This Is a Sermon About Love

Sermon

This is a sermon about love. There’s a danger here, of course. What else is there to say about love? There are countless songs, movies, and books on the topic. It’s easy for talk about love to get overly sentimental and cliché or overly clinical and removed from experience.

I don’t know if what I’ll preach is anything you haven’t heard or if it will be that exciting. I just hope it will be true.

I remember getting the call from my mom a few years ago. “Your dad is in the hospital.”

Without getting into the details, my dad had a health scare that affected his heart. My family rushed him to the ER in the middle of the night, and it was very scary. As I drove from New York City to Jersey, I was thinking, Would he be OK? And if not, did I do everything I wanted to do with my dad?

I should say upfront that my dad is now fine; he’s watching this broadcast, laughing, and he’ll tell me he just played a few rounds of golf this month—there wasn’t any need to be afraid.

But many of us have had some situation like this when we are confronted with the fact that our time with the people in our life is limited.

This is even clearer in the times we live in. There is suffering all around us, disease that reminds us of our mortality. And when I talk to folks younger than me and teenagers especially, the future specter of climate change haunts them.

Our Scripture passage today reminds us that almost everything has an end. Prophecies, tongues, knowledge, and implicitly underneath, our lives as we know it, and all that we have done in it. So what do we do with what we’ve got in the time we have? And in the end what will last?

I do believe that the answer to all of this is love. That is indeed the overarching answer of the Bible, down to what Jesus Christ says is the Greatest Commandment:

Love the Lord your God. And love your neighbor as yourself.

But if this is the case, what exactly is the substance of this love? And why is it foundational and powerful?

I’ve been thinking a lot about love since bell hooks died. bell hooks, as Beth mentioned in a sermon a few weeks ago, is one of the most influential black feminist writers of our time and an author who has had a huge impact on me. And in her groundbreaking book “All About Love,” she makes the case for a specific definition of love.

bell hooks says that love primarily is not a feeling. We may have a feeling of connection that is a byproduct of love, and we’ll talk about these byproducts later.

But for hooks, love is primarily an action. She lifts up this definition from M. Scott Peck, love as “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.” Spiritual meaning the dimension of our core reality where mind, body, and spirit are one.

hooks adds that though we usually recognize love as affection, we need to see love as a mix of various ingredients – affection, yes; also care, recognition, commitment, trust, communication.

What would it mean to see love as an action, as the will to extend yourself to nurture another’s growth or your own?

For one, this emphasis on growth prevents us from diminishing the accountability and fierceness of love. Especially when it comes to justice, it’s tempting to say, “Don’t say those divisive things, don’t you want to be loving? Don’t you want unity?” But sometimes love means naming hurts done in the past. Love means not being passive but doing something about existential threats like white supremacy and lack of affordable housing and climate change, and, to echo the Scripture, love means rejoicing in the truth and not in wrongdoing.

What else would this definition of love mean? hooks emphasizes that love is a choice. You choose to extend yourself for another. And it’s not a one-time thing. You have to make the choice to love again and again.

A beautiful memoir came out last year called “Crying in H Mart,” about how Michelle Zauner in her mid-20s struggled with her 56-year-old mother, Chongmi, dying from stage IV cancer. The book has many examples of love as a choice you make again and again that anyone who has cared for someone sick knows too well; her book chronicles pages of prescriptions, changing sheets, spending nights in the hospital as her mom physically withered and became less and less coherent.

But one of the more hopeful stories that stuck with me is after it was clear that there was no more treatment to be done, her mother spent her last days in her own house. Michelle decides she and her boyfriend will get married before her mom dies, and Chongmi is determined to be healthy enough for a slow dance with her son-in-law. So, each day until the wedding, Michelle would hold her frail mother arm in arm as they went outside and walked around the house to build up her stamina. Chongmi was able to dance with her son-in-law.

Love is an action, a choice made over and over, to extend one’s self for the growth of another and your own. And with this definition, here is what our Scripture passage reveals for us:

Love breathes life into everything else. Love breathes life into everything else.

Just as God in the book of Genesis breathes life into the earth to create humanity, love breathes life into all that it touches.

This is the crux of Paul’s soaring rhetoric about how speaking tongues of angels and having prophetic powers and all knowledge was nothing without love.

When you use spiritual gifts to extend yourself for the growth of others, life flourishes. Our gifts and talents are used to bring people together and help each other be better people.

But all our gifts and actions and accomplishments become self-serving and destructive without love. To echo the Scripture, they become boastful and arrogant and insist on their own way.

As we talk about the work of the Deep Dive Task Force and what changes we need to make as a church, we need to remember this.

To build off Gregg’s sermon last week, this talk of change is not just change for its own sake but growth into what it means to love as a church in the 21^st century. We cannot just be about the preservation of Westminster the institution or keeping things as they have been to preserve what has worked for those already here. All the ways we use our spiritual gifts must be rooted and grounded in love, in the choice to extend ourselves for another’s spiritual growth and our own. Sometimes it will look like a fierce, just love for those whose backs are against the wall, and sometimes it will look like welcome for those who are unlike those who are already here. But it must always be love.

Now why such confidence in love’s power to bring life? It’s important to end with this, so let me build on my point.

Love breathes life into everything else. Because when you act out of love, God shows up. Let me say it again. Love breathes life into everything else. Because when you act out of love, God shows up.

When you choose to love, in a way that’s almost magical, you become an active participant in the mystery of the Trinity. God is Love, according to Scripture. This is why Paul can confidently say love never ends, because God never ends.

I think if we search within ourselves, we can sense that our acts of love carry the spark of the divine. Yes, when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end, but we sense glimpses of the complete in those byproducts of love that carry heavenly joy.

We see glimpses of the complete in the laughter of a child or grandchild as you push them on the swings, in the embrace of a friend or sibling who holds you after a good cry, in the cheers of a wedding toast that was illegal just a few years earlier, in the “thank you” from someone you had gone out of your way to serve, in the energy of people flooding the streets rising up for a better world, in touching the dimples and wrinkles of your beloved’s face whom you’ve shared so many tears and arguments and pain and joy, and yes, I saw a glimpse of heaven at the sight of my dad on the hospital bed cracking jokes hours after his health scare.

And in these glimpses of the complete, we sense in our heart of hearts that love is worth it, that love never ends, that God shows up. So in these grim, heavy times, choose love, again and again. In the end, it may be all that we have.