Love is Forever
Text: I Corinthians 13
December 19, 2004, Dave Philips
During World War II just before the Marines landed on the island of Saipan, a Marine battalion surgeon was briefing the men of the Fourth Division on the hazards they would encounter when they landed on the island. After a few minutes of the briefing, it became obvious to the Marines that the landing would be dangerous not only because the Japanese would be taking pot shots at them, but because being on Saipan wasn’t like being back home again in Indiana.
"When you get off your landing craft and jump into the surf," said the surgeon, "look out for sharks. If one of those babies gets hold of you, you’ll never make it to shore. Look out for the coral, it’s sharp as a razor and can go right through your boots. And whatever you do, don’t step into a giant clam or you’ll be there all day. They close on a man’s leg just like a bear trap.
"When you get on shore, you’ll have to be careful not to fraternize with the local people. They’ve got a lot of infectious diseases: leprosy, typhus, yaws, typhoid, dengue fever, dysentery, and heaven knows what else."
The surgeon wound up his talk: "Look out for the saber grass, look out for the snakes, look out for the giant lizards. Don’t eat anything growing on the island, don’t drink its water, and don’t approach any of the inhabitants. Any questions?"
A lone private put his hand up. "Sir," he said, "why don’t we just let the Japanese keep the island?"
Pretty good question the private asked. Why in the name of common sense would the United States Armed Forces risk the lives of its men to capture an island so completely unattractive and so full of so many perils. Well, of course, the answer is that the United States Armed Forces didn’t want to capture Saipan to build a resort on it. They landed on Saipan because the island was strategic and a vital link in winning the war in the Pacific. I knew personally one of the men who landed at Saipan, and after he came home again he had no desire to return.
Picture God in a similar situation: the beautiful world he made had fallen under the domination of evil. Picture God giving a group of warrior angels similar instructions: don’t do this, don’t do that, watch out for such-and-such, and don’t go near the inhabitants, don’t even talk to them, they’re in league with the enemy. And the natural question of the angelic invaders might be, "Lord, why don’t we let the humans keep their world?"
And now erase that image from your mind, and remind yourself that when the divine invasion took place on the first Christmas, God didn’t brief a group of warrior angels. He briefed his own dear Son. Picture God saying, "Son, go down there and get involved. You’ll get hurt when you do, but let’s not forget the reason you’re going. Son, you’re going to show my people what I’m like, and you’re going to let them know how much I love them."
"Love never ends," Paul tells us in the eighth verse of I Corinthians 13. Love is forever. Love has never not been. Love will always be, because God is love, and God is forever. So, for the last time in 2004, listen to our text for the past several weeks, I Corinthians 13.
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There are two ways we can understand that phrase, "love is forever": you can understand it to mean that love never quits, and you can understand it to mean that love never ends. Both work. And I’d like you to consider both aspects of this amazing Christmas-Easter-Pentecost love.
LOVE NEVER QUITS
First, think about this God-love, this Christmas-Easter-Pentecost love as a love that never quits. When Paul tells us in verse eight that love never ends or fails, the word he uses means literally "to fall." It’s the same word Jesus uses in the story of the foolish man building his house on the sand. When the rains come down, and the floods come up, and the hurricanes beat against the foolish man’s house, it falls with a great crash.
But Love never does that. It never crashes. Our loves quit and crash when we try to manage them by ourselves. Willard Harley tells the true story of a young woman who had always been very much overweight. She was so obese that she never got any dates. Finally, she got sick and tired of being sick and tired of being overweight, and she decided to do something about it. She got on a weight reduction program, stuck to it, and trimmed down to a svelte 115 pounds. Suddenly, she realized, and so did the boys, that she was a very pretty, very attractive girl. A guy in her church’s singles group got interested in her, courted her, and finally asked her to marry him. The two were married, and did they live happily ever after?
Well, not quite, since the young woman, once married and feeling secure, began to eat again. From her svelte 115 pounds she very quickly ballooned up to 200 pounds. Her new husband who hadn’t known her in her obese period, said, "Hey! What gives? You were so skinny and so beautiful when we got married, but now you’re not. Seems like I’ve been the victim of a bait and switch scam." She rejoined, "I thought you loved me for what I am, not for the shape of my body."1
What’s the problem of these two young people? Their love for each other needs some energy. The young man says, "I love this girl, but I’m not sure I’m going to keep on loving her if she’s going to be overweight." The young woman says, "I love my husband, and I want to please him, but not if it means I absolutely have to stay skinny."
Both of them have a love that quits at a certain point and under certain conditions. We call this conditional love.
But God’s love doesn’t quit. Divine love never crashes. God loves unconditionally even when he gets conditional love in return. We see this all through the history of Israel as God’s people return conditional love for God’s unconditional love.
Finally, God says, "I’m going to do a new thing. I’m going to bind myself to the human race forever by becoming one of them." So God becomes very small. Remember Jesus’ story of the mustard seed: the tiniest of seeds which nevertheless grows into a huge shrub? But mustard seed size is too big. God becomes microscopic. He becomes a gamete, and his divine gamete joins with Mary’s human gamete and becomes a zygote. And that zygote becomes an embryo, then a fetus, then Almighty God is born as a human being on the first Christmas.
And then that baby grows into the most magnificent human being the world has ever seen, and he loves all people unconditionally, but even his own chosen disciples don’t return that love unconditionally. Judas betrays him, Peter denies him, and the others run away when the chips are down. His fellow countrymen get him crucified, and all of join in this act of injustice. Nevertheless, even though we crucify him, he rises from the grave and tells us, "Listen to me! I’m going to be with you always, to the end of the world."
