Someone sent me the results of a survey of the views on love expressed by kids between four and eight years old.  Here’s what these young people say love is:

            Love is that first feeling you feel before all the bad stuff gets in the way.

            Love is when a girl puts on perfume and a boy puts on shaving cologne and they go out and smell each other.

            When you love somebody, your eyelashes go up and down and little stars come out of you.

            When my grandmother got arthritis, she couldn’t bend over and paint her toenails anymore. So my grandfather does it for her all the time, even when his hands got arthritis too. That’s love.

            When someone loves you, the way she says your name is different. You know that your name is safe in her mouth.

            If life is an ‘A,’ love is the whole alphabet.

            Love is when you go out to eat and you give somebody most of your French fries without making them give you any of theirs.

            Love is when you kiss all the time. Then when you get tired of kissing, you still want to be together and you talk more. My mommy and daddy are like that. They look gross when they kiss but they look happy, and sometimes they dance in the kitchen while they’re kissing.

            Love is what’s in the room with you at Christmas if you stop opening presents for a minute and look around.

            You really shouldn’t say ‘I love you’ unless you mean it. But if you mean it, you should say it a lot.

            Love is like a little old woman and a little old man who are still friends even after they’ve known each other so well.

            You can break love, but it won’t die.

            Love goes on even when you stop breathing and you pick up where you left off when you

reach Heaven.

            These are neat little definitions of love.  They seem very perceptive to me.  They’re mostly about love between lovers, or love among family members, aren’t they.  C.S. Lewis says in the introduction to his wonderful book, The Four Loves, that when he set out to write about love, he assumed that there were two kinds of love, Need-love and Gift-love.  Need-love says, “I love you because I need you.”  Gift-love says, “ Because I love you I’m yours forever.”  Obviously, thought Lewis, Gift-love is the best kind, the divine kind of love.  Need-love is selfish love, hardly worthy of the name, love.

            But Lewis, as he studied love, concluded  that he had over-simplified.  He discovered that love was much more complicated than he had supposed at first.  He ended up concluding that Need-love, even though it may be selfish, is still love.  “I cannot now deny the name love to Need-love,” Lewis concluded.¹

            I agree with Lewis.  I’m fond of saying, “All truth is God’s truth.”  Wherever you find truth – whether you find it in a laboratory, or a court of law, or coming out of the mouth of someone like Madonna or Jerry Springer – truth remains true, and it’s God’s truth.  I believe, similarly, that all love is God’s love, whether that love is expressed by a wonderful saint or a terrible sinner.  “God is love,” John tells us, “and those who live in love live in God, and God lives in them.”²

            When I was studying to write this sermon I also found out something I didn’t know about the way the Bible uses the word “love.”  Last Sunday I was kind of putting down the way we Americans use the word “love”.  We use the word “love” for everything from baseball to romance.  But the Bible has an equivalent word and uses it in the same way.  The Hebrew word ahab is a sort of generic word for love, and the way the Old Testament writers use it is similar to the way we use our English word, “love.”  So when Israel is told to love God with all their heart, soul, strength, and mind, and their neighbors as themselves, this Hebrew word ahab is used.  And when we read that Jonathon loved his best friend, David, it’s the same word.  And when the woman in that romantic poem, the Song of Solomon, tells us that she is faint with love for her lover, it’s the same word.  Even when we hear that the patriarch Isaac loved a certain kind of spicy stew, it’s the same word.  Kind of like when we say that we love pizza!

            So as we continue thinking this week about the nature of God’s love, I’d like you all to relax about the way you’re understanding and expressing love.  All the loves God has given us are part of his great encompassing love for us.  We can abuse these loves, we can express them poorly.  We can twist and distort them beyond all recognition.  You can love pizza excessively, for example, and eat it to the point of indigestion. 

            Nevertheless, all these various expressions of love are still part of God’s gift of love, and they are all meant to bless us, whether romantic love, or friendship, or affection between family members, or sacrificial love like the kind we see so conspicuously in the life and ministry of Jesus, or even love for pizza or ice cream:  all these are love, all these are evidences of God’s intention to bless and delight us.

