Twenty Questions: #16 Do You Love Me? (Jn. 21:15, 16, 17)

“Do you love me?” It is a question which no lover ever hopes their beloved will ask them. We don’t ever want someone to ask us whether we love them; we want it to be so clear that they need never ask. That the question needs to be posed is an admission that there is sufficient cause to doubt. That was certainly true in the case of Simon Peter. Simon Peter was to be the Rock on which Christ would build His Church. But he had denied his Lord three times, watching at a distance as He was led off to be flogged, mocked and crucified. This from the man who was absolutely adamant of his fidelity to Jesus: “Lord, why can I not follow you?” he protested, “I will lay down my life for you” (13:37). No wonder, then, that Jesus asked him the simple question which He asks also of us: “Do you love me?” And yet, one of things that I love most about this story is that there is no need whatsoever for Peter to ask that question of Jesus. The simple fact that the risen Lord would return to a deadbeat denier of His like Peter is proof enough of where His heart is at.

Of all the questions God asks us in the Bible, this one before us today is surely the most important. Everything hangs on our answer to this one question. And it’s telling that the most important question God can ever ask us is not, “Do you go to Church?” or “Do you tithe?” or “Do you read your Bible?” No. As it says in 1 Sam. 16:7, God doesn’t look at outward appearances; He looks at the heart. God knows full well that anyone can stand and mouth the words of a good worship song if they want to; what He wants to know is if our heart is in it and more to the point, if our heart is in Him. The fact is that we can say all the right words, do all the right things, while our hearts are a million miles from Him (Is. 29:13). As the prophet Jeremiah warns, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick” (17:9). God wants to know the state of our heart. Deut. 8:2 tells us that it was for that very reason God led the people of Israel wandering through the wilderness for forty years: to find out what was in their hearts. The basic commandment God gave to His people was this: “You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might” (Deut. 6:5). The question, therefore, remains the same as it has always been: “Do you love me?”

On the surface of it, this is a pretty straight-forward question. Do we love Jesus or not? The problem is that what Jesus is asking here and what we think that Jesus is asking here are not necessarily the same thing. We hear Jesus ask, “Do you love me?” and we think He’s asking us whether or not we feel a certain way towards Him. He isn’t. In our modern Western culture, we tend to talk about love primarily as an emotion; a warm, fuzzy feeling we get deep inside for another. That isn’t what Jesus meant when He asked Peter whether he loved Him. This is no ‘Jesus is my boyfriend’ kind of love; this is something quite different. Earlier in John’s Gospel, Jesus tells His disciples quite plainly what love means: “If you love me,” He says, “you will keep my commandments” (14:15). This kind of love is love in action. I do not think it is any accident that every profession of love that Simon Peter offers is met with a command: “Feed my lambs … Tend my sheep … Feed my sheep.” Love calls for an integrity of words and deeds. As Paul tells the Galatians, the only thing that matters is “faith working through love” (5:6). Love is the visible expression of faith.

C. S. Lewis is surely right when he says that love is “a deep unity, maintained by the will and deliberately strengthened by habit.” In the Bible, the heart is not only the seat of emotion, but the centre of one’s cognition and volition also. In other words, the heart is the core of one’s personal inner life. The word ‘love’ has a similar depth of meaning in the Bible. In the kind of love Jesus is talking about, feeling, thinking and doing are all linked and interconnected. When He asks us whether or not we love Him, Jesus is not looking for soppy, sentimental professions of undying love and affection; He is looking for a steadfast loyalty and devotion to His will which reveals itself in the way that we live. John Wesley writes that the fruit of one’s love for God “is universal obedience to Him we love.” It is, he goes on, “conformity to His will; obedience to all the commands of God, internal and external; obedience of the heart and of the life: in every temper, and in all manner of conversation.” This kind of love says that the quality of our devotion to Jesus is not proved by singing loudly in Church or by wearing a clerical collar around our necks; rather, it is proved by following Jesus closely, practicing His presence routinely and obeying His commandments faithfully.

