speaker-1: Our first reading this morning comes from 1 John chapter 4, verses 7 through 21. Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God. Everyone who loves loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love. God's love was revealed among us in this way. God sent his holy son into the world so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God. If we love one another, God abides in us, and his love is perfect in us. By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his spirit. And we have seen and do testify that the Father has sent his Son as the Savior of the world. God abides in those who confess that Jesus is the Son of God, and they abide in God. So, we have known and believed the love that God has for us. God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them. Love has been perfected among us in this, that we may have boldness on the day of judgment, because as He is, so are we in this world. There is no fear in love, but perfect love cast out fear, for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love. We love because He first loved us. Those who say I love God and hate a brother or sister are liars, for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen cannot love God whom they have not seen. The commandment we have from him is this those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also. The word of the Lord thanks be to God.

speaker-0: you

speaker-1: So everything we've been talking about for the past two weeks, that God is love, we we reran that scripture that Kathy read for us. We we had that at on week one because I was making the point then that God is love, and it just so happens that that passage pretty perfectly illustrates two points that we were gonna make throughout the course of this four-week sermon series, and that is that God is love, and therefore we ought to love one another, which is our focus this morning. But for these two weeks Up to now I I've been trying to make the point that God is love, and you are beloved because of the God who made you and always looks upon you and all that God has made in love. All of that has been in the service of building a foundation of a Christian worldview that begins from love. That love is the genesis of all things, that love is their proper goal, even if it isn't their end. As Corinthian tells us, love never ceases. This is, in fact, the message of our scriptures, all of them from start to finish, that God loves, creates in loves, will consummate in love, and wraps your lives into God's loving mission in the world. And Jesus, when dared to put the finest of points on what is of supreme importance in this life, does it this way. Listen with me for the word of the Lord from the Gospel of Matthew. When the Pharisees heard that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them, an expert in the law, asked him a question to test him. Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest? Jesus said to him, You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart. With all your soul and with all your mind. This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it. You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets. The word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. Let us pray. Gracious God who loves us, speak to us in clearest tones, that we may fully receive and reciprocate that love. And now may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be pleasing and acceptable in your sight. O Christ, our rock, and our Redeemer. Amen. In a few weeks, my family's headed to Pennsylvania for a short weekend trip. And no, it is not to watch the Pirates play in a playoff game. That'll be next October. Right, Jesus? Next October. It isn't even to watch the leaves turn colors before they fall off the trees. Did you know that in other places in the world? Leaves fall off trees for reasons other than sheer exhaustion. that is a real that's a real science fact. it isn't even because I have a hankering for what is my favorite Italian pastry, a soyadelle. If you haven't ever had a soyer, you should go to Pittsburgh and get a soyer because I've never seen them outside. It is a flaky little pastry. It looks like a lobster claw. Apparently that's what foyadel means in Italian. Looks like a lobster claw and it has a very mild lemon custard inside. It is delightful. It doesn't get much better than that. But we're not going to Pittsburgh for any of those things. I am gonna have a soyadel, and we might see the leaves, but that's not why we're going. We are going because my sister gave birth to a little boy named Isaac about six months ago. And this is our first opportunity to go see him. She had the audacity not to ask me when her labor would be most convenient for my schedule. And so we are getting there low these six months later. Isaac is, by all accounts, a truly delightful little creature, and has brought my sister and her husband already so much joy. Amelia is only a few years younger than I am, but like Sarah and Abraham before her, her first child came later than she would have hoped. And so likewise they named him Isaac, because he has brought laughter and joy to them. And from everything I can tell from afar, he's living pretty well into his namesake. And I'm quite excited to meet him. I'm really looking forward to getting obscenely close to him and smiling my biggest, goofiest grin at him. And if my experience tells me anything, looking like a cartoon character as I do, Caleb gets it. if my experience if my experience tells me anything I bet that what I'm gonna get in return is a big toothless grin, maybe even a chuckle. There are few things so genuinely pure and lovely as baby smiles and laughs. Second maybe only to how they smell. Why do they smell so good? It doesn't make any sense. Is it because they have to be close to us all the time? So they might as well smell good, thanks Jesus. I don't know. Anyways, the point is that I'll be sniffing and smiling my way through the weekend. And why am I so certain that little baby Isaac will smile back at me? Well, it's because he is, like most humans, hardwired. For reciprocity. And that is true for good and for ill. If you've ever gone like just a little too hard at a game of peekaboo with a baby and started startled them, they cry. Why? Well, they're hardwired for reciprocity, and you've given them a fright, so they don't have words to tell you that. So they just they let it out in in a cry. In the nineties, we discovered something. that scientists