The passage today is about love. And as I mentioned in the announcements, it is likely a very familiar passage to you. It’s the passage where the apostle Paul says, “Love is the more excellent way.” The best path to follow, the way of obedience following Jesus Christ. Many of us know this passage and have talked about it at different points in our lives. Bob Jordan and I have discussed it often. I’ve had the privilege to sit in his Sunday School class and to be a part of the Followers of the Way, the Monday Bible study with him now for eleven years. One of the things I have seen Bob do over time is work at perfecting his own definition of love, even as I have worked on mine. I have almost got his memorized, but I had to get him to say it for me one more time. He says, “Love is the actively expressed benevolent feeling for another.” The actively expressed benevolent feeling for another. And then he’ll often add to it, “Or wanting good for others and doing something about,” his point being is that love is not just a feeling, but love is something you do. And that’s a pretty good definition.

 

The definition that I worked at originally came out of my being elected, while a freshman in college, as the representative to the Student Legislative Assembly. At one of the dorm representative meetings (I was representing my dormitory), somehow the Student Legislative Assembly got into talking about the nature of love. I don’t know why we were doing that, because we were supposed to be basically planning parties. But we got into talking …. Maybe that was how we got into doing it! But at any rate, we got into talking about the nature of love. I was a young philosophy major, and thought I had pretty well mastered that kind of thing. So when they didn’t seem to be able to pin it down, I figured they just needed some help, and I would offer up a definition for them.

 

I quoted a definition from Isaac Asimov, the science fiction writer, that I had always thought was good and I just had memorized. I didn’t attribute it to him, I just plagiarized it and said, “Love is that state or condition of being where one’s happiness is directly affected by the happiness of others.” Actually what I said was, “I can define love. Love is that state or condition of being where one’s happiness is directly affected by the happiness of others.” I didn’t have the to-do element in it, Bob, which should have been (and I now see it as a critical flaw). But I was so pleased that I could just lay it out there like that, and I was sure that they would all be awed at that moment by the mental clarity I was bringing to bear on the subject.

 

But instead, the chairperson of the Legislative Assembly, a senior named Natalie Green—I remember her today—looked at me at that moment and said, “You freshman! Only a freshman would think that anybody could define love!” I was rebuked at the moment for trying it.

 

I wish I had said to her, “Well, how about the apostle Paul? He did a pretty good job in First Corinthians 13, but I didn’t. I just put my philosophical tail between my legs and walked away.

 

But Paul does a pretty good job with it. Maybe the best job. It’s a longer job than Bob has done, and it’s a better job than John has done.

 

The apostle, I judge from the way it seems dear to you, comes perhaps better than any other place in Scripture here, to describing the character of love for us. Is there any passage about love that is more beloved, any substantive passage, than this? Not only in the Christian community, but in the world? What would it be?

 

This arguably, at least, is the greatest statement on love ever written. And the apostle approaches it with a series of descriptive adjective clauses. You heard Nicole read them so beautifully. The full passage includes the description about we grow in Christian maturity at the end. But I’m focusing just on these verses about the description of the character of love here. “Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious, boastful, arrogant, or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth.” Now you can say it with me. “Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.”

 

You really do have it written on your hearts, don’t you? And it lists some things that love is. Notice also what it does not say. It does not say that love is sentimental. You may think love is  sentimental, but the apostle didn’t put it in there at all. It does not say that love is necessarily romantic. We’re going to sell a lot of candy, and a lot of hearts and flowers in about two weeks, but it doesn’t say once in there that love is a many splendored thing. It does not say love is necessarily romantic. It does not, any place in here, say love is a feeling. Which is how I notice most Americans in contemporary culture think about love. We think of it as a feeling. But that didn’t make it into the best description. Love as a feeling is not in there.

 

The Amish community in the last year, going to the funeral of the man who shot their children, in going to express their care and their forgiveness to his family…. It’s likely that they did not feel good in doing it, and their actions were not based on a feeling.

 

In today’s Gospel, when Jesus (who is the paradigm for love), when Jesus (who got love right better than anybody else in human history), when Jesus stands to speak in the synagogue as an act of love, he speaks a hard word to the people. He speaks about their inability to hear. He speaks the truth, a hard truth to them. And it’s an act of love.

 

And Jesus, the best example of love, when he is faced with being stoned to death, when his life is in danger, acts with courage. The Bible says, “He passed through the midst of the people who were trying to stone him.” That’s an act of love, and I don’t think it’s because he felt good about it.

 

If I was going to tweak the description at all, and I probably shouldn’t because that would be heresy, but if I was going to tweak, the one clause I might add is “Love is brave.” Or “Love is courageous.” Because it seems to me that Jesus is. And I think that might help be a corrective to our notion which so very often is that love is sort of weak. But love is kind, and we equate that with weakness. But that’s not what the apostle says. Love is strong. Love is strong.

 

Love is not an unchosen emotional state that falls on one uncontrollably, like “a moon that hits your eye like big piece of pizza pie”. That’s Tony Bennett, that’s not love!

 

This is agape, to use the Greek word, which most of you know. This is agape. This is an act of Christian obedience. This is something you do. This is something you do for others. This is a path one follows because one is seeking to be faithful to Jesus Christ, even when you don’t feel like it.

