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Content type: Sermon Poem / Prayer Service / Tribute Incomplete Biography
Body: How do we love like Jesus? For love, to be true, it must hurt just as it hurt Jesus to love. The day is December 11, 1979: in Oslo, Norway, an Albanian nun named Teresa, who has dedicated her life to live a simple life of love among the world’s poorest and most desperate people, receives one of the world’s most significant awards – the Nobel Peace Prize. As part of the proceedings, she had the opportunity to speak, and here is one of the things she said: Jesus “insisted that we love one another as he loves each one of us. And we read that in the Gospel very clearly - love as I have loved you - as I love you - as the Father has loved me, I love you - and the harder the Father loved him, he gave him to us, and how much we love one another, we, too, must give each other until it hurts. It is not enough for us to say: I love God, but I do not love my neighbor. St. John says you are a liar if you say you love God and you don't love your neighbor. How can you love God whom you do not see, if you do not love your neighbor whom you see, whom you touch, with whom you live. And so, this is very important for us to realize that love, to be true, has to hurt. It hurt Jesus to love us, it hurt him. And to make sure we remember his great love he made himself the bread of life to satisfy our hunger for his love. Our hunger for God, because we have been created for that love. We have been created in his image. We have been created to love and be loved, and then he has become man to make it possible for us to love as he loved us. He makes himself the hungry one - the naked one - the homeless one - the sick one - the one in prison - the lonely one - the unwanted one - and he says: You did it to me. Hungry for our love, and this is the hunger of our poor people. This is the hunger that you and I must find…” So: “And so this is very important for us to realize that love, to be true, has to hurt.” Context: We know the words of Jesus in response to the question asked him, “Teacher, which is the most important commandment in the law of Moses?” 37 Jesus replied, “‘You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind.’ 38 This is the first and greatest commandment. 39 Second is equally important: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ 40 The entire law and all the demands of the prophets are based on these two commandments.” (**Matt 22:36-40**). We see and believe that loving God and loving our neighbor are indeed the greatest commandments, and most of us here today would wholeheartedly affirm our desire to obey Jesus’ command and truly, honestly, and powerfully, live lives of love. But how? Mother Teresa’s affirmation that “love, to be true, has to hurt.” Is that True? So, the question is this – are there messages in our culture about love that would support the 30-year-old observations of a Catholic nun, or does our culture speak a different message? Let’s look at what our culture has to say about pain and hurt. What is our culture’s view of pain and hurt? Are they to be avoided at all costs, or even ignored? Are they a necessary but unpleasant part of life that must be endured? Or is pain and hurt a genuine and valuable part of what it means to be human that shapes us in positive ways? How does Mother Teresa’s statement that “love, to be true, must hurt” resonate with you? If we agree that our culture sees hurt as a problem (or a “bad thing”), and Mother Teresa says “love, to be true, must hurt”, what about Jesus? Let’s go to **John 15**, which Mother Teresa quoted: 9As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love. 10If you obey my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have obeyed my Father's commands and remain in his love. 11I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete. 12My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. 13Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.”. Notice especially that last verse and then let’s go to the cross. Let us stand once again at the foot of the cross of Jesus, the incarnate God of the universe who willingly left heaven to come to earth and humble himself, let us remember the whip and the crown and the nails, and then let us once again ask the question, does love hurt? As Christians talk about wanting to be “Christlike”, wanting to be like Jesus, and we think that means we are just going to be “nice”. We think it means we’ll avoid conflict, won’t stir up trouble, won’t be noticeable, we’ll just be sweet and kind and nice and plain and innocent. We think the same thing when we talk about being loving. We associate this idea of love with the idea of smooth sailing, happy feeling, problem avoiding, life-is-just-super-okay-cause-I’m-just-loving-like-Jesus! But that, my friends, is not what I see when I look at the cross, which I believe is the greatest example of love and is the fulfillment of Jesus’ statement that “greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.” Where do we get this notion that love doesn’t hurt? That love makes life easier?? That love means that everything will be nice??? We certainly don’t get that from looking at the life, death, and example of Jesus. So then why on earth would we bother? If love equals pain, if “love, to be true, has to hurt”, why would we pursue a life of love? Why bother loving, if it hurts? Answer, because it is worth it! What does it mean to love? What does it mean to be like Jesus – to live like Him, to love like Him, to live in obedience to Jesus’ command in **John 15:12**, “My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you.” How then should we love? How do we actually live a love for God and a love for others? The cultural message is that life is about meeting someone, growing to “love” them in some form or other, and then moving on to the next relationship, which many of us have watched hundreds of times on television - let me ask this question: can love ever be temporary? Our conception of “love” in general, not just in romantic relationships can love ever be temporary? I think that one major message of our culture is that it is okay for love to be temporary, and to last as long as it seems to “work” in one way or another. We see this in friendships, in small groups, in marriages, in our commitment to relationships with people in our church community, even sometimes in family relationships. We live in the middle of a culture that says that love is okay and good and desirable as long as everything is working out, which we then instinctively evaluate based on how this relationship or circumstance meets our needs. Was Jesus’ love ever temporary? On the highest “plane”, I think we’d all say “no” – Jesus’ love for humanity has existed since the beginning of creation, when God molded us, when God breathed His Spirit of life into us, and it will continue into eternity. But how about in Jesus’ human relationships – in those, as a model for us – did Jesus ever love with a temporary