We may think of God’s love as a commodity, like Swiss cheese. We may think that God’s love is just "there" for us, and we can go cut a piece of it and consume it at any time. If we think that, we’ve got it wrong.
God’s love is not a commodity, it’s an active verb. God is love, and what God is, love is. But don’t forget: what Love is, Love also does. Just as E=MC2, that is energy equals mass multiplied by the speed of light, so G=LS2, that is God=Love multiplied by the power of the Spirit. God is divine energy, and that divine energy is love.
God is not a cosmic hunk of Swiss cheese. You can’t think of Swiss cheese as quitting. Swiss cheese, basically, doesn’t do anything but sit there and wait for you to come up and cut yourself a piece. And, you know, some of us Christians think commodity love is the way love is. We say, "Here we are! Come and get us! Church is at 10:30." And we just sit there and wait to be loved.
But God’s love is not the way Swiss cheese is, God’s love is the way Jesus is: not sitting and waiting for people to come to him, but out there looking, out there teaching, out there challenging, out there causing trouble, out there feeding the hungry and healing the sick.
And when we look at the baby in the manger, we need to understand that the baby is not Swiss cheese but God’s active verb that tells us that God’s love doesn’t crash if things are not just right. God’s love doesn’t quit. God’s love keeps going.
LOVE NEVER ENDS
For how long? Forever. God’s love persists for time and eternity. "O give thanks to the LORD," says the psalmist, "for he is good; his hesed, his steadfast love endures forever!"2
Our human loves pass away even as we humans pass away. A woman telling her story in American Girl, the Girl Scouts magazine, said,
When I was ten, my parents got a divorce. Naturally, my father told me about it, because he was my favorite. "Honey, I know it’s been kind of bad for you these past few days, and I don’t want to make it worse. But there’s something I have to tell you. Honey, your mother and I got a divorce."
"But, Daddy --"
"I know you don’t want this, but it has to be done. Your mother and I just don’t get along like we used to. I’m already packed and my plane is leaving in half an hour."
"But, daddy, why do you have to leave?"
"Well, honey, your mother and I can’t live together any more."
"I know that, but I mean why do you have to leave town?"
"Oh. Well, I’ve got someone waiting for me in New Jersey."
"But, daddy, will I ever see you again?"
"Sure you will, honey. We’ll work something out....Now I’m going to get my luggage, and I want you to go to your room so you don’t have to watch me. And no long goodbyes either."
"Okay, daddy. Goodbye. Don’t forget to write."
"I won’t. Goodbye. Now go to your room."
"Okay. Daddy, I don’t want you to go!"
"I know, honey. But I have to."
"Why?"
"You wouldn’t understand, honey."
"Yes, I would."
"No, you wouldn’t."
"Oh well, goodbye."
"Goodbye. Now go to your room. Hurry up."
"Okay. Well I guess that’s the way life goes sometimes."
"Yes, honey. That’s the way life goes sometimes."
After that, this woman writes, "...my father walked out that door, and I never heard from him again."3
That’s the way we often love apart from God. But God says, "I will never leave you or forsake you. I will be with you always, to the end of the world."4 I’ve been to theological school and studied the great theologians, and after forty years in the ministry, I can honestly say I don’t know a whole lot about God. The more I know, the less I know. I think most of us feel that way. God is just too big, too great, too overwhelming to be well known by the likes of us.
But I think I understand something about the most important thing there is to know about God. God is love. The God-love we see in Jesus Christ isn’t the most important thing about our Christianity, it’s the one thing. Faith? Yes, that’s very important. But have you ever known somebody with a lot of faith who was lacking in the love department? I have! I’ve been that person from time to time, believe me. Hope? Absolutely, we’ve got to have hope. Life is unbearable without something to look forward to. But have you ever known people with great hope, people who were optimistic in the extreme, who nevertheless lacked love? I have, and I think you probably have too.
But the greatest of all is love. God isn’t faith. You can’t define either faith or God in terms of the other. Nor is God hope -- we hope in God, but God is not the same thing as hope.
But God is definitely and positively love. Isn’t it amazing that 2000 years after the first Christmas, there are zillions of people around the world who say that Love Incarnate, that is Jesus Christ, is the most important person, the most important entity in their lives, that being aware of and expressing the love of this God-man is what gives life its meaning and its satisfaction!
We know that hate is strong and mocks the song of peace on earth, goodwill to men. But we also know that those who hate the most are frequently the people most in need of love. What kind of person would Saddam Hussein have been if he had only had a father who loved him, not the father he had who brutalized and abused him? If Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold had felt that they were loved unconditionally, would they have killed thirteen of their fellow students and one of their teachers at Columbine High School?
But wherever God’s love story is told, wherever the Christmas-Easter-Pentecost faith is proclaimed, Love springs up again -- and again -- and again.
One Sunday morning not too long ago as I was in the bathroom getting dressed, my wife stuck her head in the door and said, "I just had a wave." That means a wave of love. For me! Whenever I do something outrageously lovable, or even if I don’t, "I just had a wave," is Cathy’s shorthand for telling me she loves me. And I responded, "I just this minute had one, too." And then Cathy said this great thing, and on this I’ll close: "Waves make waves." God started this immense tidal wave at Christmas, and it continues to make waves that make waves that make waves.
Merry Christmas, everybody! Enjoy your holiday. Don’t forget to put the turkey in on time, don’t forget to put up the stockings for the kids on Christmas Eve, don’t forget to write your Christmas cards by April 15 at least (which is when we Philipses generally get them finished), but above all don’t forget the most important thing, the one thing: you are loved unconditionally and personally by the One who is love, whose divine energy will never crash, whose love will never end. God had a wave for you. Waves make waves that make waves. Surf’s up, folks! Enjoy the ride on your boogie board! Then go make some waves of your own!