Love Stories

Galatians 5:16-26

The fruit of the Spirit is love. We begin this morning with the first of the fruit of the Spirit mentioned in Paul’s letter to the Galatians.

The Beatles sang, “All you need is love.” Charlie Brown said, “Love is a warm puppy.” “Would you like to go to a concert with me?” “I’d love to.”
I love my Renault quatre car and I love my wife.
I love eating sushi and I love my daughters.
I love watching waves crash on the rocks of the Moroccan coast and I love God.

In English and most other languages, there is a problem in that love needs to cover so much ground that it becomes meaningless. If someone says to you, “I love you,” ask for more clarification.

551 times in the NIV Bible we read the word “love.” What does love mean?

This may be overly familiar territory for some of you, but there are three Greek words in the Bible, all translated into English as “love.” They are: eros, philos and agape. It’s important to know the difference because love is so important. Not only does Paul list it as the first of the fruit of the Spirit, but in his letter to the Corinthians, in the passage we read as a call to worship this morning, he says,

And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.

Since love is so important, we’d better know what it is we are talking about.

Eros is the root of the English word “erotic” and speaks of the sexual love between a man and a woman. Eros embraces longing, craving and desire. Unfortunately, what God gave as a gift has been distorted and abused so what is erotic is considered “dirty” and unfit for Christians. But the Scriptures speak very highly about this love given for our pleasure and survival. If you doubt me, then read sometime Song of Songs that comes after Ecclesiastes and before Isaiah in your Bible.

Eros love is self-centered with the focus on me and my pleasure. It is a gift of God but empty and inevitably unsatisfying when it is not accompanied by the other two Greek words for love.

Philos is companionship and friendship love. It moves beyond the egotism of eros love into the love exchanged between two people. While eros love concerns itself with my pleasure, philos love is concerned with the mutual pleasure of me and another person. Let me read a conversation between a boy and a girl that Stuart Briscoe wrote to illustrate philos love and it’s limits.

A boy meets a girl. “I like you,” says he shyly.
“I like you, too,” she responds.
Encouraged, he adds, “I like you more than I said.”
“Me, too,” she mummers, blushing.
“I love you,” he blurts.
“What?” she asks breathlessly.
“Nothing,” he mutters.
“Go on, say it,” she urges.
“Okay, but don’t laugh. I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
Bells ring, fireworks explode, violins play, heaven comes down, and they get married and live happily ever after for six weeks. But then the relationship takes an ugly turn.
Appearing from behind the paper at breakfast, he says, “I’ve had it with burnt toast.”
She responds, “Just be thankful you’re not in Uganda, with the starving millions.”
“When I see the food you prepare, I sometimes wish I was.”
“Well if life is so bad for you, why don’t you just go?”
“I think I will. Good-bye.”

Just as eros love is limited with its focus on self-pleasure, so is philos limited. Although philos love loves another person, it is conditional on that person’s behavior. If you are a good friend, I will love you. If you do what I like, make me laugh, make me happy, don’t get in my way, don’t keep me from what I want to do, then I will love you. But if you displease me, if you cross me, if you disappoint me, if you betray me, then philos love falls apart.

Agape love is the love that makes all the difference in life. Agape love is the love God has for us. When the Scriptures talk about God’s love for us, it is agape that is translated as love. Agape love is unconditional love. Agape love is not dependent on my pleasure. It is not dependent on my happiness or satisfaction. Agape love persists in loving through disappointment and betrayal. Agape love says I love you and nothing you do will ever change that fact. I cannot love you more and I will not love you less.

Agape love protects eros and philos love so that they reflect what God meant them to be. Without agape love, both eros love and philos love damage and cause pain.

Agape love allows eros love to thrive because in a committed marriage relationship, it can seek pleasure without using or abusing the other person in the relationship. What makes eros love “dirty” is the practice of sex outside of a relationship that protects the persons involved. I don’t need to go into detail, but the world of sex outside marriage is a world of people using and abusing others for their own pleasure. Agape love allows eros to be all that God meant it to be.

