Love. It’s a central message in the New Testament. It is a world changing power, and we take it utterly for granted, using it casually and half-heartedly. Yet there is nothing casual or half-hearted about love. It is the principle message of our faith, and because of it Jesus was obedient despite risk, and continued to love all the way to the cross. Love is risky and powerful. And as Christians, we believe that it can and will change the world.

I am often shocked when I hear, “I love you” rattled off by people I know don’t love me or whomever else they are saying it to. Just the other day I was changing channels on my TV set and the Apprentice was on. People were yelling and arguing, so in a fit of voyeuristic temptation I stopped channel surfing to watch. In the middle of a yelling match about betrayal, someone blurted out, “I love you. I’ll only turn on you if I have to save myself.” I actually yelled at the TV set. The word “love” is used all the time, and it is rarely meant.

Love is as precious and fragile as it is powerful and potent. Love is everywhere but difficult to grab on to, just like butterflies on a warm Southern spring day. They’re all around, but they flit around too quickly to touch; they remain just out of reach. Love can be like that. We see flickers of it, but deep and abiding love can seem just out of our grasp. We don’t encounter real love in most of our relationships, and when we do, we have a great obligation to tend it, to care for it, and to nurture it. Love can be all too rare in this world, where stories of teenagers shooting their friends, terrorism, wars, global ecological destruction, and other crises fill our headlines, where loneliness seems more prevalent than belongingness. Love can seem impossible when we live in a sea of strangers or hold contempt for ourselves or our life situations.

Yet, simply put, the core message of Christianity is love. And the core message of Methodists is “practical divinity.” John Wesley never wrote a set of beliefs that Methodists were to adopt. Rather, he called upon those who called themselves Methodist to embody their religious ideals by living lives of love – visiting the ill in hospitals, spending time with people imprisoned, making time daily to tend their own spiritual health. Divinity, for Methodists, is not something from another world to which we aspire. Rather, it is living lives circumscribed by love. For us love is active and vibrant. Love calls us into the mess of one another’s lives to offer care and nurture, and to be present with one another in times of pain and hurt. Love invites us into the struggle for wholeness. Love is not passive; it is not easy. Love is demanding and relentless. As Christians we see in Jesus God revealed fully and completely. As his followers, we too are called to encourage the God in each other, to accept difference, and to battle indifference. Love – not right belief – is what lies at the very core of our identity – as Christians and as Methodists.

Love is often depicted as soft and easy, passive and ineffective. But the love of God is ferocious and fierce. It is the kind of love that was needed to stand against apartheid; this love was not soft. The love embodied in the Civil Rights movement in the United States was fierce; it was not easy. The love that holds gay, lesbian, and bisexual people in churches that often tell them they are bad is a gritty love, one that can’t be cowed by prejudice and hate. This love is active and powerful. John Wesley said that we are “going on to perfection” in love. We may not yet have attained the perfect love of God, but it is our hope and belief as Methodists that we can. Perfect love casts out fear and hate. It tramples on prejudice and small-mindedness. It frees us from shame, and gives us incredible power, sustaining us in the hard times. This kind of love keeps going when all indicators say the path is dark and dangerous, long and perilous. Perfect love is our end destination. We may not have found ourselves there yet, but 1 John tells us what it is like. “16We know love by this, that ‘Jesus’ laid down his life for us—and we ought to lay down our lives for one another.” Perfect love brings us into radical relationship with one another, serving each other regardless of risk, knowing that when any of us is in need, God’s reality has not yet come, and all of us are in need.

In Paul Tillich’s The New Being, he includes a chapter called “Love is Stronger Than Death.” In it he writes, “…what is most important is not the alleviation of need but the actualization of love. Of course, there is no love which does not want to make the other’s need its own…there is also no true help which does not spring from love and create love…there is no love which does not become help. Where help is given without love, there new suffering grows from the help.” When helping is our goal, we often simply meddle, but when loving is our goal, we cannot stop ourselves from helping one another.

If we take seriously our call to love, we answer John’s question, “How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help?” seriously. We cannot hear it with idle ears or treat it as a rhetorical question. It is an imperative question. In it we find a call to action and a rule for life.

And yet, as difficult as that call is, we often love others with more ease than we love ourselves. Shame, feelings of insignificance and inconsequence can be paralyzing. Many of us make allowances for others who fall short of perfect love, but we cannot find grace in our hearts for ourselves. 1 John also says, “God is greater than our hearts, and God knows everything. 21Beloved, if our hearts do not condemn us, we have boldness before God.” God loves us. In a world in which Death and its powers and principalities connive to reign, God has made in each of us a miracle of life, capable of love, capable of experiencing so much. To be a community of love, we begin in our own hearts, extending forgiveness and grace to ourselves, asking God for forgiveness and grace when we need, and offering them to others as we can. We have to start with ourselves. It is this rootedness -- this grounding -- that allows us to lay our lives down for others out of a sense of abundance and joy and not out of obligation or self-negation or defeat. Loving others begins with loving ourselves. God loves us; I wonder why we have such a hard time doing it, too.

1 John gives us one commandment in two parts: “believe in the name of God’s Son Jesus Christ and love one another.” To believe in Jesus is to believe that God was, is, and can be embodied in this world, that perfect love is possible. To believe in Jesus is to believe that love is stronger than hate, and life is more potent than death. Jesus, one man, walked his country healing, teaching, and confronting. He challenged the politics and religious realities of his time, and did not allow the difficulty of his work to stop or impede him. Emboldened by the Holy Spirit, Jesus found his mission in the words of the prophet Isaiah: to preach good news to the poor, to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.” (Isaiah 61:1, 2). Love was anything but passive for Jesus. It was active and controversial. At its very core lay compassion edged with justice.

Love – if we were to pare away all of the fluff of our religion and get to the very root of it, we would find love, love experienced in God and in covenant community. As we walk through Easter, we walk deeper into love. It may be elusive, especially during these times. The world does not make finding and experiencing love easy. Love is our promise and our challenge. It is our mission and our identity. Love shines a sliver of light into darkness that threatens to suffocate. It brings life into places of despair and death. It is our tool and our goal. It is our God. Love is not beyond us or above us; it lies within our deepest selves waiting to be loosed, waiting to spring forth with the ferocity of God’s passion to devastate the silence of indifference with its very presence.