6 EASTER GLORIA DEI, ANCHORAGE
MAY 14, 2006 PASTOR SCOTT FULLER
ACTS 10:44-48; PSALM 98; I JOHN 5:1-6; JOHN 15:9-17
Prepare our hearts, Lord, to receive your Word. Silence in us any voice but your own that in hearing we may believe and in believing we may obey your will revealed to us in Jesus Christ. Amen.
Dear friends in Christ: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
Moments ago, we listened to the Bible lessons for today. In recalling the readings from both First John and the Gospel of John, did any word seem to stand out more than the others? Well, in those two little paragraphs, the word love is mentioned a total of fourteen times! Maybe we’d better explore this a little. Let’s start with this basic question: In general, what does it mean to love?
Part of why we’re all over the map with examples is that we use the word love so casually in our culture. The Beetles sing: All you need is love. Then there’s that tear-jerker of a children’s book entitled: I Love You Forever. Say the line with me: I love you forever. I like you for always. As long as I’m living, my baby you’ll be. Or maybe it’s best defined by that line from the movie: Love Story: Love means you never have to say you’re sorry. And at this time of the year, there’s always that heart-felt Alaskan phrase, Don’t you just love the warmth in the sun?
On top of that, Hollywood’s handling of falling in love and making love… only makes it worse. Carolyn and I recently watched a movie in which the main female character was battling issues of trust in her relationships. After a couple of failures, she was a little gun-shy about starting another. But then, wouldn’t you know it, she met someone new, Cupid shot his arrow, and, well, how do couples show that they love each other in the movies?
They jump in to bed…The problems start when they start to get to know each other. Then the man discovers that his “lover” will share with him her body…but not her heart. That, my friends, is not love.
Maybe we should limit our discussion to what love means in our lessons for today…any ideas? In other words, how, exactly, are we supposed to love one another? What should that love look like? Well, Jesus gives us one concrete example: No one has greater love than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. Does anyone have a friend...whom you love so deeply… that you would die in their place?...Does Jesus mean that literally?
We discussed this at our Church Council meeting on Thursday. It seems to me that, like many of the outrageous things Jesus says, love your enemy, forgive seventy times seven, turn the other cheek, he really means this one as well. I think it’s supposed to: stop us in our tracks, catch in our throats, bind our hearts, throw us for a loop...and change the way that things are done.
I went to two meetings this week…actually, I went to a lot of meetings this week, but two had to do with this very topic. At both we talked about the importance of God’s love for all people. At both we talked about how our faith plays itself out in our daily walk of life…but only in one of them did the people present actually put their proclamation on the pavement, did they turn their talk about love into a walk of love.
I was puzzled by the one and blessed by the other…and later it came to me why: it’s rare “out there” when a person or a group acts as if these words of Jesus are true. Says the Lord, I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another. Guess which of the meetings I enjoyed the most? The one in which our shared faith in God opened the door to help us love our neighbor.
Last February, AFACT (our community organizing ministry) sponsored an action that was held in the sanctuary down at Central Lutheran Church. Hundreds of people from the Catholic Native Ministries, the Alaska Native Lutheran Congregation, and others, came to talk with Superintendent Carol Comeau about the painful experience of Native kids in our school district.
One woman at the microphone shared some of her pain, then shared this beautiful insight. She said, I’ve spoken about these problems before, but I never dreamed I’d be able to do it while standing in front of…the altar.
One more AFACT story, again down at Central Lutheran. Last Wednesday evening, 200 people gathered to talk about the struggles of those who live and work right around the church in that West Fairview area. A half-dozen middle-school boys, all Native, have adopted Central Lutheran as their Church. They’re there because two afternoons a week, Central opens its doors to the neighborhood for a free after-school program.
It is one of the very few places IN TOWN that they feel safe…and for very good reasons. These young men stood in front of that crowd and showed us a map of their 8-10 square block home area. Then they highlighted fourteen different places where people buy/sell drugs, find prostitutes, or gather to get drunk. Their question for the city was: Can you help our families keep us safe? And, I think, the question behind it was: Can you help our families keep us from falling into those same traps?
I am excited about how AFACT is leading us, how the Church, through our faith in God, is sending us out into our faith community and our neighborhoods: to listen to the needs of our neighbors and then help them help themselves. This, I think, is some of the best fruit of the love that Jesus is talking about…the love poured out upon us in Christ that helps us love one another. Amen.