Acts 4:5-12; 1 John 3:16-24

Last week I was in Davis and as I walked through the center of town, just past the organic coffee shop. A tall man –I guess he was in his forties- stood silently by the edge of the sidewalk. He was sunburned and he had very curly hair. Next to him was a small stack of books. It was pretty clear they were a stack of the book he had written.  The title of the book was “Compassion.” I thought about stopping and talking to him and telling him that I was working on a message for Sunday about love and did he have any input, but then I might have just told me to buy his book and I did not feel like that. I also did not have that much time and thought the exchange might turn out to be a bit weird. I am kind of curious now though.   Friends, our two texts today are about love, love directly related to the coming of Jesus Christ.  Peter defends the healing of the sick man and said his been name in the name of Christ, in other words an act of love.  In I John love, or “compassion,” is discussed in starker terms. It’s almost a warning about love and the love of Christians. In verse 15 we read: “everyone who hates his (or her) brother (or sister) is a murderer.”  Wow.  I assume there is an exception for people who have been traumatized during their life, because that’s a pretty tough statement. But the author goes on: someone who has a lot of wealth who closes his (or her) heart, how does the love of God abide in him (or her)? Then he warns against hypocrisy: let us not love with word or with tongue, but let us love in deed and truth.” Heavy stuff.  It is, friends, a reminder that love is central to the Christian faith.

I have to admit there are times I get really discouraged with the Christian Church. It seems that as Christians worldwide we are doing more harm than good.  We are causing more suffering than we are relieving it seems. So many Christians live in powerful nations that only seem to understand “national interest.” Maurine Huang organized a meeting last Tuesday her at the church with a group of about forty students from an Islamic school in Sacramento.  They asked a lot of tough questions, like about Christian support for Israeli occupation of Palestine and why when I lived in a Muslim country for so long did I not become a Muslim, and about Sodom and Gomorra etc. There was one question by a teacher I believe who asked:” Is it true you believe Jesus said:”When someone strikes you on the cheek, you should turn the other cheek.” I said that I believed that and then she asked:” when why always “bomb, bomb, bomb?”  Whatever you think of this, friends, it does raise the question of the danger of Christian hypocrisy, doesn’t it?  I explained that Christians deep in their heart believed they should live like that, but that in reality they weren’t very successful at it.

Friends, perhaps we are not very good at the love thing, because we don’t tie it to justice.  We see love as personal kindness and sweetness. We forget it has much wider and deeper implications. At the First Presbyterian Church of Dallas there is a sign that says:” Justice is love distributed.” Think of that one for a while. Justice is love distributed. Justice is love in deed for a larger group. You see, we tend to  keep our love to a personal relations or perhaps our checkbook occasionally, but it has much greater consequences.  If we forget that, we are likely going to fail and in I John it is made very clear: without love we cannot call ourselves Christians, no matter how devout we are or how often we go to church. A Christian without love is an empty shell. How difficult this is, because there are so many ways to mess up, so many opportunities every week to ignore people, to say unkind things, to lose our temper, to accuse, to be less than generous and hospitable. It feels like we have to do it right all the time and that’s just too hard.  But we have no choice.

But friends, let me tell you what gives me hope.  What gives me hope is the faith that God, the creative force of the universe made as the ultimate, final and greatest creation this thing we call unconditional love.  It is the faith that this is what matters most to God and this is what God needs our help with.  This is really what are lives are all about: The compassion we pass on.  Love is a sacred thing and the greatest thing we can put our energy behind.  Another thing that helps me is the final sentence of Bible passage today. One translation says:”God is greater than our heart.” God is greater than our heart. That is a great insight.  It reminds us that God’s love is infinitely greater than any love we could engender.  God’s love is greater and more steadfast that all our flickering and fluttering emotions.  Our hearts are so unstable, so fickle and so fragile. We do not know what we will feel from one moment to the next. How can love be forged in that cauldron of our hearts?  Only in remembering that “God is greater than our hearts.” Thanks be to God. Amen.