            But I also hope that your understanding of God’s love will be enriched and expanded as you take a look at how God loves and how he teaches us to love each other.  Our scripture lesson of the morning teaches us that love does not exist in a vacuum.  William Morris wrote a poem in praise of romantic love entitled “Love Is Enough.”  Someone wrote a two word review of Morris’s poem: “It isn’t.”³  God speaking through Micah shows us that love has partners.  There are things that always accompany love when it is expressed the way God intends.

            For example, you could be in a beautiful covenanted love relationship with a husband or wife.  You could be faithful to that spouse and have an exemplary marriage.  At the same time, it is conceivable that in your business you could be robbing your stockholders and cheating the government out of taxes that have been fairly and accurately assessed.  So, God would say, “Your love is exemplary in that one department, but you’re out of sync with me in the other.  You’re loving your wife and children very well, but you’re not loving your neighbor.”

            “God has showed you, O people, what is good,” says Micah to Israel . “And what does the Lord require of you?  To do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God.”

            So, in our scripture lesson, we see that the partners of love are justice, kindness, and humility.  There are some other partners we could mention, but let’s take just a look at these particular partners of love as we study Micah chapter 6.

 

JUSTICE

 

            Surely justice is a necessary partner for love.  If we love without justice our love must be distorted.  As you continue to read through the eighth chapter of Micah, you see that God is calling Israel to account for its injustice.  Israel ’s merchants had the bad habit of trying to cheat their customers with dishonest scales.  And the wealthy people of Israel used violence to maintain their wealth.

            Israel at this time in its history was living with a foot in two camps.  They worshiped the Lord, but they also worshiped at the altars of the pagan gods.  The pagan gods were themselves unjust.  They were vicious, immoral, and unpredictable.  Anyone with a romantic notion about the beauty of paganism ought to study those Canaanite religions.  People didn’t particularly love these gods so much as they feared them and tried to stay on their good sides.  They would try to bribe their gods with huge offerings.  They even went so far as to sacrifice their firstborn sons to the gods.  If you read James Michener’s novel, The Source, there is a vivid description of this horrible practice in the early chapters.

            God lets Israel know that he cannot be bribed or bought.  He can’t be gotten around with sacrifices of thousands of rams or ten thousand rivers of oil.  You can’t offer your  firstborn son to atone for your sins.  God is sickened by such things. 

            In the excellent film, Changing Lanes, which is a morality play for our times, a young attorney is faced with a moral dilemma.  He learns that the law firm he is working for has committed fraud and is liable to criminal prosecution if the fraud becomes public.  If he tells the authorities what he knows, he may go to jail.  Furthermore, his father in law who is the head of the firm will also go to jail.  All the things he has been working for – a place in the community, a home in a wealthy suburb, the respect of his peers – will go down the drain.   The pressure is intense on this young attorney to break the law and conceal the fact.  His wife, his fellow workers, his father in law all know of the fraud, but they urge him not to go public with his knowledge. At the climax of the film there is an angry confrontation between the young man and his father in law.  “How can you live with yourself?” the young man asks his father in law.  “I can live with myself,” his father in law replies, “because at the end of the day I think I do more good than harm.”  And then he says, “What other standard have I got to judge by?”

            We Christians know the answer to that question.  Our standard is Jesus Christ.  “What would Jesus do?” is a simple but powerful question by which to test our ethical behavior.  We know that there’s no way Jesus would be a party to fraud.  To act unjustly is to act without God’s love. Love needs its partnership with justice for its full expression.

           

KINDNESS

 

            We are also to love kindness.  The word translated “kindness” in your pew Bibles is the Hebrew word I introduced to you last week: hesed.  Hesed, you remember, is the Old Testament word for God’s love.  Kindness is one aspect of hesed.  Hesed also means loyalty, compassion, and the determination to be faithful.

            When we take wedding vows we come closest to expressing what hesed means.  “I, John, take thee, Mary, to be my wedded wife, and I do promise and covenant before God and these witnesses to be thy loving and faithful husband;  in plenty and in want, in joy and in sorrow, in sickness and in health, as long as we both shall live.”

            Do we mean these words when we get married?  Of course we do!  Do we break these covenant promises that we make?  Of course we do, every single one of us, sometimes to the point of divorcing one another.  Do we regret these failures?  Absolutely!  Does God forgive us for these failures if we repent them?  Sure he does!  Does God want something better from us?  You bet! 

