Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places

1 John 3:1-7
Easter 3
April 18, 2021

See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are. The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him. Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is. And all who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure.

Everyone who commits sin is guilty of lawlessness; sin is lawlessness. You know that he was revealed to take away sins, and in him there is no sin. No one who abides in him sins; no one who sins has either seen him or known him. Little children, let no one deceive you. Everyone who does what is right is righteous, just as he is righteous.

 

 

Easter is more than a single day. For the church, it is a season. And in the church’s selection of scripture texts from the First Letter of John, it is a season of love.

 

There is a lot we don’t know about the First Letter of John. No address is posted, so we can’t say this is actually a letter, although we can be sure it was a document that was passed around ever since it was composed. There is no signature, so we cannot say who wrote it. It sounds like the Gospel of John – same terminology, same concerns – but the Gospel of John isn’t signed either. Since we don’t know what it is or who wrote it, we will call it the First Letter of John.

 

What we do know is that John is a leader in an early Christian community. He calls his flock “children of God.” They gather around Jesus, whom they believe is very much alive. The Risen Christ stands at the center of their life together. He is the glue that holds them together. They don’t come together because they have membership cards. Neither do they focus on a building, a program, or an activity. Their center is Jesus. For them he opens up life.

 

And the heart of their life together is love. Thirty times in 105 verses, he speaks of love. That’s a heavier concentration than any other book in the Bible. There is love on every page. There is love in nearly every paragraph. This is striking because love is mentioned a lot, but never defined. Love is indeed a “many splendored thing,” but what kind of thing is it?

 

I ask as the pandemic begins to lift and the weddings begin to be rescheduled. It is my practice to meet with all the couples who want to get married. We aren’t doing a lot of weddings in the church building these days. A few, but not many. The funerals have moved inside, and the weddings have moved outside. But every couple I meet, I ask them to tell me some stories. How did you meet? How long did it take? How did you know? And then the big question, what have you learned about love? And where did you learn it?

 

I ask out of my own general ignorance. There was a time in my life when love seemed to be defined by my hormones. At least I thought that was love; it was probably something else. Or maybe love has something to do with escaping difficult circumstances; daddy was an alcoholic, so let me find somebody who is not. Other times, I wondered if love had to do with companionship. You find somebody to share common interests. You decide to raise children together or join in some other enterprise. And you hope there’s enough glue to make it stick.

I raise this with the couples, I raise this with myself, because this old world is no friend of love. Whatever love is, the world offers a lot of counterfeits.

 

When I was a newlywed (the first time), I was in my least year at seminary and took a class on love. I was sure it would be a piece of cake. The honeymoon in the Adirondacks was fresh in my memory. We had set up house in a high-priced university town. You know the story: we didn’t have much but we had one another. So I signed up for this class on the philosophy of love. The professor’s first name was Diogenes, so I knew he would be a seeker after truth.

 

Well, he was. It was one of the hardest courses I ever took. On the very first day, he denounced greeting cards. Then he ripped into James Taylor songs. Along the way, he made us read an historical study that pointed out that “romance” was an invention from the Middle Ages. It was mostly a rich person’s invention; the poor were too busy to pick flowers and too destitute to give chocolate.

 

I didn’t do very well in that course. I went home and told my wife, “I got a B- in love.” She looked up and said, “Was he grading on the curve?”

 

What kept my grade low was the final exam. Professor Diogenes passed around photocopies of a movie review from the New York Times and said, “Critique the review.” That was our final exam. Everything we had learned in the course came to bear on that single task. The movie was a romantic drama, which I had not seen. I was too busy and too destitute in those days. Roger Ebert, the film critic, said it was just as tell. “Terrible movie,” he said.

 

It was the story of two people in New York who were married to other people. They bought Christmas gifts in a bookstore for their spouses, and the salesclerk wrapped them and accidentally mixed them up. Later, the two meet on a commuter train, meet again, and sparks begin. And you can guess where this story is going.

 

I don’t remember what I wrote for the exam. Probably too shell shocked by the assignment. But a good friend later reported on his poor grade. He said the film sounded like sentimental schlock, like so many other films of the time. He mused how that story would turn out, and whether the two would ever be happy together. The professor wrote a single comment in block letters: “Whoever said that love has something to do with happiness? B-.” I didn’t feel so alone. There was solidarity in my suffering.

