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Monday, May 14, 2012

The Hardest Work in the World


A Sermon based upon John 15: 9-17; Acts 10: 44-48
By Dr. Charles J. Tomlin, Pastor
Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership
Mother’s Day, 6th Sunday of Easter, May 13th, 2012

About a month ago, democratic political advisor, Hilary Rosen set off a political firestorm when she commented on CNN that GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s wife, Ann, because she is a stay-at-home mom, “has never worked a day in her life.” 

The backlash to Rosen’s critical comment were swift and so strongly negative that Rosen had to go back on CNN several times with both oral and written apologies.  Even President Obama attempted to distance himself her comments saying that “moms have the toughest job in the world.”   “Anybody who thinks otherwise, needs to rethink their statement.” (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/12/obama-hilary-rosen-being-a-mom_n_1422036.html). 

Today, this being Mother’s Day, I would like to add my own thoughts to this most recent public conversation concerning “the toughest job in the world”.  What I want you to understand from these words of Jesus and from the truth of the gospel, is that the work of love is often hard to understand.  It is not only difficult for Hilary Rosen to understand the work of love, but it was also hard for Jesus’ disciples; and it can also be hard for us.  Love always has been and always will be, both the greatest and the toughest job in the world.   It seems, in our world, that some people know about working for money; working for power, prestige or political office, but less and less about lifting up “the work of love”.   If we can agree with the world on any single thing that Jesus accomplished, in both his life and his death, it is that he attuned hearts to the value of both divine and human love.

LOVE IS MORE THAN A FEELING
In the very first words of today’s text from John, the heart of Jesus’ life and message surfaces, when Jesus says to his disciples, “As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you (vs. 9).  Here, Jesus reminds all his disciples, including us, that the very source of his life and his love comes from the Heavenly Father, whose love is the foundation of his ability to share and show love.  The way that we know that Jesus’ love for his disciples is confirmed and made clearer as Jesus goes on to say in verse 13, “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for ones friends.”   Could there be any “harder work” than to give up your own life for the sake of another?  And this is exactly what true love does.   The work of love is to be able to love someone more than you love your own self.   This is part of the true definition of love, which is not always defined nor understood.  For example,  if you “Google” the words “definition” and “love” together you’ll get an online dictionary, which gives this definition of love:  “an intense feeling of deep affection.”     If you “click” on more information, you’ll get additional defintions, from 1 to 10, from love as being defined as “romantic or sexual attraction”,taking an “interest or pleasure in someone or something” all the way to “the score of zero in tennis”.   But there is nothing in any of the popular defintions that says anything about giving your life for the love of another.    I find this very interesting and even disturbing that love is defined as “feeling” or “liking”, but never as “giving” your own life to another.   My point here is not just that these definitions of love miss the idea of “laying down your life for someone”, but that the whole idea Jesus implies of love as being something you “do” or as something you “give” has been lost. https://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=1G1GGLQ_ENUS340&q=defintion+love&btnG=Google+Search#hl=en&sa=G&pwst=1&rlz=1G1GGLQ_ENUS340&q=love&tbs=dfn:1&tbo=u&ei=jCupT7OiIImE8ASAwL3GAw&ved=0CG4QkQ4&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.r_qf.,cf.osb&fp=ecb6a798695883bc&biw=1346&bih=833 . 

The picture of love as “hard work”, which is much more than a mere emotion is clarified again when Jesus adds the conditional phrase in verse 14: “You are my friends IF YOU DO WHAT I COMMAND YOU.”    Again, love is “more than a feeling” (quoting the 70’s Band Boston) for love means “doing” and showing what we feel in real, living, personal “acts of love”---the greatest of which is to ‘give’ or as Jesus says, “lay down your life for your friends.”   Jesus even explains further how and why he can do this, as he reminds his disciples that as their Teacher and Rabbi, he has “loved them from the very first, saying, “You did not choose me, but I chose you” (15:16).   When I read those words, I can’t help on this mother’s day not to hear the echo of my own mother’s words to me when she explained what it meant for me to be “adopted”.   “Being adopted,” she told me, means that “you were especially chosen to be our child”.  You were not born, naturally into our family but you were “chosen”, which means you are even more special to us.”  And because we “chose” you, we love you just as much as if you were born to us. “   When you are a child, wondering, maybe even subconsciously “worrying” about being “adopted”, it always helps when you mother tells you, “WE CHOSE YOU!”    And guess what?  The Scripture also tells us that “God choose us!”   As the apostle Paul elaborates later, we too, even as sinners, have “been destined to be {God’s} adopted children through Jesus Christ” (Eph. 1:5).  To love and adopt sinners is more than a feeling.  As Paul goes on to say in his letter to the Romans,  “God shows his love for us… even while we were still sinners, Christ died for us “ (Romans 5.8).  Here again, we find that it takes much more than a feeling to love and to save sinners.   

