John 15:8-12
“Cultivating Love”
April 25, 2004 - Third Sunday of Easter

         “All happy families are like one another; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Thus begins Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy’s greatest work after War and Peace. It is the story of several unhappy families who suffer the consequences of the evils which they have done to each other.

         Strictly and ultimately, Tolstoy is wrong. It is not happy families which are all alike. It is the unhappy ones who achieve a sort of boring, ugly sameness of existence. Ask anyone who has counseled much with dysfunctional families and I would guess they could tell you of the habits of interaction, the cycles of mutual misunderstanding and injury, the patterns of hurtful behavior which are repeated over and over in the people they see. In many ways, unhappiness is drearily, dully the same again and again.

         Happiness, on the other hand, is fruitful. It blossoms forth in people’s lives in a multitude of ways. Each truly happy family or person is a unique and wonderful aspect of all the wonderful variety which God has created in the world. Happiness is constantly surprising, infinitely diverse.

         Yet there is a bit of truth to Tolstoy’s thought. There is a kind of unity to the happy life which does not exist for those who are unhappy. That is demonstrated in Galatians 5 by the way in which Paul contrasts the “works of the flesh” in verses 19 through 21 with the “fruit of the Spirit” in verses 22 and 23. To begin with, note that the word “works” is plural, while “fruit” is singular. Evil is described in a random list of fifteen wrong behaviors ending with a kind of dismal et cetera, “and the like,” in verse 21. Sin goes off in every direction, chaotically. The Spirit, however, works toward unity, producing for Paul a carefully ordered list of nine, three sets of three, all connected, all in harmony.

         Paul’s subtle thought here is what philosophers call the “unity of the virtues.”[1] Good character traits do not exist in a person independently. The best character has a unity and balance about it. The courageous man is also gentle. The kind woman is also wise. Yes, you can have a virtue by itself, but it won’t be fully developed. It will be like the stunted fruit that remains and grows on a tree when most of the blossoms have been frozen off by a spring frost. Yes, a person can be courageous without being good in any other way, but think about it: courage without wisdom becomes foolhardiness; courage without love tends to be a bully; courage without hope is mere desperation.

         So the fruit of the Spirit is in the singular. It’s one thing, manifested in several different ways in our lives. Spiritual fruit is a unity. To have one part of it is to at least be developing and growing the rest of it. That’s what Jesus Himself suggests in our text for today. He calls us to remain in His love and then in verse 11 of John 15 says, “I have told you this so that my joy may be in you.” The fruit of love leads directly to the fruit of joy. It’s all connected, it’s all one.

         Love is listed as the first of the fruit of the Spirit for a good reason then. As Jesus implies, the other fruit all flows out of this first one. If you have love, you will have joy and peace. With love, you will be patient, kind and good. By nurturing love you will also nurture faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. As I suggested in a sermon earlier in the year, love is the roof over the whole building of the Christian church. All the other good things we do and experience as believers take place beneath the covering of love.

         Speaking about the fruit of the Spirit, Martin Luther said, “It would have sufficed to list only love, for this expands into all of the fruit of the Spirit”^[2] One writer suggests that love is like light shining through a prism, it spreads out into all the colors.[3] Those colors do not exist apart from the light, nor do they really add anything to it. The prism simply lets us see all the different hues which were already present in light.

         So Tolstoy is right to this degree: every happy family has at its center the same thing. All happy families have love at their centers. And all Christian virtue and fruit has love at the center, but love is expressed in a variety of ways. Paul’s list of fruit is an image of love growing and multiplying in different forms. Cultivating the fruit of the Spirit begins with the cultivation of love.

         How then, do we do that? How shall you and I cultivate the fruit of love for ourselves? Books like Anna Karenina capture our minds and become classics because there is so very much unhappiness in our lives. How can we practice Christian love in such a way that it can stem the tide of all the unhappiness with which we are surrounded?

         To begin with, we might consider the characteristics of the fruit we wish to grow. Love means many different things in our world, everything from the deepest act of self-sacrifice to the merely physical act of intercourse. What is the nature of the affection which is true fruit of the Spirit, true Christian love?

         Jesus gives us a starting point in the verses we’re reading this morning. He begins by telling His disciples that they will glorify His Father by bearing much fruit. Verse 9 begins to explain what that fruit is: “As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you.” Then in verse 12 it becomes crystal clear, “My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you.” Jesus wants our fruit, our love, to be like His love.

