Galatians 5.1,13-25 Love is the whole of the law

Complete the sentence. God is ___.

How many of you would complete this sentence with love? God is love. The overwhelming majority of people would.

Now, complete this one: Love is ___. How many of you want to say God? Love is God.

Okay, that’s all well and good and logical but what happens when God commands us to love God and one another? How do we complete it then? Love is not supposed to be limited to God. It is supposed to be bigger and broader than that. It’s supposed to encompass not just God but also God’s creation.

You hear me tell you all the time to love God and love one another. The only commandment we have been given that we must follow is to love God and neighbor as ourselves. But what on earth does that mean?

Each and every week I try to give you one component of the answer to that question. I could just stand up here and give you a whole list of things, but you wouldn’t remember any more than the one thing you are already doing. So, it is broken down week after week, one small change at a time, until hopefully a divine transformation has occurred and you are successfully living a life that is nothing but love.

1 Corinthians tells us that love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.

Remember what I said about the list and how you would only remember what you are already doing and not the whole list? It also doesn’t apply when we only do things sometimes. Love is not temporary. If God is love and love is God there is absolutely nothing temporary about that. It is the epitome of always.

We are to love others as God loves us, which means unceasingly. We aren’t just patient one day in one circumstance; we are eternally patient. We are not just kind when others are kind to us; we are kind to everyone. And we use the dreaded word never. We never envy. We never boast. We are never proud.

If you are led by the Spirit, you are not subject to the law. I love this long list that follows, starting with the more obvious grievances, like fornication and incest, and then culminating with jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissentions, factions, envy, being overly intoxicated, carousing, etc. I love this long list because we seem incapable of understanding exactly what not loving someone means just as much as we can’t seem to figure out what love is.

Growing up, I loved Bryan Adams. My sister getting to see him in concert and I did not is one of my great envies of life. Everything I Do, I Do It For You is a love song. It starts off great.

♫Look into my eyes, you will see, what you mean to me. Search your heart, search you soul, and when you find me there you will search no more. Look into your heart, you will find, there’s nothing there to hide. Take me as I am. Take my life. I would give it all, I would sacrifice

… wait, this is starting to get unhealthy. Beautiful rendition of love but then… as humans do, we wander into some dark and unhealthy territory.

♫ I would fight for you, I’d lie for you, Walk the wire for you, Yeah, I’d die for you…

hmmm… getting unhealthier by the minute. I don’t think this is what human love is supposed to be. God’s love absolutely but human love?

So, if our love songs aren’t what love is, what is?

Love is not fighting for someone. In John 18:10 when Simon Peter chops off a guard’s ear, Jesus immediately tells him not to use violence or fight on his behalf. Jesus’ example  is that we are to suffer the consequences of our own actions as deemed by the law.

At Annual Conference this year I witnessed something I have seen more than I would like in the church. People fighting for someone … who doesn’t want them fighting on their behalf. This, I’m sure, very well-meaning person, got up to speak. They proposed that we reinvest the money that was just cut from the budget back into children’s, youth, older adult, and college ministries.

I am so very proud of the Youth Leader then who got up, went to a microphone in front of 500 people and spoke on behalf of the Youth of the WVUMC to state…”We don’t need any more money. We created a budget. The conference gave us every penny we asked for and we do our own fundraisers. Please give that money to others who could use it more.”

I should also mention that during these budget conversations, someone got up to ask why money to Clergy and Family Counseling was being cut and that this was not right, mental health should be a priority, especially for our leaders. She’s not wrong. But the response she got from the finance team? The budget was being cut because the money wasn’t being used.

After several more comments against the finance team and their hard work, a member of the finance team goes up to the microphone to say that every one of those groups (youth, children, college, and nursing homes) were given the amount they requested. If they had requested more, it would have been granted and cuts would have been made elsewhere to cover it. Those groups are our priorities.

Love is not fighting for someone who hasn’t asked you to.

Love, is not lying for someone but being honest and telling them the truth. I love when Jesus shouts things like in Matthew 23:13 “You hypocrites!” Or in Luke 11:40 when he shouts “You foolish people!” So often we humans think that love is to “spare someone’s feelings” or to “sugar-coat” the truth. Not Jesus. Nope. Jesus tells it like it is.

Remember the woman at the well who offers Jesus water in John 4:17-18 who says “I have no husband,” and Jesus said to her, “You are right when you say you have no husband. The fact is, you have had five husbands, and the man you now have is not your husband. What you have just said is quite true.” He’s not being condescending or telling her she is going to hell, or wrong, he is just being honest with her. He is loving her for who she is.

Love is not walking the wire. To walk the wire is a phrase which means to take a significant risk that will require a balancing act to maintain. Love is not a risk, it is a commandment. It is not a gamble but a requirement. There is no return expected to be made on the investment of love. It is to be given freely with no expectations. There is no expectation of getting anything back for yourselves.

We struggle to give money to the church, that’s why Annual conference had such a long budget discussion because we want to know what we are getting back out of our investment. We forget that it’s not about what we get back out of it but what we’re willing to give into trusting God and helping those outside of our walls that we never meet and may never hear from again.

We are endeavoring to make flood buckets because we have suddenly become acutely aware of their use. This should not be the case. We should have leapt at the opportunity to make them when we were only helping others, that’s love. Waiting until we are suddenly in need isn’t the way love works. You love first and may or may not receive later. Love is not a delicate balancing act to maintain. It is not a high-risk investment. It’s not an investment at all because you are expecting absolutely no return at all. God’s not necessarily investing in us.

Do you really think you can do something God can’t do? Do you really think God needs us? God doesn’t need us, God wants us. God’s not gambling, they already know the outcome.

Love is not dying for someone. We do not die on behalf of our loved ones. Abraham was prepared to sacrifice his own son and his son was prepared to be sacrificed. Our days are numbered by God it is not our choice when we go. We do not choose whose life is given for us, that choice was made by God long ago. The only one who is eligible to give a life for love has already done so. God gave one life that we would never give another. Your job is to live for others, not die for them.

Love is not slavery, it is freedom. Paul’s letter to the Galatians tells us that we are not to submit ourselves again to the yoke of slavery but we are called to freedom. But when it comes to the love spoke of in our poetry and love songs, we use that freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence. We are to become slaves through love to one another but not just one person. To our community, to our neighbors lest we be consumed by one another.

The word love that we throw around so half-hazardly as human beings is linked to the love of the flesh not the love of the Spirit. Now, the works of the flesh are obvious… at least according to this letter and are not love. I feel obligated to point out that the actual translation for what is generally translated as a generalized: sexual immorality is fornication and incest. The actual translation for drunkenness is an overindulgence in intoxication. Remember the loopholes I talked about last week? Translators in what I hope are honest attempts at simplification, have a tendency to want to translate in ways that make it easier for us rather than just saying things that might make our lives more difficult.

Galatians though provides us with a list that doesn’t leave wiggle room. Jealousy, anger dissention, factions, all sins as great as any other. None of them demonstrations of love.

Fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and… here’s a hard one: self-control. There is no law against such things. If we live by the spirit, let us also be guided by the Spirit.

Perhaps the problem of it all is self-control. We don’t want to think of ourselves as animals and yet most of our problems in this life stem from our lack of self-control and just as problematic, an over-exertion of self-control.

When it comes to infatuation, we lack self-control. David and Bathsheba readily comes to mind. But when it comes to over-control, well that’s where love your neighbor falls in. We stop ourselves.