What Love Looks Like
a sermon based on 1 John 4:7-21
by Rev. Randy Quinn
I
found a short history of Mother’s Day this week that I thought you might
find interesting:
The earliest Mother's Day
celebrations can be traced back to the spring celebrations of ancient
Greece in honor of Rhea, the Mother of the Gods. It was a pagan
celebration. As Christianity spread throughout Europe the celebration
changed to honor the "Mother Church" - the spiritual power that gave
them life and protected them from harm.
During the 1600's, people
in England celebrated a day called "Mothering Sunday". Celebrated on
the 4th Sunday in Lent, "Mothering Sunday" honored the mothers of
England. During this time many of England's poor worked as servants
for the wealthy. On Mothering Sunday the servants would have the day off
and were encouraged to return home and spend the day with their
mothers. A special cake, called the mothering cake, was often brought
along to provide a festive touch.
Over time the church
festival blended with the Mothering Sunday celebration as people began
honoring their mothers as well as the church.
In the United States,
Mother's Day was first suggested in 1872 as a day dedicated to peace by
Julia Ward Howe (she also wrote the words to “The Battle Hymn of the
Republic”). Howe held organized Mother's Day meetings in Boston every
year.
In 1907 Ana Jarvis, from
Philadelphia, began a campaign to establish a national Mother's Day.
She persuaded her mother's church in Grafton, West Virginia to celebrate
Mother's Day on the second anniversary of her mother's death, the second
Sunday of May. By the next year Mother's Day was also celebrated in
Philadelphia.
Jarvis and her supporters
began to write to ministers, businessmen, and politicians in their quest
to establish a national Mother's Day. It was successful as by 1911
Mother's Day was celebrated in almost every state. President Woodrow
Wilson, in 1914, made the official announcement proclaiming Mother's Day
a national holiday that was to be held each year on the second Sunday of
May.
While many countries of
the world celebrate their own Mother's Day at different times throughout
the year, there are some countries which also celebrate Mother's Day on
the second Sunday of May, including Denmark, Finland, Italy, Turkey,
Australia, and Belgium.
There you have it, the
story behind our celebration of Mother’s Day.
However, our text for
today is not about mothers. It’s about love. And while it isn’t as
well known as it’s “cousin,” the “love chapter,” First Corinthians 13,
our passage does include the oft-quoted line, “God is love” (1 Jn. 4:8b
and 4:16b).
But, note, it does not say
“love is God.” That would be a form of idolatry, an idolatry often seen
in the world around us – a world that claims to know about love, a world
that strives to find love, but has, in fact, proven to not know what
love really is.
Part of the problem is
that we who speak the English language have used the word “love” in so
many different ways. We “love” pork chops, for instance. Or we “love”
the way someone has cut their hair. We also speak about “love” in
relationship to our country as well as our spouses.
More often than not, in
our culture the word “love” is used as a noun to describe an emotion, an
emotion that is better described, perhaps, as affection. Our culture
thinks of love as a “thing” that can be lost or found, sought after or
cherished. It becomes a god unto itself as people seek love in things
and begin to treat people as things when they think it has been found.
And not only that, people
often act as if there is no one who has control over this emotion.
In part of a video
presentation I use when I meet with couples. Dr. Howard Markman offers
the suggestion that some people act is if they can fall out of love as
easily as they fall into love. The world speaks about falling into love
and out of love in the same way we might speak about falling out of a
tree.
(Although I’ve heard that
America’s Funniest Videos is still waiting to catch someone
falling into a tree!)
According to both the
Apostles Paul and John, love is not an emotion. It may stir our
emotions of affection, but love is more a verb than it is a noun. As I
said last week, actions speak louder than words; love requires action to
be recognized as love.
In the Biblical sense,
love is a learned behavior, something that can be taught.
Only from that perspective
can we understand what it means when we hear the command to “love our
neighbor.” God is not commanding us to like what our neighbor looks
like. God doesn’t say we need to enjoy being with our brother, either.
God is saying we are to love them, no matter what. We are to
care for our neighbor, to care about our sister, to meet the needs of
the orphan and the widow – as if we had deep affection for them, as if
they were our child or our spouse or our parent.
Bob is the parent of one
of our cub scouts. He hangs wall paper for a living – and from what I
can tell, he does a fairly good job at it. When I first met Bob, he had
a long pony tail and was often wearing painter’s overalls.
But he cut his hair this
winter. So I asked him if he got more business without the ponytail,
thinking that it may be a put off for some of his clients. Bob assured
me that it was the quality of his work that brought him business –
primarily from referrals. People weren’t interested in what he
looked like; they only wanted to see the walls he had covered.
Actions speak louder than
words. And his deeds are the way people measure his work, not his
appearance.
And in our text for today,
John is reminding us that loving our neighbor is evidence of the love of
God dwelling within us (1 Jn. 4:12). It is the proof that we love God
and God loves us. Our loving acts are often the only means by which
others see and experience the love of God in their lives.
I know it isn’t true in
every home. I know there are mothers who never teach their children how
to love. I know there are mothers who selfishly think children exist
for the sole purpose of bringing joy to their parents. I know there are
mothers who only knew love as an emotion over which they had little
control and were therefore not able to love their own children
unconditionally.
But in the case of my
mother, and in the case of many others I have known, the truth is she
was the first person to love me in a way I could understand love. It
was a love that invited me to reciprocate, a love that allowed me to
share love with those around me.
John, in our text for
today, is suggesting that in much the same way, we learn to love from
God. God loves us first, he says, and without that model of love, we
could never begin to love – not even the best of mothers. We would all
be selfish creatures who are only concerned about ourselves.
One of the joys of
parenting is to watch a young child grow and learn. And often, we learn
about ourselves in the process. We learn what words and phrases we use,
for instance, as they repeat them back to us. We see our own mannerisms
in their imitative behavior – whether we like what we see or not.
J
But anyone who has ever
been around an infant or a toddler for very long also knows that
children need to be taught how to love. In children we see the truth
that we are all born demanding that our needs be met – we cry when we’re
hungry and we cry when we’re dirty. We cry when we want to be held and
we cry when we want to be left alone. It’s all about us when we are a
baby.
And when we learn to talk,
it doesn’t get much better. “Mine” becomes one of the first concepts we
grasp – no pun intended.
The truth is: love is
something we must learn over time. We only learn to love our mothers,
for instance, when we see them loving us. But the origin of all love,
including a mother’s love, is the love of God, for “God is love.”
God comes to us and loves
us, even when we act selfishly, even when we might be judged by others
as unlovable. For it’s God’s love that makes us both lovable and
capable of love.
On Mother’s Day, many of
us honor the first person in our lives who taught us what love looks
like, our own mothers. But I am convinced that none of them could have
done that without first experiencing the love of God. For “God is
love.”
Thanks be to God.
Amen.
