“Love…Love Changes Everything!”

Matthew 22:35-40

Date:  January 6, 2008

Preacher:  J. Michael Smith

Place:  Grace United Methodist Church, Urbana, IL

“A lawyer asked Jesus a question to test him.  “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?”  He said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’  This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it:  ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’  On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”  (Matthew 22:35-40 NRSV)

            Since this is the first Sunday of the New Year, it seems as though we should start with the most important teaching of the Christian faith:  first things first.

            And the most important thing for Christians—more important than anything else—is the commandment that we love God, totally.  I believe that:  that in order to be a genuine Christian that I should love God with my whole heart, soul, strength, and mind.

            I’d like for us to explore the realm of LOVE this morning.  And we’ll begin by contrasting the difference between the way the Bible portrays love—and the assumptions our culture promotes.

            First of all, (in the Bible), love is not a feeling.  Love isn’t a feel-good phenomenon.  Jesus didn’t always have a warm and eager feeling toward others.  Sometimes he felt weary.  Sometimes he felt frustrated.  Sometimes he felt overwhelmed.  Sometimes he felt irritated.  Sometimes he felt angry.  And on occasion, he simply had to get away from people—perhaps to make sure his negative feelings didn’t drive him to do something harmful.  It is possible to go for a long stretch of time--loving someone—but not having positive feelings about him or her.  Love influences our feelings, but love isn’t the same thing as a feeling. 

            For example, when I’m trying to figure out whether another person genuinely loves me (or not)—I don’t put much stock in the feelings that person demonstrates.  People may feel things they don’t show.  And a person’s feelings toward me at any given moment may or may not be about me.  Feelings come and go.  They are notably volatile and transient.  Love, on the other hand, is known for its quality of steadfastness, especially in the Bible.  And we know that feelings are NEVER steadfast—unless a person is mentally ill—unable to get over a feeling and get on with life.

            So if genuine love isn’t about feelings, what then is it about?  Love has two essential components.  It consists of motive and effort.  We see this in the way Jesus lived his life.  Jesus never talked much about the feelings he had toward people.  But he was transparent about his motives in regard to others.  Jesus’ motives were always rooted in the well-being and growth of others.  So—first is motive, and second is effort.  Jesus constantly made an effort to help people become well, to help people grow. 

            Love does not operate from a selfish motive.  It is generated and guided by the realities of the other person and the solid desire we hold for the other person to survive, mature, and flourish. 

            In his book, The Road Less Traveled, Scott Peck describes a young man in therapy who told his psychiatrist, “My mother loved me so much that she wouldn’t even let me ride the school bus until I was a senior in high school.  And even then, I had to beg.”  Did this mother really love her son?  Some folks (including the son himself) thought she did.  But in reality, what appeared to be love was actually neurosis, sickness!  This mother was not driven by a motive to help her son mature.  She was driven by the motive to be in control.  Things are not always what they appear.  What appears to be love may actually be its opposite—selfishness:  unconcerned with the well-being and growth of the other.  You know that someone else loves you if that person has gotten into position to promote your survival, maturing, and flourishing. 

            We now move on to effort, the second essential element of love.  Love demands effort.  Motives without effort are mere rubbish.  It is said that the road to hell is paved with good intentions:  motives minus the efforts.

            When we look at the phenomenon of love in our lives, it occurs to me that love requires six necessary efforts:  listening, presence, flexibility, detachment, commitment, and sacrifice.  There is no true love without these six.  (I offer these six “necessary efforts” as a result of my own experiences, my understanding of Jesus, and my reading.  When I have failed to love someone, the failure is almost always due to my failure in one or more of those six “necessary efforts.”  Likewise, when I have experienced love, those six efforts are always present.  The non-biblical reading which has influenced my thinking the most in this area is Scott Peck’s 1978 book, The Road Less Traveled.)

            I want to briefly define each of these six efforts.  First is listening.  There is no such thing as love without listening.  Peck paints the picture of a parent listening to a six year old child.  He says that there are five levels of listening:  ranging from the least listening to the most.  The lowest level of listening is to tell the child to shut up—to not even let them talk.  (There are moments when it is better for children to be seen and not heard!)  The second level of listening is to let the child talk but ignore everything.  A third level is to pretend to listen.  (I myself have become quite skilled at this third level.  It is also the level many of you in the congregation are probably practicing right now!)  A fourth level is to listen selectively:  not paying attention to everything, but trying to tune in when the child appears to be saying something important.  And the fifth level of listening is hard work:  it involves bracketing out all our other thoughts and feelings and locking in on what the child is saying—everything—for a sustained period of time.  That fifth level of listening requires enormous energy, patience, suspension of judgment, alertness, and mental agility.  There are some people who have never in their lives had anyone listen to them at the fifth level.  But genuine love requires significant time logged at the fifth level.

