“A Loving Friend”

Romans 13:8-14

September 4, 2005

St. Paul United Methodist Church

Rev. John A. Fleming

Have you noticed that sometimes it is hard to get along with other people? I could ask my question with a little more boldness. I could ask it this way. Have you ever noticed that it is not easy to love another person, especially those that we are closest to?

Of all the sermons that I have preached here now going on four years, the one that I received the most comments about was the one that I preached less than a month ago about the power of words. I cannot tell you how many people told me that they needed that sermon.

Our words, often, can get us in trouble with those that we love the most. We have to be careful when questions like these come around. “Honey, what do you think about my haircut?” That question got me in trouble early in my marriage to Susie. Instead of saying that it looked great, I answered, “It’s all right.” Here is another question that can get you in trouble. “Do you think that I have put on a little weight?” The answer to that question is always no. Here is the question that got me in trouble the other evening. A letter arrived from UAMS asking us to give to a fund that was established by a friend of our’s whose wife recently died. Susie read the letter, looked over at me and said, “Steve loved Suzanne so very much.” Then came her question, “Why don’t you love me like that?” I know what I should have said. I should have said, “I love you that much, maybe more.” That is not what I said. Instead I shrugged my shoulders and said, “I don’t know.” Susie looked at me and said, “Wrong answer!”

I understand that someone has written a book on how to get men out of situations like that one. The author provides a list of things to say that are divided into three different categories. First, there is a dangerous thing to say. Next, there is a safer thing to say. Finally, there is the safest thing to say. Let me give you an example or two of his suggestions. Here is a question. A man comes home and asks, “What’s for dinner?” That is the dangerous thing to say. A safer thing to say would have been, “Can I help you with dinner.” And of course, the safest thing to say would have been, “Where can I take you to dinner tonight, dear?” Or how about this one. First, the dangerous thing to say, “You’re not wearing that, are you?” A safer thing to say would be, “Honey, you look great in brown!” But the safest thing to say would have been, “Wow! Look at you!” I love these. Let me give you one more. A dangerous thing to say would be to come home, look around, and say, “What did you DO all day?” A safer thing to do would be to say, “I hope that you did not overdo it today” The safest thing to say would, of course, be, “I’ve always loved you in that robe.”

Love is not easy. Married love or dating love is especially tough. But the truth is that love in any kind of a relationship isn’t easy. And yet Paul tells us in our lesson for this morning that the person who loves his brothers and his sisters has fulfilled the law. Paul writes, “Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law.”

These words, our lesson for this morning, come in the so what section of his words to the Roman Christians. Paul has given a deep and complex set of theological statements. He has laid a foundation. Now his concern is how we are going to stand and live and move around on the poured foundation. Okay, so you believe that you are saved by the grace of God, what difference does that make in the kind of conversation you just had with your mother. So you believe that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, so how does that help you with the one who is on your last nerve? According to Paul, there ought to be a before and after contrast in our lives when the truth sinks in. We should be able to look back on our lives we should be able to think, “Look how different I am now than what I was!”

For Paul, it all boils down to loving our neighbor and loving ourselves. Keeping the commandments is not enough. Staying faithful in our marriages is not enough. Not murdering someone is not enough. Not stealing is not enough. Not wanting something that someone else has is not enough. What is enough, says Paul, is loving our neighbors as we do ourselves. Then as if to put an exclamation point on his thoughts, Paul says, “Love does no wrong to a neighbor.”

Of course, this idea of loving other people sounds all well and good, but what does that kind of love look like? How would you define it? What does loving others, even loving yourself really mean? Here is my problem with the idea of love and loving others and loving ourselves. We throw the word love around as if everyone who hears it knows what we mean. We throw it around as if we know what it means. It is not the only “religious” word that we throw around. We also say the words faith and hope as if everyone knows what they mean. Those sermons are for another today. Today is about love. What does love really mean? When we say that we love our little girl, our precious son, our husband, or our wife does it mean the same thing as when we say that we love a new car, or the new couch that we just bought?

Paul says that if you are not loving the way that you should, then it is too late. The apostle was sure that Jesus was going to return in his lifetime. That is why he wrote the words, “...how it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep, for salvation is closer to us now than when we first became believers.” Paul does not believe that there is time for things like debauchery, licentiousness, quarreling, and jealousy. Our salvation is too close to be doing those things.

