TEXT: 1 Cor. 13, Luke 10:25-37

Back in the 60's, the movie "Alfie" asked the question, "What's it all about?" The song was asking about life in general, but I think it is a good question for the church to ask itself every now and again. In this place of conflicting ideas and lifestyles, doctrines and theology...what is the bottom line? What is it really all about? Where can I stick the anchor of my faith and be sure that it is not going to move with the shifting tides of culture, and dogma?

My preaching class in seminary taught me that a good sermon should be able to be summarized in a single sentence. Is it possible to do that for the faith as a whole? Is there a basic thread to the Gospel message that will be true across denominations and countries and time? Something that is easy to communicate to those without a faith background? Something that is easy to understand even by those with limited abilities?

I believe the answer is "yes." Our faith can not only be summed up in one sentence, it can be summed up in a single word...Love. That's what faith is all about; that's what life is all about, as Alfie learned in that old sixties movie. That song says, "As sure as I believe there's a heaven above, Alfie, I know there's something much more. Something even non-believers can believe in. I believe in love, Alfie. Without true love we just exist." I wonder if the author of the song knew they were paraphrasing 1 Corinthians 13...without love I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And how very wise of God to make the core of faith something even non-believers can believe in.

Love is the place to anchor both your faith and your life. That's the one-sentence summary for this sermon. All through Scripture...Old Testament and New...that thread remains constant. Love may look different in different contexts, and it may not always be easy to tell what is the loving action and what is not...but the Bible is very clear that love is the nature of God and therefore the ruling principle for the lives of those who want to be more like God. Love is why we were created and why we have not been completely destroyed.

Love is the spirit behind all the laws in the Bible. Jesus says this in the passage from Matthew when he is asked what the greatest commandment is. His answer was the same as Jewish rabbis both before and since...Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul and strength and your neighbor as yourself. Jesus was not just pulling words out of the air. He is quoting the Hebrew Scriptures...first from Deuteronomy 6 and then from Leviticus 19. All the rest of Scripture is God trying to explain what that means and what it looks like lived out.

The early Hebrew people came to think that it meant bringing sacrifices to the altar and God had to send the prophets to say... "No! It means taking care of the widow and orphan and giving to the poor." In Jesus' day the Jewish leadership had come to think that it meant keeping the law exactly as it was given to Moses and not deviating from the smallest detail. So God sent Jesus who broke the law of Moses again and again to say, "No! Love means acts of justice and mercy. When keeping the letter of the law causes you to be lacking in true justice and mercy, you are not really keeping the law at all. The law is simply an example of what love might look like in a given circumstance. If your circumstance is different it is love, not the law, that remains the rule."

What's it all about? It's all about love...from beginning to end. And just like most of God's people before us, we too have forgotten. There is a wonderful story from the tradition of the desert fathers and mothers who flourished as hermits in the early centuries of the Christian church. Just as we now call a priest "father," so they knew each other by the Hebrew word "Abba," which means father.

The story is told that Abba Lot went to see Abba Joseph and said to him, "Abba, as far as I can, I say my little office, I fast a little, I pray and meditate, I live in peace and as far as I can, I purify my thoughts. What else can I do?" Then the old man stood up and stretched his hands toward heaven. His fingers became like ten lamps of fire and he said to him, "If you will, you can become all flame."

There isn't a lover on this earth that doesn't know that love is a fire. And it's not a controlled burn, either...deciding to burn here and not there. When someone is completely in love, it burns everywhere and spills onto everything. Lovers are often fit only to be with each other because everybody else is sick of hearing about it. They become all flame. I think that is what Abba Joseph was trying to say to Abba Lot. It's nice that you have the disciplines down well, but the real goal of all of it is love...to become all flame in our love for God and for each other. To become the burning bush which will make people wonder that we can burn and not be consumed; that will make people come to us to see what it's all about.

Real love is just like the flame of that burning bush that Moses saw in the desert. Science says that when wood burns it is consumed and sooner or later you have only ash. But the flame of love, when it is based in the love of God, does not consume...it gives back and makes us more truly alive. That is what our faith is supposed to be...a love affair in which we are so engrossed that we become all flame...and worship is the weekly tryst with our lover. In worship all the garbage of the week, all the drudgery of daily living should melt away as we come to spend time with the beloved.

