By Rev. Dr. Charles J. Tomlin, DMin
Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership
Pentecost 3, June 9th, 2013
“Above all, clothe yourselves with
love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. (Col 3:14 NRS).
In the long running 60’s Broadway play, and 70’s award winning movie, Fiddler on the Roof, the Jewish Father,
Tevye has a big problem. Not only is the
world changing around him and his people are still being persecuted by Russian Tsarists,
he has 5 daughters, 3 of which are of marrying age. His
daughters no longer want to marry according to the long-standing Jewish
tradition of ‘chosen’ or ‘matchmaker’ marriage, but they want to marry for
love. While Tevye reminds his daughters about
“tradition”, they challenge his own understanding of ‘love’, even causing the
poor Tevye wife to wonder, “Do you love me?”
If ever a culture has been confused about the meaning of love, it is
ours. In the ancient Greek language
they had 4 different words for love, but we only have one. We can say things like I love my dog, my
car, my house, my children and our spouse all with the same word and mean very
different things. The Eskimos have 5
words for snow, which is very important to them. Why do we only have one word for love? Is there any wonder we are confused about the
true meaning of love?
LOVE
ABOVE ALL
Paul wants to resolve any confusion that
might exist about the Christian faith, when he says in our text, ‘above all, clothe yourself in love.” All the virtues of the resurrected life that
we’ve been discussing up to now; compassion,
kindness, humility, meekness, patience, bearing
one another and forgiving one another,
each make up a different part or angle of the overall meaning of virtue of
Christian love. These words are all ‘love’
words; and they are all love virtues. This
means that without love they do not happen. Only with love in our hearts will we
practice the virtues of compassion, show kindness, be humble, display meekness,
have patience, bear the unbearable and forgive the unforgiveable. Only love can make these very challenging and
demanding virtues happen in our lives.
As Paul says, love ‘binds
everything together’. And love holds
us together too. The biggest, greatest,
largest and most important element of the Christian faith, of the Christian
experience and of the Christian life is the practice of love---love ‘above all’.
Why
is ‘love’ the most important virtue (or behavior) within Christianity? Love
is central to everything it means to be Christian, to follow Jesus Christ
because love is what it means to know
God. Scripture says that “God
is love”; which means that you can’t separate faith from the practice of
loving, or the separate the practice of loving from the practice of faith. The Christian faith believes that God loves
because love is of God. Love is of God precisely
because God is love. For this reason, in
Christian theology, Love is not just any virtue; it is called a ‘theological virtue’. As with all three theological virtues, faith,
hope and love, love not only comes from God alone, love also reveals God to
us. This means you can’t have true love,
unless it comes from God, and you only know God fully in the human capacity to
love. In Scripture, of these three
theological virtues, ‘faith, hope and
love, Paul reminded us then, in 1 Corinthians as he
does here, in Colossians, that: ‘the
greatest of these is love’. This is why, as the fullest revelation of God
himself, Jesus gave us the two greatest
commandments as commands to love---to love God with all our heart, soul and
mind, and to love our neighbor as ourselves.
‘For God so loved the world’
is only fully understood when we practice love as the greatest virtue in our life. Love
is central to everything we believe about God and the world.
If you look deep into Judaism, you will
find the message of love, but in post-exilic Judaism, it was the Law, not love
that became central. If you take a
close look at Islam, you will find that the central idea is not the love of
God, but surrendering to God completely.
Islam is Arabic for ‘surrender’ and a Muslim is one who has submitted
completely to God. It is not love, but
full surrender that guides the heart of a Muslim. In Buddhism, the central idea is
Enlightenment. The Buddha left his love
for his wife and family behind to search for enlightenment. Buddha learned about suffering and love as
part of his Enlightenment, but love was only secondary to knowledge. In Hindu thought, the oldest religion in the
world, the key goal is of life is full consciousness, unity or oneness with
God. Only the one who puts on the full
yoke of unity with all things, someone who is called the Yoga, can understand love
as connected to everything else. But in Hinduism, this oneness or unity brings about
love instead of love bringing about unity.
This is the opposite approach to what Paul is saying when he says that ‘love binds all things together in harmony’.
It is not the binding that causes us to
love, but it is the love that will enable us to bind.
To be fair to all those who seek God and
desire faith in our global community, it is important to understand that in
most, if not all the great religions of the world, love is put right up there
near the top of all the greatest virtues
and practices of faith. But in
Christianity, love is not one thing, and it is not only the greatest thing, love
is everything. Remember what Paul told
the Corinthians, ‘without love I am nothing’,
‘I gain nothing’ and ‘if I do not have love I am a noisy gong.’ (See 1 Cor. 13: 1-3). In the core thinking and in the central acts of
Jesus and Paul, love is the core motivation.
