Love: Making Room for Others
1 Corinthians 13 (Luke 4.21-30)
Epiphany 4C; February 2, 2024
There is an old Jewish story about a rabbi who was about to set out on a journey. As he sat in his carriage, ready to leave, he spied one of his students. He called out to the student, inviting him to come along on the journey. But the student hesitated. He said to the rabbi, “I am afraid my presence in the carriage will give you too little room.” The rabbi smiled and replied, “Do not worry. Join me. We will love each other more, and there will be room enough.” [from “I Am Ready to Listen,” a sermon preached at St. Peter UCC, Seven Hills, OH by Allen Groethe, Jan. 16, 2000, Epiphany 2]
The rabbi understood the nature of love: love makes room for others. As Paul tells us, love does not count itself superior to others, more gifted than they; love does not horde resources and seek only its own good; love does not fear others, viewing them as a threat. Instead, love is magnanimous. [David Bentley Hart’s translation of “Love is patient.” The New Testament: A Translation, p. 342] Love is kind. It is generous. It gives of itself, even sacrificially. Love is open; it embraces others and seeks their good.
There are four words in Greek which may be translated into English as “love.” The term Paul uses is agape. It is the same term used to describe God’s attitude and actions toward humanity in John 3.16—“For God so loved the world, that God gave God’s only Son…”—and in 1 John 4.8—“God is love [Ho Theos agape estin.].” God’s very nature is love. The doctrine of the Trinity suggests that God is an internal and eternal relationship of love. Thus, Hans Urs von Balthasar says, “God is not, in the first place, absolute power, but absolute love.” [Clements, The Meaning of the World Is Love: Selected Texts from Hans Urs von Balthasar with Commentary, p. 45] And that love overflows. The very act of Creation is an act of love, for creation is an act of making space for others to exist and thrive. But we see God’s love most clearly in Christ. God gives of God’s self in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, God Incarnate, for us and our salvation. God, in Christ, is making room for us for us, inviting us into relationship with God, adopting us into God’s family. God’s love is an orientation that “longs for the well-being of the beloved” [Shannon Craigo-Snell, Connections, Year C, Vol. 1, p. 216] and thus acts to bring about that well-being—even at great cost to God’s self. And what is more costly, more generous, more loving, more beautiful than becoming human and living and dying as one of us?!?!
We love God because God first loved us. [1 John 4.19]. We are drawn to God by God’s graciousness, God’s welcome, and God’s kindness. One of the Greek philosophers claimed that no one has ever loved that which she did not find beautiful. I believe this is true of our relationship with God. We are wooed by the Divine beauty of infinite goodness, unbounded creativity, and a love that humbles itself and reaches for us in the depths to know us, to nurture us, and to enjoy us.
Such a love cannot help but transform us. As the influential German theologian Jürgen Moltmann has observed, “The nearer we come to Christ, the nearer we come together.” [I recently discovered that Moltmann is actually quoting someone else, but I can’t locate the exact passage in his autobiography, A Broad Place.]
The sixth century monk Dorotheus of Gaza provides us with a brilliant metaphor for this truth. In one of his sermons, he is exhorting his fellow monks to love one another: to forgive, act patiently, help one another and live peaceably together. He asks his audience to imagine a perfect circle, drawn with a compass so that every point on the circle is an identical distance from the center. Then he says they should imagine straight lines drawn from points on the circle to the center, like the spokes of a wagon wheel. Got that image in your heads? He continues, “Let us suppose that this circle is the world and that God himself is the center: the straight lines drawn from the [circle] to the center [,the spokes, they] are the lives of human beings.” Then, he asks us to imagine that we are traveling down the spokes of our lives, closer to the center, journeying closer to God. What happens as the spokes draw closer to the center? They converge. What happens in our lives as we draw closer to God? Our lives converge; we draw closer to one another. As our love of God increases, our love of one another necessarily increases. As we draw closer to the Parent, we draw closer to the children. And, the opposite is also true, if we move away from the children, if fear or prejudice or pride or greed decreases our love for each other, we are moving away from God.
As Roberta Bondi has observed, “Dorotheus’s metaphor [of the circle] suggests that neither the love of God without love of people nor love of people without the love of God is possible. Human beings are made in the image of God, and this means that we cannot love God without at the same time loving God’s image.” (To Love as God Loves, p. 27, Dorotheus’ metaphor is on p. 25) As 1 John reminds us, we cannot love God whom we don’t see, if we do not love our brothers and sisters who we do see right in front of us and there beside us. Whoever loves the Parent, will love the child; whoever loves God must learn to love God’s human children. And as, by the grace of God, we grow in love for our fellow humans, we will find we are drawing nearer to God.
