The Proof is in the Loving, a Sermon preached on Sunday, May 5, 2024 at First Presbyterian Church, Clarks Summit, Pennsylvania. The Scripture readings were John 15. 9-17 and 1 John 5. 1-7

The Spirit works in mysterious ways.  I sat down on my front porch, happy to have my outdoor sermon writing perch available thanks to the summer morning on a Friday in May.  The crab apple tree to my left had blossomed overnight.  The Red Maple to my right shone brilliantly bathed by the sun.  Gold-finches swarmed the nearby birdfeeder. Dandelions dotted the lawn as a squirrel hopped across it to feed on the seeds the birds discarded. I was about to launch into a story, I’ll tell in a moment, when the lines of an old poem popped into my head.  I walked into the house, over to a bookcase in my study and found Edgar Guest’s collection called The Light of Faith. The poem called “Sermons We See,” goes like this:

     I'd rather see a sermon than hear one any day.

    I’d rather one should walk with me than merely tell the way.
    The eye’s a better pupil and more willing than the ear,
    Fine counsel is confusing, but example’s always clear;
    And the best of all preachers are the men who live their creeds,
    For to see good put in action is what everybody needs.

    I soon can learn to do it if you’ll let me see it done;
    I can watch your hands in action, but your tongue too fast may run.
    And the lecture you deliver may be very wise and true,
    But I’d rather get my lessons by observing what you do;
    For I might misunderstand you and the high advice you give,
    But there’s no misunderstanding how you act
    and how you live.[i]

I suppose it might be best to just go over there and sit down, but I’ll press on and tell you the story that triggered the memory of that poem.  One World Communion Sunday long ago, an Elder and I spent the afternoon bringing the Lord’s Supper to those no longer able to attend church due to age or illness.  As we entered Elsie’s room at Wesley Village, we commented on a beautiful bouquet of fresh flowers on the nightstand. Proudly she told us that her son, Bill and his wife, Bea, had brought them earlier, noting that they were from the garden she herself had tended for most of her ninety years.

 That evening I found myself back at Wesley Village to sit with a family keeping vigil at the bedside of a sister who was near death.  In the silence of the moment we heard the sound of shuffling slippers approach the doorway.  In came Elsie with some of the flowers from her bouquet, and a good night wish for the woman in the bed. She had divided the arrangement to share handful by handful with friends and neighbors up and down the hall. That night, we saw a sermon.  We witnessed love in action.  The kind of love we find described repeatedly in the First Letter of John.       

 During the Sundays after Easter this year, portions of the First Letter of John have been read by our liturgists. First John might well be called, “The Love Letter of the New Testament,” for the number of times and the number of ways the word love turns up. If you think back to the first reading his morning you’ll soon discover that First John echoes the Gospel of John in its use of the word, love.

To understand what the Gospel and the Epistle mean by the word love, we have to pause a moment and do a little word study.  There is an ocean of difference between the word love as used in today’s readings and the way we use it. I love tuning in to see the Yankees win and I love three scoops of Caramel Sea Salt ice cream while I’m watching. That is not what today’s scriptures are talking about.

The New Testament was written in Greek. That language has many different words that are translated as love.  Two of them show up in the Bible. Philos, from which we get Philadelphia does, and is used by Paul to express brotherly affection toward Timothy. The word found in our readings from the Gospel and First John is agape’. A-G-A-P-E.

Pretending I have forgotten my New Testament Greek, I typed those letters into a computer search, the first thing that comes up is AGAPE, “adjective (of the mouth,) wide open, especially with surprise or wonder.”[ii] It certainly described my reaction!   Just below, however I found this under the heading “People also ask:” “What is Agape Love? ‘Agape love’ differs from other types in the Bible.  It is the highest, most pure form of love as a choice, not out of attraction or obliga-tion.”[iii]

 Now we’re getting somewhere! Back into the study I go and grab my Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary to look up A-G-A-P-E. Two entries. The second is the adjective. (Mouth open!) The first, has two entries: 1) Love Feast and 2) Love 4a, which I took to mean “look up love and read the fourth item, first offering.” Sure enough, here is what it says: “unselfish loyal and benevolent concern for the good of another: as (1) the fatherly concern of God for humankind; and, (2) brotherly concern for others.”[iv] There we have it.

