The Movement Continues: God is Love

“God is love.” We encourage our children to memorize it. When we see those words in a social media meme, we are quick to hit the “heart” button. We embroider it on our throw pillows.

But, what in the world does it mean? Really mean? Rob Bell, in his Nooma video titled “Flame,” talks about how vaguely we use that word: “We get incredible mileage out of this tired, old English word “love,” don’t we? We’ll tell someone we love them and then in the same breath we’ll talk about how much we love a new car, or a new pair of pants. I mean, I love my wife, and I also love…tacos?” Bell points out that when we use this word, it is one of the most profound in the English language, and one of the most vague. As if to further the point, as I was working on the sermon this week, I got up and walked past our counter to see a loaf of store-brand white bread to discover that it was “baked with…love.” I’m sure it was. Whatever that means.

So let’s spend the next several moments thinking about what it might mean. The famous sculptor Michelangelo reportedly said of how he carved his famous statue David, “It’s simple. I just removed everything that was not David.” Scholar Ronald Cole-Turner takes that phrase—”God is love”—and does the same thing. In short, Cole-Turner asks, perhaps we should start with the question of what God is not:

John might have said that God is power or order or goodness. In our insecurity and longing for protection, we often yearn for a God who can control nature and prevent sickness or violence, a God who will protect us from all harm. In a world of moral confusion, we wish for a God who lays down the law with complete clarity and holds everyone accountable, catching the cheaters and rewarding the faithful. In our hunger to possess, we might even imagine a God of prosperity, one who promises to make us rich if we obey a few principles. Whatever may be true about God’s power or moral order or generosity, John avoids all these descriptions in favor of the simple word…love.

A brilliant reminder, is it not? Because we live in a world where so many people are embroidering on the throw pillows of their hearts that “God is power.” “God is order.” “God is prosperity.” They talk about a God of love, but they worship something else. And it’s not a coincidence that those who already happen to have power, worship a God who is power. And those who benefit from the current order, worship a God of that order. And those who find themselves already prosperous, are quick to define God by prosperity. God is power; I am power. God is prosperity; I am prosperity. But the Elder upends those assumptions with this totally different phrase:

God is love.

But again, let me ask the question, what in the world does that mean? Let’s continue our sculpture. Caroline Simon continues this model of contrast by asking what love is not. She writes using the word “counterfeit” to talk about things that we call love, or confuse with love, but are really something else entirely. I’ll share three:

• Love is not sentimentality. She says that papering over problems with sweet feelings or nice words will not make the problems go away. John the Elder seems to understand this, as seen in the passage I read a few moments ago. “God loved us and sent his son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins.” The love example that the passage uses to talk about love is the cross. And sin. And sacrifice. When we say, “God is love,” it is not mere sentimentality. Simon says that pretending that things are better will not make them better. Jesus came to earth to die. Or more accurately, he came to live a life that the world couldn’t handle without murdering it. The way to God’s love is through the cross. Through unblinking sacrifice. Not sentimentality. Not another throw pillow.

• Secondly, love is not guilt. We can get kind of twisted in the Church, can’t we? We take this fear-based guilt and baptize it and call it love. Thus, love sometimes turns into a list of stuff that we have to do, so that God will love. Or a picture of all of the needs of all of our neighbors, requiring us to run ourselves into the ground on behalf of love. If we don’t accomplish it all, we are terrified of God’s punishment, or perhaps worse, those voices in our own heads that say, “you aren’t doing enough.” But fear-driven guilt seems to be the opposite of God’s life of love. “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear,” says I John. Caroline Simon invites us toward the work of self-love. Remember that when Jesus talks about love in the Gospels, he explains that we love our neighbor as ourselves, which means we have to love ourselves. And that includes the vigorous and hard work of replacing guilt and shame, fear and reactivity…with perfect love.

• Thirdly, love is not fictional. Sometimes the language that we use around love is generalized and almost disconnected from reality. But a big part of Simon’s description of love depends on the particularity of the one who loves and is loved. She writes that our lives are “storied.” We each imagine ourselves in a narrative sense, as a character interacting with other characters along the way. But we write these stories, for ourselves and others, that might not be based in reality. Famous baseball player Mickey Mantle watched his father and uncle die in their 30s from cancer. As a young man, Mantle fell into a hedonistic, partying lifestyle, assuming that his life would be just as short, so he should live it up! It didn’t matter how he lived, because his story had been written. Or so he thought. But then that wasn’t his story. He didn’t die young. He is famously quoted, lamenting “If I knew I was going to live this long, I’d have taken better care of myself.” A humorous quote, except that it belied a tragic assumption about his own story. Simon would call this “fiction-making.” When we see ourselves or others in a fictional way, perhaps how we think they ought to be, or how we wish they would be, instead of how they really are. Our feelings then are a kind of counterfeit love, empty and tragic.