Agape love also protects the relationships in which philos love is experienced. When one person irritates the other and philos love has no power to hold the relationship together, agape love causes the person who was irritated to stay in the relationship and seek a way to make the relationship work.

In a friendship, I take risks by revealing who I am to the other person. The more intimate the relationship, the more vulnerable I become. This creates danger, because when I reveal myself to another person, I open myself to the possibility of being hurt. When I let another person know the things that I try to keep hidden because I am ashamed or embarrassed about those parts of me, I open myself to the possibility of pain when that person withdraws his or her friendship. Agape love allows me to reveal myself, open myself to the possibility of being hurt and then relax because I know that agape love will never disappoint me or leave me.

God loves us with agape love. Nothing we can do will make God love us more than he does now. If we read our Bible every day and pray and give a lot of money to the church and help the homeless people around us, God will not love us more than he already does.

If we have a lapse and watch some television we should not watch, God does not love us less. If we drift away and ignore our relationship with God, he does not love us less. God is committed to us. He pursues us. He works in us to draw us ever closer to him.

God’s agape love allows us to relax in our relationship with him. We can open ourselves and be vulnerable in our relationship with him because we know he will never leave us or desert us.

When we practice agape love with another person, we offer that person the same privilege we experience with God.

This morning I want to tell you two stories that illustrate agape love.

The first one is taken from a book by Phil Yancy, What’s So Amazing About Grace?

A young girl grows up on a cherry orchard just above Traverse City, Michigan. Her parents, a bit old-fashioned, tend to overreact to the nose ring, the music she listens to, and the length of her skirts. They ground her a few times, and she seethes inside. “I hate you!” she screams at her father when he knocks on the door of her room after an argument, and that night she acts on a plan she has mentally rehearsed scores of times. She runs away.

She has visited Detroit only once before, on a bus trip with her church youth group to watch the Tigers play. Because newspapers in Traverse City report in lurid detail the gangs, the drugs, and the violence in downtown Detroit, she concludes that is probably the last place her parents will look for her. California, maybe, or Florida, but not Detroit.

Her second day there she meets a man who drives the biggest car she’s ever seen. He offers her a ride, buys her lunch, arranges a place for her to stay. He gives her some pills that make her feel better than she’s ever felt before. She was right all along, she decides: her parents were keeping her from all the fun.

The good life continues for a month, two months, a year. The man with the big car – she calls him “Boss” – teaches her a few things that men like. Since she’s underage, men pay a premium for her. She lives in a penthouse, and orders room service whenever she wants. Occasionally she thinks about the folks back home, but their lives now seem so boring and provincial that she can hardly believe she grew up there.

She has a brief scare when she sees her picture on the back of a milk carton with the headline, “Have you seen this child?” But by now she has blond hair, and with all the makeup and body-piercing jewelry she wears, nobody would mistake her for a child. Besides, most of her friends are runaways, and nobody squeals in Detroit.

After a year the first sallow signs of illness appear, and it amazes her how fast her boss turns mean. “These days, we can’t mess around,” he growls, and before she knows it she’s out on the street without a penny to her name. She still turns a couple tricks a night, but they don’t pay much, and all the money goes to support her habit. When winter blows in she finds herself sleeping on metal grates outside the big department stores. “Sleeping” is the wrong word – a teenage girl at night in downtown Detroit can never relax her guard. Dark bands circle her eyes. Her cough worsens.

One night as she lies awake listening for footsteps, all of a sudden everything about her life looks different. She no longer feels like a woman of the world. She feels like a little girl, lost in a cold and frightening city. She begins to whimper. Her pockets are empty and she’s hungry. She needs a fix. She pulls her legs tight underneath her and shivers under the newspapers she’s piled atop her coat. Something jolts a synapse of memory and a single image fills her mind: of May in Traverse City, when a million cherry trees bloom at once, with her golden retriever dashing through the rows and rows of blossomy trees in chase of a tennis ball.

God, why did I leave, she says to herself, and pain stabs at her heart. My dog back home eats better than I do now. She’s sobbing, and she knows in a flash that more than anything else in the world she wants to go home.