“Do you love me?” We don’t like to talk of love and obedience in the same sentence; they seem to us like two completely different concepts. The reality, however, is different. Love requires obedience and without obedience, love will fail. Love, I believe, means being for the benefit of another. In his novel, That Hideous Strength, C. S. Lewis describes his character Jane coming to this realisation for herself: “The name me … was a person (not the person she had thought), yet also a thing, a made thing, made to please Another and in Him to please all others.” What it means to love God is to live to please God. In the Song of Songs, the woman declares: “I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine” (6:3). That is to say, she belongs to him whom she loves, she gives herself over to him and lives for his sake. That is what it means to love. Love empties us of self and wholly consumes us with Another. For many centuries, the Song of Songs has been read as a love song between Christ and His Bride. Christ asks us, “Do you love me?” But can we, I wonder, say that we are our Beloved’s and our Beloved is ours?

Jesus, asks me whether or not I love Him. And with Peter I answer, “Yes, Lord; you know that I love you.” But do I love Him enough? No. Not even close. In the wonderful words of John Newton, “The love I bear Christ is but a faint and feeble spark, but it is an emanation from Himself: He kindled it and He keeps it alive; and because it is His work, I trust many waters shall not quench it.” My love for Christ is certainly not what it ought to be—so weak, so fleeting, so cowardly. Nor is my love for Christ what I want it to be—courageous, fiery and strong—O how far from it! And yet my love for Christ is also not what it once was. There was a time when I did not know Him and did not obey Him in anything; but He, of His own accord, has wakened my drowsy soul with His love and has started in my heart a fire, which, as long as the breath of His Spirit stirs in me, shall be fanned into greater and greater flames.

In closing, I am reminded of these words of invitation to Holy Communion, based on those of John Hunter in 1880:
Come to this table, not because you must but because you may,
not because you are strong, but because you are weak.
Come, not because any goodness of your own gives you a right to come,
but because you need mercy and help.
Come, because you love the Lord a little and would like to love him more.
Come, because he loved you and gave himself for you.
Come and meet the risen Christ, for we are his Body.

I do love you, Lord. But I would love you so, so much more.

All Consuming Worship

Preached at Honley Trinity Methodist/URC
29th June 2014: 2nd Sunday after Trinity
Romans 6:12-23; Genesis 22:1-18

Let me ask you a question: what does your worship cost you? Well, the obvious answer is that it costs you an hour a week, or let’s be generous, two hours a week by the time you add in tea and coffee, or if you get a long-winded preacher like me. That’s 2 out of every 168 hours of your week spent in church if you come every Sunday. What else does it cost you? Well, financially-speaking, it costs you whatever you put in the offering plate—be it a few coppers or maybe even some pound coins. But is that it? 2 hours a week and some loose change? Is that the sum total of what our worship costs us? If it is, then it’s got to be said, we’ve obviously got a pretty good thing going on. God must be a really cheap date for us!

Alas, Abraham didn’t find him so. Abraham found him to be much more demanding than that. “Take your son,” God said to Abraham, “your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains of which I shall tell you” (Genesis 22:2). We hear that and we’re horrified. How could God ask something so cruel, so callous, so costly? It is stories like this which give the Bible (and the Old Testament especially) a bad name. It is stories like this which turn people off of God and off of religion.

Let’s be honest, if we were on the heavenly committee responsible for the editing and publication of the divinely inspired word, this story would have a big red cross through it. There’s just no way we’d allow it through into the hands of unsuspecting readers. Think of the children! Won’t someone please think of the children! They couldn’t read this story, could they? And what about the rest of us? I mean, even if it’s true, what kind of a message does this story send out? It’s not a very attractive depiction of the life of faith, is it? No. I’m sorry, God, but this story has got to go. Either that or if it really must go in, it’s got to be printed in so small a font as to make it illegible—no one must be able to actually read it.