This love will make room for others, just as God has made room for us. It will seek the good of others, just as God seeks our good. This cannot be done in abstract; agape love is a verb. [a favorite observation of the late Sunday School teacher (and former President) Jimmy Carter; many others have made the same point] Such love is necessarily expressed in actions. It is always embodied, just as God’s love was embodied in Jesus. So, Paul’s description of the character of love might be more accurately rendered: “love acts with patience;” “love does deeds of kindness;” “love does not insist on its own way, but works for the good of others and makes space for them.” [based on Boring and Craddock, People’s NT Commentary, p. 538] Of course, such love cannot be a formula or a prescription that’s one size fits all. Love will be flexible, adaptable, personal, and responsive to the particular situation of the other. Love necessarily takes many forms and is called by many names as it is acted out in the myriad circumstances of life.
For the stranger, the outcast, and the shunned, love will take the form of hospitality.
For the sinner, the guilty, the shamed, love will take the form of grace.
For the hurting, the sick, the suffering, love will take the form of compassion.
For the needy, the deprived, the hopeless, love will take the form of generosity.
For the poor, the oppressed, the downtrodden, those denied basic human rights and essential human dignity, love will take the form of justice.
Those words—hospitality, grace, compassion, generosity, justice—may sound imposing, but they ought not, because, more often than not, they are acted out in everyday choices, in “small deeds, done with great love.” [Mother Teresa] There is a place for great social movements such as those that sought the abolition of slavery or the establishment of Civil Rights for all people. There is a need for large projects like building homeless shelters and affordable housing; a need for passing legislation to care for the needy and establish justice; a need for relief programs for refugees fleeing violence and persons afflicted by natural disasters; a need for increasing access to life saving health care; a need for digging wells in impoverished communities overseas and for upgrading infrastructure so every community in this country has access to safe drinking water—these are important expressions of love on a large scale. They are essential ways to make space for and seek the good of others.
But, most of the time, we love by making space for the others—the neighbors—whom we encounter in the course of ordinary life. Henri Nouwen wisely reminds us: “We choose love by taking small steps of love every time there is an opportunity. A smile, a handshake, a word of encouragement, a phone call, a card, an embrace, a kind greeting, a gesture of support, a moment of attention, a helping hand, a present, a financial contribution, a visit---all these are little steps toward love.
“Each step is like a candle burning in the night. It does not take the darkness away, but it guides us through the darkness. When we look back after many small steps of love, we will discover that we have made a long and beautiful journey.” [Nouwen, Bread for the Journey: A Daybook of Wisdom and Faith, June 15, emphasis added]
It is a journey that is long because learning to love is a life-time endeavor, one that requires the help of God who is Love. God sends the Holy Spirit to pour God’s love into hearts so that our fears are overcome, our weakness is strengthened and we are more and more able to embrace others and desire their good. Love is a journey that is beautiful because it creates community and transforms us ever more into the image of Jesus, who is God’s love made incarnate.
Some years ago, an anthropologist working in Africa learned a lesson about how love seeks the good of the other from a group of children:
The anthropologist had been studying the lifestyle and customs of this particular tribe for some time. When it was time for him to return home, he found himself waiting for a Land Rover to pick him up and take him to the airport. He knew that he would be waiting for quite a while, so he decided to pass the time by playing a game with the children of the village, with whom he had bonded.
He often handed out candy to the children and now, as he prepared to leave, he had quite a bit of candy left. So he placed it all in a basket, decorated it with a colorful bow and placed the basket under a tree. He called the children over, drew a line on the ground and proposed a race. When he shouted “Go!” all of the children would race toward the tree. The first one to arrive would win the entire basket of candy.
The children lined up side by side behind the line. But when the anthropologist shouted “Go!” an unexpected thing happened. The children all joined hands and ran together to the tree. Arriving as a group, they began to share the candy.
The anthropologist was dumbfounded. As the smiling children ate the candy, he walked over to the tree and asked, “Why did you all hold hands and run together? If you had run over separately, then one of you could have had all the candy for himself.”
Matter-of-factly, one little girl said, How can one of us be happy if all the others are sad?" [A story entitled “Ubuntu” told by Lia Diskin at the Festival of Peace, in Florianopolis, South Brazil. http://www.harisingh.com/UbuntuAge.htm]
When we love each other and our neighbors with such generosity, when we truly seek the good of others, rejoicing in their successes and embracing them in times of loss and difficulty, when we hold one another’s hand so that none are left behind and all arrive at our joyous destination together, when we embody love—then we reflect the love of Christ for all to see. When we make room for others, we will find that there is space enough for us all and together we shall see the glory of God revealed in the community of love that unites us. So let us “pursue love” (1 Cor 14.1), because love is the essence of Christian community, the heart of Christian action, “the goal of the Christian life” [Bondi] and the very nature of the God we long to see face to face. Amen.