love? And what then does that mean for us? Let’s go to 1 Cor 13:7-8, “(love) **always** protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.” Once again, are these little more than nice-sounding ideals, or does God intend for us to somehow live by them? And do they only apply to people closest to us – those we love “most”, and not the other, less-important relationships, or even people we don’t know personally? We all recognize that we live in a culture where people move in and out of each other’s lives constantly, so how can we possibly live a love that ALWAYS perseveres/trusts/hopes/protects? The whole idea of love as something strong and permanent, with words like “ALWAYS”, is what love REALLY is. Our cultures experience of love being temporary is what makes it so hard for us to really accept the love of God for us. See, God’s love isn’t like the love we have known from other people, but on a deep level within us that is really hard to believe and accept because it is so different from what we have experienced. God’s love is different, God’s love is steadfast and faithful and “always protects, always trusts, always hopes, and always perseveres. Love never fails.” God’s love is not the same as the love of the parent that let you down or abused you, of the friend who betrayed you, of the spouse who abandoned you, or of the child who rejected you. God’s love is not the same as that! God’s love is perfect, beautiful, full of power, moving and strong, and there is NOTHING that can “separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? 36As it is written: "For your sake we face death all day long; we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered."37No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. 38For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, 39neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Rom 8:36-39). THAT’S how powerful God’s love is! God’s love is so powerful, that it can heal us from all the wounds we’ve experienced from the harm done to us by those whom we trusted to love us but who actually hurt us deeply. That’s the great, amazing, hopeful, incredibly good news. But in order to be healed by the love of God, we must allow ourselves to be loved. We must open ourselves to be loved by God. And that is sometimes a tough thing to do, when we’ve had experience after experience of risking and getting hurt. I think a lot of people are walking through life coping but desperately needing to take the risk of letting God’s love really wash over them and start to heal. It can be hard, but it is very much worth it. Where do people find the motivation to take those steps, to get past the hurdles, to face the hurts of the past? Sometimes the circumstances of life, sometimes an inner resolve, but often it comes from hearing the story of another person who has travelled a similar path. And this, my friends is where this whole message about God’s unfailing love, and God’s command for us to love “our neighbor”, and all the Scriptural messages about being a “witness” to God’s great love, this is where it all comes down to the second of Jesus’ commands described for us in 1 Cor 13. You and I need to love people enough that we share our story of God loving us perfectly, and how that has healed, restored, transformed, and set us free. It’s not about having all the answers to the theological questions, it is not about debating and convincing, it is not about confrontation or pressure or manipulation. The story of the Kingdom of God goes like this: God loves me perfectly. My life has some hurts and pains, some self-inflicted and some inflicted by others. But when I opened my messed-up life to that perfect love of God, God did some amazing things for me. Now your story has different details than my story – the hurts are different and so are the amazing things God does – but the story is the same, and the story needs to be told. And in the telling, there is incredible joy, and in the telling is a powerful expression of love. The Vision: When I think about God’s vision for Cane Creek, this vision of love manifests itself in three ways: 1. Loving God deeply. This is the heart of the Christian message – God loves you. God’s desire is to bring life to death, bring healing to hurt, and to bring forgiveness instead of condemnation, mercy instead of judgment. 2. Loving one another deeply. God’s vision for us is that we love one another deeply. That we nurture, care, that we help one another grow. Like a greenhouse, where plants are cared for and nurtured with tenderness so that they might grow strong and bear much fruit. 3. Loving others into the Kingdom of God. What about all the rest of the people in the world who are lonely? What about all the people who are desperate to know the kind of love I’ve been talking about? Who are, literally, dying and in need of help? God needs us to love those people. This is God’s vision of His church being like a hospital. A place of healing, of restoration, of taking broken and hurting people and mending wounds, ministering to broken hearts, and seeing the transforming power of love as we choose to love. If we do not love God deeply through worship, we wither and die and miss the main thing for which we were created. We dull the ache, we medicate it in the hope that it won’t bother us, but it will eat us away from the inside until there is nothing good left. If we do not love one another deeply then others will wither and die. And if we do not love others who are lost then we are condemning people to eternal death. But if we do… If we love God deeply through worship, we will be able to look into the eyes of the Father and see and know and feel the depth of His love, and we will return it. We will be set free in that love, and we will be unstoppable in living a life of gratitude and of joy. If we love one another deeply, broken and hurting people will be loved back to life, people that had been written off or who had written themselves off will be energized and engaged, and new life will grow. And that will be multiplied as their lives bear fruit which then brings life to others. And if we will love others, by building relationships and friendships, by being open and vulnerable and by sharing ourselves and our lives with them, then they will see what true life can be like. God changes eternities. And He does so through us. Wouldn’t you like to be a part of all that? To find meaning, significance, and purpose? To be used by the God of the Universe in the incredible business of loving? You can be, by using the gifts He has given you. God will change the world, through your love. Conclusion: So let me conclude with this: “36"Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?" 37Jesus replied: " ’Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’[b] 38This is the first and greatest commandment. 39And the second is like it: ’Love your neighbor as yourself.’[c] 40All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments." (**Matt 22:36-40**).
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