This story is shocking. It is disturbing. There’s no getting around that. Even if this was just a test, as the narrator tells us it is in the opening verse of the story, Abraham doesn’t know that. What’s more, test or no test, it doesn’t alter the horrific nature of the command. Surely, we ask ourselves, God couldn’t possibly demand the life of a child in sacrifice, could he? That’s not the God we know. And even though we, the readers, know that God prevents Abraham going through with it, we also know that he waits until the knife is in his hand, suspended precariously above his innocent son Isaac.

And yet, with all our ill-ease at this story, we in the Church can’t ignore it. We believe that this story is a gift. We believe that God has given us the whole of the Bible, this story included, as a precious act of his own self-revealing. We remind ourselves of that when, at the end of a reading someone says, “This is the word of the Lord,” and we all reply, “Thanks be to God.” This story is a gift. It may not seem it. We may struggle with it. This story may not make it into the list of our top ten favourite biblical passages, but it can (and I believe, does) point us the way of God’s light and life.

Last weekend I visited an elderly couple I know well. The man is 91, his wife a couple of years younger and together they have been married 68 years now. For the last several years, the man’s wife has suffered from dementia. Recently, however, both her mental and her physical states have declined quite sharply. The man is determined to give her care at home and even at the not-so-young age of 91, is nursing her around the clock—washing her, dressing her, changing her, feeding her—all day, every day. When I spoke to him, he told me, quite candidly and emotionally, “I never imagined that at 91 years old, I’d have to be doing all this.” It never occurred to him that his love for his wife could be so costly.

Our culture at large talks about love primarily as if it were an emotion, a feeling. We talk about ‘falling in love’ as if we were walking along a road where a manhole cover has been removed and we drop down and this big pit we land in is called ‘love’. Christians, though, have quite a different idea of what love is, which you can tell by looking at the marriage service. In church, when a couple come together to be married, the minister doesn’t turn to the man and ask, “James, do you love Rebecca?” but rather, “James, will you love Rebecca?” Love, for Christians, is an act of willing. It’s a choice. It’s a conscious decision we have to make. That’s why couples to be married make vows to one another.

Love like this is costly. When the woman you married 68 years ago doesn’t know who you are, has violent mood swings and requires constant attention, any love that’s less than a steadfast commitment to the other simply won’t cut it. Love, then, has to be more than an emotion. It has to be borne out in action, irrespective of whether we feel we’re ‘in love’ with the person or not. There are times when to love means choosing to love, even though we’d rather not. I wonder if that’s not rather like what Abraham went through here.

“Take… Go… Offer…” The words send tingles down our spine. I think it’d be wrong to suggest that Abraham got up early the next morning after hearing God say these words to him and set off down the road to Moriah with a spring in his step. I just don’t think that’d be fair. He must have headed off with the heaviest heart imaginable, the burden of what he’d been asked to do pressing down upon him all three days of his journey. “Why do it, then?” we might well ask. And the only answer which makes any sense to me is the same answer to the question of why a 91 year old man should spend every hour of the day looking after his frail, demented, old wife: because his love demanded it.

Jewish writer Jon Levenson says this story is about “whether Abraham is prepared to surrender his son to the God who gave him.” In other words, is Abraham willing to put his loving obedience to God ahead of every other competitor for his affections or allegiance? God had chosen Abraham as the channel through which to bring his salvation to the world in Isaac and his descendants. But will Abraham put God first, or will he prize his son more highly than the God who gave him? To put it another way, is Isaac his own son more valuable to him than Isaac the beloved son of God’s great providential drama?