call a mirror neuron in your brain. That is, when you watch somebody else do something, those same parts of your brain light up like a Christmas tree. It's why we all love football, right? Or sports. It's because those part it makes us feel good. It makes us feel good to watch somebody else do something exciting. If you've ever wondered Well sorry. Why when you see somebody else yawn, you sometimes yawn. That is why. It's mirror neurons. Gotcha. Also, pop culture would say that if you don't yawn during seeing somebody else do it, you are a sociopath. So I need to make I need to make some notes real quick. Just Okay. We were literally made to receive love and to offer it again over and over, like you're standing between two mirrors, endlessly sharing what is offered to them at first. And because there are other options for sharing available to us, and because the chain of love has been broken in so many. Human interactions, the Lord has commanded us to love one another so that we can put things back into their proper place and back into joint. Jesus says when he is pushed that the greatest commandment is that we love the Lord our God with all our heart and all of our soul and all of our mind, and then completely unbidden, he adds a second. Which he says is like the first, not a second, unrelated commandment, but having the same likeness. And that commandment is that we love one another as we love ourselves. That you love your neighbor as you love yourself. And it's because of Jesus' framing of this command that I spent an entire sermon last week trying to convince you of your loveliness, because It is a loveliness, a belovedness that isn't predicated upon your ability to earn or create or produce it, but simply given to you by the God who is love and created all things in love. Jesus wants you to love one another as you love yourself. And if you do not believe that you are loved, then your ability to love another person is diminished. To the extent that you know yourself to be loved or not, you will be capable or not of loving another person. And you should go to therapy. To learn how to test all your thoughts against this one thing that is really true about you, that you are loved. The greatest commandment for Jesus starts with the love of God and ends with the love of neighbor as self. Unless that all these loves become some generalized idea that is no good to God or anybody else, it's worth asking what shape that love takes. What exactly are we being called to do? For one another in that command to love. And since these two are apparently alike, I I would suggest that we can work, we're gonna work our way from one to the other. What does it mean then to love God with all our heart and soul and mind? Interesting question. I which I think for most people might sort of end up just being worship. Right? We come we spend this hour thinking about God, listening about God, singing songs to God. Maybe that's part of it. But I actually believe it's much broader than just our acts of worship. I believe God is asking something of us that comes rather naturally. I don't think this is a a huge ask from God. I think God is asking for reciprocity. Which comes natural, and imitation. It's right actually right right there in our mission statement for Trinity is explains this movement. Our mission statement is discovering God's heart, becoming faithful servants. So we discover by God's heart by leaning in to figuring out who this God is with all of ourselves, our heart, our intellect. To discover the the nature, the character of God. And what we discover is that God is love. And that love comes to us in gift and in service. God creates in love, sustains our lives in love, and guides us into justice and care and mutual concern in love. It's why in Isaiah we read as we read on Wednesday night that God can't stand our worship, this thing that a lot of people sort of Boil our love of God down to. God can't stand our worship. He can't stand the songs and the sacrifices while the people that Isaiah is speaking to ignore the orphan and the widow with blood on their hands. Loving God is never divorced from caring for people. And when we turn our eyes to Jesus, God's love takes on an even sharper point. We see it more clearly, even. We learn that this is a love that is willing to sacrifice for us, a love that counts the cost of love and will endure pain and even death on a cross for the ones that He loves. Jesus wants us to see that love and service that comes with sacrifice, even when it isn't reciprocated, but in the hopes that it will be. Love is worth it, in other words, even when it doesn't work. Jesus' success rate was pretty low, which is pretty wild, right? Not everybody Jesus talked to, not everybody that Jesus had contact with loved him in return. And you know what? There are some parents for whom their child doesn't or didn't smile back because of some developmental difference. And they teach the rest of us the good and godliness of what it means to smile. and to smother with affection and to love anyhow, no matter what the response, simply because that child is lovely and worthy of love. That's the way that God loves us. So, what might it mean to return that love to God? Well, the second part of our mission statement tries to answer that. We discover who this God is, and then we become faithful servants of this God and of this God's love. We invite the Lord to shape us whole, to shape our hearts, to shape our affections, to shape our minds, our thinking, and our worldview. To shape our souls. And there the Greek word is posuke, which means breath and life. it's the same word that the Greek Old Testament translates for that that breath that God breathed into the clay figures that He had made of Adam and breathes life into them, so that the animating force of our being, the motivations of our very lives, the reason that we move and live and breathe, is to serve the loving purposes and intentions of God. And the closer that we get, this is my conviction, that the closer we get to understanding and receiving fully that deep and unchanging love of God for us, the more that we will want to return a sense of love and adoration to Jesus for all that God has done and for all that God is doing in and around us. And because we move toward what we find attractive. We experience what so many have called union with Christ. We move toward God because we find the loveliness and the truth and the beauty of God compelling. And because we are moving toward God, we