         Let’s ask then, what the love of Jesus is like. As He says, His love as God the Son is the same as the love of God the Father for Him. We are asking, “What is God’s love like?” There is much that could be said. Since God is eternal His love is never failing. The Cross shows us that God’s love is willing to suffer. But what I would like to zero in on this morning is that the love of God for us is absolutely undeserved, unmerited. As Scripture reminds us over and over, we can do and have done nothing that could possibly earn all the love which God shows us. Romans 5:8 says that God demonstrates His love for us in just this way, “While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”

         The love we offer each other, then, ought to be the same sort of free, gracious, undeserved, unconditional love which God has for us. That is the sort of fruit we want to cultivate in our lives.

         However, the ground for growing that kind of love in us is pretty hard. In the country in which we live it is more or less accepted truth that nothing is free. One of our premier economists, Milton Friedman, wrote a book in 1975 entitled, There’s No Such Thing as a Free Lunch. That saying comes from the fact that bars used to offer free lunches. But you pay a cover charge to get in the door. The food is salty so you order plenty of drinks. In the end, you pay significantly more than the worth of your meal.

         Convinced then, that there are no free lunches, we’ve come to believe that there is a price on everything. MasterCard commercials might appear to be saying something else, but they’re not. One classic ad shows a cute-as-a-button preschooler eating her morning cereal. You hear the voiceover, “New sneakers to help her play basketball and win a college scholarship: $26. Books to help her learn her ABCs and become a best-selling author: $30. Globe, so she can learn her continents, which will come in handy when she’s president: $18.” Then you see the cute little girl attempt to drink the milk from her bowl and spill most of it down her shirt, as you hear, “Remembering to take it one day at a time: priceless. There are some things money can’t buy, for everything else there’s MasterCard.”

         The dangerous, subtle and real message of those ads is the implication that’s what said to be priceless really is not. If you can buy the other things, the shoes, the books, the globe, you will have the peace of mind which will allow you to “take things one day at a time.” That’s the message MasterCard actually wants to send you. If you can buy movie tickets and hot dogs and a car to carry your kids, then you can in fact have the priceless joy of fun times with them. Use your credit card to purchase dinner in a nice restaurant, some beautiful flowers, and a big diamond ring, and you can have a priceless beginning to a happy marriage. Those commercials are just another way of saying what we generally believe: Anything, even the supposedly priceless moments, can be bought.

         So we tend to view all of life as moments of exchange or transaction. We view our own self-worth as a function of our earning power. We speak of many if not most of our relationships in terms of cost. We might say of a friendship that we break off, “It just wasn’t worth it,”  or “It was costing me too much.” We live in a consumer society and being a consumer tends to become our whole identity.

         Thinking like a consumer is not all bad. A person with good business sense can accomplish many good things. My wife’s eye for a bargain when she shops brings our family a number of small pleasures. It is one small part of good stewardship to be concerned about getting good value for one’s investments.

         The problem is that we carry consumer thinking with us every area of life, even into the community of the church. We “church shop” looking for a place that “meets our needs” so that we can “invest” ourselves for the best return on our time and resources. How often do we go away from a worship service thinking something like, “I sure didn’t get anything out of that this morning.”?

         At its worst, consumer thinking leads us to believe that our commitment to Jesus Christ is just one more shopping decision. Looking around at all the options for a philosophy of life, we decide that Jesus is the one that pays off best.

         What gets forgotten in all our consuming is the biblical, Christian view of life. According to the Bible, according to Jesus, according to Paul, relationships, church community, and worship have very little to do with receiving value for value. At the center of life in Christ is love which comes to us totally free, regardless of the fact that we have absolutely nothing we could possibly give in exchange for it. The plan of Jesus has always been that such free and truly priceless love from God would be planted like seeds in us and grow new fruit which expresses the same sort of freely offered love.

         So to grow the fruit of Christian love, we must engage in practices which work against the consumer mentality which so permeates most of the way we live. We must develop relationships which are not transactions. We must give when we get nothing back. We must do loving acts for people who do not love us. We must cultivate new attitudes which let go of the feeling that we ought to be receiving something in return whenever we invest ourselves in an activity.

