Mark 12:28-34; I John 4:7-21
Do Eskimos really have 50 words for
snow? I have heard that claim for many years, but it has always sounded like an
urban legend to me. This claim has been made for over 100 years, ever since anthropologist
Franz Boas published his 1911 book “Handbook of American Indian Languages.” In
the introduction to that book he claimed that Eskimos have dozens, perhaps even
hundreds, of words for snow. Most linguists have considered this false, the
product of sloppy scholarship and journalistic exaggeration. Some have even
gone as far as to call it the Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax. But according to an
article this year in The Washington Post, the latest evidence says that it is
true. In fact the dialects of the native peoples who occupy the far north in
Alaska, Siberia, and Canada have up to seventy different words for snow and ice.
But they are outdone by the Sami people, who live in the northern tips of
Scandinavia and Russia, who, according to Ole Henrik Magga a linguist in Norway,
use at least 180 words related to snow and ice.
Why am I talking about Eskimos and
snow? I am not trying to rush winter. It is to point to the fact that different
languages explore different areas of human experience more thoroughly. In
English we use the word “love” to mean many different things, from loving ice
cream, to loving our spouse, to loving our pets. But the Greek language, in
which our NT was written, has for five words for love. There are not fifty
shades of love, as the title of my message suggests. That is just a ploy to get
your attention, a reference to the best-selling romance novel series “Fifty
Shades of Grey,’ which I have NOT read and which I am not talking about this
morning. So if you are expecting me to be giving a talk about romance this
morning, you will be disappointed. But I am talking about love.
The Greek language has five words for
love. One is mania. This is possessive love. This is more like obsession than
love. It takes over the “lover” as a form of insanity. It is fanatical love. The word fan, as in
football fan or soccer fan is short for fanatic. And when we see the fights and
violence that erupt in the stadiums between fans of opposing teams, we see why
they are called that. It can also be used for mental disorders like kleptomania,
pyromania. In the NT “mania” is
translated as “madness” and being “beside yourself” in Acts 26.
The second word is eros, from which
we get the word “erotic.” That is what the novels “Fifty Shades of Grey” are
about. But eros does not describe only sexual love. It is also emotional love;
the feeling of love. Eros love is that
insatiable desire to be near the object of love. The third word for love is philos. It is
sometimes called “brotherly love.” Philadelphia is called the “city of brotherly
love.” Philos is friendship or neighborly love. Philos describes the love
between two people who have common interests and experiences. The fourth type of love is Storgy, commonly
called “motherly love.” But it can also
be fatherly love. It is family love, parental love.
But the type of love I am going to be
talking about this morning is the fifth type of love. It is the Greek word
agape, which is used in the NT exclusively for divine love. It is the love of
God. Our epistle lesson for today uses this word when it says, “God is love.” I
would not go so far as to say that love is a synonym for God, but it is the
best human word that we have to describe God. For the rest of this message we
are going to be exploring this type of love, which comes in three shades.
1. The first is Love from God. Here I
immediately want to get into experience. It is fine to talk about the meaning
of biblical words, but that might mean no more to us than different meanings of
the fifty Eskimo words for snow. Those distinctions mean nothing to a person who
has lived all their lives in the tropics and never seen or touched snow. Let’s
talk about experience of God.
Experientially my awareness of the
love of God is rooted in awe. It is not “Jesus is my buddy” love. That is
technically philia type love – brotherly love, rather than agape, divine love.
There is a sense of awe in the presence of God that transcends “what a friend
we have in Jesus.” Jesus is my friend; Jesus calls us friends in the Gospel of
John, so I am not knocking that. But Jesus is more than that.
A year ago, September 2012, the network
news ran a video of guy who owned a pizza restaurant in Florida giving
President Obama a big bear hug. Remember that? Obama is lifted up into the air
by this guy, and the president has his arms outstretched to the Secret Service
as if to say, “Hey, Why are you letting this happen?” I would never think to do
that when meeting the president of the United States. I think that the office
demands more honor and respect, not a bear hug. That is why I dislike party politics,
especially as currently practiced by the two main political parties. One party
is always degrading those in the other party, even when they hold the office of
the president of the United States. It was true when Bush was president and
true now when Obama is president. Showing disrespect to those in the highest
office of the land is wrong in my opinion. The Scriptures tell us to honor and
respect those in authority.
When we come before Jesus Christ, the
King of Kings and Lord of Lords, you don’t give him a bear hug. At least I
don’t. Christ deserves awe and reverence. He is Lord and God. My experience of
God as Lord is awe. We could use the word awesome. A more literal word might be
awful, not in a bad sense but in the literal meaning of being “full of awe.”
God is awe-inspiring.
When one comes in contact with God
one becomes awestruck. My favorite description is that of Isaiah who describes
himself when he meets God as being “undone.” He feels like he is coming apart. One
dissolves in the presence of God. Boundaries are breached. The wall of
separation between God and us, human and divine comes tumbling down. The
apostle Paul describes this in Ephesians 4:6 as “one God and Father of all, who
is over all and through all and in all.”
