In her all-time number one best-selling single, Tina Turner (THE Tina Turner whose legs are insured by Lloyds of London) asked the most critical question of 1984 – the critical question of all time: “What’s love got to do, got to do with it?”
Believe it or not, Tina makes me ask you – makes me ask myself – this: What does love have to do with all of this? What does God’s love look like?
To be clear about what I’m after, I’m not really asking about attributes, or characteristics, of God’s love, nor am I quizzing myself, or you, on long-forgotten theological terms from seminary. As a side note, the old joke still stands: “What do you call a young man in seminary who makes Cs in theology? Father!”
Declarations about God’s love are deeply powerful for describing God’s love, but I’m not asking about those either. Things like, “Jesus loves me this I know” or “Jesus is the friend of sinners” are of course true – very true indeed – but I’m really after something else. I’m asking what God’s love looks like in the sense of how is His love made most manifest practically speaking – most matter of fact, most in your face, as the idiom goes?
If you go online or go to Walgreens after mass, you’ll see all sorts of greeting cards that conclude with the words “I love you.” You should know that according to the American Greeting Card Association, Americans purchase approximately 6.5 billion greeting cards each year, making it an $8 billion industry. If you go almost anywhere in early February, you’ll see heart-shaped boxes of chocolate, and even heart-shaped candy, that when given to someone else is supposed to mean “I love you.”
Has anyone ever given you a gift, or written you a complimentary note or text, and signed it, “I love you?” It feels good, doesn’t it? Or what about the first time someone sent a text to you with a heart emoji? There are 29 heart emojis on your iPhone, by the way, and they all are supposed to communicate something about love. Earlier this week (true story) our Facilities Manager, Steve Wernet, replied to a text I sent him about some lighting, saying, “thanks,” and then he sent a heart emoji. When I texted back to say how much I appreciated the heart emoji, he said the heart was “for someone else.” So much for flattery.
In Alabama, however, and in other parts of the South, it’s considered appropriate to flatter your friends by saying, “I just love you.” And the longer into the night the party goes, the more you’re supposed to say it to the host. And, when it’s said enough over and over, it becomes almost believable.
Are any of us here willing to admit that when certain people tell us how wonderful we are that we really relish it, saying to ourselves, “Well, Self, you are kind of loveable and charming.” The root of most pride begins with a sort of internal love-note, if you will, written to the ego, saying, “How I love thee, let me count the ways.”
One twentieth century musical historian claims that 95% of all the music written in the twentieth century was about some form of “love.” Lots of movies are certainly about love at some level or another. Every woman here today wants Jerry McGuire – handsome Tom Cruise himself – to say to you what he said to Renee Zellweger in 1996: “I love you. You complete me.”
I’m totally rambling, but I’m actually trying to say there is love culturally presented and culturally defined, and it’s not all bad, and then there is love biblically speaking and divinely exposed.
I’m trying to say that the cultural zeitgeist basically presents love as Play-Doh – as a word that I can use to mold into whatever I want it to mean at any given time. And the collective result, predictably, is that in a parish of 2,500 members, there are at least 2,500 definitions of what the word love means.
The contemporary Christian author Jen Wilkin writes:
All the repetition [of the word love] is having a formative effect on us—the word love doesn’t always hit us the way that it should and in the way that the Bible often intends…Because of the way that our culture tends to think of love—almost off-hand or flippantly—when it comes to being told God loves you, it can fail to land on us with the beauty and significance that it should.
And it was no different 2,000 years ago in Jerusalem.
The story of Palm Sunday, the triumphal entry into Jerusalem, sets love culturally expectant and divinely disclosed on a collision course. The Jews believed God would manifest His love for them by parading Messiah
When little children waved palm branches as Jesus road into town, it was because their version – their own cultural understanding of what love is supposed to look like – showed up to do what they loved and longed to do: to inaugurate civil and political change that could turn back the clock to a better time – to a time when they weren’t prisoners in a promised land – when they could go back to yesterday – “When all my troubles seemed so far away,” to quote the Beatles.
And while Almighty God does certainly care about political systems and just societies, the donkey didn’t stop at City Hall. No, “In lowly pomp ride on to die; [Jesus], bow your meek head to mortal pain…” Have you ever seen a lamb riding a donkey, because that’s what took place?
What does God’s love for us look like? What is it’s real beauty and significance?
To quote the great hymnist William Cowper:
There is a fountain filled with blood
Drawn from Immanuel’s veins;
And sinners, plunged beneath that flood,
Lose all their guilty stains:
Lose all their guilty stains,
Lose all their guilty stains;
And sinners, plunged beneath that flood,
Lose all their guilty stains.
If this is jarring – if this is surprising and startling, even difficult to confront and completely upsetting, thanks be to God. That makes it all the better. And it is better because God’s love is most beautiful and most significant when we are least prepared, least conditioned, and least disposed to plan for its reception. The “amazing” bit about grace, you see, is how a lack of preparation – how lives of chaos and confusion – renders it more effective, not less.
John Newton – THE John Newton we know as the ruthless slave-trader turned priest and abolitionist was surprised – was totally transformed – precisely because he was unprepared – totally unaware of the depths of God’s mercy and grace – what God’s love looks like. So, the man who wrote the words to “Amazing Grace,” wrote also these words in his private diary:
“I began to understand the security of the covenant of grace and [now] expect to be preserved not by my own power and holiness but by the mighty power and promise of God, through faith in an unchangeable Savior.”
Is our ultimate faith in Hallmark cards, in some sentiment of love culturally presented? Or is our faith in the complete work of an unchangeable Savior?
What does God’s love look like? What does it look like? “Behold the wood of the Cross, on which hung the salvation of the world.”
Sermon preached by the Rev. Charleston D. Wilson
Church of the Redeemer
Sarasota Florida
Palm Sunday
28 March 2021