Love is God’s antiseptic – go, get it

Sermon on Mark 9:2-9

Happy Valentine’s Day!

I have come to love Valentine’s day very recently. Before that I didn’t care too much about that day. When I was a teenager it was a day of disappointment that the guy I fancied didn’t care about me. And probably didn’t even know I liked him since I was too shy to tell anybody. In college it was a disappointment because I never happened to date anybody who celebrated Valentine’s Day. And Philipp and I just never got into it either. It seemed too commercialized to us, too enacted. Plus, I never liked the idea of celebrating the one romantic idea of love over all the other kinds of love, friendship, companionship.

Just 2 years ago that changed. We had just arrived here in the Bay Area and had lived here for about 6 weeks when it was Valentine’s Day. Toni’s Kindergarten Teacher sent us a class list to make Valentines. “For everyone?”, I asked. “Yes”, she replied. So, I took Toni to Target and she picked treats for her new classmates. Kids, she hardly knew the names of. Even for the one guy who was mean to her during the first couple of months. “Why him as well”, she asked.

“Because he might need love the most”, I told her. We labeled the little cards and off she went to school.

When Toni came home that February 14th , she was transformed. Her face was glowing, there was a deep joy in her eyes I hadn’t seen since we had moved to this new continent and country with people she didn’t understand. She carried a large paper bag filled with goodies and notes.

20 kids had written her name, even the mean guy. Some had even added a note in German with the help of Google translate. Toni felt showered in love and appreciation. And she loved showing love to kids she hardly knew but wanted to be friends with so badly. The cards she sent and the cards she got were more of a promise than a confirmation of a relationship. Yet, she felt validated in this strange new town she was supposed to call home now.

Sending a Valentine card to everyone, regardless of one’s actual relationship might seem like a sellout of love. Like cheap love. I would argue the opposite. To me, this represents the actual meaning of love. Of a love that’s less of a tally and more of a promising statement. It’s mirroring God’s love that just loves, just gives, without offsetting our deeds against God’s.

It’s mirroring the kind of love today’s Gospel talks about. A transformative love through Christ’s transfiguration. A love that chose not to stay up on the mountain with his eclectic group of friends. Leaving out anybody else while having the best of times.

Peter asks for the obvious: “Rabbi, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” It’s beautiful up on the mountain, it’s the perfect moment of unity among Moses, Elijah and Jesus. 3 men of God hanging out in a moment of peaceful solitude. It’s too wonderful to be true. And Peter wants the moment to stay forever. He advocated for the small group to basically form an exclusive club and stay up on the holy hill. Where no one will bother them, no one will harm them. Because they will keep the world out of their lives.

This is Peter’s egoistic idea of love. That is very similar to how Hallmark movies show the perfect Valentine’s Day. With the one perfect person, forming a perfect unity, forever. Pretending that one person will be all one needs. Or, in Peter’s case, 5 other people. It’s the idea to only send a Valentine’s card to your one true love.

We know that Jesus disagrees and walks the group right back down into the mess of the everyday life. Into a world that has very mixed feelings about Jesus and his friends. Thereby, Jesus democratizes the idea of love. He doesn’t just have one close friend like Moses or Elijah, he has at least 12. Probably many more. He doesn’t lead his people physically out of slavery but walks right into the center of power in Jerusalem, transforming his friends. Instead of fleeing his enemies, he tells them to love their enemies. And their neighbors and everyone in between those two categories.

Calling for love to be the antiseptic to the wound in our nation and our world is just too trivial for most folks. You’d have to be crazy to think that love would provide any healing.

But wasn’t Jesus crazy? This radical sandal-wearer walked around insisting that we love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us. This crazy Godman insisted that violence wouldn’t bring us together, but seeing our enemy as our neighbor, as someone we love like God, could.

I understand why Jesus didn’t have that many followers in the beginning. And why even now so many don’t follow him. Jesus reveals the truth in such a way, that it pulls at their hearts. Many can’t bear it. It’s somehow super hard to imagine that there is more potential in loving others instead of hating others or simply ignoring them. Which to me seems like an American way of hating each other. To stop talking to each other, to unfriend each other and block people we disagree with from our Social Networks and lives.

Jesus walked around meeting everyone as they were, seeing into their hearts, listening to them, validating their existence. The words he would utter to those who sought his help were intentional and came as a result of seeing their divinity. He saw that they were love, pulled that image out of their hardened hearts, and reflected it back to them, like a mirror. He saw what they could not see, but once they saw it, it transformed them. Jesus touched them, he touched love inside. It was as if a dormant seed suddenly sprang forth to life and began to grow inside of them.

Often, love is inconvenient, and not in a good way. Love requires time, energy, attention. It seduces us into calmer states. Love beckons us to give and give and give. Even if it seems like we don’t get anything back.

Love itself is not an inconvenience. It is inconvenient to the systems of the world. We have established efficacy, productivity, selfishness, greed, power, and control as the Gods of our time. We recite the hymns of work, work, work, work, work. Love is a resource that cannot be traded, transacted, or offered as a trial service. If you cannot profit from love, it is of no use. That’s how it seems.

Love, however, is no product to be kept on shelves. It is not a luxury afforded to only those who have the means to pay for it. Love is a process. A process that requires the slow dance of understanding, the tango of tumultuous trial and error, the mamba of mystery and revelation. We can dance if we want to survive. We need to dance if we want to feel alive.

Love doesn’t have to decide what to “do” about certain groups of people until love is face to face with the person. Love listens, lets the other know she was heard, and then responds with intentions of love being duplicated and expressed. Love does things differently with all walks of life, all walks of faith, and all walks of the political aisle, too. 

I know that it may seem a pipe dream to believe love is the power that solves all the world’s problems. But we cannot deny that we are a hungry bunch of people. We are hungry for something new. We are hungry for a relatable experience, hungry for conversation, hungry for connection. It’s time we took the heirloom seeds of the past and plant them in a new bed of soil in a new season. This will produce fruits of love that will satisfy our hunger for life.

Love is like a mirror. It reflects the divinity of the person. It transforms you. It transfigures what others see in you. And it shows you where you need to grow. Love shows both perfection and potential. These are the thorns that surround the fruit of love. No one ever said that growth would be pain-free. The thistles and thorns will stick us—it’s challenging to see a reflection of ourselves that we hadn’t expected. But love is unexpected like that.

For Peter, the transfiguration of Jesus revealed where he had to grow. Which is where most of us have a lot of potential for growth. In the area of sharing our love, sharing the people we love, sharing the best we have with the rest of the world. The desire to identify and utilize love as the solution is radical. It’s different. And there has never been a time so far where it was embraced on a global level. What’s stopping us from making love trend? What’s stopping us from writing Valentine Cards to everyone we know. Even to the neighbor that refuses to fix his part of the fence and to the guy from around the block that yells at me when he drank too much. What are we waiting for? Jesus already showed us the way, walking down that mountain, sharing everything he had with everyone he encountered.

Happy Valentine’s Day. When we are asked to leave any inner circle of love and love everyone. The people we like and the people we don’t much care about and the people we would rather not see. God loves you. Now, get off that mountain and love the world.

Amen!