From Sampler to Sower

Granted, it’s been a while since week in review #20-almost exactly a year to be, well, exact.  So it’s high time to get back to this.

Weekend Teaching Series: Cultivate

Message Title: Love

Sermon in a Sentence: The solution to the problems caused by love is not to give up on love, or to tone love down; it is a radical reorientation of love.

Text(s): Romans 5:1-8; Romans 8:38-39; Galatians 5:13-26; John 15:1-17

Message Summary: This sermon was the second in our Cultivate series for Water’s Edge. It’s all a part of our church’s Homesavers campaign.  From the first of the year through Ash Wednesday, every department of our church, children, youth and adult, are all taking a closer look at the Fruit of the Spirit.

Read more to see our original video The Vegetables of the Spirit and to see a summary of our teaching for this topic.

To introduce the subject of love, we showed an old video of Jackie DeShannon singing “What the World Needs Now”.  I was really hoping the praise team could cover this song live before the sermon, but scheduling conflict made that impossible.  But the video did an adequate job of setting the scene.

We used the video to ask the question: Is more love really the solution to the world’s problems?

Of course the easy answer, the Sunday School answer, is yes.  More love would fix most of what’s wrong in our world.  But we didn’t settle for the easy answer.  Instead we looked a bit deeper.  After all, isn’t it possible that love is not the solution to, but actually the cause of many of our world’s problems?

Just look at the news and see all the crimes of passion caused by the love of people, position and possessions.  Try telling the victim of a crime of passion that all that was needed was a bit more love… Now granted, we might try to explain this by arguing that it wasn’t love but lusts that led to this violence, but where do you draw the line?

And we’re not the first to be asking this question.  People have understood that there is something potentially destructive about love for a long time.  In fact, most of the world’s religions and philosophies recognize this fact.  Buddhism recognizes that love can lead to attachment, and attachment traps us in the cycle of suffering.

The Greeks likewise recognized the potentially dangerous aspect of love.  Eros, the most common Greek word for love, refers to a desire for something.  Eros recognizes something in the object of love that the lover desires for his or her own.  This desire can lead to grasping, as the lover seeks to obtain what they desire. And this can be dangerous.  It’s no accident that when they personified love in their mythology, Eros was an archer.  Sure it’s cute on Valentine’s Day cards; but the Greeks knew, Eros’ arrows leave wounds.

Of course, it’s not just the Buddhists and the Greeks that recognized this fact of human existence.  It’s recognized by the Biblical authors as well.  Eros, the love that sees something it desires and seeks to obtain it for itself, is, by definition, a self-centered way of living.  And in Galatians 5, Paul explains that the natural outcomes of such a self-centered way of living are obvious: sexual immorality, impurity, debauchery, idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness orgies and the like (Galatians 5:19-21). There is something dangerous in love.

Recognizing a problem is easy. The hard part is diagnosing a solution. How do you solve the problems caused by too much love?

The Buddhist solution is to learn to empty oneself of desire. It’s accomplished by a combination of right thinking and right action that seeks to free you from desire so that you can be set free from suffering. Of course, make sure that you don’t desire freedom from desire too much, because that might ruin everything.

The Greek solution is actually quite similar. In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle explains that while eros is not a vice, it is a potentially harmful excess of a different kind of love, the love of friendship, or philia love. You see, eros is dangerous because it is prone to excess. Based on desire, it’s easy to get caught up desiring too much.

Philia, however, is different because unlike eros, it is not based on something desired because it is lacking.  Eros sees in another something it doesn’t have and wants it for itself.  Philia love instead sees in the other some common bond, some common trait, and loves because it can see itself in the other.  Whether it is the common blood of family, the common personality and purposes of friendship, or the compatibility of romance, philia is based on having something in common.

Furthermore, according to Aristotle at least, philia is always mutual and measured.  Eros can cause problems when it is unrequited.  Philia, however, is always mutual, always reciprocal.  Part of the common bond is shared love for each other.

And philia, properly expressed, is measured.  We love the other in proportion to how virtuous they are.  There is no more loving someone who is unworthy of love.  Philia loves because the other is lovable.

However, one wonders just how well these solutions work.  Because at their heart, they are still both self-centered.  Teaching yourself not to desire through right thought, right action and right attention, is still living a self-sufficient, self-centered, me powered life.  And loving someone else because of how well I can see myself in you is no less self-centered that desiring them because they have something that I want.  And the Bible teaches that the outcomes of a self-sufficient, self-centered, me-powered life are obvious…

So the question is does Jesus offer a better way?

For Jesus, the solution wasn’t to learn not to love, nor was it to tone down eros until it became philia. Jesus’ answer was an entirely different kind of love altogether.

Jesus talked a lot about love… He said things like:

“You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that?  Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.(Matthew 5:43-48 NIV)

“The most important [commandment],” answered Jesus, “is this: ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.” (Mark 12:29-31 NIV)

“As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love. 10 If you keep my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commands and remain in his love. I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete.  My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends… This is my command: Love each other.” (John 15:9-13, 17 NIV)

Jesus didn’t suggest avoiding love.  Instead he commanded it.

