I’m a big fan of green peas. Even the frozen kind that you nuke for 4.5 minutes right before dinner. With just a little butter on top, they fit almost every plate perfectly. Eileen and Josh don’t share my affinity for the petite verdant delicacies – at least not to the same degree – but we’re all fans of peas in a pinch.
Anyway, there’s an interesting and pithy bit of wisdom tucked away in Proverbs 15:17. It’s worded like this: “Better a small serving of vegetables with love than a fattened calf with hatred.” Wow. That’s a mouthful (pun fully intended). What good’s a party if the guests don’t even like each other? Where’s the fun in that?
I guess that’s the Bible’s way of reminding us that the food on the table isn’t nearly as important as the love around the table. Excellent point. Sage counsel for all of us pilgrims along the way. It is, after all, “the fear of the Lord” – just one verse earlier – that helps us find our contentment not in the stuff of life – but in the deeper matters of the heart. When Christ is in it, even a little daily bread can be received with delight and thanksgiving.
We’re all prone to hatred – as the Scriptures so clearly testify – but you and I don’t want to live there. We know better. So my goal today is to remind us how privileged we are to be the Lord’s ambassadors of love – even when and where lovelessness might seem to abound.
So how do we love?
Eleanor Roosevelt once notably quipped: “The giving of love is an education in itself.” The popular advice columnist, Ann Landers (her real name was Esther Pauline “Eppie” Lederer), defined love as “friendship that has caught fire.” And the American novelist and poet, John Updike, expressed the wonder of romantic love like this: “We are most alive when we are in love.” Across the pond and more than a century earlier, the English Victorian poet known as Alfred, Lord Tennyson captured the famous sentiment: “‘Tis better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all.”
We know from Christ’s compelling story of the Good Samaritan that the human race is exceptionally adept at making excuses for why we don’t have to love this or that person – “Who is my neighbor?” asked the lawyer insincerely – but such smug self-righteousness doesn’t get us off the hook. Jesus was very clear: whoever needs us is our real neighbor. G.K. Chesterton said it well: “The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people.” It was also Chesterton who penned: “To love anything is to see it at once under lowering skies of danger. Loyalty implies loyalty in misfortune.”
You and I are called to loyal love. It was Martin Luther King Jr. who preached: “Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend.” Sang rather melodiously Michael W. Smith: “Friends are friends forever if the Lord’s the Lord of them.”
Love is exhilarating! Exciting! Enduring! Fun and funny. It was Agatha Christie who noted: “It is a curious thought, but it is only when you see people looking ridiculous that you realize just how much you love them.” The politician, essayist, and playwright of “Les Misérables” fame, Victor Hugo, keenly and rightly observed: “The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves.” Indeed. And the French aviator and writer, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, offered his own insight into the mystery of love: “Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.”
Love is costly. Calvary’s cross is Exhibit A.
The business guru and motivational speaker, Simon Sinek, warns via Facebook: “Love is giving someone the power to destroy you and hoping they don’t use it.” From his professional experiences at Oxford and Cambridge, and from the pit of his own personal agony, C.S. Lewis – who had much to say on the subject of love’s inherent risk – left us with this sobering reality check: “To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, perhaps the most influential writer in the German language, took a stab at the selfless nature of true love: “Love does not dominate; it cultivates.” That’s good. I truly enjoy people’s real-life definitions of love, but in a sense each definition falls short, because each one of them is – knowingly or unknowingly – an attempt to define God. I say this, friends, because “God is love” (1 John 4:8, 16).
It is the gospel good news of Jesus that fuels all true love, and which liberates us from loving in all the wrong directions. St. Augustine prayed humbly before God: “He loves Thee too little, O Lord, who loves anything together with Thee which he loves not for Thy sake.” Love for God is our only starting point, and – without it – we are lost in pursuit of a fantasy. With a love for God, however, all of the love which we can express here on Earth becomes a signpost for amazing grace.
“For God so loved.”
So I shall let God speak for Himself. He used the Apostle Paul to summarize exquisitely the matter of our high calling in Jesus Christ (1 Corinthians 13:4-7): “Love is always patient and kind. It is never jealous. Love is never boastful or conceited. It is never rude or selfish. It does not take offense and is not resentful. Love takes no pleasure in other people’s sins, but delights in the truth. It is always ready to excuse, to trust, to hope, and to endure whatever comes.”
Peas be with you.
Pastor Charles
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