The following is a reflection on First John 4:7-21

Bob Dylan once wrote of an unrequited love, “You say love is a four-letter word.” Ouch! But it’s true. Like other four-letter words not fit for this occasion, love has been used to injure and to hurt.

I remember one particularly cruel game played sadly in our church youth group called Honey, I Love You but I Just Can’t Smile. With participants sitting in a circle on the floor, the object of the game was to get someone to crack up and smile as you expressed your love. One Sunday evening, a particularly beautiful girl picked a particularly awkward boy as an easy mark. She curled up and sat in his lap, arms hanging over his shoulders, long brown hair brushing against the largest smile that gave way he was somewhere very close to pubescent paradise. Everything made this situation uncomfortable. Sitting on his lap she confessed her love for the purposes of the game, and with red face and nervous laughter his smile didn’t abate as he said, “I love you too”, and his hand landed heavily on her thigh. Quick she jumped like she saw a spider, and began brushing whatever presence this boy left behind on her far-too-beautiful-for-this-fat-loser skin. To say she wasn’t happy would be an understatement. “Yeah, right. I LOVE you. I LOVE you so much. Let’s run away. Let’s get married. As if anyone could love you.” You never saw someone break so quickly, so completely. Love can be a four-letter word.

Love isn’t a weapon yielded by High School girls exclusively. Like a selective country club, our culture believes there might be those unworthy of admittance into the loving circle. As though love is blessing to those only worthy of it, and a poison to those found lacking; nationality, race, gender, economic, and religious restrictions, just to name a few. Prohibitions have been erected to protect those with love to give from mistakenly loving those who have classically fallen outside the scope of acceptance. I don’t take pleasure in agreeing with folks who might think this way, but I have to admit something. In some ways they are right; love can be dangerous.

Love is dangerous; it can get you into trouble. Love the wrong person, or the right person at the wrong time, love too much or not enough, love out of motive or simply out of apathy, confess those four little letters and be warned. Love is dangerous, but then again, so is the God who First John extols as the author of love. The Dangerous God of Love; it has a certain ring to it, a certain of truth to it. Take the story of Peter’s encounter with the Ethiopian Eunuch. On one level the story is about sharing the Gospel, certainly an act of love, but on another level the story is about another dangerous four-letter word associated with love: fear.

Love and fear are strange bedfellows. Fear arrests, it stops. We hear today that “there is no fear in love” to which many of us say “yeah, right.” If loving as God loves is dangerous than fear can’t be far behind, and as I read of Peter’s encounter with our Ethiopian friend along the Wilderness Road, I sense fear. Fear of what happens when the Gospel goes viral; when the Gospel goes places we are no longer in charge of. What was largely a small start-up, an off-shoot of Judaism was tightly controlled and managed by a handful of disciples and apostles. The Pentecost we will soon celebrate breaks the mold, but we are not quite there yet.  Today, baptizing this Ethiopian and sending him on his way, the message is no longer in the hands of the letter writers, the first-hand witnesses, and the disciples who encountered the Risen Christ. How dangerous is God’s love? It has us share the very thing most precious to us with people so very unlike us, and it is only in that dangerous loving that we authentically say we love God. Loving God by equally loving others? Such can challenge and convict our love of God. See, what I mean: God’s love is dangerous.

John’s first letter lets us know what God is and what God is not. Try as some might to pray for a reformation in the character of God, it doesn’t work. The God who the Gospels confess is the Dangerous God of Love; it is our God known in Jesus Christ. This is the God of self-giving love and not a God domineering with power and law we can know and study; as though knowing all the rules will sustain us. John reminds us that we know more about the heart of God than we will ever know of the mind of God[1]. We know God’s heart is filled with love and the calling to show that love to others has never been a mystery. But, then again, it has also never been anything we’d call easy.

God’s heart is revealed in relationship, but if we knew God’s mind we could avoid all of love’s dangers and required risks, couldn’t we?. We could dwell safely in the comfort of certainty. How carefree we are when we know the facts on our side. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could live knowing the outcome as sure as we know the answers on Jeopardy? We could talk about our faith like we talk about facts, but God is a revealing God and not a textbook or an instruction manual. We are told we’ll experience the fullness of God when we love others, not when our knowledge is expanded. Such a relational, revealed love is as dangerous as it is another four-letter word: Holy. It is easy to love God – far off, mysterious, unseen –but loving each other is holy. Such a love is not a vocabulary to learn but a practice to exercise.

Loving is not a skill. It is not born in the realm of human potential. Our ability to love depends on how much time we spend in the presence of God’s love each and every day. How much time we’ve spent experiencing God’s love as molded by others, and how much grace we extend when they falter; this is the only way to increase our capacity to show love. We see the risk taken on the behalf of others to love, and we are called to do the same. Love is to be lived out, and not simply talked about.

In my first year of seminary I had this class called CHATS. Every time you had class, a paper was due, and that kind of writing will wear you down. Day after day, week after week, all year long, paper after paper. It was about March when after seeing paper after paper returned with nothing more than a pencil-lead check in the corner, I ran out of cares to give.

At this point I could write the two-paged, double-spaced paper based off of our reading in about thirty-minutes, and as often was the case, my friends and I found ourselves in the library computer lab preparing to pound out the latest required paper. A quick scan of the reading, and the growing apathy towards actually caring about this papers presented an opportunity. The reading was about love, on a theological level; that is God’s love for us, and how we respond , and so the decision was obvious. The three of us sat in one row, and had a little contest: how many song lyrics about love could cram into these two pages.

Ready, set, go!

Love is a many splendored thing. Love is a battlefield. Love is a flower. Love is a river. Love is a razor.  All you need is love. I’m all out of love; I’m so lost without you. Love is a state of mind. Hate knows that love is the cure. I guess love is like a banana peel; that on is Elvis Presley. I want to know what love is; I want you to show me. Love is like a stove, it burns you when it’s hot. Love is a rose. Love is the finest thing around. You say love is just a four letter word. Love lifts us up where we belong, where Eagles cry, the on the mountain high.

With minutes to spare we printed our papers, and hustled to class where we turned them in, and went about our business. A few days later, there were a whole lot more than pencil-led checks on our papers. My two friends who were in two separate discussion groups, each with their own surprisingly savvy professor, got their papers back first. For one, all the song lyrics were carefully underlined with a little number in a circle next to each one. The only thing written on his paper was the word “impressive” all in capital letters. My other friend too had the lyrics underlined with a sarcastic note stating, “John Wesley is sounds very musical.” Neither friend got a particularly great grade on the paper.

A day later I got mine back. Like theirs, my paper was filled with circles and underlines. My professor, an expert in medieval church history that could tell you what someone had for breakfast in the 1300s but seemingly hadn’t spent much time with the radio on the last twenty years, had written YES in all capitals, stared and circled the points in my paper that she found particularly important. They were all lyrics; every single one. It was the best grade I ever got back from her.

After having sat down with more than a few couples in preparation of their wedding, I have heard my fair share of lyrics when it comes to love. I almost always ask, “what do you mean when you say ‘I love him/her’”, and I almost always get stammering. When I’m lucky, I get lyrics. Channeling the movie Jerry McGuire, one bride-to-be back in Ohio told me her would-be groom “completed” her. Why do we find talking about love so terribly difficult? Why are we so quick to let Hallmark or Air Supply and the Beatles do our talking for us when it comes to love? I know why. It’s because love isn’t an entry in an encyclopedia, to know and recite properly. Love is an expression of our very last four-letter word: life. I am convinced the only right answer to my question about love is simply: let me show you.