 

This is trying to be in the pattern of the character of God, which is revealed to us in Jesus Christ. That’s where the apostle gets this outline for love, you know, that he is quoting here. He doesn’t just make it up. He doesn’t get this pattern for love by looking at me or at you. He gets this pattern, this description, by looking at the character of God as the apostle saw it in Jesus Christ. That’s why he could say Love is patient. He doesn’t say John is patient. He doesn’t say Bill is patient. A lot of the time, I’m not patient.

 

He says Love is patient. You’re not. Love is not jealous. Sometimes I am. So we live toward it. We’re not this description yet, but we’re trying to be. We’re trying to grow up into it. We’re waiting while the Spirit works in us, shaping us and pulling us and calling us and trying to make us look like this pattern for the character of God seen in Jesus Christ that the apostle speaks of here. We’re trying to learn to walk in an excellent way.

 

You may have heard the story of Danny Rover before, because it’s a popular story now. But I want to share it with you, in case you haven’t. Danny Rover is an Assembly of God pastor. I got to hear him speak once. He’s a Vietnam veteran. When you look at him, you can see that he’s horribly disfigured, because in Vietnam he was the victim of a phosphorus grenade. As a result, he was terribly burned. He had terrible third degree burns on his face and down the rest of his body, but especially his face. It left him grotesquely disfigured. Even plastic surgery has not been able to change some of the tragedy that happened in that act of violence.

 

He was taken to the hospital at Okinawa and began to be treated there at the military base, and then was flown to the military burn center in San Antonio, Texas. It was only there, after about two months, that he had the first opportunity to see his spouse. He had married her as a teenage bride before he went over to Vietnam. So she had not seen him in the way he looked, and he did not know how she was going to react.

 

In the story, as I heard him tell it, he talks about seeing other brides come in and seeing husbands who were less disfigured than him, and seeing them not be able to stay in those relationships because of the burden of having to be now with this person who is so changed in his physical appearance. He saw one person take off their wedding ring and walk away at the hospital bed, and that’s what he remembered as he waited for his own spouse to come in.

 

When his spouse, Brenda, came in for the first time the doctors let her see him, she walked over to him and she leaned down and she kissed him on his terribly grotesquely disfigured face. And then he said to her, “Brenda, I’m sorry. I’m sorry that I look this way, and I’m sorry that this is what you’ve had to come back to. I’m sorry I’m so ugly.”

 

She said to him, “O Danny, you were never that good looking to begin with.”

 

And I don’t think it was because she felt like it. Where does a young bride find that kind of character? I don’t think she just makes that up in herself. That looks like the character of Christ to me, that powerful kind of love.

 

Love is something you do because it looks like what Jesus would do. And love is not weak. Love is strong. Indeed, the Bible teaches us that love is the most powerful force in the universe. Do you believe that? More powerful than a nuclear bomb. More powerful than a great academy of scientific minds. More powerful than a preacher in a pulpit. Love is the most powerful force in the universe. Powerful enough to take a human life and to sustain it beyond death into the life everlasting.

 

That’s what the Bible is arguing. And the apostle was trying to describe it here. Love is kind, patient, not jealous or boastful. Not irritable. Not envious, or weak, or rude. It does not seek its own way.

 

My friend, Bob Barden, is the pastor of a congregation called “The Chapel.” It’s a community church in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. He talks about their Logos program, which is a ministry for children. It meets every Wednesday evening. It has a dinner and activities and singing, and then they go home. He said at one Logos event, they had a first grader whose birthday it was, and she had gotten a new umbrella for her birthday. So on a January Wednesday evening, she brought her new umbrella to the Logos program. He said that she was walking around with that parasol like she was a hen in the barnyard strutting with it. He said she was so proud of it in showing it to others, it got to be a little obnoxious by the end of the evening. And much to her delight, as they got ready to go home, there was a rain falling. A chilly, cold Wisconsin January rain. She stood at the door, waiting to go out, and she got kind of anxious because she couldn’t get her umbrella open. She was pulling on it, and she started to say out loud, “I can’t open my umbrella! I can’t open my umbrella! Somebody help me.”

 

Bob went over to her and unleashed the snap and pushed the button, and the umbrella opened up. He was a little annoyed that she would be so demanding. As soon as it opened, she ran over to the door to the first person in the line, her little friend, so she could hold the umbrella over her head as they walked outside into the rain.

 

Love really is something you do. It’s something you do in the pattern of Jesus Christ. It’s something you do because you think it’s what faithfulness looks like. It may be at times something you experience as a feeling; but it’s not weak and it’s not strong. It’s something you do as an act of Christian obedience.

 

You’re not there yet, but God is going to get you there. You don’t always feel loving. But God is making you in to look like this love.

 

Once when I was with a group of pastors, we got to hear Ernie Thompson talking to us. He was talking to us about how there were changes we needed to make, and in the fellowship of pastors, one of the folks in the back of the room hollered out, “We’re Presbyterian pastors. We’re not going to change!” And they laughed. He was quiet for a minute and he said back, “No, you’re not going to choose to change. But in the power of God’s love, God will change you.”

 

I want you to sing the last verse of the opening hymn with me again, will you? “Love Divine, All Loves Excelling.” Look at the last verse, and look at how it’s talking about how God is using love to change us. How God is using love to make us into the people that God wants us to be.

 

 

 

©John T. DeBevoise 2007