Love is what motivated Jesus to challenge the status quo in Israel and
to include sinners in God’s love, and
even to command that the great commandment to love includes the love of enemies (Matthew 5:44). In the teachings of Paul, Paul understood
that love is the great fruit of the
Spirit which gives life, a life that can’t be found in even in the best
works of the law. In is in the Spirit
of love that God is able to include all people, both Jew and Gentile in God
gift of salvation, which is ‘by grace,
through faith, that you are saved, and not of yourselves, for it is God’s
gift. It is not of works lest anyone
should boast.” (Eph 2: 8,9). Because
love is the core motivation within true faith is why John writes in his letter
to young Christians, that “whoever does
not have love, does not have God” (1 John 4.8).
What I would never say is that other
religions fail to understand this any less than many Christians fail to understand
or implement it. The truth is that sometimes, there are people in
other religions who come closer to the biblical understanding of love that
Christians do. I am not only thinking
here of those Christian who have failed to love, but I am also thinking of some
non-Christians in history, or even living today, who have understood God’s love
completely. One person I’m particularly
thinking of here is Ghandi, the great Hindu lawyer and teacher who studied and understood
Jesus’ teaching on love and civil rights better than most Christians in South
Africa, as did many, if not most southern ‘Christians’ here in the south during
the Civil Rights era of the 60’s. The
light of God’s love is bright enough to shine through any religious search for
truth. But in the same way, any
religion, including Christianity, including any denomination or any church goes
completely dark and fails to be of any human or heavenly value, IF WE FAIL TO
LOVE.
LOVE
BINDS EVERYTHING TOGETHER
There should be no doubt at the central
place of love within the list of Christian virtues, behaviors, or
practices. Love rules supreme in the
Christian faith, because without God’s love we have nothing; no hope, no faith,
no life worth living, and no death worth dying.
But with love, everything looks different. It is much like Peter Berger, the great
sociologists once put it: “When a mother rocks her crying baby to sleep and
night as saying “Hush, don’t cry! It’s
going to be O.K. This is either the
greatest lie in the world or it is right at the source of the greatest
truth.” We are loved by the only one who
can tell us in both life and death that everything will be O.K. It is such great love that holds everything
together.
But the question still remains
unanswered until we get a closer look at what Paul is saying, when he says that
‘love binds everything together.” Paul is not only telling us how important
love is, he is also telling us what true love is by what true love does. When
Paul wrote his most famous words about love to the Corinthians, Paul only
defined love by what love does. He
never gives us any kind of philosophical definition. The act of love is the only definition we need. Love
is what love does. It is not something
you dream about, but love is something you do.
This is why Paul says: “love is patient, love is kind, love in not
envious or boastful, or rude. Love does
not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not
rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things,
hopes all things, endures all things.
Love never ends.” To
this expansive list of what love does, in his letter to the Colossians, Paul
adds one more most important characteristic of love: ‘Love
binds everything together in harmony.’
Love ‘bears all things’, ‘believes all things’, love “builds us up” (1
Cor. 8:1), as he also told the Corinthians, but now Paul tells the Colossians and us, that love is the
‘binding agent’ of human life.
When I think of the ‘binding power’ of
true love, I can’t help but think of the story of the Good Samaritan, one of
the greatest love stories in the New Testament, and the whole world. It’s the story that Luke (10:25-37) included
in his gospel, because his gospel was particularly written for those who find
themselves outside of a circle of of love.
In the story Jesus told, a Jewish man is robbed and left for dead by the
side of the road. Several religious
people come by, but do not stop and help.
It is only the Samaritan, the foreigner, the immigrant, the Mexican, the
African American, the Jehovah’s Witness, the Homosexual, the Democrat, Republican,
the Liberal or the Fundamentalists, who stops and helps by ‘binding’ up the
man’s wounds.
Just pick out somebody you are prejudice
against and put them in this story and you will clearly see and feel how Jesus
first told this story. And did you hear what
the Good Samaritan did for this wounded man?
The key to the Good Samaritan’s faith was not decided by his adherence
to God’s law, but he was a ‘good’ person and a good neighbor (who we are
commanded to be), because he was ‘moved
with pity (or compassion)’ and ‘he
went to him and bandaged (or bound up, KJV) his wounds.” True love
‘binds’ us together as we bind up each other’s wounded lives. We
love as wounded healers to each other, Carl Jung the great psychiatrist used to
say. We help and heal each other because
we all have hurts and we all have the need to love and be loved. The deepest wounds can only be healed by
human love which mirrors God’s love for us all.
In Chemistry, if I remember my lessons
from long ago, one of the most important elements in physical existence are
those elements that have been formed out of chemical bonds, such as H2O. Without such a ‘bonding’ process human life
would be impossible. But when one part
Hydrogen and one part Oxygen are bonded together, we have water. If it were not for the attraction of electrons
to bond together we would not have electricity. If it were not for the fact that Sodium and
Chloride bond together we could not have salt or salt water. Someone once asked a physicists, “what is
the most important chemical bond?” Do
you know what the answer was: all of them.
