Christopher Maricle was a loyal churchman and a faithful Christian, but when severe pain entered his life he was thrown into a faith crisis.  His son had been born without a spleen and was given less than a five percent chance of survival and two years later a life threatening illness was bearing down on his wife.  He wrote, “I needed to get to know my God a lot better.”  He started studying the Gospels with one question in mind, “What did Jesus consistently say and do during his public ministry that would be instructive for us?”  He gathered all the stories and the number of times they were told.  He organized these into themes – priorities reflected in Jesus’ ministry and habits lived out in Jesus’ life.  Maricle came up with eight of them – habits that we will be looking at this Lenten Season.  We started on Ash Wednesday, with the habit of healing.  Jesus is frequently seen healing people in the Gospels.  Sometimes it was very clear and immediate, like when Jesus cleansed a leper with his touch or raised Lazarus from the dead.  Other times it was more subtle, but no less powerful, like when he gave the woman at the well living water that healed her broken soul.

The habit that appears next in number of frequency is Jesus’ teaching and insistence on love.  When Jesus was asked about the greatest commandment, he identified love at the root of it all – love God and love others, do this and everything else will fall into place.  That would have been fine, but he also painted pictures of love that are not all that comfortable.  Take for example this one, just a six verse teaching, a mere paragraph from a rather lengthy sermon, the Sermon on the Mount, found in Matthew 5:43-48.  Hear now the Word of the Lord:

⁴³“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ ⁴⁴But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, ⁴⁵so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. ⁴⁶For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? ⁴⁷And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? ⁴⁸Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.   

This is the word of God for the people of God.  In this passage Matthew reported to his readers, Jesus’ expectations for love to be taken to a new level.  Let us pray.

I don’t need to make a case this morning for the importance of love in our lives.  We get that.  We even agree with Paul of Tarsus that without love, we are just noisy gongs and clanging cymbals, and with Paul of Liverpool who declared, “all you need is love”.  Nevertheless, we do occasionally need to be reminded what love looks like.  This morning I want us to notice three things in this teaching of Jesus about love: love shows no partiality, love shines as the reflection of the Father, and love seeks no reciprocity.  May we never forget that love makes a difference.
 

Love Shows no Partiality

Jesus was at the end of the part of the Sermon on the Mount where he was quoting Old Testament scriptures and putting a New Testament spin on them.  He had already addressed anger, adultery, divorce, honesty, and retaliation.  Here he addressed the topic of love.  Leviticus 19:18 does command God’s people to love their neighbors.  They are to hold no grudges and take no vengeance on their kinfolk, their neighbors.  However, the commentators are quick to point out that nowhere is it written in the Bible for us to hate our enemies.  They had to go to one of the Qumran texts in 1 QS 1:3-4 where the followers of the Dead Sea sect are encouraged to love God’s elect and hate those who are on the outside, the rejects to which they are referred in the text.  I would think that we don’t have to go all the way to the Dead Sea Scrolls to find evidence of this maxim, “Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.”  It is taught to us very early.  There is something in us that often defines ourselves by who we are not.  We see it between the Iraqis and the Iranians, the Pakistanis and the Indians, the Romanians and the Hungarians, the Americans and the Immigrants, black and white, Christian and Muslim, and the list goes on and on and on.

Friday night Tammy and I were invited to Rudder Auditorium to watch our adopted Aggie dance.  That’s all we knew.  So we went.  I was surprised to discover that the event was kicking off International Student Week for Texas A&M University.  Over 1,000 students gathered for the International Variety Show that included groups from China and Thailand, Panama and Guatemala, Africa and Bangladesh, Iran and Lebanon, Mexico and Ecuador.  The Grand Finale had all the participants on the stage singing, “It’s a Small World”, and “Everybody Dance Now.”  There was so much joy on the faces of people from all over the world, that I caught a glimpse of what it could look like.

Jesus taught us to love neighbors and enemies alike.  We are to pray for them, even as he prayed for those who were nailing him to a cross.  There is not much wiggle room here.  Love shows no partiality, but there is an amazing benefit to the follower of this habit.  This kind of love not only benefits others, but also frees us from hostility, prejudice, and even fear.  Love makes a difference.
 

Love Shines Brightly as the Father’s Reflection

Not only does love free us from the internal hostility, prejudice, and fear; loving in the habit of Jesus reveals us as children of our Father in heaven.  We reflect the love that has been consistent in showering grace on the religious and the irreligious. 