            Second, genuine love involves simple presence:  shared time and space.  There doesn’t have to be constant talking and listening for love to occur.  Love also involves common experiences:  shared sights and sounds and smells and places and people and events.  Love invests significant time in creating mutual memories.  Spending the time with another person is a necessary act of loving:  whether it be playing games, attending events, traveling, working together, or partnering to help others. 

            The third necessary effort of love is flexibility.  There is a time for embracing—and a time for letting go.  There is a time for softness—and a time for toughness.  There is a time for tears—and a time for taking a deep breath and pressing onward.  There is a time to lend a hand, or a dollar—and a time to say no.  There is a time to give the beloved a fish—and a time to teach how to fish.  When we genuinely love someone, we have to recalculate every day just what we should do—and sometimes it is hour by hour.  The motive determines the action:  what action will help our beloved survive, mature, and flourish? 

            The fourth necessary effort of genuine love is the practice of detachment:  honoring the separateness of the other person.  It is impossible to truly love another person who has (in our minds) been reduced to a mere extension of our own selves.  Some people are incapable of love because they are so self centered that they are unable to see a child, a spouse, or a friend as distinct, unique, living his or her own life.  And while it is indeed a true joy when we can identify with another person, (experiencing common feelings and thoughts), we can only go so far without becoming unhealthy.  In the wake of psychological fusion, two unique and special persons are “missing in action.”  Mature love is knowing that each individual is distinct--and each one of us has a unique destiny from God.  Even the individuals we know intimately contain a complex of mysteries and privacies which we will never be able to broach, even in our imaginations. 

Sometimes the effort to detach can be very difficult, especially if detachment leaves us feeling lonely—as it usually does.  In such cases, true love requires the effort of courage—to face being all alone in our own separateness.  Love is painful, and it takes effort to endure the pain without turning to re-fusion.

            Fifth, love requires commitment.  The word “commitment” comes from a Latin root and literally means to “put it out there.”  A commitment is a resolution to share the future with a person:  come what may.  When we are committed to another person, we are determined to be resourceful and resilient—reliable in troubled times, industrious during the good ones.  The people who really love us are the ones we can count on to stick with us, no matter what—always finding a way to nurture our growth.  Commitment is real love, and it is hard, and it is rare in this world.

            Sixth, love demands self-sacrifice, an effort indeed.  We risk our very personalities being changed by the person we love.  When we love someone, we are going to lose a part of who we are.  When we love someone, we are partially changed by that person.  The people we love most change us the most.  (Jesus said that we cannot enter into a deeply loving relationship with God without losing our own selves.)  Anyone who truly loves me takes the risk of being changed by me.  I cannot, for example, truly love my wife while simultaneously hanging on to everything about me.  Likewise, when I became a parent, I gave up a part of my identity.  I had to change.  Love has made me a very different person from who I was 26 years ago. 

            To summarize love:  it is motive and effort.  The motive is the well-being and growth of the beloved.  And effort requires listening, presence, flexibility, detachment, commitment, and sacrifice. 

            When we think of love as the motive we bring to a relationship and the efforts we put into a relationship (rather than the transitory feelings we have about someone), it becomes clear that real love can make a huge difference in our human relationships. 

            Finally, I’d like for us also to reflect on what it means to love God.  Sometimes it’s hard for me to have feelings about God.  God is so mysterious to me, and sometimes so confusing, and sometimes so hard for me to conceptualize, that I don’t always have strong feelings about God.  But that doesn’t mean that I don’t love God—because love has to do with the motive I bring into my relationship with God.  And my love for God comes alive in the efforts I put into that relationship.

            If the motive of love is always the well-being and growth of the beloved, how can I contribute anything to the well-being and growth of God?  After all, God is all powerful, all knowing, and perfect.  Fortunately, Jesus shows us that the way we love God is to love the Kingdom of God.  Jesus talked more about the Kingdom of God than he did any other topic.  When our motive is the advancement of God’s Kingdom, that’s how we love God.  Our motive in life is peace on earth, goodwill among all people, the dawning of justice, and recovery for all who suffer.  We love God when our motive is the well-being and growth of God’s Kingdom.  We promote the Kingdom of God when we worship God, when we exalt him, when we praise him, when we publish our thanksgivings to him.

            And we love God when we put effort into our relationship with God.  We love God when we listen to God:  which eventually involves some serious engagement with the Bible.  We love God when we allow ourselves to be simply present to God:  which we do when we worship frequently and faithfully.  We love God when we are flexible:  not stuck in self-righteous scruples or empty piety—but always listening for the fresh and living word from God, wrestled from lively conversation among people of faith.  We love God when we are detached from God:  in other words, we do not domesticate God to our desires and thinking—but we continue to be awed by the uniqueness of who God really is—as displayed by the Old and New Testaments.  We love God when we commit ourselves to God:  especially through our loyalty to the church, resilient and resourceful and reliable as members of the body of Christ, the people of God.  And we love God when we are willing to lose a part of who we are—to be changed by the relationship.  Through a deepening life of faith, we are reshaped, transformed, spiritually quickened, becoming more and more the likeness of Jesus himself.