Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
December 14, 2003

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

Today is the third Sunday of Lent, and the theme of the day is love. A few minutes ago we lit the third Advent candle, the candle of love. It burns among us now, bringing us the light of Christ’s love. Love is of course a very good thing. Christians talk about it a lot. In fact, there’s even a Scripture verse that says God actually is love. It’s 1 John 4:8. You can look it up. It says: "Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love." Now, that’s lovely isn’t it? God is love. How nice. Scripture tells us that God loves us. A couple of verses later that first letter of John that I just quoted says: "In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us...." 1 John 4:10a And almost every Sunday I say Paul’s words to you that tell us that absolutely nothing can separate us from the love of God. God loves us. How nice. I mean, it is indeed very nice. It is, for many of us, what makes it possible to go on living. It’s what gives life its ultimate meaning. And yet, I’m afraid that all this talk of love is a classic example of what my friend Dennis Hughes once said to me: "There is no non-dangerous theology." Because, you see, I’m afraid we don’t know what love is any more than we know what the peace is that I talked about last week. Let me explain.

The problem has to do with the fact that the word love can have lots of different meanings. It has a Biblical meaning that I’ll get to shortly, but it has a lot of secular meanings too, and we use it all the time in its various secular senses. Just think about how we use the word. Sometimes, it doesn’t mean anything more than the word "like." We tell our friend that we "love" her new hairstyle. Many of us "love" our car or our truck. In these cases, all we mean is that we like these things, or that we enjoy them, or find them somehow attractive.

Sometimes, we use the word love when what we mean is sex. We "make love." It’s a euphemism that we use to avoid words that make us uncomfortable. This use of the word has become pervasive in our culture, to the point where love becomes almost a "four letter word" in the figurative as well as the literal sense.

Sometimes, though, we use the word love more seriously. We tell our spouse or our life partner that we "love" her or him. We may mean many things by this term. Mostly we probably mean that we like them a lot, more than we like anyone else. Or maybe we mean more than that. Maybe we mean that we want to be with them more than we want to be with anyone else, that we want to spend the rest of our lives together. We tell our children that we love them. We mean, probably, that we care deeply about them and their welfare and that we are prepared to make sacrifices to help them. In these uses of the word we are getting closer to its most profound meaning. Yet even in these uses of the word we haven’t quite gotten to what the word means in the Bible, what it means when Scripture says "God is love."

Our Gospel text this morning, strange as it may seem, actually gives us a pretty good idea of that Biblical meaning even though it doesn’t even use the word. In that lesson from Luke, John the Baptist has begun his public ministry of a baptism of repentance at the Jordan River. That lesson begins, however, with John making a statement to the people who have gathered that seems anything but loving: "You brood of vipers!" And then he threatens them with eternal damnation: "Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees." That’s them, the brood of vipers. John seems to have worried much about mixing metaphors. "Every tree that does not bear good fruit [that’s the brood of vipers again] is cut down and thrown into the fire." Yikes! Doesn’t sound very loving, does it? Our conception of love just doesn’t have room for that kind of judgment, that kind of condemnation. The last thing in the world we’d conclude about John is that he loves the people whom he calls a brood of vipers and whom he threatens with eternal damnation. And yet, I think he did. I think that’s precisely why he called them a brood of vipers and trees that do not bear good fruit, threatening them with the wrath of God.

To understand how that constitutes love, you have to understand what the Bible means by that overused and sorely abused term. The Bible dictionary that I use says that in the Bible love "is a relationship of self-giving." That little phrase tells us a lot, I think, about what the Bible means by love. In the Bible, love is a relationship. That means, among other things, that love is not a feeling. It isn’t liking, not even liking a lot. It isn’t affection, not even strong affection. It has nothing to do with romance. It isn’t about feeling good. It is a relationship, that is, it is about the way we live with God and with one another. When we love in the Biblical sense, the way we live with God and with one another is that we give ourselves to God an to one another. It is, as we just heard, a relationship of self-giving.

That means, among a lot of other things, that love does not exclude judgment. John is calling under judgment the sins of the people precisely because he cares what becomes of them. He cares about them enough to care about their relationship with God. He wants to know: Are you in right relationship with God? That is, is your relationship with God one of love, that is, of self-giving? If not, God’s not happy with you, and neither am I, he’s saying. Love as a relationship of self-giving means, among a lot of other things, a relationship of truth telling. Paul tells us to speak the truth in love, and I grant you that calling a group of people a brood of vipers is not obviously loving language. Still, we can see here that John cares about the people he calls vipers, that he is giving of himself to them. Recall, after all, that John’s preaching got him killed too. And we see that he is really talking about love in what he says next.

Faced with his condemnation, the people ask him what then they are to do. He tells them: "Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none; and whoever has food must do likewise." He then gives some specific instructions to tax collectors and soldiers, people whose job it was, essentially, to oppress the people of the land. His point is clear: Give. Give a meaningful portion of what you have to those who do not have any of it. To get right with God, give of yourself and your possessions. In other words, to get right with God, love.

That is indeed good news, as our lesson says when it concludes by telling us that with these and "many other exhortations," presumably of the same nature, John "proclaimed the good news to the people." But in this Advent season, and in the Christmas season that is to come, we relive and celebrate the fact that the relationship of self giving, that is, the relationship of love between God and us is not one-sided. God calls us to give of ourselves to God and to others to be sure; but the truly great good news of Christmas is that God also gives of Godself to us. That, finally, is the real message of our faith. "God so loved the world that He gave his only begotten Son...." John 3:16 At Christmas God gave us God’s Son. Because for Christians the Son is also God, we can, indeed we must, say that at Christmas God gave us God’s self. Christmas is the ultimate act of God’s self giving. It is the ultimate act of God’s love-love for us, each and every one of us.

Christ is God’s ultimate act if love, of self giving, because coming to us in Jesus was the God’s ultimate act of self-sacrifice. God gave up being God and became a human being, a man eventually but at first just a child, a helpless human baby, born to poor parents in the most humble of circumstances. God came to us in the midst of human poverty and human need because God knew that that is precisely what we needed, and still need. And because God loved us, and still does. God gave up, for a time, being who God is because God’s beloved, that is, because we needed God to come to us in a way we could see, touch, talk to, listen to, and know with the certainty, the immediacy, the intimacy, of knowing one of our own. That’s the story of Christmas. That indeed is the story of the entire Christian faith. That’s what it means when we say God is love. God loves by giving God’s self for us.

And God calls us to do the same. Not by forgetting that we are, each one of us, ourselves children of God whom God loves and cherishes; but by going out from the strong center of our whole, healthy selves to love, that is, to serve God’s people and all of God’s creation. Love is not self-denial, it is not losing your self. It is giving yourself, and you can’t give yourself unless you have a self to give. Love, divine love, is not a sentiment. It isn’t a feeling, although it feels really good. It is caring enough to give the most precious gift we have, the gift of ourselves. That’s what God did at Christmas. Praise be to God! Amen.