I saw that recently as I met with a couple to plan their wedding. Life was difficult and stressful in the weeks before the ceremony and they were in a pretty lousy mood when they came into my office...bothered and distracted. Then we settled in to select a Scripture passage to be read and they asked me to read a couple of passages from the list of suggestions. The last one I read was 1 Corinthians 13. As I read those gracious words of Paul about the nature of love, I could feel the tensions lifting. She reached over and took his hand and stroked it as they began to remember that the ceremony was just the trappings...just the bare shell. What was important had nothing to do with attendants or candles, limousines or gowns. It was all about love and deciding to stick it out with each other for better or for worse.

That is what worship should do for us. This should be the place where we come to remember what it is all about. Love. Love of God, love of neighbor, love of self. This is the place where all the distractions and garbage of our daily lives should drop away...if only for a time. The place where we can reach out and hold the hand of someone that we have been fighting with as we remember, with Alfie, what is really important in life. And hopefully, if we hear it enough times, we can begin to take it with us out the doors and begin to remember it out there as well as in here. We can become all flame.

We forget so often. We get so caught up in our controversies and our beliefs that we start to think and even teach that it's all about doctrine. There is so much fear in the church. Fear that if we don't believe the right doctrines or say the right words that we have no chance at a relationship with God. We are so worried about right belief that we have forgotten about love. God knew we would forget. That is why when God first told us to become all flame...to love God with all our heart, soul, and strength...that God told us to say it every morning when we get up and every night when we go to bed; told us to talk about it at home and on the road and to write it on our foreheads and the doorposts of our houses and gates. It's a ridiculous picture when you really think about all that graffiti everywhere...even on your forehead...but God knew how easy it was to forget. And we did forget. We forget even now.

If we could only remember...if we could only focus on becoming all flame...consumed with love of God and one another in the way a lover is with the beloved. If we could get to that point, then we could see if anybody still had an interest in refining our doctrine, polity, or theology. I doubt at that point that anybody would care about the issues that currently divide us. I think our concerns would be very different.

I think we would stop worrying about who our ministers were blessing and start worrying about who we were cursing. I think we would stop worrying about who Christian people were loving and start worrying about who they were hating. I think we would be so completely consumed in being all flame, fanned by the rushing wind of the Spirit of God, that our only concern would be spreading the fire. Christianity was never meant to be a controlled burn. It was meant to be a wildfire.

Square one in the Christian faith and in all of life is love. If you missed it, you've got to go back...do not pass Go, do not collect $200...go back to square one and start over. "If I speak with the tongues of mortals and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing." It's not about whether your theology is correct or whether your doctrine is pure. It's not even about the United Methodist Discipline. It is about whether the love of God burns hot in your breast. Love is greater than hope and even faith, says Paul.

That's what it's all about, Alfie. Paul reminds us that all our actions...no matter how "righteous" they may seem, count for nothing without the spirit of love behind them. And John reminds us that waves of warm fuzzy feelings count for nothing if they aren't expressed in concrete acts of justice and mercy.

Jesus was love incarnate...the love of God that had previously been expressed in words finally made flesh. The truth for Christians, Jews, and Muslims alike is that it is all about love. When people ask "How do we know what that means?" the answer we give as Christians is Jesus. Jesus is the revelation of God...God revealed, which means love revealed. Jesus did not spend his time on earth in a love-sick swoon. His love moved him to acts of compassion: healing, exorcisms, feeding the hungry, providing wine, raising the dead. His love sometimes moved him to forceful acts–running wild through the temple swinging a whip and turning over the tables of the money changers or speaking out harshly against the hypocrisy and injustice of the religious leaders. Finally his love showed what every good love story has always told us–that love is willing to endure pain and even death for the beloved.

They came to Jesus and asked, "What must I do to inherit eternal life?" Love...he replied. Abba Lot went to see Abba Joseph and said to him, "Abba, as far as I can, I say my little office, I fast a little, I pray and meditate, I live in peace and as far as I can, I purify my thoughts. What else can I do?" Then the old man stood up and stretched his hands toward heaven. His fingers became like ten lamps of fire and he said to him, "If you will, you can become all flame."

We have a new fire alarm in this building. It ought to be going off all the time.

Amen.

(c) 2000, Anne Robertson