This Week: Easter 6B
Gospel: John 15:9-17
This week’s gospel offers a simple-sounding theme: love. You’ve got to love people.
Anyone listening to Presiding Bishop Michael Curry preach knows this can be the preacher’s wheelhouse. It’s about love! We can start quoting the Beatles: Love is all you need! And we get meta-theological, naming the very nature of God as being love.
It also can strike a person as simple or easy. When we keep talking about love, we aren’t necessarily helping people fix a problem. Or we’re unintentionally offering the wrong solution because we aren’t clear about what we mean.
And then there’s an entirely other world of the love conversation. It’s that crazy land of gonzo-theology where we hate people to love them, abuse them to love them, manipulate them to love them. Where we say terrible things “out of love” and we support child abuse “out of love” and we cut people off “out of love.”
It’s easy to talk about love when things are clear. It’s much harder to figure out how to love when it isn’t.
the most obvious example
Whenever I talk about love, people turn to the extreme—not quite hypothetical, but the kind of realistic thing that doesn’t happen to everyone out of of the blue every day. It will be something like
My alcoholic father is killing himself—I’ve taken to hiding his keys to keep him from killing someone. Is this loving?
or it is some variation of doing something we objectively think as unloving (lying, stealing, saying hurtful things) to help the person not die.
Sometimes it is as simple as not knowing what is “the loving thing to do” when someone “ruins” Thanksgiving dinner by exposing a family secret about abuse.
In these, and many more examples, we are putting a lot of weight on defining the concept of love as things that are only tangentially related to love. Like not rocking the boat, being nice, and avoiding conflict. And we’re also trying to sweep the difficulty of what it means to be human into a simple four-letter word: love.
And while most of us do come to the conclusion that doing something that isn’t very nice to protect people is a pretty generous act of love, we might not feel very good about it. Or we might feel morally conflicted.
And this is where the sneaky problem of definitions, consistency, and abstraction let in tortured visions of love because we then start to see them as related in type if not in kind. If we can do something borderline abusive as an act of love, then what other abusive acts can be defended as loving?
I want to point out that most of us do know the difference here, but that many are so taken with matters of consistency that the difference disappears. Besides, allowing love to be abusive might support their political associations.
Love isn’t supposed to be easy.
That needs to be the takeaway here. It isn’t supposed to be easy. Love is supposed to be good. Something we do.
It isn’t an emotion that is the opposite of an emotion we call hate. It is behavior and a way of being that represents the character of God among the children of God.
So love isn’t about technicalities and definitions. It isn’t about certainty and decisiveness. it is about being open to the people around us, welcoming to strangers, giving to those in need, generous with the people around us, intimate with those seeking companionship, and hopeful in the midst of adversity.
Honestly, this is why I like that we’re doing a lot of taking about “haters” in the last decade. Because love isn’t the opposite of hate, it is opposed to hate. We reject hate and embrace love. Which means we choose to be a way that enables flourishing—generously and throughfully.