LOVE IS THE HARDEST WORK
Because true love can demand the price of life itself, love is and will always be “the hardest work in the world”.   Love is the “hardest work” of God and the “hardest work” for humanity as well, but it is also necessary work.   So, let’s talk a little more fully about “what this hard work of love means” in our own lives, not just as mothers, but for all of us, as people who find our “life” and source of “love” in Jesus Christ.

If you continue to read Christ’s words to his disciples, you will find that he tells them much more about what love means in this discourse.   For one thing, Jesus suggests that if they reciprocate the Father’s love in the world, they too must do the “hard work” of obeying his command of “loving one another” (15:12).  Loving one another as disciples will be hard enough, but Jesus goes on to add, just outside of our text, words of warning about an even greater cost of the hard work of love.  In verse 18 we read, “If the world hates you, be aware that it hated me before it hated you.  If you belonged to the world, the world would love you as its own, but I have chosen you out of the world---therefore the world hates you” (John 15: 18-19).   Here, we can see another way “love” becomes hard work.  It’s is not just hard to love, but when we love, we have also chosen what we will love and what we will not love; that is, to some things in this world we say yes, but to other things, we say a definite no.   Because saying yes to Jesus, means we say no, as we choose to love Christ; we bear the risk and cost of being “hated” by the world.   As the Bible says, God loves the world, but there is a part of the “world” that does not love God.  We must do the hard work of taking the “risk” of loving in a world that does not yet know how to love, like God loves the world.

Love is a hard work, because there is always a risk involved when we love.   If you turn in your Bibles to another text for this morning, the story of how the church in Acts learned to love, like God loves, you will see one of the greatest examples of how the church of Jesus learned to accept the risk and the hard work of love.  Acts 10: 44-48 gives us the ending of a great love story; a love story that was “inspired” and “directed” by the mothering, feminine side of God, we call the Holy Spirit.   It tells us how the gift of “Holy Spirit” and God’s love fell upon “Gentiles” people whom Jews and the even the first Jewish Christians had a hard time loving.   But in this story we see a new kind of love story taking place.   The story begins with the story of the Gentile Cornelius, who lived in the Gentile town of Caesarea, who loved and feared God, and had a dream to invite Peter, the leader of the early church to his home.   We also read how Peter also had a dream; a dream that God revealed it was now right for him, as a Jew, to go into a Gentile’s home and eat the foods that Gentile’s eat.  

Why was God speaking in this dream for a Gentile to love a Jew who had hated them?   Why was God calling a Jew who had become a follow of Jesus to eat with a Gentile and break all the Jewish laws of purity and cleanness?  Why did the God who is supposed to never change, suddenly decided to change all the rules?   Why did God ask humans to do this strange, risky, new and hard work of love?   Well, the gospel truth is that Jesus had “warned” his disciples that something new was going to happen in the work of God’s love.   According to John’s gospel, Jesus told his disciples, “I am the Good Shepherd of the Sheep” (John 10: 11a) and he also said, “The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep,” (John 10:11b) but he added, “I have other sheep who are not of this fold” (John 10:16). 

In another moment of life formation with my own mother, I’ll never forget when my mother gave me my first “hard” lesson about love.  I was an only child, and as an only child, I didn’t have “brothers” or “sisters”, but I had been given a few more “things” to play with, I guess.   I surely didn’t have “everything I wanted”, but I know they sometimes compensated by giving me a little more than I needed.   But I also needed, even more, to learn how to socialize and to learn how to love.   On this one occasion, very early, I was probably about 5, not yet in school.  My mother had invited another child my age to come over and play.  We were playing in my room, and we were coloring in our coloring books, when my playmate wanted to color out of my special book.  You see, I had early artist abilities, and I didn’t like to share my coloring book.  But when my Mom saw my resistance, she came over and asked me to share.  It was in that moment that I realize that my Mom’s love was not just big enough for me, but my mother’s love was also big enough for a stranger.  She made me share so I could learn that with true love, there was always enough to go around and that it was not love unless we were willing to share; and to share it even with the stranger in our midst.   In short, she showed me, in that childhood moment, that both my mom and God, had “other sheep who were not of “our” fold.