It’s one thing for us to be able to say, “I love God.” It’s something quite different for us to be able to say, “I obey God.” When, I wonder, was the last time any of us said, “I really want to do this, but I can’t because Jesus commands me not to”, or perhaps the other way around, “I really don’t want to do this, but I will because Jesus commands me to.” The fact is that God’s love makes demands of us that we won’t always like. It’s not so much about belief as it’s about behaviour. “Take… Go… Offer…”

Instinctively, we shrink from a God who demands sacrifice. In fact, we shrink from a God who demands anything at all. What we really want is a God we can treat a bit like a cosmic cash machine. We can keep each other at arm’s length, but approach him when we need to make a withdrawal. Worship, love, doesn’t work like that. God asks Abraham to surrender what is most precious to him, his only son. This is worship. It’s not two hours a week and a few loose coins for the collection plate. It’s God put at the centre of our lives 168 hours a week and with everything we’ve got. Worship of this God must be all consuming worship.

A rich young man came to Jesus once and asked him what he had to do to inherit eternal life. “Obey the commandments,” Jesus told him. “Done that,” he said, “been doing that since I was in Sunday School.” And Jesus looked at him and loved him. “Alright,” Jesus said, “because I love you, I want you to go, sell everything you have and give it away to the poor, then come, follow me.” And the rich young man couldn’t do it. He got back in his Mercedes and drove away (Mark 10:17-31). “Take… Go… Offer…”

The love of God could never ask me to do something I don’t want to do, could it? Surely it could never be so costly. Yes it could. But the paradox of this story is that Abraham only keeps Isaac because he was prepared to give him up to God. Both Abraham and the rich young man are invited to believe that the life God asks of them is better than the life they could make on their own. Abraham could have jealously guarded Isaac and elected never to leave home and set off for Moriah. But if he had, God’s salvation would have had to come into the world by another route. What’s more, Isaac would never have been the son God promised him, or the son through whose offspring blessing would flow to the nations.

What Abraham discovered that the rich man didn’t is that sacrifice and life are bound up together. For that 91 year old man I mentioned earlier, the joy of 68 years of marriage to the woman he loves far surpasses the cost of the sacrifice he was now being asked to offer. “Those who want to save their life,” Jesus says, “will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will save it” (Luke 9:24). Do we dare to believe that life with God in obedience to his commands is better than the life we could live by ourselves? Do we dare to trust that when we give everything to God, he’ll give us back even more than we started with? Could it be that God loves us enough to say to us, “Take… Go… Offer…”?

The truth is that God doesn’t ask us to do anything he has not done himself. Some four hundred odd years ago, the great reformer Martin Luther read this story of Abraham and Isaac to his wife. “How could a loving God ask Abraham to sacrifice his only son?” she demanded. “Why Katy,” he said to her, “He did it himself.” We give all to God because God gave all to us, just as he gave all to Abraham, and that love inspires us to do it.

So let me put before you once more the question we started with: what does your worship cost you? And, in light of all God gives, is it enough? May God in his grace, send us the fire of his love to make our worship all consuming.

In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

The Shamrock and the Saint

Preached at Holmfirth Methodist Church, 11am Shoppers’ Service
14th March 2013
Acts 16:6-15

Think of St. Patrick’s Day and you probably think of everything Irish: anything green and gold, shamrocks, leprechauns, music, dancing, and of course, the black gold that is Guinness. St. Patrick’s Day has become a day to celebrate Irishness and Irish culture generally. For many, it’s a day associated with fun and laughter, as well as having a little too much to drink. I wonder, though, how much we know about the Saint himself after whom the day is named. Who was Patrick, and why do we have a day to remember him?

Well, it may surprise some of you to learn that Patrick wasn’t, in fact, Irish; he was English, born in Roman Britain, in a place then called Banna Venta Berniae, which, though otherwise unknown, is often located somewhere in modern day Cumbria. There you have it then: St. Patrick was an Englishman.

There are lots of traditions surrounding St. Patrick, the most famous of which (you probably know) is that he banished all snakes from Ireland, chasing them into the sea. Another popular legend about St. Patrick says that the reason the shamrock (clover) is the national flower is because when he was preaching to the pagan people about the Christian God, he used the three-leaved clover to explain the doctrine of the Trinity, how God could be both Three and One at the same. I have to say, though, there’s one tale about St. Patrick I particularly like. The story goes that St. Patrick carried an ash walking stick with him everywhere he went to preach the Gospel and that wherever he stopped to spread the Good News, he would plant his walking stick into the ground until he moved on. Only, there was one place he went where it took him so long to get through to the people with the message of Jesus that the stick had actually taken root by the time he was ready to leave.