Such love is not a noun, but a verb; not an emotion, but an act of will.  Just as God want’s the best for us always, the commandments to love call or the same: actively doing what is in the best interest of God or the other.  Knowing that changes how we process what we’ve heard in the readings from First John every Sunday during the season of Easter.

Three weeks ago, on the Sunday Bill Samford preached a wonderful sermon, the liturgist read the first verses of Chapter 3:

    “See what love the Father has given us,

    that we should be called children of God;
    and that is what we are.      1 John 3. 1

    Beloved, we are God’s children now;
    what we will be has not yet been revealed.
    What we know is this:
    when he is revealed, we will be like him,
    for we will see him as he is.      1 John 3. 2         

Wanting the best for us, God claims us as children, not because we somehow earned it, and even if we struggle to love God and God’s other children unselfishly, we are promised that someday we’ll be able to pull it off!

Two weeks ago, the liturgist read from deeper into Chapter 3.

   "We know love by this, that he laid down his life for us—    
    and we ought to lay down our lives for one another.
    How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods
    and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses to help?          1 John 3. 16-17

    Little Children, let us love not in word or speech,

    but in truth and action.          1 John 3. 18

That reminds me of the boy who was a challenge to his Sunday School teacher. When he tipped back his chair on two feet, she would remind him to keep four feet on the floor at all times.  With a mischievous smile, he would point out that his two sneakers plus the two back chair legs did equal four.  He harnessed his creativity to become an Eagle Scout, and then went off to culinary school in California. While there, alone and far from home, he found a unique way to keep doing “a good turn daily” and to show love in action.  Pinching his pennies, he regularly scanned the local free paper for discount coupons for meals. When he found a two-for-one coupon for dinner, he would take the second meal in a to-go container.  Instead of taking it home to heat up for tomorrow, he handed it to the un-housed man he passed on his way to and from the restaurant.       

That sermon might have gone unseen if he hadn’t shared his practice with his justifiably proud father.  Another of his loving gestures was noticed by a grateful recipient.  A young woman who had been in his confirmation class made some poor choices that landed her in the county lock-up for a while. From her cell she wrote letters to her friends on the outside.  Only one of them picked up a pen to write back. Guess who?

Those seemingly simple acts reflect the concern and caring that the author of First John had in mind when he wrote:  

   By this we know that we love the children of God,
    when we love God and obey his commandments. For the love of God is this:
    that we obey his commandments.             1 John 5. 2

          Unraveling of the weaving together of love and obedience to the command-ments is possible when we remember that we don’t obey the commandments in order to be blessed. It is the other way around.  Because we have been blessed to become children of God, we obey the commandments, wanting to do that which is pleasing to God.

        We heard that same idea last week as the liturgist read from the fourth chapter of the letter.

    God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them. 
    Love has been perfected among us in this: that we may have boldness on the day of judgment,
    because as he is, so are we in this world.

    There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear;
     for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love.

    We love because he first loved us.
    Those who say, "I love God,” and hate their brothers and sisters, are liars;
    for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen,
    cannot love God whom they have not seen.

