Love Changes Everything

I remember as a kid we use to get all over someone who would say “I love _____!” We’d say “Well why don’t you marry it?” Or “Should we leave you alone with it?” Or we’d say some other equally obnoxious thing. It did not matter what the item in question was – candy, fried chicken, playing basketball, going camping, sneaking into Grant Pool after hours, watching the stars, when you said you loved it you opened the door for swift and immediate sarcasm. You can only imagine what happened when we started to get interested in others in romantic ways the kind of mockery that came when you could not deny the dread accusation of “liking” someone. When the inevitable happened and we began to seriously fall in love it changed everything because love was no longer a source of scorn and disdain it became critical to our lives.

There are four basic types of love – the English language is woefully inadequate in words for love so we have to put adjectives with the word love to make clear what type of love we are talking about. These are four kinds of love are: agape, philia, storge, and eros. Agape is unconditional love, like God has for humankind and Jesus calls us to have for one another. There is philia the love that exists between close friends. Storge is the love that grows between family members. And eros is a special intimate love between two people that is often so deep and intense that it can last a lifetime.

Today is the final Sunday of Advent. Today we talk about the coming of Jesus as the coming of love, Jesus is the lord of Love, Love is king. How can we say love is king? How can we live as one who loves as Jesus loves? We love our families. We love our friends. We even love many strangers. But sometimes our love is limited, hedged, calculated. Jesus as Lord of the Universe brings love to the fore. No longer can we just love those that love us. We are to love everyone. But how do we do this? We are challenged by our Lord to love everyone.

The theological gymnastics of Advent sometimes means you have to play a bit fast and loose with the scriptures for a Sunday in order for the passages to match up with the theme word of the day. Today’s passages fit into this category. In Isaiah we hear about the sign God will send that will alert the people to the coming of their salvation. “Look, a young woman is with child and shall bear a son, and shall name him Immanuel.” Now Immanuel means God with us so it isn’t too much of a stretch to say that this young woman’s son as a sign from God is a sign of love because we can see how promising “God with us” would be understood as “because God is with us then God loves us.”

The passage from Matthew about Joseph and his reaction to the whole Immaculate Conception is a bit harder to bend around to the theme of love. It does contain the quote of the Isaiah passage about the young woman and her child Emmanuel so we can always carry to this passage the same argument we used for the one from Isaiah. But I think we can do better than that. Maybe I’m a hopeless romantic but I think regardless of the arranged marriage thing Joseph had feels for the girl. Why else would he seek to “dismiss her quietly”? Then there is the love Joseph had to have had for God since he so readily went along with the angelic dream. You can add to this the love Joseph felt for his fellow human beings because the name he gave his son, Jesus, means “the Lord is Salvation” or savior.

But the more reasonable way to get to the theme of love is through understanding the gift that is given and why it is given – the gift of a baby for our salvation. Today we celebrate the young woman’s son, this Emmanuel, this Jesus. It is the gift of love, God’s love given that we might find our way in life. God with us, savior are ways to see and understand God’s involvement in our lives and desire for creation. We have received a priceless gift, God incarnate, God with us, God as us, God as our lord and savior. This is all four loves tied up into a neat package and placed under our trees. This is why Joseph stayed with Mary and why 2000 later we still tell the story of Joseph’s angelic encounter.

This gift of Emmanuel, Savior is why we give gifts each Christmas. Ours are tokens, pale representations of God’s gift of love. But gift giving has become a problem, we worry about what we should give and how much we should spend when we aren’t sure who will give to us and how much they will spend. And if we allow this to be our gift giving mindset we have missed the point. The gift we give and the gift we receive are not mean to in any way have a value other than as a symbol of the love we share and as a reminder of the love God shares with us. It is the same with giving love. Our society is overly cautious about loving – trusting others. Love is calculated, it is used only as much as is needed to find security and comfort. We find that loving those who are strangers and even strange are beyond many in our world today.
We all know love is the answer. How do we love others so that they can love others and Jesus can be the Lord of love?
Our answer may be found in Joseph. He loves Mary but social convention and the situation seem to dictate that his love is not enough. But he discovers that love is enough. Everything changes with love. By our loving we show others how to love. It’s not the gift it’s the love that lies behind the gift that matters. We are partners of the Lord of love and our loving sets the stage for others to love. We love first, last and always. The best gift I can give, that we can give is love. What the world needs is love and we can give it.

Willie Nelson sings a song that catches the flavor of what it is I am trying to say.
Love is king.
He is born.
There’s a reason now to carry on.
Love is here.
Seated at your table now.
Not living in a stable now.
Love is here.

As partners of God and followers of Jesus Christ we profess that Jesus is the Lord of all there is, not the tyrannical despot but the serving, loving Lord who asks for our loyalty and our hearts. We love and by doing so we show the world how to love and we proclaim Jesus is the Lord of love all the various kinds and degrees of love. Love is here. Amen.