Give Me Your Unconditional Love

Did you know the classic tune from Camp McDowell is a Donna Summer almost hit?

Acts 10:44-48

Psalm 98

1 John 5:1-6

John 15:9-17

 

 © 2021-2024 The Rev. Seth Olson

This sermon was preached at the Episcopal Church of the Holy Apostles on Sunday, May 5th and video of it may be found here. 

The title track off of Donna Summer’s 1983 album She Works Hard For The Money was a huge hit. It topped the Billboard R&B chart for three weeks and reached #3 on the Billboard Hot 100. It remains one of Summer’s most well-known tracks, played around the world and streamed tens of millions of times.

 

The second single off that same album was a commercial disappointment, only reaching #43 on Billboard’s pop list. I am sure Summer and Mercury Records were upset by the lukewarm reception of this track. However, the late Donna Summer would be happy to know that the youth of our diocese love this song, which is entitled, “Unconditional Love.” If you have been around a diocesan youth event, you may have heard it: 

 

Don't take too long to find

True love transcends all time

That non-reacting, everlasting love

 

Give me, your unconditional love.

The kind of love I deserve

The kind I want to return.

 

Until a few years ago, I had no idea of the genesis of this classic camp hit. My friend and fellow former associate rector at All Saints, Charles Youngson, revealed the original singer of this song, and I was so confused. “’Unconditional Love’ was sung by Donna Summer? Like, ‘Bad Girls’ Donna Summer? ‘Last Dance’ Donna Summer?” After googling and going on Spotify to make sure Charles had not lost his mind, I explored a little more. 

 

Discovering that this song had a less than stellar reception amongst critics and radio listeners alike actually did not surprise me. We prefer to put our energies into working hard (for the money) instead of receiving and giving unconditional love. This is true not just about Donna Summer’ songs, it is true throughout life. Of course, we in the Church love love.

 

We love talking about love. We love putting love in our mission statements—“At the Episcopal Church of the Holy Apostles, our mission is to… love Christ in every person”—but what do we really mean by unconditional love, transforming love, or in the Greek agape? Jesus in today’s Gospel lesson gives us some clues as to the immensity and the difficulty of participating in God’s love.

 

“As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love,” Jesus told this to his disciples on the night before he died. Sometimes we believe that God loves us because God is Our Heavenly Father (or Mother or Parent depending on your piety). However, that is getting things backwards. As a beloved friend once preached, “God doesn’t love us because God is our heavenly parent. [God] loves us because that’s who God is, and it is the love that God has for us that makes us God’s children—not the other way around.”[1]

 

Think about it this way, most of us probably believe deeply that we love our grandparents and parents, our children and grandchildren no matter what. We may even strive to practice unconditional love with them, so that when they hurt us profoundly, we still come back with the same unabashed affection. This is wonderful, and it’s another form of love, sometimes referred to as storgē familial love. Jesus was calling his disciples (and us) to abide in this agape love. This sounds great, but what does this love look like?

 

Agape is revealed in keeping Jesus’ commandment. What was Jesus’ commandment? To love one another as he loves us. [puzzled look] Okay, I know. This is as though we are walking through an M.C. Escher painting in which we reach the top of the stairs only to realize we are back at the bottom. Jesus’ words are a bit circuital. He essentially says: “Love one another as I have loved you. Do this by abiding in my love. You will know that you are dwelling in my love if you follow my commandments. What are my commandments? Oh wait, there’s just one and it is to love one another.” Oh, Jesus!

 

This snake eating its tail sort of logic is frustrating; however, digging deeper into what Jesus meant by this love may leave us even more frustrated, or at least more challenged! After Jesus told his disciples that his commandment was to love one another he gave them a real-world example of this: “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” We sometimes bypass these words too quickly, so let me read them again, “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” Jesus not twenty-four hours later lived these words out—or perhaps better said, he laid his life down to prove these words perfectly true. 

 

How do we even attempt to live into this sort of love? That same friend I mentioned earlier also pointed out that there are two surprises within these challenging words.[2] The first is right in front of us: Laying down one’s life for another is not simply an act of ending one’s mortal life. 

 

Another sort of “martyrdom” exists. We celebrate this example in the Church Calendar when we put up white liturgical hangings for Saints’ feast days. These Saints did not die because of their faith, instead they lived for it. In the musical Hamilton the character of George Washington put it more simply, “Dying is easy, living is harder.” John in a passage from his First Letter that we read a few weeks ago expanded this concept even further. When we sacrifice resources, we would otherwise use and give to God’s work in this world here too we are laying down our lives. So, this is the first surprise—the agape love of giving up ourselves is not just about death, it happens any time we sacrifice for God’s work in this world.

