Love Them Anyway

This is the message given in the United Methodist churches of the Wheatland Parish Sunday, April 12, 2015.  The Bible verses are 1 Corinthians 13:1-13.

            Today we’re starting a new sermon series called, “The Paradoxical Commandments.”  They’re not really commandments in the sense of coming from God or anything, but I do think they agree with Biblical ideas.  There’s a bulletin insert today that lists them.  They’re often attributed to Mother Teresa, but while she approved of them and even had them posted at her mission, she did not write them.

            The Paradoxical Commandments were written by a man named Kent M. Keith in 1968.  He went on to become a Rhodes Scholar and eventually got a doctorate in education, but in 1968 he was none of those things.  He was nineteen years old and was a sophomore at Harvard.  He originally wrote the Paradoxical Commandments to encourage his friends, who were becoming bitter and disillusioned over the fact that no matter how hard they tried to go out and change things for the better, things stayed pretty much the same.  Not only that, but their efforts to change things for the better were often met with negativity or even ridicule.  He wrote these to tell people that to really change the world, we need to really love people, and to let that love be enough to sustain us even though we don’t get the results we want to get.

            Our plan is to go through Dr. Keith’s Paradoxical Commandments one at a time over the next ten weeks.  As you can see, the first of them is this:  “People are illogical, unreasonable, and self-centered.  Love them anyway.”

            And before we go any farther, let me point out that saying that people are illogical, unreasonable, and self-centered is not meant as a put-down of anybody.  What it’s saying is that people are people.  All of us have times when those terms apply to us.  We all have times when we’re illogical.  We all have times when we’re unreasonable.  We all have times when we’re self-centered.  It’s part of who we are as human beings.

            But to put this first paradoxical commandment in a Biblical context, we read from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, Chapter Thirteen.  That’s one that you hear at weddings a lot.  It’s called “the love chapter”, for obvious reasons.  It emphasizes how important love is.  But it is not really talking about romantic love.  That’s included, but romantic love is really not the main point.  It’s really talking about the love you and I should have for everybody, no matter who they are and no matter how they act.

            Because when we look at what this chapter says about love, there’s one thing it does not say.  And it does not say it in big, bold capital letters.  It’s a really glaring omission, one that really jumps out at us.

            Know what it is?  What it does not say is how the people we show love to are supposed to react.  It does not say, “love people and they will love you”.  It does not say, “love people and they will be nice to you”.  It does not say, “love people and they will be there to help you”.  It does not say anything about what the people we show love to will do.  It simply says we are to love people.  Period.

            That’s the point of the passage.  And that’s the point of the paradoxical commandment, too.  The commandment does not say that our love will make people stop being illogical.  It does not say our love will make people reasonable.  It does not say our love will keep people from being self-centered.  It says that we are supposed to love people anyway.  We are supposed to love them regardless of how illogical, unreasonable, and self-centered they are.

            And you know, when you think about it, that makes perfect sense.  Because if we show love to someone with an ulterior motive, it’s not really love, is it?  If we say, “I’ll show love to someone so I can get them to change” or “I’ll show love to someone so they’ll do things for me” or “I’ll show love to someone so they’ll come to our church”, that’s not really love, right?  Love, real love, does not expect anything in return.  Real love is a gift.  It comes with no strings attached and it’s given regardless of what the result of that love is.

            Look at what Paul says about love.  He says that love is patient and kind.  He says that love always protects, always hopes, always perseveres. 

Think about that word “always”.  There are no conditions on that word, are there?  There are no exceptions to that word.  Always means constantly.  It means every single time.  Love protects, and hopes, and perseveres, no matter what else happens.

            And that’s important, because if we really take this seriously, if we really love everybody no matter how illogical and unreasonable and self-centered they are, there are going to be times when we get treated really badly by the people we’re trying to love.  As I said, that’s the point of Dr. Keith’s commandment:  that we should love people even when we get treated badly as a result.  Because that is going to happen.

            When I was a kid, I used to read these children’s stories.  And in these stories, there’d be the bad kid who was mean to everyone, what we’d call a bully now, and there’d be the good kid who tried to be nice to everyone.  And the good kid would be nice to the bad kid, and eventually the bad kid would reform and we’d find out that he wasn’t such a bad kid after all, he was just misunderstood, and they’d become good friends and everyone would be happy.

            I don’t know if they still write children’s stories like that.  But I hope not.  Because it does not work that way.  Oh, it can, I’m sure, but an awful lot of the time it does not.  And pretending that it does only gives us bogus ideas about the way the world works, and it leads to bitterness and disappointment when we find that out.

            You all know the Golden Rule, right?  It’s in two places in the Bible, Matthew 7:12 and Luke 6:31.  “Do to others as you would have them do to you.”

            We all like the Golden Rule.  But I wonder how many of us really practice it?  Probably not very many.  I mean, we probably do sometimes, but there are a lot of times we don’t.  A lot of times we don’t do to others as we want them to do to us.  We do to others as they actually do to us.

            If you’re nice to me, I’ll be nice to you.  And the reverse is implied.  If you act like a jerk to me, then I have the right to act like a jerk to you.  That’s not love.  That’s bargaining.  That’s a quid pro quo.  That’s a contract.

            And that’s a temptation.  Because it’s not easy to love people who don’t love us.  It’s not easy to show patience, to show kindness, to people who act like jerks.  Paul says, “love does not dishonor others…it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs”, but when someone wrongs us, we do get angry.  We do want to dishonor them.  We do keep that record, and we want to do the same thing to them that they did to us if not worse.

            That’s why the Golden Rule is hard.  That’s why love itself is hard.  But that’s also why Paul tells us that love is the most important thing in the world.  It’s more important than hope.  It’s even more important than faith. 

Paul says, “the greatest of these is love”.  The reason for that is that without love, nothing else matters.  We can speak flowery words in every language ever created, but without love, those words are meaningless.  We can be the smartest people on the planet, but without love, all our intelligence is wasted.  We can be the most generous and sacrificial people in the world, but if our generosity and sacrifice is not done out of love, it does not accomplish anything.  None of it means anything without love.

If we cannot love people who are illogical, who are unreasonable, who are self-centered, then we cannot love people.  Because that’s who we all are.  We are all illogical, we are all unreasonable, and we are all self-centered.  And yet, we are all worthy of love.

You know who says so?  God.  Last week we celebrated Easter Sunday.  We celebrated the greatest act of love ever recorded.  We celebrated the fact that Jesus Christ, the divine Son of God, allowed himself to be arrested and tortured and killed in a very painful way.  He did that to take the punishment for our sins.  For your sins and for my sins.

If Jesus had treated us the way we treated him, we’d all be dead.  But Jesus did not do that.  Jesus did not get angry with us.  Jesus did not keep a record of our wrongs.  Instead, Jesus loved us.  Jesus Christ loved all of us illogical, unreasonable, self-centered people, all of us people who did not deserve his love and did not return his love, so much that he died on a cross to save each one of us.  To save you, and to save me.

            People are illogical, unreasonable, and self-centered.  Love them anyway.  Not because they deserve it.  Not because it’ll change them.  But because it is what our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ did.  And because it’s what Jesus wants us to do, too.