Now, I am not sure that I have all the answers. What I have is my answer. What I challenge you to do is to try to find your own answer to the question of what love really is. Here is what I think. I think that love is the most powerful and the most powerless thing in our world. It is the most powerful because it the only thing that I know that can, all alone, all by itself, conquer the strong and bomb proof thing that we call our hearts. Love is also powerless because by itself it can do nothing except with someone else’s consent.

Hollywood doesn’t want you to realize that. Hollywood wants us to think that love is something that you fall into, like a pit. After all, when we are first in love, we usually say that we have fallen head over heels. According to Hollywood, love happens like this. Girl sees boy and decides that she wants him for her own. So she pursues him. She courts him. She woos him. She wines him and she dines him and when she has him, she decides that she does not want him after all. Is that how love happens?

If that is how love happens then I did it all wrong. I went out with Susie way back in 1989 because my roommate and Susie’s sweet mate decided that we would make a cute couple. A girl had just broken my heart and so I had no interest in anyone. Brent wore me down. After talking to me for the hundredth time, I said, “Brent, if you will leave me alone, I will go out with her!” As it turns out, the same kind of thing was happening with Susie and her roommate. She did not want to go out with me either. Her roommate wore her down. I agreed to go out with her and she agreed to go out with me and we have been together ever since. Our love, in those days, was eros love. Eros love feels so good. It is the kind of love that makes you want to stay up all night talking. It is love that reaches for someone else’s hand. Eros love is new love. It is romantic love. It is exciting love.

There is, of course, another kind of love. In the church, we call this love agape. When Jesus came into the world, there was no word that really fit what he did and how he lived. For sure, there was no word for what he did for us on the cross. So the world had to come up with a new word for love. We call it agape love. It is the kind of love that Paul talks about in his letter to the Corinthians, the thirteenth chapter, in what he calls the more excellent way. It is love that keeps no records of wrongs. It is love that does not insist on its own way. It is love that is patient and it is love that is kind. Love here is not a cozy, emotional feeling, the kind of thing that you can create. You can’t create it any more than you can a sneeze. So, in the Christian sense, love is not an emotion, but an act of the will. It is something that we decide to do. So when Jesus and Paul tell us to love our neighbors, he is telling us that sometimes we have to be willing to sacrifice our own well being for some one else’s well being. Sometimes loving someone means leaving them alone. Love does not always mean that you are nice. Think about that. I love my daughter, but if she were traveling down what I thought was a dangerous path, I would be the first one to tell her. Why? Because I love her.

Can loving someone change them? I’ve seen it happen before. But it’s not common. Can loving someone change the past? Of course not. Can I change other people? That would be nice. I was working on a sermon a year or so ago. I don’t think that I preached the sermon, but it’s title was this Other People. I came to a stopping point and was about to leave. I needed to save what I had done on my computer. But instead of hitting the save icon, I tried closing the file. Here is the message that popped up, “Save changes to Other People?” I thought, “Now wouldn’t that be nice” Sometimes there is tough love. Someone that I highly respect recently told me that tough love means that it tough on you. Some behaviors cost more than they are worth! Friends, I just want you to know that you can’t throw the word love around. What does love mean to you when you say it? What does it look like when you do it?

It may look like what I saw on the news last Wednesday night. I came home after a long meeting. I was tired and decided that I would watch the local news to see what had happened during the day. I watched to catch up on what was happening in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. There on the news, were two of our own, Jacob Christie and Tyler Crane. Along with Lee Perry, the three of them had spent the better part of the day raising money to purchase bottled water. They delivered the water and helped load a truck that would deliver its cargo to the hurricane affected areas. I saw them and I thought to myself, “That is what love looks like!” So, friends, what is love to you? What does it look like? What does it feel like? What does it mean to you when Paul says that we are to love our selves and our neighbors? Let us pray.

(Special thanks to Frederick Buechner for help in understanding love. Special thanks to Bryan Gray. He is the one who gave me some ideas for this sermon. Special thanks to all, everywhere, who are helping and will help with hurricane relief).