Last week Tammy brought a movie home entitled, “Henry Poole Lives Here”.  I had never even heard of the movie.  It is about a man diagnosed with a rare and fatal disease.  He buys a house in which to die and has no idea what to do with the time that he has left.  I won’t tell you the whole story, because I want you to watch it.  However, I will tell you that in one scene he is confronted by a miracle and says sternly, “There is no such thing as a miracle.  I don’t believe in them.”  I always find this to be a rather absurd statement.  Just because I don’t believe in something does not mean that it is not so.  The movie is consistent in its depiction of God’s grace shining on the religious and the irreligious, the compassionate and the self absorbed, those searching for God and those refusing to believe.

How amazing that we have been given the opportunity to be reflectors of the incredible love of God.  How do we do this?  We do this by showing love without partiality, by sharing love with our enemies as well as with our neighbors.  Nelson Mandela was imprisoned in South Africa for 27 years and for much of that time James Gregory was his prison guard.  The lengthy relationship caused Gregory to rethink some of his beliefs about apartheid.  Mandela who became the first president to be elected by a fully representative democratic election, invited James Gregory to stand at his side at his inauguration. 

This is the kind of love that made Corrie Ten Boom and Mother Teresa known to so many.  They reflected the love of the Father in heaven.  These examples are to be more common than exceptional for the Christian according to the teaching of Jesus.  Love makes a difference. Love shows no partiality, shines as a reflection of the Father, and…
 

Love Seeks no Reciprocation

Jesus exposed the current practice of loving those who love you as being mere reciprocity, not necessarily agape love.  Agape love is to seek to bestow true blessings upon the one loved, to do that person the highest good and it is to be given especially to those who cannot or will not give back.  Jesus pointed out that reciprocated greetings are not all that impressive.  The word translated “greet” means “to be fond of, to cherish”.  Jesus encouraged his listeners to extend that type of greeting to those on the outside.

Kris Hogan got this message.  Kris is the coach of the Faith Christian School football team in Grapevine, Texas.  They had a pretty good year, winning the bi-district championship in the state playoffs.  But it wasn’t their 10-3 record that impressed most people, it was their last regular season game against Gainesville State School on November 7^th that was featured by Rick Reilly in ESPN.com and newspapers all over the nation.  Gainesville was 0-8 coming into the game and had only scored two touchdowns all year.  What’s more, Gainesville State School is a correctional school, so the players road to and from the game with guards on their white bus with bars in the windows.  Kris Hogan sent out an email the week before the game asking some of the parents and boosters to sit on the Gainesville side and cheer for the boys.  He received a list of the players’ numbers and first names, the last names of the minors were withheld by Gainesville.  The cheerleaders made a banner for the Gainesville Tornadoes with those numbers and names written on it.  The Junior Varsity Cheerleaders cheered for the Tornadoes throughout the game.  Over 200 parents and boosters sat on the Gainesville side yelling for the players by name.  Gerald, one of the linemen for Gainesville said, “We can tell people are a little afraid of us when we come to the games, you can see it in their eyes. They're lookin’ at us like we're criminals. But these people, they were yellin’ for us! By our names.”

When Coach Hogan was asked by his players why he was doing this he said, “Imagine if you didn’t have a home life.  Imagine if everybody had pretty much given up on you.  Now imagine what it would mean for hundreds of people to suddenly believe in you.”  Faith Christian won the game 33-14, but the Gainesville players still gave their coach the “Gatorade Bath”. 

After the game, players from both teams gathered at midfield for a prayer.  It was Isaiah, the Gainesville quarterback who led the prayer by saying, “Lord, I don’t know how this happened so I don’t know how to say thank you.  But I never would’ve known there was so many people in the world that cared about us.”  Afterwards, the Gainesville players loaded up their bus with a postgame meal bag that also included some homemade cookies, letters from the Faith Christian players and a Bible.  Coach Williams of Gainesville sought out Coach Hogan of Grapevine before they left. “You’ll never know what your people did for these kids tonight.  You’ll never, ever know.”

There was no chance of reciprocity – only love expressed.  Love makes a difference.  And whenever we are tempted to justify ourselves we are confronted by this Table and the gifts of love placed here by a God whose love we can only hope to reflect.  Amen.