All You Need
1 John 4:7-21
Click here to view the full sermon video, titled "All You Need"
One of the first things that I do when putting together our worship services on Sunday is to look for an image to put on the front of the worship order. Maybe you take notice of these, maybe you don’t. That’s okay. Because Presbyterians place such a strong emphasis on education and learning, we tend to be pretty verbally oriented. We aren’t just people of the Word. We are people of the words. And oh boy, do we love our words. For better or for worse, this tends to be our contribution to the Christian witness. Our theological forebear, John Calvin, was known for eschewing the overly decorative practices of the Roman church and their ornate and costly cathedrals. As a result reformed worship and the spaces in which they take place have been less ornate. Honestly, some have been deliberately plain so as not to distract from the Word of God. I get it. A couple of years back I took a picture of a baroque pulpit in a church in Prague that was absolutely gaudy. But in the best way.
Still, if faith is essentially an act of imagination, trusting in things that are often unseen, then it makes sense to find faith expressed beyond words, in the sounds of music and in the beauty, color, and movement of a painting or sculpture. Our sacramental life is built on the taste of bread and wine on our tongues, the way cool water feels against our skin. St. Augustine is said to have observed that to sing is to pray twice. And we all know that picture- well, a picture can be worth a thousand words. Faith is a sensory experience. So, I spend some time trying to find a picture that has some resonance with the sermon text. That generally means I go looking on Google Images. But here’s the thing. As blogger Seth Godin recently wrote, “AI is dumber than it looks.” Search engines don’t actually know anything. So sometimes finding the image that I want takes some tweaking of the words I type in. Ironic, no? That I need a few carefully chosen words to find an image that can convey more than those words ever could. Anyway, all of this is to say that it can take some time to find what I’m looking for. Photographs don’t tend to work. And so much of religious themed art is as embarrassingly obvious in missing the mark as biblical literalism can be. I don’t want an image that tells me something, or even shows me something. I want an image that evokes something of what the reading itself evokes.
This is a very long way of telling you that when the scripture is about love, the image results are unsurprising, but unsatisfying. Lots of variations on hearts, or couples. Basically, you get the contents of a Hallmark store in early February. It’s unsurprising because when our culture talks about love, this is often what we are talking about. It could be the love song medley from the film Moulin Rouge, “Love is a many splendored thing. Love lifts us up where we belong. All you need is love.” Don’t get me wrong, I am a sucker for that kind of thing. Every time we watch Love, Actually at Christmas and there’s that wedding scene at the beginning of the movie where the bride and groom are about to process and the choir in the loft launches into the Beatle’s tune. Love, love, love. And then all the instrumentalists pop up in the pews. I get jealous and wonder why no one has ever proposed doing such a thing for a wedding here. But for as much as that movie has given rise to the trope of standing in front of someone with a series of signs humorously declaring an unrequited love. Its best depiction of the kind of love described in the letter before us isn’t likely to come up in an internet search. In fact, for many people, the best depiction of love is their least favorite part of the movie. It’s the clip at the end where Laura Linney’s character celebrates Christmas with her institutionalized brother instead of with her crush Karl from the office. It isn’t perfect, and maybe she could have better boundaries, but you also get the sense that she understands the sacrifice she is making. And she is making it out of love.
The kind of love depicted by hearts and flowers, by couples embracing, that is good. That is necessary on so many levels, I wouldn’t want a world without romantic comedies and grand declarations, but that really isn’t what’s before us in this letter. The Greeks might call that eros, or philia. But the Greek word used over and over again in this passage is agape. It is the kind of love that sacrifices itself for another. God is agape, we are told.
It’s easy to turn that into a bumper sticker, to sigh and pass right over it. But this morning I think it would be a good idea to stop and consider why worshipping and entrusting our lives to God as agape transforms how we look at and live in the world. If God is the one to whom we entrust our lives, to give them shape, meaning, and purpose, then to have that shape, meaning, and purpose informed by who God is means that such things are also defined by who God is not. If God is agape then God is not power. Or, at least, not power as we’re used to talking about it, as we’re used to exercising it. We may want a God who will control nature, or prevent sickness and violence, one who will protect us from harm. The difficult truth is that power- at least power over- has very little to do with agape. In fact, the very thing that agape sacrifices is the need or desire to control the object of such love. It’s been said that in any relationship or friendship we can try to control the other person, or we can love them, but we cannot do both. I think that’s at the heart of what the writer of the letter is getting at when they observe that to profess love in a God that we cannot see is lie while we are hating the people that we can see. Hate is often born of our inability to control them; to make them more like us and less of who they are.
Likewise, if God is agape, then God is not order. This one makes people like us, people who cling to our decency and order, uneasy. Everything would be so much easier, we think, if the highest good came from laying down the law, offering complete clarity. It’s the original temptation really, the knowledge of good and evil. If only we could be like this god. Then we could hold everyone accountable. The good would be rewarded and the evil would be rightly punished. But once again scripture pulls us up short. Such order traffics in fear of punishment. If, as our writer assures us, perfect love casts out all fear, such fear of punishment leaves no room for love. Professions of faith motivated by threats of hell are a poor substitute for lives that abide in and thrive from a love that will not let us go.
We live in a culture that worships material abundance. But we cannot look to Jesus upon the cross and rightly conclude that God is prosperity. The abundance that God offers is the immeasurable riches of God’s grace. It is a grace that does not give us all the things we want, all the things that we would have in our pursuit of happiness. No, God’s grace gives us what we need, all we really need; the kind of love that gives us its own life that we might have life. And not just life, that we might have love. True love. The kind that raises us from death to new life.
There’s a moment in the film Perks of Being a Wallflower in which the lead character Charlie observes how willing his friend and crush is to be mistreated by the boys she dates. So, he asks his trusted teacher, “why do nice people choose the wrong people to date?” His teacher answers, “well- we accept the love we think we deserve.”
The love that we see in Jesus, the kind that defines who God is for us and for the world, the love we rarely accept because we do not think we deserve it, love like that doesn’t usually look like hearts and flowers. It looks more like the caregiver who sacrifices some of their freedom and much of their time to make sure that their mom, or dad, or spouse, or sibling, or neighbor, or friend is okay, takes their medicine, gets a bath, has clean sheets and enough to eat, and is safe. It looks like the family that sacrifices their anger, sadness, and need for payback by offering forgiveness to the person who took away the one who was most precious to them. As Jesus tells it, it looks like a father who will sacrifice his dignity and pride to welcome home his wayward child and restore what had been lost. God is that kind of love. And those who accept and make their home in such love, find their home in God and God finds a home in them. Where God continues to live and move and give us our very being.