Acts 8:26-40, Psalm 22:24-30, 1 John 4:7-21, John 15:1-8
You want to bear fruit, right? You don’t want to just hang on. You want to abide, but not just abide, not just take up space, you want to be productive, you want to produce something, offer something, contribute something, make some difference in the world. You want to bear fruit.
I’ve never grown grapes, but I have had roses. I learned to prune them. The vital power in the plant is called its “virtue,” and whenever a branch lost its virtue, and shriveled, I trimmed it, but I also pruned some green and vital branches for the sake of the whole. I did the same with the rosebuds—I would disbud some of them to give more virtue to the remaining ones.
Which God does with you, according to Jesus. With your fruit, your virtue, your power—and to get pruned hurts. “Why have you taken that away from me?” “Because the fruitfulness that I want from you is love.” And love is that power of God that we are talking about today.
The English word “love” translates three different Greek words in the Bible: eros, philia, and agape. These three kinds of love overlap, but we can say that eros is sexual love, erotic love, a kind of love with lots of power. Philia is fraternal love, brotherly love, sisterly love, family love and tribal love, and that has power too.
These two loves are natural and necessary. They both require possessing as much as sharing—not selfishness but some essential payback to yourself. There are limits to freedom in these loves: your lover owes you obligations, and so do your children and your parents. Both loves have abiding power: the two lovers become one flesh, and siblings share their genetics and their memories. They eat at the same table and live in the same abode. But if siblings no longer can abide each other, if lovers no longer abide each other, that power gets negative and nasty.
The third kind of love is agape. In the ancient Greek vocabulary of Homer, what this word meant was to welcome, to entertain a guest, even an enemy, and show respect. Essential to your welcome was the freedom of your guest from your own interest.
This word was chosen by the Jewish translators of the Hebrew Bible into Greek for the love of the Lord your God and the love of your neighbor as yourself. The Lord Jesus used this word in his teaching, as did his followers in their epistles.
Agape is the word for love that evokes the distinctive Christian ethic and the distinctive Christian mission. Radical welcome, sharing without possessing, giving without payback, honoring the other with freedom for the other. It is making room without making distance, it’s making space not to keep you off but invite you in. It’s a mistake to call it selfless—the Bible doesn’t make that mistake—you are to love your neighbor as yourself, not instead of yourself. Agape-love is sacrificial without being self-destructive, and to show respect is useless if you don’t respect yourself.
Agape-love is not absent from erotic love and filial love. Lovers welcome the differences in each other to be happy in love, and happy siblings give each other room and rejoice in their differences. Close friends have to respect each other and trust each other with freedom. I can easily love my cousins when we share so many tribal traits, but when Jesus calls me to love my enemies, that goes against the instincts of filial love. Agape-love does not have any physical or emotional reinforcements, so its abiding power has constantly to be renewed. Jesus says, you won’t be able to sustain it unless “you abide in me and in my love.” You have to be in communion with Jesus.
Old First is a community of Jesus. We are not changing that part of our mission statement. But the Consistory is revising the second part. It’s going from this: “we welcome persons of every ethnicity, race, and orientation to worship, serve, and love God, and love our neighbors as ourselves,” to this: “offering a space of unconditional welcome.” In fewer words we get precisely at the practice of agape-love, offering unconditional welcome, and how we sustain this is as a communion of Jesus, drinking from the power and virtue of his vine.
The way that this power of love flows from Jesus into us is not in some supernatural ether or some invisible gamma ray of love sent down from heaven. You get it from the ordinary weekly means of grace, the preaching of the Word and the sacraments. God quite simply uses your sharing in the hearing and thinking of the congregation around the Word, and your sharing in the singing and the eating of the Communion, to keep you abiding in Jesus and also to stimulate and empower and sustain your practice of love as mission to the world. God does it quite down-to-earth!
Now let me direct your common mind to the story of the Ethiopian eunuch. The Holy Spirit pushed the deacon Philip to offer unconditional welcome to this eunuch. It wasn’t automatic, and the deacon took a risk. It was not a rhetorical question when the eunuch pointedly asked Philip, “What is to prevent me from being baptized?”
“Well, for one, we baptize into community, and you’re going back alone. Second, you’re a Gentile, we’re not baptizing Gentiles yet. And third, you’re half-transsexual, you’re Queer. The Book of Deuteronomy specifically prohibits people like from the congregation. I’d like to baptize you, but I have these conditions to consider!”
Of course it so happens that the eunuch was reading the prophet Isaiah, who prophesied, three chapters later, that a eunuch shall no longer call himself a dry branch, and a faggot for the fire, but he too will have a place in God’s house and he shall never be cut off. Hmm! Isaiah or Deuteronomy?
So Philip has to make a decision. Can he interpret one part of scripture by another, the part that excludes by the part that includes, the part that cuts off by the part that welcomes, and can he do this on the spot without the approval of the apostles? But did the Holy Spirit plunk him down into this chariot to tell this queer guy No? He baptizes him. He loves him, agape-love, in terms of an action. He gives him unconditional welcome. And freedom too, he lets him go with no obligations.
There’s something else here. The power to love is the power to interpret–to interpret scripture. To interpret scripture in a spirit of welcome and freedom. God puts scripture in our hands, not as law to be defended but as gospel to be expanded. The power to love is to welcome into scripture new guests and new experiences. Our interpretation of the Bible is never settled and complete, it is living and growing and bears new fruit, and it is rooted in the vital, expanding love of Jesus Christ.
This power of love is the power of God, because God is love. When we say that God is love, we must be careful, we are not saying that love is God. We do not start from our human experience and understanding of love and magnify that as God. We work the other way around, we observe the lift and death and resurrection of Jesus and what he said and whom he touched and welcomed and we say, O, that’s what God is like, and then we contemplate this God and the stories of God from Genesis to Revelation and we say, O, that’s what love is like. Rich, complex, constant, open, weak in the eyes of the powers of the world, but as powerful as the force of life in the body of a little bird.
When we say that God is love, we do not say that all God is, is love. There is more to God than love. But there is nothing in God that is not also love. All that God is, is loving, and all that God does, is loving.
When we say that God is love, we say that God welcomes you, God rejoices in your otherness, God gives you space and room, not for distance but for your inclusion precisely as you.
When we say that God is love, we say that God gives you freedom, that God loves you unconditionally. Yes, God has conditions for your life, for holiness and righteousness, for justice and fairness, but those conditions for your life are not conditions on God’s love for you.
When we say that God is love, we do not say that God is the energy of love or essentially the power of love, as if God were a what. God is a who, and God is free, and God is the creator of love and the sustainer of love. God is love because God is a lover—the great lover, the original lover, the great respecter, the universal welcomer. You can know this God and learn this love and abide in this love and share this love. Once again I invite you to share with your world the love God has for you.
Copyright © 2018, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.
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