But there is good news here. There is an alternative to these counterfeits. I John talks about this alternative using two important words. The first is the Greek word meno. Here in the NRSV, it’s translated as “abide.” It means throughout Scripture to stay, to dwell, to be present. It connotes that we are in it for the long haul. Not a fleeting feeling or a fear-driven reaction, but a thing that yearns to stay in relationship to know who you are, what you need, and who I am in relationship to you. The text says that we meno—we abide—in God and God abides in us. God is in it for the long haul with us, making it possible for us to be in it for the long haul with God and with each other.

Which brings us to the second important Greek word: agape. Simply translated, it means “love,” but whereas our English word “love” is a bit vague and used for both deepest connection AND white bread, the Greek word agape is more profound. It references a love that is welcoming, and self-giving, and deeply relational, and…abiding. It is these two concepts together—agape and meno—that describes this long-haul love. The passage I read is not subtle about love: it uses this Greek word agape in one form or another 24 times in the 13 verses that I read. So this word that is constant and unrelenting throughout the passage describes a love that is constant and never-ending. Like the drummer in a good rock band, driving the beat, beat, beat that acts as the backbone to the song, agape is the drumbeat of God’s relationship to humanity, and humanity’s relationship to one another.

So let’s talk about the distinction between those two: God’s love and our love. Theologians have tried to understand this difference over the generations…it cannot be the same, right? Well, I John seems to think so. It isn’t as if the Elder uses different words for these two different loves: the word agape is used throughout. In fact, that seems to be the point. The God-originated, God-ordained, God-created love is the same love that we have access to as well. Agape is agape, no matter who is the originator. But the Elder makes it clear that the practice is different, between God’s love and our love. There is this important grammatical and theological shift in the passage, right around verse 13. Before verse 13, the verbs have all been in the indicative form. If you don’t remember your high school English, the indicative form deals with realities and facts. This thing is real. This moment happened. I John uses this form to talk about the reality of God’s abiding love. It is true. It is verifiable. It is a fact. But then, around verse 13, the verb tenses shift to the imperative. Again, grammar review: this is the tense used to name a command. Do this thing. Be like this. This is the tense that the Elder uses to command the love of humans to one another. Reality first…action second. By the way, that’s how we get untwisted with the whole guilt thing. When we say IF we love others, THEN God will love us, we get it wrong. Instead, John says BECAUSE God loved us first, THEN we respond by loving others. Like the yeast in the bread, God’s agape is baked into who we are as humans. Baked, one might say, with love.

But, again, what does this really mean? What does this look like? There are so many counterfeits of love out there, how do we know when we see the real thing? Again, I turn to Caroline Simon. Her conception of a narrative, storied, grounded love is crucial to understanding what I John is talking about. But instead of fiction-making, where we write each other’s story for them, for how we think it should be, she says that the key to loving each other is this other concept: imagination.

Imagination is a word that we often associate with a lack of reality, and silliness, and a Charlie and the Chocolate Factory fantasy. “Hold your breath, Make a wish, Count to three, Come with me and you’ll be, In a world of pure imagination…” A great song and a great movie, but not exactly one that is grounded in reality. It actually feels ripe for the kind of sentimentality that Simon was talking about earlier. But the way that Simon uses the word “imagination” is an unblinking, grounded, realistic love. Imagination is the key to how we love one another. Because God created, and gifted, and formed us to live a life of meaning and significance and purpose, our role is then to imagine for one another what that life is. Let her tell you in her own words:

Self-love involves the hard work of knowing ourselves, of giving up our wish to have unlimited creative license in writing our own story. Self-love requires the imagination to see ourselves as creatures whose destinies are gifts of grace from our Creator. Thus, true self-love always entails seeing how God’s story comprehends our story. In neighbor love, imagination allows us to see others as also having been given such a gift. Seeing others, no matter how confused or broken or unattractive they may be, as creatures loved by God and gifted with a destiny makes a claim on at least my respect and, if possible, my help.

Let that sink in for a few moments. Do you see the fingerprints of I John all over that concept? Agape love and Meno abiding? A love for myself and others that imagines that God created each of us with a purpose. An abiding spirit in it for the long haul, for us to imagine together what that means for each of us. Not closing your eyes and making a wish, but doing the relational, committed, long-haul work of holy imagination. Do you start to see now how far we have come since white bread and embroidered pillows? This reality is both the most important reality that has ever been done on earth—indicative form—and the most important command that we are called to do—imperative form. We are called and gifted to be agents of imagination, tasked with loving one another into the lives that they are called and gifted to be…as we allow them to do the same for us. That is the Gospel that the Elder preached over and over again. It was the hope that he had for a splintered and disjointed and angry community that wasn’t sure that they would hold together. It was the theological grounding that made it possible for the Church 70 years after Jesus to exist until 700 years after Jesus, and dare I say 7,000 years after Jesus. The ongoing story of God, in which we all play a part. All grounded in those three simple words: God is love.