You can't love in theory

A sermon for Faith Lutheran, Andover

 1 John 4:7-21

“God is love,” says 1 John.

            Two thoughts come to my mind about love in 1 John 4. My first thought is that we don’t say this enough: God is love. Not God loves a lot; not God helps us to love, but God is love. So, if you know love, you know God, which in turn means a few things: Firstly, love is not just a concept and not just a feeling, love is a person. To know God is to know love and vice versa. We don’t say that enough.

But then I have a second thought, which is this: I’m not sure that saying God is love is a good thing in a world that seems absolutely set on cheapening love. Love is more than thoughts and prayers. Love is more than a throw-away, “I love everybody” kind-of-sentiment to make us feel better about ourselves. Love requires self-sacrifice and it forces us to act with mercy—it is lived and actual and real. It is never theoretical—always lived in the flesh. You can’t love a theory, and you can’t love in theory.

            Ewalu campers arrive at camp having had all different experiences with love. Some know deep down that they are loved—they experience it with their family, their friends, and their God. Some hope they are loved—they have hints of it in their lives, but they have times when they really don’t know. Some suspect they are not loved—they have only known it rarely. Some know they are not. Love, to them, is a fairy tale.

            We can’t fix our campers. We tell our staff that all the time: You can’t fix your camper. You can’t make them believe anything—not about God and certainly not about love. Rather than trying to fix them, their job is much simpler and much harder: You need to love them. Really, truly, love them. This is especially hard when the ones who need love the most are the ones who you want to kick out of the cabin on the first night—the ones who are pushing all the boundaries, the ones who are disrespectful, the ones who we worry are making everybody else miserable. It’s tough work, this love. We don’t do it perfectly—we can’t. Sometimes the kids who need love the most also can’t stay at camp, which is heartbreaking. All we can ever do is try to love as God loved us. We are limited—God is not. Our love is imperfect—God’s is not.

            Love is frequently found in tandem with something we call grace, which flows from the recognition that we cannot love as well as we should—that all of us are worthy of love not because we are good enough for it—we aren’t—but rather, we are worthy of love because of how human we are. God’s love for us is for people who are broken, which is why we all need grace so badly—grace for all God’s campers, but no less importantly, we need to have grace for ourselves. None of us are perfect. You aren’t. I’m not. Lord knows, my kids aren’t; neither are anybody else’s kids. So, we do our best to follow where Jesus led—toward the outcast, the broken, the hurt person on the side of road, toward the sick, the person who was unclean by every conceivable religious law of the day. Ultimately and most importantly, Jesus leads us to the cross—to death as the one and only path toward resurrection.

            God’s love ultimately took the form of Jesus Christ so that we would be able to know it on a human level, and Jesus rising showed us that resurrection is both an eventual reality and an immediate reality. When you open your eyes in the natural world, everything out there is preaching resurrection: Every spring bud, every flower, every trout rising on the water, every hawk and eagle on the thermals, every tree popping with color. The world is alive with color, which we can see if we have our eyes opened by love.

Still, we realize at camp: Not everybody can see it.

            I love to stand on the A-Frame Bridge across the Maquoketa River and watch the trout swimming in the channel. This time of year, the water is full of white suckers migrating upstream with recently stocked rainbow trout dashing in and out of the channel after flies and minnows. I cannot help but marvel at the wonder of God’s world as I watch it all unfold beneath the water, but to plenty of campers it is just a river. Where I see clear water, they see mud and weeds, cold depths, slimy fish and crayfish that will pinch their fingers and toes. I look in the water and see possibilities, while others see danger. None of us are wrong with how we see the world. We all see with different eyes.

            I believe the love of God is wider than we can imagine, but our awareness of that love is not one-size-fits-all. We hope that everyone who comes to Ewalu encounters the love of God, but if all we did was take campers to my favorite places, we would be far less successful than we are. Rather, kids experience God’s love at camp because of the many different places where that encounter takes place. For some it is at campfire, for some it is creek stomping in the river, for some it is at the farm, or at the canteen, at the pool, or out on the trails. For some, it is staying up all night; for others, it is rising quietly in the morning. God’s love meets us in all those places and more.

            I wish I could say that everybody who comes to Ewalu comes away believing that God loves them as deeply as I believe is true. But that’s where we all come in: We can live our lives the rest of the year as if God’s love is real. Right now, there are a thousand reasons to be down about the world—internationally, nationally, regionally, locally. Turn on the news and you’ll see. Worse, we can’t just explain away everything bad in the world. All those fears you see on the news are real—if not for you, then for somebody—but here’s the crucial point: We overcome those fears with acts of love. It might well be that love calls us to act in the face of an unjust world decisively, but we must constantly check ourselves that it is love (and not fear) that is guiding us. If God is love, then love is the firm ground on which all our actions must stand.

            We love because God first loved us.

            We change the world not by fighting fire with fire but by fighting anger and hate with love. We change the lives of children not by converting them to our faith, but rather, we change their lives by showing them a light so beautiful that they wonder, sometimes against everything they have experienced in their lives, “Could it be true?”

            When the world seems too much, just start with love, because after all, the world can take a lot from you. Your opportunity, your time, your dignity, even your life—you cannot guarantee any of it—but the world cannot take your ability to turn to love when you are expected to respond to malice with malice. The theologian, Robert Farrar Capon, in talking about God’s grace, wrote about how the right hand of power wielded by forces in the world can beat you up, and kick you, and eventually kill you, but there is a powerful reason that Jesus tells us to turn the other cheek, and that is because what is it, really, to be killed by power? It is a sign of weakness that hate must resort to killing to achieve its ends. Love perseveres even through death—it cannot be defeated by a weapon—it is perfected in what the world will call weakness.

            This is the power of the cross. The only thing needed to rise is to die. Love is perfected there. So, the honest truth (which is so hard to believe), is that we have nothing to fear. That is what it means that God is love—not that you won’t hurt, or suffer, or die, but that love will catch you when you do—especially there. Then, we will rise with Christ—and with the trout in the stream—and the flowers in our gardens—we will do what all things loved by the creator do in their season: We will rise.

            I thank God for you and the work you do here in Andover, because you are helping kids to rise from uncertainty and to discover that the love of God is real and it is theirs. There is nothing more powerful than that. Here, in our little corners of eastern Iowa, we are changing the world with that love, because we are changing the lives of kids who discover the love of God on the way. And it happens in the river, and on the trails, but it also happens on the car ride home and back at school and in our churches. God’s love is wild and unconfined—not least by the boundaries of camp.