Three straight phone calls, three straight connections with the answering machine. She hangs up without a message the first two times, but the third time she says, “Dad, Mom, it’s me. I was wondering about maybe coming home. I’m catching a bus up your way, and it’ll get there about midnight tomorrow. If you’re not there, well, I guess I’ll just stay on the bus until it hits Canada.”

It takes about seven hours for a bus to make all the stops between Detroit and Traverse City, and during that time she realizes the flaws in her plan. What if her parents are out of town and miss the message? Shouldn’t she have waited another day or so until she could talk to them?” And even if they are home, they probably wrote her off as dead long ago. She should have given them some time to overcome the shock.

Her thoughts bounce back and forth between those worries and the speech she is preparing for her father. “Dad, I’m sorry. I know I was wrong. It’s not your fault; it’s all mine. Dad, can you forgive me?” She says the words over and over, her throat tightening even as she rehearses them. She hasn’t apologized to anyone in years.

The bus has been driving with lights on since Bay City. Tiny snowflakes hit the pavement rubbed warm by thousands of tires, and the asphalt steams. She’d forgotten how dark it gets at night out here. A deer darts across the road and the bus swerves. Every so often, a billboard. A sign posting the mileage to Traverse City. Oh, God.

When the bus finally rolls into the station, its air brakes hissing in protest, the driver announces in a crackly voice over the microphone, “Fifteen minutes, folks. That’s all we have here.” Fifteen minutes to decide her life. She checks herself in a compact mirror, smooths her hair, and licks the lipstick off her teeth. She looks at the tobacco stains on her fingertips, and wonders if her parents will notice. If they’re there.

She walks into the terminal not knowing what to expect. Not one of the thousand scenes that have played out in her mind prepare her for what she sees. There, in the concrete-walls-and-plastic-chairs bus terminal in Traverse City, Michigan, stands a group of forty brothers and sisters and great-aunts and uncles and cousins and a grandmother and great-grandmother to boot. They’re all wearing goofy party hats and blowing noise-makers, and taped across the entire wall of the terminal is a computer-generated banner that reads, “Welcome home!”

Out of the crowd of well-wishers breaks her Dad. She stares out through the tears quivering in her eyes like hot mercury and begins the memorized speech, “Dad, I’m sorry. I know…”

He interrupts her. “Hush child. We’ve got no time for that. No time for apologies. You’ll be late for the party. A banquet’s waiting for you at home.”

This is such a powerful story because it speaks to the deepest need in us. We long to be loved with agape love. We want to be forgiven and loved as this daughter was loved by her father and family. We have an intense craving for agape love because agape love satisfies the deepest need in us.

We are attracted to this story because deep down, we know that it is agape love that makes the world liveable.

What also makes this story so powerful is that so often we see a different ending to the story. Think of all the alternatives. The parents could be ashamed of their daughter’s behavior and want no more to do with her. If she comes back and her story becomes known, think of what the neighbors might say?

Here in Rabat, the daughter of an Imam became pregnant and was in despair because she could not tell her parents about this for fear of what they would do to her. She could not slip away for nine months to have the baby and then return because that would be the same as telling her parents what she had done. So she took the only route available to her and had an abortion.

This stands in contrast to friends of ours whose daughter got pregnant. They brought her home, cared for her and delighted in the birth of their granddaughter. Five years later, their daughter met a man in church and Ann and I were privileged to go to their wedding the December before coming here to Rabat. Agape love makes a difference.

When you choose to put aside your own hurts and your own pride and your own disappointments and decide to love with agape love, to consider what the other person wants rather than what you want, you bring life to a dying world.

There is another side to agape love. When Jesus chastised the Pharisees, he illustrated this different side.
15 “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You travel over land and sea to win a single convert, and when he becomes one, you make him twice as much a son of hell as you are.
25 “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence.  26 Blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup and dish, and then the outside also will be clean.
27 “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of dead men’s bones and everything unclean.  28 In the same way, on the outside you appear to people as righteous but on the inside you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness.
33 “You snakes! You brood of vipers! How will you escape being condemned to hell?

