1 John 4:10

December 7 2016 Sermon Advent 2

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and

sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. 1 John 4:10

P I can be a nervous gift giver. I worry that the gift I've bought is not right for the recipient. I watch their eyes carefully as they first glance at the gift just as it's unwrapped. What will they say? What I hope I don't hear are responses like these: "You shouldn't have!" which can mean, "I wish you wouldn't have!" Or "Isn't this a surprise!" Or "Are you sure this is for me?" which could mean, "This is really inappropriate!" Or worse, "I'm a Size Medium, not an Extra Large!" Everyone, after all, is not a gracious gift recipient, nor is everyone a skilled gift giver.

It is that way with the gift of love sometimes. Not everyone receives it well in every circumstance. Adoptive parents can tell you that sometimes their adopted child has a difficult time receiving their love. There can be a turning aside or even a push back from a child who cannot understand herself why she rejects her parent's expressions of love. Or consider how difficult it is to receive a gift from someone for whom we've not purchased a gift in return.

Some gifts can be so generous or so rich with sacrifice that we find ourselves embarrassed to receive them. I recall receiving such a gift at Christmas. It was just too much, simply too expensive to come from this particular person. "I can't accept this," I said, "it's too much." The giver's countenance fell. "Please," he said, "we want to do this." Still sensing the extravagance of the gift but, more importantly, the sincerity of the giver, I said simply, "Thank you." I remember the look on his face, so joyously rich with love that I cherished his countenance more than the actual gift itself.

I am convinced that unless and until we are overcome by the love of God in sending His one and only Son for us, our love toward God and others will be shallow at best. The essence of Christianity is not so much that we love God and others but that God the Father loves us enough to send and sacrifice the Son, Jesus Christ. The father/son language can be off-putting to some today, yet it gets to the heart of our Trinitarian faith. It captures the depth of relationships within the very nature of God and the essence of the sacrifice God was willing to make for us. To say that God "sent His Son" affirms not only the relational nature our Triune God but also the reality of the essence of God being love (1 John 4:8).

Notice that John says, "In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us." Simply loving God and our neighbor doesn't constitute true Christianity. It may be the summary of the law (Mt 22:), but it is not Christianity at its deepest. It misses the crucial motivation we have for loving God and others — our having received God's love in Jesus. We don't give love because it's the right thing to do or the human thing to do. We give love because God in Jesus Christ has overwhelmed us with His love. We love God and others because God's loving gift of Jesus continues to transform us. We love because God first gave us love (1 John 4:7).

In 1927, American writer Thornton Wilder won the Pulitzer Prize for his short novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey. In the novel a Brother Juniper witnesses the death of five people in Peru, who tragically die when a bridge they are crossing suddenly collapses. He spends six years studying their lives before the bridge collapse, seeking an answer to the question, "Why these five people?" He finds no answer. Yet as we meet each of these people and hear their stories, what matters is that they were loved and that even the tragedy of the bridge collapse brought about deeper love in those who had loved them.

At one point Wilder has a character, the Abbess, say, "But soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them....There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning (Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey. 1927. New York: HarperCollins, 2002).

Ultimately, what matters, what survives, what gives life meaning, is that we are loved by God. That is no doubt why Paul says in 1 Corinthians 12:13: "These three abide, faith, hope, and love, but the greatest of these is love." The Abbess says, "All those impulses of love return to the love that made them." The gift of love endures and takes us to God, who is love. Amen.