I Love You, Man!

"I Love You, Man!" John 15:9-17 I looked for some commercials that I could show to start out this message about love. Even though the commercials are selling some product, they are also selling a message, or an understanding about our culture. And often those subliminal messages are about what love is. Some of the commercials I found on YouTube weren't exactly what I was looking for. The one's that came close were the Axe body spray commercials that depict love as nothing but animalistic, sexual desire. But the commercials were so blatantly sexual, I couldn't in good conscience show them in church. Then I ran across some old Bud Light commercials. The old, "I love you, man" commercials. Remember those? They were about a loser named Johnny who was always trying to manipulate a Bud Light out of someone. Here's one of those commercials: (show the one where Johnny is proposing to a girl on the hillside) Here are some of the unspoken themes behind the way this run of Bud Light commercials depict love: --love is only something you profess when you want something out of someone else; --love is shallow; --love is self-centered; --love is words without any substance; --love is a game; --love is deception. How do we live a life of Christian love in a distorted commercial world? How does Christian love differ from the shallow, bumper sticker slogan kind of love? What is the difference between a Bud Light commercial saying, "I love you, man," and Jesus' "...love one another just as I love you"? These kinds of questions have been asked ever since the Christian gospel was first preached. What's the difference between how Christian's live life and love, and how culture tells people how to live and love? In the first letter of John, thought to be the same John who wrote this gospel, he taught how the world's kind of love had more to do with lustful cravings, self-centeredness, and material goods. (Certainly the Axe body spray has picked up on those themes.) John begged his listeners, through his three letters not to base their love on that which will pass away, but on the eternal will of God. It's evidently a hard lesson to learn. We, in our culture, are having to learn it over and over again. I'd like to direct our attention to Jesus' farewell statement to his disciples. In his final teaching to the disciples he says a lot about what love is. This farewell statement takes up chapters 14 through 17 in the Gospel of John. The part that was read in the 15th chapter falls right in the middle. Jesus is saying good-bye. He's trying to bring loose ends together. He's trying to sum up all that he has been about. He wants to make sure the disciples have gotten it. He wants to know that what the disciples will be carrying out and carrying on with after he has gone to be with the Father God is the right stuff. Right in the middle of this tearfully moving speech, Jesus talks about what love is. One of the best movies of the past few years is Forrest Gump. One of the most powerful scenes in the movie is when Forrest proposes to Jenny. Jenny is on the stairs of his home. He has been in love with Jenny his whole life. She had looked for love in all the wrong places. At one point in the movie she told Forrest he didn't know what love was. But, in truth, she was the one mixed up about love. Forrest stood at the base of the stairwell and said, "Will you marry me, Jenny?" Then he paused, and answered her statement from earlier in the movie, "I may not be a smart man, but I know what love is." Jenny looked down at him and all the waste and guilt from her life, ill spent by chasing after love through casual sex and drug abuse came through her reply: "Oh, Forrest, you don't want to marry someone like me." Jesus is making the same kind of statement to his disciples that Forrest is to Jenny: "I may not appear to be a very smart man, or it may not appear that I'm doing a very smart thing by laying my life down, but I know what love is. And I want to make sure you know what love is, so you don't waste time trying to find out in the wrong way." Jesus says twice in these verses, "Love one another." In between the two statements are a number of ways that Jesus wanted his disciples to do that. Jesus tells the disciples that they can show the depth of their love for him by being obedient--by following his rules. Part of being loving has to do with following rules. By being obedient to those rules. That may not sound quite right. Doesn't love have to do with freedom and privileges and choices? As I thought about Jesus' statements, I realized that love in terms of rules and obedience means at least two things. First, love is intentional. Love as obedience--in this case, obedience to Jesus--means that the person who is loving intends to be loving, intends to give up some of their selfish rights. Love means making a conscious choice, an intentional decision, to be loving; of giving up the self in loving service and relationship to another. Most couples don't like to include the word, "obey" in their marriage vows anymore. It is the one word that makes people think about what it is exactly they are saying to each other. If they are going to obey somebody, they want to be sure they understand what that means. To obey someone is to turn yourself over to them. That's a scary thought in our individualistic, self-empowerment culture. When we hear the word obedience in relation to a man-woman relationship, we immediately think of a middle eastern, al-qaeda kind of relationship where the woman must walk behind her husband, never go out without him, and can be beaten severely if she displeases him. But what are we doing in being obedient to our Lord Jesus? To turn ourselves over to him. To let him set the agenda for our lives. To give him the power and say in what we do, and how we do it. To give him the upper hand in the decision making of our daily living. Why isn't that just as scary to us? Or is it? I think it shouldn't be scary because we are giving ourselves over to him in obedience knowing that we are loved and cherished by the one we are obeying. It's a mixture of love and obedience in which we are willing to give up our control into the control of someone who loves us deeply. Secondly, by linking love with commands and obedience, I think Jesus is trying to make the point that love happens best within certain boundaries. Love between people doesn't give them the freedom to behave however they wish. In marriage, for example, love needs the boundary of fidelity. If there is no trust that the partners are going to be