{"id":117,"date":"2010-04-18T19:24:59","date_gmt":"2010-04-19T00:24:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.newunionchristianchurch.org\/home\/?p=117"},"modified":"2010-04-18T19:24:59","modified_gmt":"2010-04-19T00:24:59","slug":"sermon-love-changes-april-18-2010","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.newunionchristianchurch.org\/home\/2010\/04\/18\/sermon-love-changes-april-18-2010\/","title":{"rendered":"Sermon: Love Changes April 18, 2010"},"content":{"rendered":"

These are fascinating Scripture passages, each deserving of careful dissection and reflection, but we don\u2019t have time for that in a sermon.\u00a0 \u00a0But let\u2019s take a quick look at some interesting and curious things about these passages, not all–or we would be here for hours this morning.<\/p>\n

First we have the story of\u00a0 Saul\u2019s conversion:\u00a0 the persecutor of the early church who loved God so passionately that he thought that the way to serve God was to prevent change, and to haul off all those people who were disrupting life in the synagogues in the Roman empire to jail and worse.\u00a0\u00a0 Flannery O\u2019Connor once said of Paul:\u00a0 \u201cI reckon the Lord knew that the only way to make a Christian out of that one was to knock him off his horse.\u201d He had been on a high horse, for sure, in his zeal that led him to breathe \u201cthreats and murder against the disciples of the Lord.\u201d\u00a0 Paul has to be taken to the house of a man named Judas on a street called \u201cStraight\u201d, perhaps reminding us of another Judas whose life took a crooked path to a dead-end.\u00a0 The disciple Ananias who lived in Damascus is given the responsibility to help the senseless Saul regain his capacity to see, and he sure doesn\u2019t want the job.\u00a0 Who among us would want the task of having to relate to someone who has intended you and your community deep harm?\u00a0 Could you do it?<\/p>\n

The Gospel story comes after it seems that the book has ended at the end of chapter 20.\u00a0 But, as if to suggest that the story of Jesus has no ending, we are given this additional story of the third appearance of Jesus.\u00a0\u00a0 It is interesting to note that there were only 7 disciples present this time, and they have decided to go back to life as it used to be\u2013 despite those two earlier experiences. \u00a0\u00a0The seven include Peter, who denied Jesus 3 times; Thomas\u2014who had to see and touch the wounds of the risen Christ; Nathanael\u2014who had early on exclaimed:\u00a0 \u201cCan any good come out of Nazareth?\u201d; the sons of Zebedee who don\u2019t deserve to be named perhaps because their egos had gotten too big to be tolerated very well in the inner circle; and two others who are unnamed, although we learn later that one of them is the \u201cdisciple whom Jesus loved\u201d.\u00a0\u00a0 As for the other 4, the author or redactor of this epilogue gives us no clue.\u00a0 They are clearly not part of this core group, and have probably gone home and back to their old routines, thinking:\u00a0 \u201cwell, it was fun\/meaningful\/exciting (take your pick) while it lasted.\u201d<\/p>\n

A couple of interesting tid-bits from the Gospel story:\u00a0\u00a0 Note that the disciple fish for fish in the dark. \u00a0John\u2019s Gospel makes a great deal of the light-dark dichotomy.\u00a0\u00a0 At daybreak, the light reveals someone standing on the beach.\u00a0\u00a0 Working in the dark produces nothing;\u00a0 whereas working in the light, in the instruction of Jesus, produces such a catch of fish that they can hardly pull it in. \u00a0\u00a0Perhaps it is meant to remind the reader of Luke\u2019s account of the miraculous catch of fish early on in his Gospel, Chapter 5 to be exact, when Peter, and the sons of Zebedee, are called to become \u201cfishers of people.\u201d\u00a0 \u00a0Despite the diversity of fish caught\u2014which is the presumed meaning of the number 153\u2014the net doesn\u2019t break.\u00a0 The net later becomes an image of the church.\u00a0 The metaphor may mean to communicate that\u00a0 diversity will not break or destroy the church.\u00a0 How wonderful that would be if we could give up the effort of trying to exclude those that mainstream society often designates as “junk” or “trash”, or somehow, unworthy of inclusion and ministry within the church!<\/p>\n

Another curiosity of this text:\u00a0 Only in this passage does Jesus invite Peter to \u201cfollow him\u201d.\u00a0 Nowhere else in John\u2019s Gospel is such an invitation given to Peter.<\/p>\n

All that is Bible study and more could be said, had we time.<\/p>\n

What I want to talk about is the effect of love.\u00a0 Love, my title for this sermon says, changes.\u00a0\u00a0 Changes what? you may ask. \u00a0 Love changes love itself. \u00a0Love change the lover. \u00a0Love changes the beloved. \u00a0Love change everything. \u00a0\u00a0Love itself changes, as we all know:\u00a0 first it begins with fascination, then moves to infatuation.\u00a0\u00a0 In its first stages, the lover wants the beloved to be the magical person in their life who completes them. \u00a0\u00a0Such love, puppy love we call it, is self-centered, and seeks to elevate the self by acquiring the love of the one whom one adores, as if it were a possession. \u00a0In more mature stages of love, love recognizes that to truly love requires a wholeness in each partner that can be melded together.\u00a0 \u00a0As love blossoms, it begins to unfold in far more complex ways, and realizes that more complex responses are required between lover and beloved.\u00a0 It is not that there are empty places that the beloved will fill.\u00a0 One has to fill in one\u2019s own empty places and then love deepens, and broadens, and can \u201cbear all things, believe all things, hope all things, endure all things,\u201d as St. Paul so eloquently write. \u00a0\u00a0Eventually, love becomes what the Greek word agape<\/em> signifies:\u00a0 that self-giving form of love that would sacrifice limb and life for the sake of the beloved, a love that so unites the lovers that they become extensions of the other.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0So love per se, in itself, as an emotion, changes in quality, and in its actions.<\/p>\n