 

The second surprise is undetectable in our English translation. The sentence “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” is much more interesting in the original language. The word for friends is philos and there is a specific type of friendly or brotherly love in the Greek, it’s philia (see: Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love). So, is that what Jesus said? NOPE! Jesus used another word for love, and it is—you guessed it—agape! 

 

Why is this important? It would have put those listening to this Gospel on notice. To truly follow Jesus’ commandment, to abide in him, to be his friend is not about brotherly love—love that is complementary or a mirror response to how someone else treats us. Instead, it is about agape—that non-reacting, everlasting love. Alright, again this all sounds nice, but what’s this look like, laying down our life for someone else? For example, how do we live in love when we have conflict with someone else? Well, how did Jesus live or as the famous bracelet asks, “What would Jesus do?”

 

Jesus was not a doormat. He was not a pushover. He pushed over tables in the Temple. He told people no. He even said to his own family, you are not my family—those who do my Father’s will are. He stopped healing people in one town, so that he could share his message elsewhere. He paused for prayer. He loved his enemies, but by challenging them. And in these and many other ways, he showed us an example of being “boundaried” in our approach to dwelling in God’s love and sharing it with others. Jesus set limits even as he expressed God’s limitless love. 

 

So, maybe living in agape is not so much about being pushovers, running ourselves ragged, and completely exhausting ourselves, but instead it is about finding times and places to fill our cup with God’s love, like Jesus did in prayer. So that then, that love overflows from us to others, like Jesus did in truly seeing and healing others. And yes, God calls us to give sacrificially of ourselves, but in ways that enrich our lives and others—not just for the sake of suffering. Jesus did not die just to die, he died so that we may live in love. 

 

Remember you are a beloved creature of this love, and not a robot that can work without rest and restoration. God’s love is not an invitation for others to take advantage of us or hurt themselves. God’s love is not a mythical “perfect love” that does not exist in real life.

 

God is always more ready to give us this gift than we are to receive it. Some moments we will dwell in this love and it will emanate from us to others. Other times we will be broken vessels that leak the little bit of agape we feel like we have inside. In all these moments may we not shame ourselves or tear each other down for that only prevents us from seeing God’s way of love.

 

In the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, the Christ, we see this way: 

-the transfiguration of human weakness by God’s strength 

-non-reacting, everlasting love as a response to violence

-the trappings of death gone and the tomb empty

 

In this way, may we sing with Donna Summer and the youth of our diocese:

Give me, your unconditional love.

The kind of love I deserve

The kind I want to return.

 

And when it feels hard to return that love to those with whom we disagree or have conflict, may we rely upon God to sustain us, as we set good boundaries, trusting that in the end God’s resurrecting love will make us all one! Amen. 

---

[1] Evan D. Garner, “To Love As We Are Loved,” [http://evandgarner.blogspot.com/2018/05/to-love-as-we-are-loved.html, posted: May 6, 2018, accessed: May 5, 2021].

[2] Garner, “To Love As We Are Loved,” [http://evandgarner.blogspot.com/2018/05/to-love-as-we-are-loved.html, posted: May 6, 2018, accessed: May 5, 2021].

A House United

Our EYC Work Week shirts for this year.

This sermon was preached at St. John's Church, Decatur, AL on Sunday, June 10, 2018. The readings for the day were the following:
1 Samuel 8:4-11, (12-15), 16-20, (11:14-15)
Psalm 138
2 Corinthians 4:13-5:1

Mark 3:20-35

Human beings have developed an impressive skill. All across the world we are good at observing differences among people. Whether it’s a contrast in creed, skin color, gender, sexual orientation, nationality, socioeconomic status, or favorite ice cream flavor, no two people on this planet are exactly the same. We see the variety of people so easily. But, why is that? Why do we notice differences so well?

From a scientific point of view, our species grew and evolved over the years. And, as we did we needed to spot differences in the environment around us to survive. So, whether our ancestors were looking for a certain plant hidden within an overgrown forest or watching out for a lurking predator camouflaged in the prairie, we needed to see patterns and how they differ. Thus, humans developed a great skill of seeing patterns and differences. Some scientists even state that we are the resulting descendants of the best pattern-spotters from the past. This ability of seeing differences and making split-second decisions based on what we observe though is not without some harmful side effects. 

Our ability to make connections and find patterns can have some drawbacks. People have “heard” voices in radio static, “seen” images of the Virgin Mary on a slice of toast, and even “believe” in radical conspiracies against mountains of evidence to the contrary. Put bluntly, sometimes people see patterns where there are none.