find something that Calvin describes and so many of the mystics describe as union with Christ. And you know how people say that the longer you are together, the The more you begin to look like your partner, terrifying for my dear wife. The tr she'll grow a beard any day now. the same is actually true of us and God. The closer we are, the longer we spend together, the more united we are, the more our lives begin to imitate the character of God. And what happens then is that God embraces us full, grabs us by the shoulder, and flips us around to look out at the world that He loves so dearly. We begin to imitate God's love out into the world. So we love our neighbors like we love God and like God loves them by serving them, by sharing this love with them. We were literally made for this. And it is the church's very reason for being to remind the world that this is true of them just as it is true of us. Dietrich Bonhoeff wrote, from a Gestapo cell, not a very loving place. The church is only the church when it exists for others. Not dominating, but helping and serving. It must tell people of every calling what it means to live for Christ, to exist for others. And daggummit, though, if we don't live in a world resistant. To such a truth, bound as we are by fears of all sorts. But that makes the declaration of who we are and what we're for and what we're about and what we are made to do no less true. Our own hearts and desires sometimes revolt against us in this way, but it makes it no less true. In fact, Nicholas Epley's research out of the University of Chicago has whole has shown that we hold back. In acts of basic kindness, which is itself a form of love, because we are afraid that it won't be reciprocated. But what his research has also shown is that those fears are wildly overblown in reality. People, it turns out, want to smile back. They want to return kindness for kindness. They want to play peekaboo with you on the bus. I'm kidding, they don't want to do that last one, likely, but you get the point. Now it's probably because I am a firstborn and I am my grandma's golden child. That one I told you about a couple of weeks ago that used to waterboard me with boiling hot water and call it taking a bath. That one. But maybe because of all of those things, but I just assume that everybody wants to be friendly to me. And it turns out that I'm right most of the time. But it's not because I'm special, right? I'm not special. I just have a tendency to be the one who's saying hi to strangers on a walk and waving to people on my bike as I pass them. They're never gonna see me again, but I'm over there showing them my teeth, you know? What an odd human evolution, by the way. Hi, nice to see you. Here are my teeth. I'm so happy. Weird. And you might say, Jake, that's nice. But the world does not work that way. People aren't just willing to love each other and sacrifice for each other. Not everyone is like Jesus. And you're right. And also, we can do something about that. Like God's love in you is the very beginning of that healing, of that place of brokenness in the world. Because God has placed you wherever and however you are to be the one who is imitating the love of God that has been poured into your life so that somebody else can imitate you. That's where in the scriptures they say, so that they might see your good works and praise your Father in heaven. This is that interplay here. When you walk into a place, any place, God has sent you there to love and to serve, to go out of your way, to be the one who loves first, to sacrifice in for whomever is closest to you, regardless of who they are, and regardless of their deserving of it. In your estimation. Because somebody needs to make this first step in love so that it can be mimicked, as it so often will. We are wired for this. But this loving snowball has to begin with someone. And you are the one who has been lucky enough to hear God's loving call in your life. So now it's your turn to let your actions catch up with the truth. That you've come to know. We are all downers on like the snowball effect of violence and hatred, but like there is an equal and opposite and much holier and good snowball effect of love. And the truth is that there will always be some barrier to love, always. But if we hold back, if we stop. Loving our neighbor. It moves us away from loving our God. John says we are liars if we say we love God and don't love our neighbors. And to put a really fine point on this, a really fine point on this. Last week, as you guys were leaving the church, I stand out there and we chat, and one of you told me that the prior week. The man who has done your lawn work for years got picked up by ice. And the first thing that you said to me wasn't, Boy, his rates were real good. And I don't know how I'm gonna replace that. Maybe I'll call ABC. What you said was he has two daughters in college. A wife who is a maid, and I don't know what they're gonna do. And that that is leading first from a place of love, right? Across across a barrier, because the fact of the matter is that right now, the first thing that a lot of people would say is, Well gosh, if you just hadn't been here illegally, none of this would happen. We try to excuse ourselves from love in this way and in so many others, right? And in Luke's gospel, that is exactly what happens, actually. When Jesus gives this same command to love your neighbor as yourself, a lawyer in Luke's gospel says, Well, who is my neighbor anyway? How can I limit To whom my love goes. And Jesus goes on from there to tell the story of the hated, good Samaritan who loved first across every reservation that he had. My friends, we have spent millennia drawing the circle of our love smaller and smaller. It has been the natural effect of a world that has been increasingly connected and feels so big that it's almost impossible to feel like we can love it well. And the more that we opt out of love, the more that we will experience our own self fulfilling prophecy of, well, the world just doesn't work like that. God's love does work like that. It came to you free and undeserving. And if you want to experience it whole, if you want to grab on to that big, audacious love for us, we've got to give it a chance to flow out of us into one another. Because I think we only get half of the story until that happens. Truth be told, we've tried to live otherwise. And how's that working out for us? So go and be a mirror of love. You were made for that. Thanks be to God. Amen.