Interestingly, however, these passages do not command eros.  Nor do they command philia.  They command a different kind of love altogether.  All of these passages speak of agape love (or more precisely, they use the verb form of that word agapao.)  Agape was an unusual word for love in Greek.  It wasn’t unheard of, but it was not frequently used.  And when it was used, it was typically seen as synonymous with philia, if a little weaker. At least one lexicographer describes agapao as “colorless” lacking the magic of eros and the warmth of philia. For the classical writers it meant something along the lines of to show honor to, to seek after, or to prefer.

These passages us the word agapao because it was the word most often used by those who translated the Septuagint from Hebrew into Greek to translate the kind of love that God has. God’s love isn’t grounded in selfish desire like eros, nor is it something that is only offered in situations where love is mutual and measured. God’s love is the extreme, sacrificial, unconditional love of a God who reaches out to humanity regardless how worthy (or more often the case, unworthy) that humanity may be. They took this uncommon Greek word and began to reshape it to reflect the kind of love earthly language cannot on its own imagine.

But what is this agape love really like?

Paul talks about love in his Epistle to the Romans.  Following his argument through the Epistle, we learn four things about this agape:

The very definition of this kind of love is revealed in the story of Jesus

In Romans 5:6-8 Paul notes that God demonstrates agape not in giving up his life for the lovable, as someone operating on the principle of philia might conceivably do.  Instead, God demonstrates agape by dying for the unlovable sinner.  There is nothing measured about the love of God.  It is given sacrificially for the unlovable.

Agape moves God to act on our behalf.

This same passages shows that Agape was far more than just warm fuzzy feelings on behalf of God for humanity.  Agape was not a matter of emotion, it was a matter of action.  Because he loved, Christ died.  In the same way, our love for God is not a matter of the warmth we feel in our hearts when we think about God, or that verklempt feeling inspired by a really good worship song.  Love is action.

Agape is a tenacious love that doesn’t give up.

Romans 8:38-39 is a beautiful hymn about God’s tenacious love, a love from which nothing can separate us.  There is no fickleness to the love of God. We need feel no angst wondering if God still loves us or not.  And because love is an action, we don’t have to worry whether or not God will ever stop reaching out to us.

Finally, God pours out this Agape into our hearts, so that we might love too.

Romans 5:5 speaks of this fact.  God loves us, and pours out his love into our hearts, so that we might love others.  Not in a grasping eros sort of way, nor in a calculating, measured philia sort of way, but with the selfless, sacrificial agape of God himself.

So how do we learn to love like that?

It’s not accomplished in trying harder or doing better.  It’s not something we can teach ourselves to do.  In fact, if we try to teach ourselves to love, our self-sufficient, self-centered, me-powered attempts will inevitable end in some obvious failures.  It will result either in sexual immorality, impurity and debauchery as we grasp after what we desire, or in envy, jealousy and rage as we struggle with love that isn’t reciprocated.

No, love is a fruit that must be cultivated.  And we are not the gardener.  Remembering back to our introductory message in this series based on John 15, we are reminded that Jesus is the vine.  God is the gardener.  We are only branches.  Love isn’t something we cultivate in ourselves.  Love is something that God must cultivate in us.

(I don’t have an online summary of this message, but you can listen to it on our podcast here.  Look for the 2011_01_05 sermon titled “Cultivate: Remain.)

Our part is to remain.  Remain in Christ.  Remain in Christ’s Word.  Remain even though it hurts.

And it will hurt.  There’s a reason Paul, when talking about the Spirit’s fruit, says “Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires (Galatians 5:24, NIV).”  If we’re going to love with God’s love, that old self-sufficient, self-centered, me-powered way of living has to die.  There are parts of our life, parts like the I-Want-I-Want mentality, the Me-First priorities, the Whats-In-It-For-Me selfishness, that have to be pruned away by the Gardner’s loving hand.  And chipping away at these cornerstones of our old way of living will at times be painful.

The question is, will we remain?

Element of Fun/Positive Environment:

As intro material for this series, we’ve launched a series of tongue-in-cheek sitcom-ish videos called the Vegetables of the Spirit which seek to demonstrate what the Fruit of the Spirit aren’t.  This week’s love episode:

We also kicked off the service with an up-front game of Guess-the-Google inspired by the online game by Grant Robinson of the same name.  I’ll be sharing that game in an upcoming post.  Fast-paced and fun, that was a perfect opener for our service, and led to a final slide showing images of “love” to introduce our theme for the night.

Worship Set: Blessed be Your Name, Still, Healer, My Redeemer Lives

Favorite Moment: Simply having service. Weather cancellations meant two weeks without Water’s Edge, which makes it really tough to have a series that runs concurrent with the weekend services.  It was good just being together.

Listen to the Sermon:

Subscribe to the Water’s Edge podcast on iTunes or via RSS.