All You Need is Love?

[Our readings were Acts 10:44-48; Psalm 98; 1 John 5:1-6; and John 15:9-17.]

We have heard a lot about love the last few weeks. I’m old enough that they’ve made an old Beatles song from the ‘60s run through my head: “All you need is love.” I don’t know what type of love the Beatles were singing about. I suspect it might not have been the agapē—love that gives without expecting a reward—that we normally talk about. But, is that really true? Is “love all you need”?

Most of us know that the English word “love” is used to translate several Greek words that mean quite different things. The Beatles may well have been singing about eros more than agapē, but fundamentally all love comes from God. The love of man and woman, the love of parent and child, the love of one Christian for his or her neighbor, all of these come from God.

In fact, the first encyclical by Pope Benedict—Deus Caritas Est or “God is Love”—was about love.

“God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him” (1 Jn 4:16). These words from the First Letter of John express with remarkable clarity the heart of the Christian faith: the Christian image of God and the resulting image of mankind and its destiny. In the same verse, Saint John also offers a kind of summary of the Christian life: “We have come to know and to believe in the love God has for us”.

In our readings from Acts this Easter, we have seen the unpredictable power of the Holy Spirit, moving in front of us, breaking down barriers. In today’s selection, Peter is preaching to Cornelius’ household. Peter has been sent to Cornelius by the Spirit—those who are being saved are not to stand still and wait for the lost to come to them.

Before Peter has even finished preaching, the Holy Spirit comes upon “all who heard the word.” (I suspect that brought a sudden end to his sermon.) The circumcised Jews who accompanied Peter were astounded that the Holy Spirit “had been poured out onto the Gentiles.” “Astounding” or “astonishing” events in Scripture are signs of God acting in our lives as God wishes, not necessarily how we want God to act.

Peter finishes his sermon by asking the Jews who came with him “Can we refuse to baptize these people who have already received the Holy Spirit?” Of course, the answer is no. The church is not ours, but God’s. We are not the hosts here, we are God’s guests just as much as anyone else. We aren’t called to welcome as much as to remember that we are all welcomed into God’s grace and love.

“This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.”

This commandment of Jesus, stated shortly before his betrayal and crucifixion is simple—we must love each other—but not easy. It isn’t easy because of the part “as I have loved you.” After all, how far did Jesus love mankind?

Jesus’ love for mankind wasn’t expressed as some warm, mushy sentimental feeling. Jesus acted that love—healing the sick, feeding the hungry and eventually accepting his death and resurrection for all mankind by “laying down his life for his friends.”

We are called to live out that love, not merely believe it; to live out the Resurrection in our lives. According to Kierkegaard, “Christianity is not a doctrine to be taught, but a life to be lived.”

We are called not just to worship the Risen Lord, but to follow him. Loving one another means to act, not just talk. To paraphrase that familiar hymn, “They will know we are Christians by our love.” Not so much our love for each other gathered here, but our love for those who are not here. We have to go out to them, not in arrogance claiming that we have the Golden Ticket, but in humility, with a love that shows the Resurrection to be a life-giving event today, not just something that happened nearly two millennia ago.

We can’t be Christians without each other, all of us. We are not Christians as individuals, but instead in a communion of faith, the Body of Christ. We can easily be tempted to take our life together for granted. In Life Together, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote from his prison cell

It is true that what is an unspeakable gift of God for the lonely individual is easily disregarded by those who have the gift every day. It is easily forgotten that the fellowship of Christian brothers and sisters is a gift of grace, a gift of the Kingdom of God that any day may be taken from us, that the time that still separates us from utter loneliness may be brief indeed. Therefore, let the one who until now has had the privilege of living a common Christian life with other Christians praise God's grace from the bottom of his heart. Let us thank God on our knees and declare: it is grace, nothing but grace that we are allowed to live in community with Christian brothers and sisters.

I began by speaking of one type of love. So similar to agapē is the love of a parent for a child. Parents don’t love their children because they expect the children to love them back, they just do it. I learned this week that a good friend of mine has begun that marvelous, terrifying journey of parenthood by adopting a young child from Russia. She and her husband went through a lot of effort to become parents, an effort upon which many people—probably including me—would not have followed through. To me this is a clear example of how the Holy Spirit can strengthen us in hard times. Let us give thanks to God for bringing little Kelly Maria into the lives of her parents and pray that they will be guided by love in all the challenges and joys of the years ahead.