            There are a lot of us here this morning who have broken our wedding vows, some beyond repair.  Have we committed the unforgivable sin?  I don’t think so.  As I read my Bible, there are only two unforgivable sins: one is not forgiving our neighbor when he or she sins against us, and the other is stubbornly opposing God and calling his goodness evil.  That’s what Jesus called the blasphemy against the Holy Spirit.  I don’t see divorce as the unforgivable sin.

            In fact, we who are married may sin against our divorced sisters and brothers!  We may make the unwarranted assumption that any divorced person we meet has broken his or her vows.  Frequently divorced people are more sinned against than sinning!  The majority of divorced people I know personally in the Church have been abandoned by abusive or unfaithful spouses even when they made every effort to keep the marriage together.

            But I do think that God wants something better from our generation of Christians, and I’m appealing to those of you who may be in problem marriages.  We are far too ready to give up on our marriages when the problems are solvable.  A friend of mine in another community divorced her husband after a debilitating illness in which he lost his short-term memory almost entirely.  He was a difficult person to live with under the best of circumstances, but his condition now meant that he had to be waited on constantly.  She couldn’t take it and sought a divorce.  I called her up to ask her why she was taking this step?  She flew into a rage and told me that I would talk a lot different if I had to walk in her shoes.

            And I’m sure I would.  As a happily married man for many years, I really don’t have a clue about what it’s like to have tried but failed in a marriage, and I really do beg your forgiveness for any insensitivity I may have communicated to you who have been through painful divorces. But I’m impressed by people like my friend Esther Russell who hung in there to the end with her husband, Murray, who had the devastating Alzheimer’s disease.  Murray was no piece of cake to be married to when he was at his best, and when he got Alzheimer’s disease, he was extremely difficult.  But Esther never gave up on her hesed love, her covenant to be faithful to Murray to the end.

 

            Oh, when I was in love with you [writes the poet] then I was clean and brave,

            And miles around the wonder grew how well I did behave.

            But now the fancy passes by, and nothing will remain,

            And miles around they say that I am quite myself again.⁴

 

            No!  That’s not hesed love.  Romantic love is wonderful, but it needs the partnership of faithful covenant love for its fullest manifestation.

 

HUMILITY

 

            The final partner of love in our scripture lesson is humility.  We are to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with our God.  The love of God by it’s very definition is humble.  Love stoops to express itself.  As we read this stunning passage from Micah, we see this right away.  There is no bullying note in God’s voice as he speaks to Israel .  On the contrary, the great God who created the universe humbles himself to make his appeal to Israel : “My people, what have I done to you?” God asks.  “How have I burdened you?” 

            Clearly, God’s greatest desire is to heal the broken relationship with his people.  God may threaten dire consequences for the unfaithfulness of his people, but his appeals to them are always because of love.

            Plato in his philosophical dialogue about love, The Symposium, describes love as a beggar, the child of poverty.  Penniless Love humbles itself and begs to be returned.  Paul in his inspired description of love says, “Love is not envious or boastful or arrogant  or rude. Love does not insist on its own way.”⁵

            To love at all its to humble yourself -- whether your love is for your sweetheart, or your children, or even your dogs or cats.  When we love we often humble ourselves to the point of the ridiculous.  Picture yourself, if you have a pet, down on the floor on your hands and knees stroking that animal, cooing and gurgling to it, allowing it to lick your face, even your mouth.  What’s that all about?  Is that a picture of pride?

            No way!  That’s humility.  We are down on all fours begging an animal to return our affection!  We’re not too far away from dogs and cats on the biological scale.  They’re not quite as smart as we are, but they’re not too far behind us.  Nevertheless, it takes some humility on our part to have a love relationship with one of our animals.

            But now, think about God: how far is he from us?  He’s not even on the biological ladder.  He made the biological ladder, for heaven’s sake!  But then as we hear in the story of Jesus, God climbed onto the biological ladder, descended it into our world, and was born as one of us, for what reason?

            Simply and solely because he loved us.  I know very few people who love their animals enough that they could envision themselves being born as a dog or a cat or a parrot or a gerbil in order to express their love for their animals more fully.

            But God did that.  That is the meaning of the incarnation of Jesus Christ -- God, out of his great love for us, humbling himself and becoming human, and finally dying a shameful and painful death on the Cross to save us from our sins.

            How can you win against a love like that?  And when you understand the nature of God’s love for you, who wants to win?