Good parenting helps the child form not only love in the family, but love for “others” who are outside the family.  Good parenting instills the importance of sharing and caring for other people; people who, are sometimes even every hard to love.   Another time, not long thereafter, a neighborhood child came into our yard and stole one of my toys.  I told my mother about who I thought it was, and we went to the home to retrieve the toy.  When the child’s mother declared the toy was theirs, which I knew to be a lie, we left the home without an argument.   On the way home, I pick up a stick and was ready to go back and demand my toy back.  That’s how hurt and angry I was.  But mom looked at me and said, “Put that stick down.”  
I replied, “But mom.  It was my toy.  I know it was!
She quickly calmed me, saying;  “I know it was Joey, but maybe she didn't have the money to buy him such a nice toy.  Tomorrow, we will go to town and buy you another.”
I could not fully understand why my mom did not demand justice and demand my toy.  But later, I realized what she was doing was teaching me something far greater.  That some “other” people are missing something else we have already and can share.  For the sake of love, sometimes we must forget the rules and show mercy and compassion.  This is what God does when he forgives us and we must do it for others too.   It is hard, yes it was hard, but it was a necessary lesson then, just as it still is today.   This work of love, to love the unlovable is hard, but it is still being inspired by the Holy Spirit.   It takes risk to do so.  It challenges our preconceptions and our prejudices, but this is the hard work of love. 

LOVE HAS THE ONLY FRUIT THAT WILL LAST
Marci Glass, a Presbyterian minister in Idaho, speaks of how, for the sake of love, the Holy Spirit will often challenge our assumptions about all kinds of things.  The Spirit will not only guide us to love people we would not normally love, the Spirit also puts us in situations which are uncomfortable, challenging, but will also become situations that can help break down barriers and boundaries we have set up in our lives and keep us from loving.   

She tells about leading a small group where there was a man from Kenya participating.  He had become her friend and when he came to the states and for a while she hosted him in her home.   Reaching out across cultures “was both an exciting and exhausting experience”, she said.  “Our food preferences were different.  Our life experiences were different.  For example, he didn’t understand, no matter how much I tried to explain to him, why I got in my car and drove to a gym to run on a treadmill.  I realized that it defied explanation to even to me….But it was one of those experiences where we could shed light on each other’s cultures.  Lots of people drive to the gym to run on a treadmill.  It never occurred to me, before he mentioned it, how ridiculous that is….  He also didn’t understand why a member of our church kept pet goats.  “I can show you how to butcher and cook him,” he told the family who politely declined the offer of turning Billy into stew.”  (From the sermon: "Boundaries" by Marci Auld Glass in Lectionary Homiletics, Vol. XXIII, Number 3, April-May, 2012, p. 54).

In the Bible Jesus says he has “other sheep”.   Later, when the time is right, God inspires both Cornelius and Peter to come together and try to learn to understand each other, to see each other differently, and to try to find out why they need to come together and learn to love each other as part of God’s growing family.   But this isn’t easy.  Peter winds up in all sorts of trouble with the church.   To show how crazy this all was, Peter is not in trouble with the Church because he baptized Cornelius, but because he ate dinner with him.  That shows us too, how immature some of our divisions and differences can become.   Perhaps there was a time when we were too immature to understand what really mattered.  Perhaps there is a time in all our lives when we have to learn what is most important.  What is most important now, is that we learn from both our immaturity and from the new thing God wants to do with us all.   God wants us to keep doing the greatest, but hardest work in the world: He wants us to grow and learn better how we can love.  As Jesus told his disciples, when they walked by the grapevine; “I appointed you to go, and bear fruit, fruit that will last”  (15:16).  What is the fruit that will last?  Again, Paul clarifies: “These three remain: Faith, Hope and Love.  But the greatest is love (1 Cor. 13:13).  And all God’s people say:   Amen!

© 2012 All rights reserved Charles J. Tomlin, B.A., M.Div. D.Min.    

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