         That cultivation may start right here in worship. Let us all be released from the presumption that we came here this morning to be blessed, to be fed, to be strengthened, to be built up in some way. We came here today not so much to receive as to give, to give praise and honor and glory to God who saves us and loves us and always cares for us asking nothing in return. So why do we expect something in return for our time here worshipping Him? Worship is not for us. It’s for God. And it’s the very place to start letting go of our consumer attitudes.

         Yet it’s not just love for God we want to cultivate. We want to let go of the spirit which makes us look at all our relationships in terms of what we give and then get back. We can work on that in a matter as simple as receiving a dinner invitation from some friends. You are invited over for a meal. If you’re anything like Beth and me, one of you may start the following conversation even in the car on the way to your friends’ house: “They invited us over, but it’s not right. We’ve been to their house several times. We should be inviting them over!” Then you begin going over the calendar in your heads, trying to come up with a date and time to reciprocate the invitation you’ve received.

         We do that in all sorts of situations. Someone from the office buys you lunch. Well then it’s your turn to buy lunch the next time. A cousin sends you a Christmas present you hadn’t expected, so you rush out to buy something for her and get it shipped off in time for the holiday. We have this built in need to achieve parity in giving and receiving in our relationships. So we won’t let a simple gift or act of kindness go un-repaid. There’s no such thing as a free lunch. Everything has a price, everything needs to be paid for. But the love of Jesus Christ says no to all that business of paying each other back for small favors.

         Now I’m not suggesting you be ungrateful. When someone gives you a gift or helps you out or is exceptionally kind, it is only right to offer warm and sincere thanks in return. But shift out of the mode which feels a need to pay back in kind what you have received. To think that way only leads you into feeling wronged when the situation is reversed. If the standard for yourself is to reciprocate every gift, then, when you give or help and the recipient offers you back nothing but thanks, you will feel wronged. But that’s not the Spirit of love. That’s the consumer mentality, value for value. It’s thorns, not fruit.

         Our goal is to become lovers rather than consumers. One more step toward that goal will be to change our concept of stewardship. I mentioned earlier that business sense is a small part of stewardship. I meant that it’s a very small part. The ancient concept of a steward was a person who kept that which belongs to another so that it could be ready for service when required. When the Bible enjoins us to be good stewards it does not mean merely conserving what we have or simply writing a check for ten percent every month. Giving a tithe is a good beginning, but Christian stewardship ultimately means a life-long work of learning to view all we have, all our time, all our skills and abilities, as the possessions of God. They are not simply ours to consume as we wish, but they are entrusted to us to place in the service of others for the sake of love.

         So it might be a good discipline every now and then to inventory your stuff. Check off all the major things you own, house, car, bank account, and even small ones like golf clubs and fishing rods and antique tables. Then ask yourself, “How might I place this into the service of love directed toward someone else? How might God use this to benefit someone other than myself?”

         Ultimately, learning to love means constantly going back to what Jesus taught us here in the text. We cannot reflect too often on the implications of “Love each other as I have loved you.” We can never pay Jesus back for what He did and does for us. There is no sacrifice great enough to reciprocate the gift of the Cross. There is no offering amount, no act of praise large and full enough to return the grace of eternal life. In asking us to be like Him in our love, Jesus is asking us to rise above consumerism. His love is gift-love, pure and simple, because He needs nothing in return from us.

         Nearing the end of a book on love, C. S. Lewis wrote this:

God, who needs nothing, loves into existence holy superfluous creatures in order that he may love and perfect them. He creates the universe, already foreseeing… the buzzing cloud of flies about the cross, the flayed back pressed against the uneven stake, the nails driven through the mesial nerves, the repeated incipient suffocation as the body droops, the repeated torture of back and arms as it is time after time, for breath’s sake hitched up. If I may dare the biological image, God is a “host” who deliberately creates His own parasites; causes us to be that we may exploit and “take advantage of” Him. Herein is love. This is the diagram of love Himself, the inventor of all loves.^[4]

Lewis goes on at length to confess and explain how very little he himself really grasps and understands this immense and awesome divine love. He ends with the suggestion that perhaps such confession is how we will ultimately come to real love, by the constant recognition that we are not yet there. Maybe, he suggests, we have only ever dreamed of love which is truly like God’s. Yet, he writes, “To know that one is dreaming, is no longer to be perfectly asleep.”[5] May our Lord by His true and perfect love awake us all more and more into true love like His.

         Amen.

Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2004 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj