The Why of Love--August 4, 2023
"We love because God first loved us." [1 John 4:19]
So, yesterday a young girl, maybe eleven years old or so, came riding her bike with her family down the street, and she wiped out. Her tire probably hit a stray rock on the asphalt or something, and it was just enough to tip her off balance and skin her elbows and knee. In a matter of moments, though, not only had her family members circled around her to help her up off the ground, but neighbors came, too. Just people who had been sitting on their front porches or in their yards and heard the noise or saw the fall, and they offered whatever she might need. Band-aids? Check. Ice for the scrapes? It was there. Neosporin and some wet paper towels? All offered, accepted, and used. And all of it between perfect strangers who just happened to be on the same block in the same town at the same time. It was a beautiful moment to see playing out in real time, and in so many ways, it seemed to be exactly what Mister Rogers had in mind all those years ago when he sang to children on television about neighborliness.
Now, there is something truly lovely about how random strangers snapped into action to offer help, without much time at all to deliberate, pontificate, or ruminate on whether they should help. They just showed up, like it was the most natural thing in the world--like they were on autopilot, or like they'd been rehearsing and practicing for such a moment for years and knew just what to do. And maybe, in that moment, no thinking at all needed to be done--it was obvious there was a neighbor in need, and those needs were easily met. So they did.
But preachers are good at digging deeper into things that seem obvious already on the surface, so I'll admit, I've been thinking about that scene ever since. What is it that spurs a handful of people who have never met to help someone who clearly cannot pay them back, someone who arguably has only added an interruption and inconvenience to their day, and someone about whom they knew nothing (other than that this was a fellow human who was hurting)? Why wasn't the immediate reaction of the neighbors on their porches, "This is no concern of mine!" or "Here's another scam from someone trying to con me out of my supply of band-aids..."? Why wasn't there any crunching of numbers to see how many spare band-aids or ice cubes were needed for the people in the house in case they had an injury? Why no suspicion that the stranger in the road with the skinned knee might be a bad person, or come from a family with different politics, or root for the wrong sports team?
Well, for those of us who strive to follow Jesus, I'll bet at least part of the thought process, if we ever find ourselves in such a situation, is simply, "Here is someone God loves--how can I not show love to them when they are in need?" Or, as a variation on the same theme, "God has loved me and offered comfort for me when I was the one who had fallen in the road: now I am called to pass that love forward for the next person in need." Or maybe it just comes across as: "God has commanded us to love our neighbors, and because this God loves me, I want to do the things that align with God's heart, too." But however you get there, the same basic move happens: something we believe about God shapes how we see our neighbors. And if we believe (as Christians do) that God's fundamental posture toward every face on earth is, "You are made in my image... you are my beloved... you are worth dying for," then our posture toward other people will be shaped by that same love.
All of that is to say, what we believe about God--and more specifically, what we believe God thinks about a world full of fellow humans--plays a direct role in how we treat those fellow humans. And for us who have come to know God in the life of Jesus, we are convinced that God loves all of those face, those neighbors, those fellow-beloveds. And so we love as well. As the writer of what we call First John puts it, "We love, because God first loved us."
Sometimes we just don't recognize that the claim "God first loved us" is a claim of faith. You can't deduce it like a logical theorem; you can't prove it with a stack of physical evidence. You can't look it up in the Encyclopedia or Wikipedia or appeal to some universally accepted Book of Knowledge. Rather, it is a claim the Christian Scriptures make that we have to decide what to do with: will we dare to believe what the New Testament writers say about God as we've come to see God in Jesus, or will we refuse to believe? Either way we are making a claim on the basis of faith--of trust, of belief--and either way, it will affect how we see other people around us.
And at least part of what it means to believe that God not only loves us, but has loved us first before we did a thing to earn it, is the realization that we are called to love others back precisely because God loved us first. What we believe makes a difference, not so much because there will be a post-mortem final exam in theology at the gates of heaven, for which your score determines your destination in the afterlife, but because what we believe about God shapes who we are and how we love. And when we take it seriously that God loves us--an "us" that includes the whole world--then we become people who snap into action when a neighbor scrapes her knee outside of our front porch, or needs someone to listen when his heart is heavy, or needs permanent housing. We come to be people who love like it is second nature, because we have come to believe we are loved by God--and so are those who come across our path.
Good theology matters, in the end, not to win us points on our Afterlife SATs, but because what we believe affects how we see the world, and how we love the people in it. Today is a day, then, to pay attention to what we believe about God, for the very practical reason that faith becomes the energy that drives our hands and feet.
Lord God, remind us that you have loved us first, so that we will love others in response.
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