So long as love remains in a\u00a0 state of neediness, it will tend to be demanding, manipulative, jealous.\u00a0 So Saul\u2019s great love of God and of the Jewish law which he imagined to be his strength, became instead his weakness.\u00a0 He learned, as he writes in Galatians 2, that \u201cno one will be justified by the works of the law.\u201d<\/p>\n

One might find a parallel between those who are currently declaring their great love for our country, and who are muttering veiled threats about taking back our country, while wanting to keep its benefits to themselves, rather than understanding that more complex times require something vastly different than the founders of our nation ever conceived, but whose ideals for the kind of society this would be can still give us guidance and goals for our life together, but not the specifics about how, in each time, to implement those ideals. \u00a0Love becomes much more nuanced, and far more complex the more intense it becomes. \u00a0Love rarely becomes simple, or without flaws and difficulties. \u00a0So too with the objects of our love.<\/p>\n

We all know, too well, that love changes the lover as well.\u00a0 If one truly loves another\u2014or even an ideal, or say, one\u2019s country\u2014change is inevitable.\u00a0\u00a0 Each of us has known love:\u00a0 love for our parents, perhaps, which made us want to either please them if they were persons whose love we sought and whose respect we desired; or perhaps, we learned that to truly love our parents we had to move beyond their limitations, their failings.\u00a0 We have each, I dare say, loved other persons\u2014one who would become a partner in life; friend who over the years became more dear to us than we might ever have imagined.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Some of us have loved the work that we felt was ours to do.\u00a0 In some of these instances, betrayals, the failure to sustain love and relationship over time through increasingly complex situations, can be soul-searing experiences.<\/p>\n

You know that you have been changed by the act of loving. \u00a0\u00a0Sometimes you have changed for the better; but love\u2019s capacity to tear our hearts in two can also cause us to hide from deep love ever again. No wonder love is so often betrayed as a cuddly cherub bearing a bow and arrow.\u00a0\u00a0 Love can be sweet and <\/span>can deliver hurtful arrows that may remain open wounds for the rest of our lives.\u00a0 No wonder that so many people keep their psychic distance from love, from commitment, even from close friendship.<\/p>\n

Paul and Peter portray lovers whose love changed them radically \u00a0 and the one they loved\u2014in Paul\u2019s case, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of Moses and Elijah and all the prophets.\u00a0\u00a0 Saul\u2014knocked flat by a light and a voice that says he is Jesus\u2014doesn\u2019t understand for some days what has happened to him, until Ananias came and prayed for him.\u00a0\u00a0 In a community of prayer, love\u2019s grace transforms the one who cannot see into one who at last doe see.\u00a0\u00a0 He is restored to community through prayer, baptism, the sharing of a meal, and then begins his radical mission to bring the name of Jesus before Gentiles and Kings and the people of Israel.<\/p>\n

In Peter\u2019s case, his beloved was the itinerant rabbi Jesus, whom the power and principalities could not control and over whom death had no final say.\u00a0\u00a0 \u201cDo you love me,\u201d Jesus asks Peter three times, to stand against the three-fold betrayal of Jesus by Peter.\u00a0 The question, in its tenderness, is an absolution.\u00a0 In the absolution come the restoration and participation in the breakfast feast of the coming kingdom\u2014recalling the great feeding of the 5000 with the 2 fish and 5 loaves of bread; and in the restoration, there comes a commission, a task\u2026follow me.<\/p>\n

Finally, love changes the beloved, too.\u00a0\u00a0 For love requires all those things Paul talks about in 1 Corinthians 13:\u00a0 patience; kindness; courtesy; respect. \u00a0\u00a0If God did not change, then the understanding of who God really is changed because of love.<\/p>\n

Ours is not a God of absolute justice, whose law must be satisfied and the price paid in some measure for all the sin in the world.\u00a0 Ours is NOT a god that must be appeased by sacrifice.\u00a0 \u00a0That is NOT what the Gospel \u00a0or even the cross are about.\u00a0\u00a0 What the Gospel of Jesus Christ presents is a God who, as the prophets before him also knew, makes all things new; the God of second chances, the God of grace; the God who longs for our love, who wants our reconciliation with our divided selves, for restoration to a relationship with all that is holy; who forgives and transforms us to lives of hope and meaning and purpose.<\/p>\n

No wonder that we say, with the writer of First John, that God is love.\u00a0 Love changes love.\u00a0 Love changes the lover.\u00a0 Love changes our understanding of the beloved.\u00a0 Love must be freely given and freely received and freely returned.\u00a0 Love frees us from all that makes us unproductive.\u00a0 Love restores us to wholeness and calls us to community.\u00a0\u00a0 And love invites us into a new future.\u00a0 \u00a0Jesus asks you and me today:\u00a0 Do you love me?\u00a0 He wants to meet us where we are, to feed us, to absolve us from all the betrayals and half-hearted ways that we have done things, even living our faith, to restore us to \u00a0fullness of community, and to send us forth with a meaning and purpose.\u00a0 So may we let the scales fall from our eyes, and see; so may we know that every one of us is invited by our holy lover to follow the one, whom John says, was in the beginning with God, and in him was life, the life that is the light of all people.\u00a0 The light still shines in the darkness and the darkness does not overcome it.\u00a0 Love changes everything.\u00a0 Amen.<\/p>\n

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These are fascinating Scripture passages, each deserving of careful dissection and reflection, but we don\u2019t have time for that in a sermon.\u00a0 \u00a0But let\u2019s take a quick look at some interesting and curious things about these passages, not all–or we<\/p>\n

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