Love is the bonding agent of human life, human potential, human
possibility and our human hope. Paul
was right on when he said that love is the greatest and without love we are
nothing, we have nothing, we become nothing.
The bonding nature of love holds everything together.
IN
PERFECT HARMONY?
We conclude with the hardest part. That love is above all is not hard to
grasp. Neither is the concept that love
binds us and everything together, but ‘in
perfect harmony’? What does
Scripture mean when there are so many different definitions of love, and we all
know that love does not solve ALL our problems, iron out ALL our differences,
nor does LOVE answer every question we humans can ask about life. A good case and point is the whole idea of
Situation Ethics which once said that “all we need is love”. There is perfect agreement that love is what
we need, but you could never say that love would have stopped someone like
Stalin, like Hitler, or that love was
the only way to answer 911, or many other crimes against humanity. Love is what we need, yes, yes, yes, but love
is not ALL we need. We also need law,
justice, judgment, and restitution. Love
rules surpreme. Love binds us together. But how can we reach ‘perfect harmony’ in an
imperfect world that so diverse, so divisive, and so morally confused and
convoluted at times, and is not what life should be? How can we understand and do love when life
doesn’t work, when things don’t go as planned, and when everyone did not get
the memo, that all we need is love. This
is the kind of question we always have to put to love when we think about what Christian
love should mean and what love must mean.
What kind of ‘harmony’ can
love really bring in this fallen world in which we live?
For one thing, we must understand that
Paul did not write about love as a letter to the world, but it was a ‘letter’
to a church who all had faith in the love of Jesus Christ. Christian love should be extended to the
world as our witness to the world, but Christian love is not yet fully possible
in this fallen world. All of the
Bible’s words about love were given to disciples, to Christians, to Churches
and to people who had already come to know God’s love. Love is possible only in the context of such
faith in the Love of God.
But there is something else we must
understand. When Paul says ‘perfect
harmony’ he does not mean to bind everyone together without mistakes, failures,
or flawless, but he means binding us together in ‘maturity’, fullness, or completeness. He does not mean that love makes everything
perfect, but he means that ‘love’ makes us as we should be, as we ought to be, even
when we are not fully there yet.
Perhaps a true story of human love and compassion in a very difficult
situation will help us know what Paul means, and where Paul is coming from when
he says love binds us together as we should be. During War World II we all know the terrible
story of what happen to the Jews, and how the Nazi’s intended to annihilate them
from the face of the earth. Eli Wiesel,
a Jewish survivor called the moment in history “The Night”. It was one of the darkest moments of
organized hate in human history. But it
is also in the darkness moment of hate that the light of love can also shine
the brightest.
This is exactly what happened in a small
town in France during that terrible darkness of the Holocaust. The city of Le Chambon was inhabited by
French Hugenots, Protestant Christians who were hunted and killed during the
time of the reformation. They still
remain marginal Christians in French society today, and many of them came to
the United States seeking religious freedom.
When Jews came to their town seeking refugee from the Nazi, they offered
them hospitality instead of hostility.
Villagers lead by their Hugenot pastor, Andre Trocme, not only offered
the Jews a place to hide, but they did this at the risk of their own lives as
the German army occupied their own country.
But they welcome these ‘strangers’ as if they were welcoming Jesus. They took them in, hid them, feed them,
protected them, and even ‘lied’ to save their lives. They offered them hospitality because they
identified with them as people who had been hunted down and wounded by hostility
themselves. They didn’t think twice
about offering them love, because gospel that had offered them life in the
midst of death (As told in Jonathan Wilson’s Gospel Virtues, Practicing Faith
Hope and Love in Uncertain Times, IVP Press, 1998, p 180).
It’s a long and difficult trip to move
from hostility to showing love and hospitality, said the late Henri Nouwen. But offering strangers, even our enemy, a
place to be loved instead of a place to be hated is to offer them a chance to
be changed by love. This is exactly why
Jesus said, “love your enemy” and Paul went on to say to the Romans “be devoted
to one another in love….practice hospitality, bless those who persecute you….never
pay back evil to anyone…never take your own revenge….BUT IF YOUR ENEMY IS
HUNGRY FEED HIM AND IF HE IS THRISTY, GIVE HIM DRINK, FOR IN SO DOING YOU WILL
HEAP BURNING COALS ON HIS HEAD. Do not
be overcome with evil, but overcome evil with good.” (From parts of Romans 12: 1—21) And the greatest good, we know already, is
love. It is love above all, (which binds us up, as the Good Samaritan shows us) and also
bind us together in perfect harmony.” Amen.
No comments :
Post a Comment