As yourself: God's gracious love for YOU

Preached at Zion Lutheran, Jubilee, and American Lutheran, Jesup 

Scripture: Romans 13:8-14

Love your neighbor as yourself is one of those wonderful, golden rule bits of wisdom that is so universal that every major faith tradition in the world has some version of it. On the one hand, it’s very simple: Treat others the way you want to be treated. Only do things to people that you would want done to you. Seems straightforward. 

But there are a couple of challenges with this little morsel of a moral. The first is that we don’t do it very well. That’s no secret. We are certainly not guaranteed that our love will be returned with love. We often have to face the question of how to respond to disinterest or disdain, and showing love to folks who don’t care or don’t want it is rather hard. Paul writing Romans didn’t seem to have a problem with this, but then again, for the first half of his career, Paul sort of made his living killing people, so it’s pretty hard to put us in the moral absolutist shoes of St. Paul. Elsewhere in his writings, it is pretty obvious that Paul feels he really deserves to have his love met with hate. In some ways, it seems the self-hatred runs deep with him.

Which gets at the 2^nd, larger and more universal challenge with loving your neighbor as you love yourself. There is one enormous assumption in this phrase—perhaps you see it? To love our neighbor as ourselves assumes that we love ourselves. The honest truth: A lot of people do not love themselves. Many people are hardest on their own self. And this is particularly true of people who treat other people poorly—they do not love others so often because they first fail to love themselves.

I think we all recognize this on some level. We recognize the lack of love in others, and sometimes also in ourselves, but what to do about it? Some folks are able to escape from cycles of self-hatred, but for many it is a bridge too far. Worse, the self-hatred grows when they feel they have tried and tried but cannot love who they are. This is because transformation seems to have less to do with any willpower we possess than it does with something outside of ourselves. If I had to give it a name, I’d call it grace.

This is where the whole business of love ends up landing. We can’t fix a lack of love by deciding we are going to love more just as we cannot decide to have faith. All these things are gifts that come to us—faith, hope, love (as Paul later talks about in 1 Corinthians 13)—the greatest of these is love, but all of them are gifts we cannot earn, feelings we can do nothing to create. They all come to us as a gift. So, if you feel no hope; if you lack in love; if you cannot find faith, it is not because something in you is broken, and it is not because you have not done enough, or said the right things, or because you are weak—whatever narrative you tell yourself. If you feel you have no love, it is because something has blocked you from the truth. You ARE loved. It starts with understanding that simplest of songs, “Jesus Loves Me.” You are loved.

Now, I know what Lutherans do with that knowledge. They make a transfer from their emotional bank (and Lutherans try not to go to this bank very often, so it pains us to do anything at the emotional bank at all, but we are obliged when somebody tells us we are loved.) Too often, Lutherans make a withdrawal of love from the emotional bank and then we make a transfer into the guilt account, because we are told we are loved, but we don’t feel it strongly enough, so now we have convinced ourselves we should feel loved, and since we don’t, here comes the guilt.

I make fun of Lutherans, but all people of every faith (and no faith at all) do this. They might receive a deposit of love and transfer it into their pride account. They might receive a deposit of love and transfer it into their power account. Or guilt. Or unworthiness. Or you name it.

I use this metaphor of a bank transaction intentionally, because it is the kind of thing we do… and it is also completely and totally the opposite of how God works.

When God receives love, God pays out love. When God receives hate, God pays out love. When God receives disinterest, God pays out love. There is no transaction, because God is love. There is no debt. All of that is over, settled, done. You are saved by grace. You are loved apart from all the ways you have fallen short. You owe nothing for this. It is all a gift.

But once you feel this love, it will make you do things. It will inspire you for service. It will push you to care for others. It will make you interested in their stories; in their passions—in their whole selves—because the more you know, the more there is to love. In short, God’s love will make you love. The law won’t do that. The law will suggest that perhaps you haven’t loved enough—perhaps you are not good enough—perhaps you should do something else to earn love. The law is a liar, but it is a persistent one, and it would be foolish to say we don’t listen to it. Somedays, it wins. But not in the end…

At Ewalu, a central principle that guides our mission is that God’s love is for every child, every young adult, and all the generations that come to this place. We are a place apart because we are a beautiful corner of God’s creation, but we are also a place apart because the God we proclaim is love-incarnate, and that is not the message most of us get in most of our lives. We are expected to do more, to do better, to earn love, to earn grace; to hope for more; to bring up faith from somewhere inside of us. Most of the messages we receive in life are a litany of all the ways more is expected of us. At Ewalu, we resist the temptation to levy more expectations on our campers—instead, we seek to embody grace.

We nurture faith through music and Bible study, through caring relationships and fun. Mostly, I suspect we nurture faith by allowing kids the space—often for the first time in their lives—for them to see that God is meeting them right where they are. And then what do campers experience when God meets them? Faith and hope and love. Hopefully love—that is our goal, first and foremost. It starts with love of their own self. Of all the positive outcomes of summer camp, one that strikes me that we don’t talk about enough is that 90% of parents report improved self-confidence in their summer campers after a week at camp. That is not just some metric for life—that is a measure of faith. If we can discover that God loves us for the person we are, we will spend our lives paying that love forward to others.

            I should point out the obvious here: We won’t do this perfectly. We too often focus on all the ways we fail to do it, which is fine—it’s worth confessing—but it is also not the last word, because while we won’t do this perfectly, God will. And that is a great comfort to me in a world that is so often lacking in love for one another. In a world of transactions, God just keeps flooding the market. Call it grace—call it impossible—but ultimately, it is the fulfilling of the law. Just love.