first were loved.  And many of us, I know, were fortunate to know that love first in our families of origin.  Others of us – especially if there was abuse – could not learn that love until we were older, until we met our first real friend, or until we first fell in love, or until we found a great church like this one.

My husband John and I thank you all so much for the outpouring of love you gave our family, and the sincere sympathy you offered us over the past couple of weeks, as John’s father passed away – and our little family traveled out to California to join the rest of our extended Garcia family for Grandpa Henry’s funeral.  It was sad, of course – no matter how much you prepare for the death of someone that comes, as it did for Grandpa, over 3 or 4 long slow years of decline and sickness.  But as I’ve told many of you who’ve asked, there is always an “up” side to these family gatherings.  For me it was to get to see again my grown nephew, and two of my nieces we really hadn’t seen since they were teenagers.  It was great to meet their husbands and kids for the first time. 

My newest great niece was smiling little Cecelia in her stroller, the spitting image of her great-great aunt Cecelia.  She cooed as Aunt Cecelia knelt at the casket of her big brother Henry to help lead the rosary, as we gave thanks to God for love incarnate, in “the fruit of Thy womb, Jesus.”  But the best hug came from my 4-year-old great niece Maggie.  She came running down the aisle of the chapel at the funeral home to greet me for the first time, as soon as her mom pointed me out – “That’s your Aunt Bryn.”  She spread her chubby little arms spread as wide as they would go and grabbed me, with a huge smile on her face.  You know that feeling in your body, don’t you—the perfect love that can get pressed into you by the flesh of a child?  It casts out all fear.

Listen to John:  “¹¹Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another. ¹²No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us. ¹³By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit.  ¹⁴And we have seen and do testify that the Father has sent his Son as the Savior of the world. ¹⁵God abides in those who confess that Jesus is the Son of God, and they abide in God. ¹⁶So we have known and believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.” 

There’s your sermon right there, in 3 short words:  “God is love.”  It was my own grandfather’s favorite scripture, and mine too.  If you can get that, as John says, you know God.  You don’t need to know anything more.  You’ve graduated from Christian Education.  You know God, and you are “saved.”  You believe – and you are on your way to being transformed, completed, and perfected in Christ Jesus.  “God is love, and if you live in love, you live in God and God lives in you.” 

Thanks be to God for this Good News.  Amen.