Jesus, God in the flesh, loved with agape love. What this demonstrates is that sometimes, loving someone with agape love requires having enough courage to stand up and confront them in an effort to bring them into the family of God. This doesn’t give a Christian liberty to blast away at anyone they don’t like or agree with. Speaking the truth in love requires agape love.

I just finished an excellent book on the recent history of the popes: Paul VI, John Paul I and John Paul II who has been pope now for 22 years.

While I don’t agree with all of Catholic theology, I love my brothers and sisters in Christ who are Catholic and think this story of John Paul II is worth telling because it so well illustrates this tough side to agape love.

On December 8, 1965, French-born Archbishop Marcel Lefèbvre began a very public rebellion in the Catholic Church because of the changes that came from Vatican II. The Tridentine mass which had been used since 1570 was replaced in 1965 with a new mass and Lefèbvre refused to make the change. He started a seminary in Switzerland and carried on a very public rebellion, calling the Vatican II Council illegal, calling the new mass a bastard mass.

Paul VI tried to reason with him and failed and Lefèbvre grew in power. In 1976 he was about to ordain 26 new men into the priesthood when Pope Paul VI sent an emissary to intervene at which time Lefèbvre responded, “If the pope is in error, he ceases to be pope.” He openly defied the church of which he was a part.

Paul VI died in 1978, having failed in his attempts to bring Lefèbvre back into the church and having failed to end the rebellion against the church.

Pope John Paul I died after only 33 days as pope and then Pope John Paul II was elected, the first non-Italian pope in 455 years. In his first month as pope, he invited Lefèbvre to the Vatican. The meeting took place because of the pressure of two cardinals who met with Lefèbvre just before his meeting with John Paul II. They came to the meeting discouraged because of the attitude of Lefèbvre. He made it icily clear that he had come to listen, but no more than that. This was not, for him, a peace mission.

The media assembled, having been notified of this meeting and they confidently expected, as in so many other confrontations with Pope Paul VI, that he would emerge to tell them how he had once more trounced the pope.

John Paul II and Lefèbvre met in private. For fifteen minutes the door remained shut. Then it suddenly opened. John Paul stood there. He was holding Lefèbvre by the elbow. The archbishop looked dazed. As they stood in the doorway the pope once more embraced the archbishop warmly. He said, in excellent French, “It will be all right, it will be all right.” Lefèbvre nodded. He did not speak and drove away without looking at the assembled media.

The thirteen year rebellion was over.

What happened? Did the forceful personality of John Paul II win him over? Did he charm the archbishop? Reason with him? No. John Paul II threatened him with immediate excommunication if he did not immediately desist with his public rebellion. He said that he could continue to stay at his seminary in Switzerland with his displeasure at the changes of
Vatican II, but he must put an immediate halt to the public rebellion..

Paul VI had the same power to do what John Paul II did, but John Paul II had enough agape love to use it.

What I so much like about this story is the pastoral touch surrounding the confrontation. This is much more than a power confrontation. John Paul’s arm on the elbow of Lefèbvre. The warm embrace. Saying in the French of Lefèbvre, “It will be all right. It will be all right.”

Agape love is not weak love. It is love strong enough to confront, but it confronts not to satisfy personal desires but to assist someone who is drifting away from God. Agape love confronts when it is in the best interest of the person needing the confrontation to be confronted. Lefèbvre had to be brought back from rebellion to the church. The Pharisees had to be brought back from their rigid theological system to the new covenant brought by Jesus.

Do you want to see agape love practiced in your life? Should you wait until you have a child who runs away so you can welcome him or her back with a party? Should you look for an archbishop who needs discipline so you can threaten to excommunicate him?

As with all of the fruit of the Spirit, we grow in agape love when we grow in our relationship with God. When we read the Scriptures and pray and reflect on the events and circumstances of our life to see what God is trying to tell us, then the fruit of the Spirit grows in our life.

We don’t have to have a list of ways to practice agape love and go around looking for those situations. It comes out of us naturally because we are growing to be more like the one to whom we are attached.

Open your heart to God, be filled with his agape love and then you will have the joy of seeing it leak out into the lives of others around you.