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May 25, 2003; The Sixth Sunday of Easter, Year B
    The Rev. Harold "Skip" Comer, Rector

The following story appeared in Proclaim a few years ago.  There was a professor of psychology who did not have any children of his own, but was always watching out for the children in the neighborhood.  Whenever he saw one of his neighbors scolding their children for doing something wrong he would say to them, “You should love your child and not punish them.”  Well, one afternoon the professor was doing some repair work on his driveway.  After several hours of working in the hot sun patching holes and cracks in the concrete he finished the job, laid down his trowel, wiped the perspiration from his forehead, and started toward the house.  Just then out of the corner of his eye he saw a mischievous little boy putting his hand into some of the fresh cement.  The professor rushed over, grabbed the boy, and was about to spank him when a neighbor leaned out of her window and said, “Watch it professor!  Don’t you remember?  You must ‘love the child!”  At this he yelled back furiously, “I do love him in the abstract, but not in the concrete!”[1]

We talk a lot about love, but how do we know what love is?  Love seems to be tied to feelings and emotion, or at least love stirs emotions, sometimes very deep emotions, like two people passionately in love.  But how do we know what love really is?

I first learned about love from my mother, as I believe most of us did.  In some ways love defies complete definition.  We can use all sorts of words to describe love: affection, fondness, adore, liking, attachment, passion, the list goes on and on.   All of these words do help to define love, but in the end the only way too truly understand love is to be loved.  Now some might say that we understand love by loving someone else, and while that is true, our experience of knowing what love is begins by someone else loving us first.  In most cases that is our parents.

Depending on how they express their love for us has a direct bearing on how we express love to others.  Let me give you one example.  In my family when I was growing up, we rarely expressed our love for each other physically.  By this I mean a hug or a kiss on the forehead or cheek.  I am by my nature, not a hugger.  Many of you may find that hard to believe, but hugging is an expression of loving or caring for someone, that I had to force myself into doing.

Undoubtedly Jesus learned about love from his parents.  Mary and Joseph must have loved him very much, because he turned out to be a very compassionate loving and caring person.  Yet we know that Jesus also experienced the love of God in a very unique way.  It is that love that is the focus of the Gospels, the New Testament, and my sermon this morning.

We can read about God’s love for us in the Bible, but it is abstract.  Even Jesus was aware of the abstractness of God’s love for us, that his why he took the love that he was experiencing from God and expressed it to others.  By loving the people he met the way that God loved him, Jesus made that love concrete, he made it real in the lives’ of the people.  We see that love in the way that Jesus reached out to those who were destitute, sinners, or plagued by sickness or a physical impairment.   While the rest of society tended to avoid and even condemn these people, Jesus reached out to embrace them in love.  He met them where they were at and allowed God’s love to flow through him to make them whole.  In some cases the people experienced a miraculous cure, in others the people underwent a conversion experience by repenting of their evil ways and following Jesus.  Unlike the religious leaders of his day, Jesus did not see the deficiencies in people, he saw their potential, a potential that was just waiting to be awakened by the power of unconditional love.

When Jesus told his disciples, “As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love.”[2] Jesus had already shown his disciples how to love God – by spending time with him in prayer, by doing his will, by treating everyone that he met with kindness and compassion.  The beauty of Jesus is that he not only talked about loving others, he actually did it.

The greatest challenge for the disciples and the early church was taking the love that they had experienced in Jesus and sharing it with others.  The major challenge for them was allowing foreigners, called Gentiles, to become members of the church.  They struggled with their prejudice and the desire to only admit people like them into the church.  Yes they had heard Jesus say, “love one another as I have loved you,”[3] and “love you neighbor as yourself,”[4] but did that really include all of these other people? 

This is the same challenge that we have today.  It is easy to love your friends, but what about the people that you don’t necessarily like?  Do we have to love them, and if we do, what kind of love are we to express to them?  We sometimes joke about having to love everyone, but not necessarily having to like them.  While there does seem to be a difference between loving someone, at least in the Christian sense, and liking someone, the distinction can sometimes hinder our ability to love them as Christ loves us.  I am not really prepared to argue this distinction this morning, but I do believe that it is a question that we need to ask ourselves whenever we are confronted by the situation.   Let’s put it in another context, does God love us, yet not like us.  I hate to think of that possibility.

Over the past month we have had many people from the community in our facility.  They have all remarked at how beautiful our church is and how warm and friendly the people are.  Katie Northway and I were talking earlier this week about how the warmth of our worship space matches the warmth of the people who worship here.  Katie made the remark that it must have been planned that way.  Those people who gathered fifty years ago, did the design of the church originate from the character of the people or was it a dream of what they hoped to become?  We believe that it originated from the character of the people, they wanted a building to worship in that reflected the love and warmth that they felt together as Christians.

The biggest challenge that we face, that the entire Christian Church faces, is making the love of God, the love of Jesus, for us and everyone we meet a concrete experience.  That challenge can only be met after we have first experienced God’s love.  And that experience is gained in the same manner that Jesus experienced it – by spending time with God in prayer, by doing his will, and by treating everyone that we meet with kindness and compassion.  But wait a minute, I have forgotten the most important ingredient to experiencing God’s love, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ who willingly laid down his life for you and me.  The disciples were commanded to pass that love on so that we would experience it in the flesh also.  The strength of the people of God, of Christians, depends on how well God’s love made manifest to the people of the world in Jesus Christ is shared with each generation of Christians.  Have we received it?  Are we passing it on?  It is the fruit that we are to bear, it is the fruit that will last forever.  How is your fruit doing?  Is it plump and ripe, or does it need some tender loving care? 

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