    The commandment we have from him is this: 

    those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also.      1 John 4. 16-21

Admittedly, this is a dizzying circular argument. But far from being a rhetorical whirlpool sucking the reader down into a “who could possibly live up to this” despair, the circularity of First John offers a clue as to how it all holds together. Author and preaching consultant David Schlafer suggests we view it like a celestial system… “like the orderly attraction of a stable gravitational field—one in which belief, kinship with God and one another, love, obedience, the commandments of God, triumph over the world, and our faith” are all elements encircling each other, held in orbit by a centering energy point, named by the writer as Jesus the Christ.”[v]

Schlafer goes on to help us understand how a relationship with Jesus, and in turn, with God, holds our lives together.  “The force of gravity locks the world in place—and frees us to walk, to run, even to fly.  As “laws” go, it is pretty liberating!  How much more so the commandments of God, which are not “burdensome,” but when followed in disciplined obedience, foster and facilitate interchanges with our kindred, embodying the kind of responsible give-and-take that characterizes God’s relationship with Jesus, and that of Jesus with us.”[vi 

The love between God and Jesus, between Jesus and each of us, between each of us and all of us is not something to be kept hidden from the world around us. In both the Gospel of John and the First Letter of John it is clear that love is to be visi-ble in the choices we make and the way we relate to one another. As Jesus loves us, we are to love...and his love is tangible, visible in the transformations that occur when we trust and obey.

Near the end of today’s reading from First John, we heard these words:

… his commandments are not burdensome, for whatever is born of God conquers the world.  And this is the victory that conquers the world, our faith. Who is it that conquers the world but the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God?”                   1 John 5. 3-5

We may quibble as to whether or not these commandments are burdensome be because we know they are not always easy.  When we throw up our hands in frustration at what we see taking place in the world today, we may not feel our efforts accomplish much. Nevertheless the Spirit is at work conquering the world bit by bit as we turn belief in Jesus as the Christ into acts that follow in his loving footsteps. As one commentator puts it  “…we discover our love for God’s children by actually getting out there and doing what God has commanded.”[vii]

          You know this.

 The world throws all manner of junk out of vehicles whizzing down the highway. Even so, this church sends a crew out to clean up what we can, because we don’t just sing: “For the beauty of the earth,” we work to preserve that beauty.

The world turns a blind eye to the children who go to school hungry, seniors whose kitchen cabinets are empty by the third week of the month, and other examples of food insecurity. Meanwhile, this church and others provide workers with willing hands to fill boxes in a warehouse and serve a meal in a church basement.

The world confronts us daily with unlovely words and deeds, calling refugees “poison” and treating those with whom we disagree as if they were less than human. Yet quietly, this church welcomes brothers and sisters made in the image of God, helping to provide shelter and sustenance and opportunities to learn.

Peter Scholtes was a priest in Chicago in 1966 when he wrote a song many of us first sang as teenagers full of hope. They’ll Know We Are Christians by our Love.” Bonnie Miller-McLemore relates the story of a white man, who in the 1960’s was Catholic priest. Peter Scholtes “volunteered to lead a half-Irish, half-black parish” on the infamous South Side. (Think Bad, Bad, Leroy Brown). In a StoryCorps interview with his step-daughter, the former priest reflected on the inspiration for the lines we will sing before come to the Table today.

 Scholtes had taken some heat for putting a sign in front of the church to welcome Martin Luther King, Jr. on his first trip north.   The two clergymen shared a cup of coffee in the church basement “where parish women knew all about accommodating those hungry and thirsty with tangible signs of God’s love.” Summing it up, the author wrote: “It is not hard to imagine that the ministry of this congregation was emboldened by First John’s mandate to “love the children of God.”[viii]

The proof is in the loving.  In the days to come, as part of our national dialogue, we will hear a lot about what a Christian is supposed to believe, do or not do. Listen carefully. Use what you know about love to test everything you hear. Be on the lookout for the sermons you can see, or the absence of them from those who speak much but do little.        

[i] Edgar A. Guest, The Light of Faith, (Printed in the United States, The Reilly & Lee Co., © 1926, p. 173
[ii] Google search
[iii] ibid.
[iv] Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, Tenth Edition, (Springfield, MA, Merriam-Webster, Inc., © 2000), pp. 21 & 688
[v] David J. Schlafer, Feasting on the Word, Year B., Volume 2, Louisville, KY, Westminster John Knox Press, © 2008, p. 491
[vi] ibid., p. 493
[vii] ibid. p. 471
[viii] ibid, Miller-McLemore, p. 492