A powerful experience of God is not
just for apostles and prophets, monks in a monastery, ascetics in the desert,
or gurus on a mountaintop. This awareness of God is available to everyone all
the time. It is always present because God is always present. It is just that we
have so much else going on in our heads and in our hearts that we miss it. We
miss God. All we have to do is pay attention to the presence of God for a
moment. All it takes is a few seconds – if we can manage that - of not thinking
about ourselves. If we do that, then we notice God.
Awareness of God is the default
setting of the soul. It is not difficult. In fact it is the most natural thing
in the world to one who knows God. If we get over our preoccupation with
ourselves, our obsession with ourselves, our manic possessiveness of ourselves
for just a moment, then God immediately is perceived as subtly yet powerfully
present. If we step out of our self-love for a moment, then God instantly fills
us. Science says that nature abhors a vacuum. Emptiness is immediately filled. That
is also spiritually true. When we stop filling our lives with ourselves for a
moment, we are immediately aware that our life is filled with God.
I have been talking experientially
about the love of God, but let me talk about this theologically now. Theologically
this comes through Jesus Christ. That is what makes this spirituality
Christian. The apostle John says in our epistle Reading today: “In this the
love of God was manifested toward us, that God has sent His only begotten Son
into the world, that we might live through Him. In this is love, not that we
loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our
sins.” (I John 4:9-10) The love of God is manifested in Jesus Christ. Without
Christ the love of God is just an idea in our heads or a feeling that comes and
goes. Sometimes we feel the love of God and sometimes we don’t, depending on
what is happening in our lives or the chemistry of our brains. Love as emotion
does not serve as a firm foundation for the spiritual life. It is not about
what we feel. It is about Jesus in history manifesting the love of God. He
incarnated the God of love. When the apostles saw him they saw the Father. He
was the love of God in a physical form.
And the pinnacle of the God’s love
manifested in Christ was the Cross. Every moment of Jesus’ life was the
incarnation of the love of God, from the moment of his conception to his birth
in Bethlehem, those years of ministry, his teaching and his healing ministry.
This was all an expression of God’s love for us. But the supreme and clearest
moment of God’s love was the cross. That was pure divine love. That was
self-sacrifice. Jesus said, “No greater love has a man than this, that he lay
down his life for his friends.” That is what happened on the Cross. Theologians
have spent a lot of time trying to dissect that love shown by the Cross. I have
spent a lot of time reading theological books and attending seminary lectures
that seek to explain that love. But to be honest with you, the theology does
not capture it for me. I experience that love of the Cross, but when I try to explain
it I get frustrated. Theories of atonement and propitiation fall so far short
of the reality that I know in Christ, that it almost seems better not to try to
explain it. When I try to explain a mystery like this it feels like it is
cheapened in the process. It is certainly subject to misunderstanding. So I
leave it to those who are better theologians than I to describe how the Cross
expresses love from God.
The 19th century Danish
theologian Soren Kierkegaard wrote a book entitled “Purity of Heart is to Will
One Thing.” That one thing is God. “Hear,
O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.” To will our lives to be
dedicated to this one God is to love God with everything. That is purity of
heart – single-mindedness or better yet,
single-heartedness. Jesus said, “Blessed are the pure of heart, for they
shall see God.” When Jesus told us to love God, he did not say to love God
before all things or to love God above all things. He said to love God only. We
are to love God with all our hearts, all our souls, all our mind, all our
strength. All means all. When you use all, nothing left over.
Our problem is that we want God and
everything else in the world. We want our cake and eat it too. We want God and
the world. Brother Lawrence repeatedly said that his practice of the Presence
of God was to know only God, to do everything in life only for God. Only with
the single-heartedness of love can we come into the presence of God. That is
what God means in the OT when he says he is a jealous God. That does not mean
that God is insecure. It means that if we really want to know God, then we need
to want only him. He will not be one among many in our life. We cannot serve
both God and mammon, as Jesus said. And Mammon is not just material wealth, but
the whole material world.
3. This brings me quickly and briefly
to the third shade of love, which is love through God. Love from God, love to
God, love through God. Jesus tells us that that second commandment of love is
like the first. It is to love our neighbor as ourselves. We cannot do this by
our own resources but through God’s resources. The truth is that we cannot love
God without loving others. The apostle John says in our epistle lesson: “If someone says, “I love God,” and hates
his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has
seen, how can he love God whom he has not seen?”
Christian love of neighbor is not a
different type of love than the love of God. The same word is used because it
is the same love. It is just a different shade of divine love. God’s divine
love for us, in us, loves others through us. God is love. That love has been
demonstrated in Jesus Christ. That love dwells within us as the Spirit of
Christ. And that love is returned to God and is turned to others as love. This
is unconditional love. God loves us
unconditionally and we can love others unconditionally. Everything else in the
spiritual life flows from this. As Paul says in the love chapter, “So faith,
hope, love abide, these three. But the greatest of these is love.”
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