There’s a spring bouquet on my kitchen table and a nasturtium in the car.
 It’s Mother’s Day once more.  I think of my mother.  I think of seeing
her in the choir with the white carnation on her robe. She lost her
mother when she was l7.  I look at my daughter as mother, and am glad
that once each year the world stops still for one often overlooked, often
unacknowledged.  Once in a while we need to be acknowledged for what we
give and what we have given.  We’re pretty sure you love us, but today
you are encouraged to say so.


Parenting is a miraculous thing.  Whatever selfless love we may have in
our hearts is extracted by the sight of our child.  And the kind of love,
selfless, generous, supportive, etc. that we give our children is
probably as close as we will come to the love Jesus expects of us as his
disciples.


Jesus said many things, but as he prepared his followers for his leaving
them, he summed it up. Love one another he said.  Jesus gave love the
status of commandment, a new commandment he called it.  He even made it
the mark by which Christians would be recognized.  “Everyone will know
that you are my disciples if you have love for one another,” he said….
Love, the mark of the disciple.


In the world in which we live, secularized, sexualized, sentimentalized,
love and its meaning have been cheapened and overused.  For too many the
word love conjures up either a momentary flash of passion or a sugar
coated valentine…eros, sentiment, but not disciple love.


For love has many meanings as C.S. Lewis points out in his classic, “The
Four Loves”.  Lewis describes the qualities that make the loves
unique…the agape, the Eros, phyla, and love of God. What did Jesus mean
as he commands his disciples to love?


We know he didn’t mean erotic love.  Human beings need no divine command
to propagate the species.  Erotic love is the love that commands us, not
the love Jesus commands.


But it occurs to me that erotic love, the love we don’t necessarily
choose, the love that chooses us…this Eros may be nature’s way of luring
us out of our natural self absorption into a wider loving…a greater
concern for another person, and if all goes well, erotic love leads us to
one of life’s most sacrificial and giving loves, the love of mother and
father for a child.


Erotic love, the tender trap as it was once known, is not the love Jesus
commands.  It is nature’s command that leads to the giving, more mature
life of spouse and parent.  It makes us grow up.  It teaches us to think
of others.


Nor did Jesus love have any real connection with feeling.  How can you be
told to feel a certain way?  Even Jesus can’t tell me how to feel.  Jesus
can tell me how I really ought to feel or what I ought to do, but not how
as a human being I am to feel.  Feelings are free agents.


Jesus love goes well beyond feeling.  It is vocation. It is commitment of
the heart, not the emotions.  Christian love is the way we look at the
world and how we see people in it. Christian love is how we live in
response to God’s love for us.  And while we can’t always choose how we
feel, we do have some choice about the attitude we take toward others.
We choose the actions we take.  I may not always appreciate my neighbor,
but I can surely respond to him/her with compassion and respect.


It is Luther who clearly tells us how to live the love Jesus commands.
He incorporates Jesus love into each of his explanations of the Ten
Commandments, taking the commandment beyond what we should not do into a
new and fresh realm of loving action.


To illustrate, I’ll take the eighth commandment…YOU SHALL NOT BEAR FALSE
WITNESS AGAINST YOUR NEIGHBOR.


None of us deliberately lies about our neighbor, but Luther doesn’t leave
it there.  What does this mean?  Luther asks.  It means we are to fear
and love God so that we do not betray, slander or lie about our neighbor.
THEN Luther continues to tell us we are to act to defend our neighbor,
speak well of him or her, and explain his or her actions in the kindest
way.  Luther has incorporated Jesus love commandment into each of the Ten
Commandments, and it makes them much harder to observe.  Luther, the old
curmudgeon, is calling us to compassion.


Love, positive, supportive, kindly love is REDEMPTIVE.  It can take away
the defenses accumulated from life’s pain and adversity.  It can open
someone who has been hurt to the possibility that love and trust exist.
Love can redeem when it has no agenda other than caring for the other as
a human being…. no payoff expected.


Early on as children we learned that God’s love in Jesus Christ redeemed
us from sin.  Love is in fact the most redemptive of all forces whether
it is a sense of God’s love in your life or the love of another person
for you.  It is healing. It is redemptive.


In the past half year I have seen the theme of redemptive love played out
in three of the films I have seen.  Many of you have seen Chocolat, and
how the woman in the chocolate shop brings new life and joy to a
repressed and joyless French village through her grace and generosity not
to mention delicious chocolate.  A week ago I saw the same actress,
Juliette Binoche, in the Widow of St. Pierre, once again a story of the
power of redemptive love.  Last Wednesday in a Japanese film, Eureka, the
love of a bus driver works to begin the healing of two traumatized
children.  Love is redemptive..on screen and off.


Redemptive, yes…but it even preserves life.  When I travel in developing
countries I see people living on the edge of survival.  I also see how
they share what they have with each other.  They have learned that
survival means sharing what you have, when you have it.  They cannot
afford, nor do they usually choose to live for themselves.  That is more
often the way of the rich.


When early Christians first assembled, they shared with each other. They
were poor. They were marginalized, and they understood that by sharing
and living in true community they would more likely survive, even thrive.
 St. James has a help within the family fund to which members have over
time contributed.  It is used from time to time to give a hand to members
who are in some need. A latter day adaptation to early Christian communal
care.


Our lives are so different than those of early Christians or certainly
the struggling people in developing countries.  Many of us are
comfortable if not prosperous.  All of us have more than most people in
the world.   We enjoy our privacy and don’t choose  communal living.  How
do we begin to love each other as Jesus would have us do?How given our
resources, given our different lives?


We begin by enlarging our neighborhood, by taking a wider view of who our
neighbor is.  Because of the media that brings Gaza and Colombia to our
door, we know quite well that there is hardship and violence and
suffering in our world.  But there is so much need and trouble out there,
it is overwhelming, and it is easy and natural to hunker down, pull in
our heads like turtles.  But that is not the way of discipleship.  We
have to begin somewhere…make some choices…allocate some resources and
some time to love.


Right now in our community three churches are working to raise
$l2,000…the amount of money needed to form a trust bank in a Peruvian
village.  Through such a bank, the very poorest woman is given a chance
to become a self-sufficient entrepreneur.  She borrows one hundred
dollars and sets up a stand to sell bananas or handiwork on the same
street
on which she used to beg.  Lives are changed, families given hope, and
disciple love calls us to take a look at being part of this trust bank.


We love as Jesus calls us to love by enlarging our neighborhood.


We can do more than pick up a checkbook. We pick up a hammer.  Already
ten women have signed on to work at the Habitat for Humanity site in
Waukegan May l6.  We’ll take your name. Just ask us. It’s a win-win
proposition.  It’s fun and it is discipleship.  They call it the theology
of the hammer.  Love is how we spend our days..how we spend our
resources. We give thee but thine own O Lord, what ere the gift may
be..All that we have is thine own Lord, a gift O Lord from thee…and that
sums it up. Discipleship is just giving back.


Love’s wage is in the currency of the heart…and you know that currency,
Mothers, Fathers and Disciples…You know the currency of the heart.


I have a friend who has spent far too much energy and thought  searching
for love. Her romantic odysseys both entertain and weary me. You won’t
find love searching for it.  But it’s a sure bet you can begin by showing
love for others…. and the odd thing is that loving can be as much fun as
being loved.


Jesus left us with the commandment to love because he knew that human
beings are pretty self-centered.  It would take a commandment to blow us
out of ourselves.  This commandment was his last gift to us, because it
is in loving that our lives find the meaning and the joy for which we
were made…in loving that we find abundant life.