Bible Reference: Song of Solomon 8:6-7; John 13:34-38, 15:12-17
Just a couple years ago, I got an email from my friend Vivian that talked about a photograph in
National Geographic that depicted a penetrating metaphor for God's protective wings. It said,
"After a forest fire in Yellowstone National Park, forest rangers began their trek up a mountain
to assess the inferno's damage. One ranger found a bird literally petrified in ashes, perched
statuesquely on the ground at the base of a tree. Somewhat sickened by the eerie sight, he
knocked over the bird with a stick. When he gently struck it, three tiny chicks scurried from
under their dead mother's wings. The loving mother, keenly aware of impending disaster, had
carried her offspring to the base of the tree and had gathered them under her wings,
instinctively knowing that the toxic smoke would rise. She could have flown to safety but had
refused to abandon her babies. Then the blaze had arrived and the heat had scorched her small
body, the mother had remained steadfast. Because she had been willing to die, those under the
cover of her wings would live." Love is as strong as death, passion fierce as the grave. Its flashes are flashes of fire, a raging
flame. Many waters cannot quench love; neither can floods drown it. If one offered for love
all the wealth of his or her house, it would be utterly scorned. Love is something that Jesus talks about a lot. Love is something that you're supposed to hear
about, and expect to hear about in church. But rather than thinking about love as some sort of
schmaltzy, preachy topic appropriate for Valentine's day and the other Hallmark holidays, I
hope you realize that love is as essential to human life as the air we breathe, the food we ingest,
and the shelter that provides us protection from the elements. We require love for survival. Many
of us receive tattered shreds of it. Many of us are still carrying wounds from love's failings.
Many of us are hurt because we can't get the kind of love we want because we can only get the
kind of love that someone else is willing to give us. But regardless, in order to feel our value as
human beings, we must, at least in some small but significant way know love in our lives. Jesus was well aware of this fact, and he has noticed how the grand scheme of things had been
falling apart. God repeatedly would offer human beings generous gifts of love, and would
repeatedly get those gifts rejected. God gives us a garden; we disobey the one rule of the garden.
God gives us a promise; we break our covenant before the ink is even dry. God gives us a law;
we either disregard it or use it to enslave one another with ever more tedious rules. The pattern
needed to be broken. No matter what good gift God could come up with, human beings thought
of ever more creative ways of wasting it. God had only one thing left to give -- the gift of love
itself. Elizabeth Stone has said, "Making the decision to have a child is momentous. It is to decide
forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body." As Christians, we believe that
this was essentially God's choice, to choose to have the divine heart removed from God's body
and given as a gift to the world. Remember, John 3:16 starts out, "For God so loved the
WORLD, that God gave God's only son……" We tailor that verse to meet our own needs and
instead want God to love the church, or the American people, or at the very least, the people who
do no harm, but it isn't like that. God loved the whole world, every scrap, every waste, every
pathetic excuse for a human being -- God loved them all. God loves them, us, so much that God
was willing to endure the painful reality of an open-heart so that we might know the depth of
that love. God forever has that heart, that child, Jesus walking around outside of the divine self
so that we experience God's love and grace forever in a new way. Now, instead of our
wastefulness bringing God's cycle of punishing wrath and the wake up call for renewal, God
feels the pain of our rejection to the heart and offers us the kind of love and forgiveness that will
not leave us stranded. It's not a popular notion to recognize that the Bible itself has a trajectory going in this direction,
from God's anger and jealousy to God's open love for humanity. People want to make all its
passages "equal" for a whole lot of reasons, some to elevate the superiority of Christ, others to
deny that Christianity has to be top dog among other equally loving religions. However, John's
gospel makes it plainly clear that we are given a new and a radically different commandment
through Christ. Jesus already blew away the "an eye for an eye" of the former legal code by
preaching, "Love your enemies." In the synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke), the
golden rule emerges saying that the ethics of all divine law, even the 10 commandments, can be
summed up in two sentences, "Love your God with all your heart, with all your mind, and with
all your strength, and love your neighbor as you love yourself. "John's gospel takes it one step
further in what Leonard Sweet calls the "Titanium Rule." Remember, John's gospel wasn't
written until many years after Jesus had died on the cross, so the Christian community had had
the time to begin to articulate just what it meant to interpret the life, death, and resurrection of
Jesus, and the Passion itself was emerging as the driving story of commitment to the Christian
way of life. Therefore, John quotes Jesus as saying, "I give you a NEW commandment, that you
love one another as I have loved you." Now, I don't know if that means that Jesus was a
hugger or a hand-shaker -- but what I do know what that means is that Jesus willingly,
knowingly laid down his life for the life of his friends, for the lives of us all. This love is
stronger and more lasting than gold -- it merits "Titanium" status. When I first heard Dr. Sweet give his lecture on this topic, I was blown away. I felt reasonably
sure that I could love my neighbors as I love myself, although there are those times when I'd
appreciate a little Old Testament "eye for an eye," but to say that because Jesus was martyred I
would need to bear my own cross and die so that others might live -- that seemed a little much.
In our noisy world of mass media and marketing, we are taught that all kinds of "things" can
take away the burden of that cross, everything from cultivating better relationships to cultivating
roses. As recently as this week, I heard the Reverend Beth Luton Cook at Maryville College
deliver a lecture on what it means to live the "centered life." When we put Christ in the center,
and get acquainted with the flame that God has lit in us since birth, our other decisions become
more focused, more joyful. If something else has replaced that center, our lives get out of whack.
It's ironic that the only way to have a good marriage, or career, or parenting track record is to
let those things be down on the list, secondary to the relationship that has the power to bring us
out of despair. For if one's center is, for example, being a great painter, if something dramatic
changes that role, your world can fall apart. But if Christ is your center, any number of things
can happen, and you will adapt. If we bear that cross, to live our lives to our truest selves and
willing to die for our friends, God reminds us, we will live, and even death holds no power over
us. We are responsible -- to the death responsible -- for our own lives of faith and for our friends'
lives of faith, and I suspect that group of friends also includes families, neighbors, and a number
of other groups that Jesus never, ever lets us forget. Our love in the church must surpass any of
our own personal wishes or desires, and that's a tall order, one I suspect we will not ever fully
meet. However, it is humbling to the core to understand that Jesus did exactly that, put aside
himself so that others, his friends, may live and know the full realization of God's love for us. Our responsibility then, as brothers and sisters in Christ is to love one another fiercely and
passionately, and to live as though we would die for one another. "No one has a greater love
than this," Jesus says, "than to lay down one's life for one's friends." We are no longer
called servants. We are called friends -- friends in the community of Christ that is privileged to
know the intimate love of a God who wears the divine heart on the outside. Tom Bandy, a church and future expert reminds us that - in this new age that shows similarities
to the chaotic time period during the life of the early church - intimacy cannot be trusted to the
fragility of human hands. It's too easy for us to get distracted. We've seen that we can work
hard at love, and still fail. It isn't about how hard we work. It's about surrender. Love must be
entrusted to a larger, shared spirituality. We need the open loving arms of a Christian community
to make this thing work. (Bandy, Coaching Change, p.138) The hope of our future depends on it.
Love that is grounded in Jesus Christ, love that is broad enough to embrace the whole
community, love that holds each other accountable for our disillusions and distractions, it will be
that kind of love that is reason enough to die to the old ways and be shown the light of new life.
Amen.
Remember the One who loves you, and then be different because of it.