 

The point of the story is simply this: the world wants to give us all kinds of substitutes for love. The world tells us love is falling for somebody you meet on a train (never mind you are married to somebody else). Love is entirely a matter of romance (when you are no longer swept off your feet, it’s time to move on). Love is a temporary release from the routines, burdens, and commitments of everyday life. And then, love is supposed to make you happy. That course was thirty-seven years ago, and I think I’m finally learning the lesson.

 

Country music fans know where I got the title for the sermon. It comes from a number one hit by a singer named Johnny Lee. It was featured in the movie “Urban Cowboy” because lead actor John Travolta liked it.

Johnny sings, “I was looking for love in all the wrong places.” He was hitting the singles bars, telling sweet lies, looking for traces to fulfill a little piece of his dreams. He confesses he did everything he could just to get through the night. It was all misdirected, as if love were something he had to chase after, something he needed to pursue out of the hunger in his own soul.

 

In the end, love is something that surprised him. Something that found him. Something he would never discover if he were hungry.

 

This is such an important lesson. Love has little to do with appetite. What appears at first glance to be love is often a shadow of our neediness. Instead of declaring “I wish to commit to you, no matter what,” we look instead for somebody to complete us, to fill some deficit in our soul. And if the day comes when we grow up, and grow into our own skin, and develop a soul, all the superficial attractions may not be enough.

 

So I ask the young couples, their eyes still sparkling, where did you learn about love? What have been the lessons? And sometimes, I tell you, what they report actually does warm my heart.

 

Like the bride who says, “When my mother was diagnosed with depression, my father backed off from his job to give the support that she needed. She said he didn’t need to do that, and he said, ‘You are more important than my work.’ And he proved it by taking the time, stepping up as her advocate, and doing what he could.”

 

Or how about the groom who says, “My mom and dad couldn’t stay married, and my sister and I knew it. But miracles of miracles, they said they would not destroy one another in divorce, and they didn’t. We expected them to fight, but we astonished how they could work together for the common goal of our benefit. Both provided for our educations. Both wanted us to succeed. Both want us to get along in ways that they couldn’t.” That was stunning truth.

 

Or I think of the ways that friends step up when the time arises. Our church has been a marvelous means for people to connect if they want to connect. In this little town of ours where so many neighbors seem anonymous, the church provides a safe place, a level place, to get to know one another. Just the other day, one of our new widows said, “I’m thinking about starting a widow’s group. Nothing heavily structured, just a way to get us together, to talk, to share what we are discovering.” Sounds to me like another expression of love.

 

The world can’t teach us these things. For John, in his Gospel and letters, the “world” is a dark place. It resists love. The world teaches us to consume. To demand. To insist on our own way. To plunder. To express anger through violence. And above all, to lie about everything. That’s why the world doesn’t know as much as it presumes to know. It doesn’t know love. It doesn’t know us. And it doesn’t know God.

 

But this is precisely how God breaks through. God does not need any of us. God was doing fine before we were born. God is spinning the planets alone. God is painting the neighbor with forsythia blossoms. God is waking up the green grass without our help. God doesn’t need us – but God chooses us. John says, “Beloved, we are God’s children.” The adoption papers were signed at our baptisms, and God says, “You belong to me. You are my beloved children.” Love is a commitment.

 

And the commitment is unconditional. God’s claim on our lives has nothing to do with how good we are, nor how bad we used to be. We did not earn our heavenly status. It just came. Pure gift, unconditional gift. This is another place to discern whether it is love: did we have to fake it, dress up for it, gulp down mouthwash and brush our air to become acceptable – or did it surprise us by how gracious it is? Love is 200 proof grace.

 

And the end of love – the final work of love – is to transform us, and inevitably make us lovable. Old John inserts a few lines that we use again and again when we baptize a new one:

 

Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed.

What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is. 

And all who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure.

 

Love is the work of God, in us, among us, between us, and beyond us. It is the purifying work of the Risen Christ, who takes us as we are and promises to make us more like himself. He purifies us by removing the world’s distractions and untangling the world’s distortions. What remains is the truth: that God sees us as we are, knows what we have done, receives us in his mercy, and makes something better out of us.

 

This is the work of love. Love is the work of Christ after Easter. So we will pick this up again next week, and the weeks following. For now, we listen for Christ to call us as the beloved children of God.

(c) William G. Carter.  All rights reserved.