Unfortunately, in our God-given abilities to observe patterns we do not also have an innate nonsense test. That is to say, we do not know instantly if the pattern we see is real or a trick of our mind. Stereotypes and prejudices may have started as the result of an actual experience someone had, but why hold onto them against new contradicting evidence? What about when we see a false positive? What happens when we see something that truly is not there?

With our great ability to spot differences, we may even go overboard. It is almost as though we are looking for differences—seeking them out when they are not even there. Our God-given abilities to connect the dots have made us so good at noticing how we are dissimilar that we do not perceive how alike we truly are. On top of this our own experience of spotting differences has made it so easy to distance ourselves from one another.

And, so we do what the crowd did to Jesus. We call each other names. We think that the odd other person has come from Satan. And, we divide the kingdom and split the house because we think that we are on separate missions competing for limited resources. If we are pretty good at spotting patterns, we are even better at splitting things up when we get scared of what we see. But, if we honestly believe we are not meant to be divided, but unified, if as followers of Jesus we trust he will unite us, if we truthfully think that we are called to be ruled by the love of God, then what do we do?

Jesus will not say it for another seven chapters in Mark’s Gospel account, but we must be like little children. We are called to see the world through the eyes of little ones. Little ones are not instantly good at separating things that are different. They do not come out of the womb with the skill of segregation. In fact, that seems to be a sinful plague that perpetually infects us. Instead, what I have noted picking up my son at daycare is an inherit gift children possess: they do not yet note differences.

It matters not a classmate’s skin color or biological sex or religion or economic status or parent’s political affiliation. Little children play together, cry together, laugh together, and teach each other to scoot and crawl, hug and talk. But, we forget this worldview and in its place we get good at spotting all our differences.

Perhaps we would live life more fully if we would remember the perspective of a child. If we would receive the reign of Jesus as a child. If we would remember Maya Angelou’s beautiful observation in her poem Human Family, “We are more alike, my friends/than we are unalike./We are more alike, my friends/than we are unalike.” But, today of all days, this may be particularly difficult. As, it feels particularly easy to get divisive.

It is easy to get divisive not only because we have tribal politics between Republicans and Democrats. Not just because our society seems determined to separate and tear at each other. Not simply because we self-segregate many times and especially on Sunday mornings. But also because we here at St. John’s may be worried about what is going to happen in our church moving forward. It is easy right now to get scared and contentious. In times of transition when we celebrate bittersweet news, it is quite easy to form camps that are disparate and desperate. So what do we do?

While they are not children, I saw some beautiful examples of how teenagers receive the Kingdom of God this week. Our Episcopal Youth Community (EYC) spent several days in Corpus Christi and Port Aransas, TX completing relief work in the wake of Hurricane Harvey. The youth endured sunburn, windburn, and attacks from sand. They went through changes in plans, sleeping on deflating air mattresses, and weak shower pressure. They overcame cramped working conditions, learning new skills, and riding in the church bus (a lot!). All the while they not only completed projects, but also modeled what a united house in the reign of God looks like.

For a couple days of the trip, our youth worked in the home of a woman named Wanda. Wanda is over 90 years old. She paid $5,000 to a contractor who partially installed some shoddy Sheetrock and then left town with most of her money. As our teenagers painted Wanda’s ceiling and fixed the patchy drywall, the nonagenarian took note of not only the work our teens did, but also how they did it. Wanda skeptically began watching our work from a back bedroom, but by the end of the first day of work she had moved in to the living area where our group worked.

As we were about to leave, she said something to us. Wanda told us thank you for what we did, as she was grateful. Then, she voiced something else. She expressed how amazed she was at how well all of our youth got along while working. There was not bickering or fighting, just working hard and laughing all the while. She was right. As we made our way back home by way of New Orleans I kept this observation close at hand. While our youth were putting a house back together, they were modeling what a house united under Jesus might look like.

A house divided will not stand. We can so easily spot differences between us; however, these distinctions do not have to separate us. If we are to live as a family—brothers and sisters of Jesus, adopted children of God, united in the Spirit, then we must seek unity over estrangement. We must find communion even when things are difficult, even when we are frustrated, hurt, or angry, even when the world seems mad!

But, how will we live together? How will we be a house united? Pray for each other, pray for our church, and pray for the Church. Share in each other’s grief and sorrow, as well as joy and triumph. Worship God together. Dig in deeper within this community. Find ways to be with those who are different from you. Seek out ways to serve together. And mostly, remember that all are children of God the Father, all are loved and redeemed through Christ Jesus, and all are sustained by the power of the Holy Spirit. If teenagers can live united with Christ, can't we all? Amen.