1. Love is an orientation in life not an emotion

2. When 1 John says that God is love, we are invited to fully embrace life

3. Perfect love is inextricable with justice

4. We have to prune back parts of ourselves to make room for new life

If we don’t have time for all of these, then we’ll get around it another time, but let’s see where we get.

1. Love. It is the central message of Christianity. Yet if asked to define it, we face a difficult task. Defining love is not easy. It is not an emotion even though our emotions are our first indicators that we experience love. Commitment is bound up in love, but commitment is not love. We commit ourselves to all kinds of things that have nothing to do with love. When we love we are kind to one another, but love extends far beyond simple courtesy or the act of being nice. Sometimes we actually have to be quite strong, upset some people, and even walk away from something or someone very important for the sake of love. To love sounds easy, but what we mean by that pronouncement is not easy. I would suggest that love is an orientation to life that is life-giving and life-affirming. Simply put, to love is to fully live, embracing the richness of ourselves and our life experiences, and to keep before us a deep concern for others. To love is to abide in God. Such love is an experiment in boldness.

2. 1 John tells us that “God is love.” God is the fullness of life, extended to all of creation. When we grab on to life, willing to look it square in the eye, willing to wholly engage it, willing to be completely who we are, then we have found God. To love perfectly – to live perfected in love – is to abide in the very being of God.

Now, I am not talking about selfishness. Rather, 1 John clearly tells us that in order to fully embrace life that we enter into one another’s experiences in such a way that we see the God in each of us, we see one another in God, and we honor and cherish one another as holy and sacred. This love cannot stop itself from helping, from laying down its life for another. This love is not bound by fear or limitation. This love is abundant in its concern for others. It is the antithesis of selfishness.

Nor is this love repressive. Real love asks us to be fully who we are, not who we might be or should be. Try this statement on for size: We cannot become who we might be if we cannot be who we are. Let me say that again: We cannot become who we might be if we cannot be who we are. Many of us spend hours, dollars, and energy telling ourselves that we are bad or wrong for being hurt, wounded, angry, upset, tired, or numb. Telling ourselves that our feelings are wrong will only keep us mired in them. Many of us believe that we cannot be good Christians because we don’t live each day fully aware of the holy presence of God. And we make such judgments on ourselves because we have some preconceived notion of what fully aware of the holy presence of God is. We have to start where we are, especially when we are wounded, tired, confused, lost. God’s love is not repressive. It does not deny who we are. Rather, it invites us to embrace fully who we are at any given moment. We start with accepting ourselves when we abide with God.

3. I wonder how our world might be different if we allowed ourselves abide in God, unafraid and unimpeded by self-imposed limitations. We might discover great boldness in the presence of danger, in the company of nay-sayers, in the face of injustice. Perfect love casts out fear… Now I am not naïve enough to believe that we will ever live without experiencing the emotion fear, but there are times when each of us has stepped with courage and boldness through our fear for the sake of love: getting married, having a child, coming out, standing up for what’s right when others pressure us not to, admitting wrong doing, asking for forgiveness…Life is filled with experiences that scare us silly, but love can carry us through emotion, through the fear of the consequence of our action, into right relationship. “The commandment we have from him is this: those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also.” I think about those who talk about love but hurt others in its name. “Those who say, ‘I love God,’ and hate their brothers and sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen.” Love invites us to live boldly in the world, loving our unseen God through the loving of our brothers and sisters…many of whom we may not very much like. Perfect love asks us to step through our fear toward a just world. One of my favorite teachers John Dominic Crossan says, “Justice without love is brutality. Love without justice is banality.” Perfect love is neither brutal nor banal.

4. Our gospel message tells us that in order for us to grow in love, sometimes we have to pare down our life, make some changes. This is true whether we are speaking of our individual lives or our corporate life together. When we intend to be fruitful – that is, when we intend to be life-giving -- we sometimes have to get rid of some stuff, sometimes stuff that is even alive and seemingly thriving. Pruning is a violent act – I’m not a gardener so I’m not going too far into this metaphor, but it is the act of cutting away life in order to make way for new life. Loving our neighbors and loving ourselves may ask that we make tough decisions to pare away parts of ourselves that we have grown accustomed to and comfortable with in order to make way for new life. This is not a repressive injunction. Rather it is a call to discernment. Where is our life, as full as it may seem, no longer able to yield new life? What parts of our lives have already begun to wither and die? We certainly don’t need to keep the dead parts of ourselves in our midst. Let’s get rid of them. But it’s often difficult rid ourselves of them once and for all, to toss them into the fire. It’s very hard to look at part of our life that seems fine and to decide to make a change – I have to say that giving up meat in Lent brought me into a new reality: Where can I eat out? How can I cook? Love asks that we look clearly at ourselves and the ways in which we live and to make the difficult decisions. What in our lives have lost the ability to make new life? What in our lives contributes to death – our own or death in the world? How far are we willing to prune for the sake of love? Are we willing to reduce our dependence of costly, ecologically toxic, and non-sustainable energy? Are we willing to pay more for our food in order to buy locally grown or organic products? Are we willing to spend more for products made by people paid a fair wage? How are we going to engage in the political debate on immigration? How important is Sabbath to us? Are we willing to give God one day a week? These are hard questions. And there are many, many others. Mindfulness of our spirits, our consciences, our souls helps us answer them, or at least begin to think about them.

There is a lot to say about love. We spend our Christian lives trying to better understand love and to better live it. Today we explored how love is an attitude in life that invites us to fully embrace experience, to hold concern for our neighbors, to work for justice, and to make room for new life. What a joy it is to enter this journey with the assurance that the God, the I am who I am and I will be who I will be, goes with us – that the Christ who said I am the bread of life, I am the good shepherd, I am the vine, I am the resurrection and the life, I am the way, the truth, and the light goes with us. We follow the one who fully embraced life, and in so doing, could not tolerate the injustice of his world. He stood against the powers and principalities of his own religion, of the occupation of his land, of the narrow-mindedness of his friends and family. He bore their weight, and compelled by and obedient to love, was executed. As his followers we believe he is not dead. He lives and reigns today. We are his body and we, like him, abide in the Author of Life. What a story we have. What a charge we have to keep. It is holy work and it starts with the simple statement, “God is love.” In this one simple statement, we find a boldness beyond all others to be strong and, like our brother and teacher Jesus, to embrace all of life. Amen.