faithful and single-minded to the relationship, how can there be love? How can love grow when the boundary of fidelity has been, or is constantly being, breached? Do you see what I'm saying here; what Jesus is saying here? Commands and obedience are far from negative things in love. They form the border around love so that love can flourish. If love is a painting, the commands and obedience are the frame around the picture to enhance the painting. Another point Jesus made about love is that it is willing to put itself on the line for someone else. Fear isn't allowed to get in the way of loving. Love faces scary situations and does what it has to do, even to the point of self-sacrifice. During the excavations of the ruins of Pompeii, one of the remains found in that volcano devastated city told it's own story. Petrified in the volcanic ash was the body of a crippled boy. One foot was clearly disfigured. Around the body of the boy was a woman's arm. It was a finely shaped arm with bracelets and jewelry. The arm that was stretched around the boy to save or comfort the boy was all that was preserved of the woman's body. Imagine the story behind that helping arm and the crippled boy that we'll never know. Imagine a love that was willing to put herself in harms way, despite the fact that both perished. A more modern version of that story is that of Stephanie Decker who had parts of both legs amputated and also suffered multiple rib fractures and a punctured lung. In describing what happened to her, Decker said two tornadoes hit her home in an outlying area of Henryville, Indiana, this past March. She realized a tornado was coming straight at the home and took the children to the basement. She wrapped son and daughter in a comforter. "I was around my children, holding them tight, as the pillars, steel beams, the bricks, everything from the house was hitting me in the back," she recalled. She said a large steel beam landed on her, nearly severing a leg. "I saw a brick coming at my daughter's direction," she said. "So I would maneuver my back, left and right, almost like dodging, so I would take the hit and not my daughter or my son. I can remember the pain of it hitting my back on both sides and my arms. But I focused on holding them." Because of her, both children are alive and totally unhurt. Unfortunately she lost parts of both legs. Every time Stephanie's children look at her amputated legs and watch her struggle to walk on prosthetic legs, they know the price she paid to sacrifice herself for them. Two mothers, centuries apart, but self-sacrificial in their love. Jesus said there was no greater love than that kind of love. Maybe going to that length out of love is too much to think about. Total self-sacrifice is probably unimaginable to most people. That is until you are in the situation where you are in the position to protect your children while a tornado is ripping your house apart. Probably not until that moment would we know if we would be able to make that kind of sacrifice out of love. Something else that Jesus infers in these words about love is that love is learned by modeling. "Love one another," Jesus said, "just as I have loved you." People become loving by having love modeled for them by someone who knows what love is. Part of what Jesus is saying here is that love, or being a loving person, does not come naturally, as if we were born with it. Some people do not grow up having love modeled in a positive way. The poet Elizabeth Barrett grew up under a tyrannical father. He exemplified the epitome of the kind of demanded obedience we all cringe from. He severely punished any opposition to his will. For many years she buried her resentment and anger. She became a sick and pitiful recluse. Eventually she became an invalid, whose only outlet was writing her poetry. One day she was visited by a man named Robert Browning. In just one visit he gave her so much joy and happiness that she lifted her head from her pillow. On his second visit she sat up in bed. On his third visit they ran away and eloped. Just seeing a different model of love was enough to arouse Elizabeth Barrett to a new life. Jesus gave the disciples, which includes us, the invitation to learn from him, to model his way of loving. I want to be careful here not to minimize Jesus, by only making him out to be a role model for love. He was, of course, much more than that--He is the Savior of God. But part of the heart of his saving message had to do with modeling how to develop a healthy, loving relationship with God and with each other. There is so much here, in Jesus' statements about loving others and being in a love relationship. I just want to highlight one more. The main point that Jesus' double statement, "Love one another," says to me is that love is not a warm feeling you hold in your heart. Love is an outwardly focused, active emotion. Love is not an individual, internal kind of warm fuzzy, but instead evokes a person to action in a relationship. Think about it. Love comes to the surface when you are with someone else and have an object for your love. In Guideposts magazine, Thomas Malone reported about a study he did. Malone found that the people with the most emotional problems were those who went through life, screaming in some way, "Please, somebody, love me." On the other hand, people who were mentally healthy were those who went through life looking for someone to love and to show love to. People became mentally healthy when they stopped their "me-centered" selfish screaming, and went about the task of showing love to another human being. Then they found the love they had been screaming for came around to them. But they had to demonstrate love first to get the love they were seeking. The friendship kind of love that Jesus says is available to us is only by loving one another, by letting ourselves go, and risking over and over, some demonstration of that love for someone else. To not let your love be outward bound toward others not only makes it not love, it also creates emotional consequences that are scary. The love that Jesus wanted his disciples to see, the kind of love he modeled as the Savior, was so different from the culture-at-large. It's not the, "I love you, man," kind of love that ends up being sappy, shallow, and self-centered. Jesus' kind of love is not just a bunch of words without substance. It is a throbbing with life kind of love, that energizes both the lover and the beloved. And it was vital to Jesus, as he was saying goodbye, that his followers understood the difference and followed his way.