Yet for all the legends about him, true or not, the real story of St. Patrick is just as captivating. Born in England, Patrick first set foot on Irish soil as a 16 year old after he had been kidnapped by a band of raiders who captured him and took him as a slave back to Ireland where he was to spend the next 6 years of his life in captivity, forced to work as a herdsman for those who had stolen him from his home.

Though born the son of manse, Patrick’s own account from the time tells of how he prayed daily through his suffering and how the experience of his slavery had deepened his faith. Six years into his time in Ireland, he heard a voice telling him that a ship was ready to bring him home. Taking this as his cue to escape, he made a break for it. He fled 200 miles away from his master, boarding a ship at port to eventually lead him back home. It’s probably fair to say that on the whole Patrick’s earliest memories of Ireland weren’t particularly fond ones. It’s what happens next that is so incredible.

Returning to home and family in his early twenties, Patrick entered the priesthood and devoted himself to a life of serving God and spreading the Good News of Jesus Christ. A couple of years later, however, that commitment to God and His work would take a strange new turn.

Patrick, writing after the event, recalls a vision from God he had one night in which he saw a man coming from Ireland with a letter for him. The heading on the letter was “The Voice of the Irish,” and as he opened the letter, he heard the Irish people crying out to him with one voice, appealing to him to come and walk among them, to tell them about God.

Most people in Patrick’s shoes would probably have given God a piece of their mind: “What do you mean go back to Ireland? Don’t you remember how you left me there as a slave for 6 years, away from home, away from family, hungry, helpless and homesick? And you want me to go back there to show them love. With all due respect God, you can get on your bike!” Well, that’s what I would have been tempted to say, anyway; but Patrick didn’t say that (or at least, not that we know of).

Instead, he spent the rest of his life in Ireland ministering to the Irish people and telling them of God’s immense love for them, shown for all times in Jesus Christ. And converting many people to a new way of life in Christ, Patrick baptised thousands of new believers and ordained numerous new priests to lead and tend the Christian communities that were popping up all over Ireland. In short, in Patrick God made a former slave in Ireland apostle of the Irish people.

God’s call leads us to unexpected places. In the story we heard earlier from Acts, we find the same thing happening to Paul and his companions. Moving from the city of Derbe in the Roman province of Galatia, Luke tells us that Paul, Silas and Timothy first tried turning left into next-door Asia to preach the Gospel there, only to find the Spirit blocking their path. After being blocked on one side, they turned instead to the right and tried entering Bithynia instead, again only to find a closed door. Instead, having hit a brick wall, Paul received a call urging them on a most trajectory north-west to Macedonia via Troas, Samothrace and Neapolis before eventually arriving in the city of Philippi.

Nothing about going to Macedonia made sense. Asia and Bithynia were right on the doorstep, so why would God send them all the way round the Aegean to Philippi instead? Ultimately, we don’t know. But what we do know is that God had gone ahead of them to Philippi because when they got there to preach the Gospel, Luke tells us that the Lord opened the heart of one of the women who heard Paul (called Lydia) and that she and her whole household was converted that day.

Obedience to God’s call will take us to unexpected places, places we can scarce imagine, and sometimes, like St. Patrick, places we don’t particularly want to go to. But what we can be assured of is that if we obediently follow where God leads, He will be there waiting for us when we arrive, making sure that our pilgrimage was not in vain. The challenge for us, therefore, is to daily listen and open ourselves to God’s call upon us, and when we hear it, to follow courageously and in faith, no matter where it leads us.

May God give us wisdom to discern the movements of His Spirit and bravery to tread the path His Spirit trails before us.

In the Name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.