May 10, 2009 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

Reckless Love

Adam H. Fronczek
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 22:25–31
1 John 4:7–21

“Perfect love casts out fear.”

1 John 4:18 (NRSV)

I love the recklessness of faith.
First you leap and then you grow wings.

William Sloane Coffin

A couple of times a month, I meet with a men’s Bible study group. We study texts together early in the morning in a conference room down in the Loop. This past week, as part of my sermon preparations, I talked with the group about this passage from 1 John 4. It’s a familiar passage, a quotable one: “God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God and God abides in them.” I’m always interested to see what the group will do with these passages, the familiar ones; we’ve all heard that God is love, but what can you say about that? That morning we landed on the relationship between love and fear. “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear,” says John. In our group, we agreed that we’ve all witnessed people who operate out of fear and others who seem to operate out of love. One of us who works in sales said, “You see a lot of people in my line of work operating out of fear, especially when times are tough. You can tell when someone is protecting what they have, is being territorial with their clients, afraid to share information that might help someone else. But then there are also people who don’t have that fear at all. They share what they know; they don’t mind if coworkers connect with their clients. Those people tend to have much better relationships with others; even when times are tough and there isn’t a whole lot to go around, they seem to do alright.

The discussion went on. We talked about coworkers; we talked about the economy. The example of the confident coworker was a pretty good one, but otherwise I found the discussion a little unbalanced. The shortcoming I sensed in the conversation was that while it was easy for us to talk about fear, at the end of the hour, I still didn’t have a sense of what it means when we say that God is love. We had a harder time describing love. Perhaps I should not have been surprised. I’m sure there are plenty of women sitting in the congregation thinking, “Well, you might’ve come up with a better theory about love if you hadn’t asked a room full of men!”

In all seriousness, I’m not sure that the problem is isolated to men. I think it’s easier for most of us to talk about fear instead of love. I think most of us are probably more familiar with fear. We live in a world where there is much to fear, much to lose, much to protect, and even if we know that things should be different, we’re not sure how to get there. We have an idea, a sort of seed inside of us that tells us what life is supposed to be like, but many times we can’t do much about it; we can’t get that seed to grow.

A few examples:

Our nation’s health care system is broken. I think we can agree on that. And we probably each have some inkling that in the richest country in the world, sick people should be able to get the basic care they need, doctors should be able to offer everyone the best care that’s available, and insurance companies shouldn’t get in the way—but we don’t seem to have any idea how to get there.

The financial crisis has raised all kinds of serious questions about issues from our personal lifestyles to our national priorities. This week, in which there was a glimmer of recovery, I read a very astute editorial in which the author said, “What worries me the most [now] is . . . my sense that the prospects for fundamental financial reform are fading.” We know we need to change, but we don’t know how to get started.

The problem isn’t isolated to politics. I recently watched a show about couples who wanted changes in their relationships; the show reflected quite well the things I hear frequently in my pastoral office. The relationships had grown stale or difficult and some of the couples had separated. Some were going nowhere. Some were in therapy making progress and were frightened by it. Most of them, if you asked, really did love their partner and wanted things to change. But it had been so difficult for so long that they didn’t know how to begin.

Understandably, in situations like these we often operate out of fear, out of protection. We have mortgages to pay and families to take care of and tenuous relationships to sustain. There are examples all around us of things that are on the verge of breaking, and so we protect those things so that we won’t lose them. My hunch is that even if we know that what we have is not good enough, we protect it because we barely even know what the other thing looks like or we don’t know how to get there.

I was troubled by this, so I committed myself this week to figuring out what that other thing looks like. “Perfect love casts out fear,” says the text. And God is love. But what does that mean? And how can we reach up out of our life of fear and get up there to that place where God is love? That’s what I want to talk to you about today.

Here’s the difference between us and God (if there’s a sound bite today, this is the one, so listen closely): God loves us even though it does God no good. God’s love is completely reckless.

Now let me tell you how I got there. Let’s start with the text. “God is love,” it says. One reliable principle of biblical criticism is that if you’re not sure what a verse or a passage means, consider the context. But one of the most frustrating things about 1, 2 and 3 John—the Johannine Epistles as they are called—is that they have no context, or at least not one we can discern from the text itself. Most of the letters in the New Testament, Paul’s letters, have an obvious context. In the Letter to the Romans, Paul lets us know what’s going on in the Roman church; in Galatians he tells us about the people of Galatia. But John just starts right in talking about God; we don’t know what question he’s answering or what situation he’s responding to. We don’t even know who the audience is. John just starts talking about God. And as I asked the question “What is God’s love like?” that lack of context didn’t help me at all. Then it occurred to me that maybe the context was right in front of me. John doesn’t distract readers with an audience as his context because God is the context. John wants us to know that if you know God’s story, then maybe you can understand what it means when John says that God is love.

So I thought my way through the story of God and Jesus. God creates the world and calls it good. God rescues the Israelites from slavery and claims them as God’s chosen people. They rebel against God, so God tries to rescue them by sending the prophets, and then, in order to help us even more, God comes into the world as Jesus Christ to show us even more clearly.

It hit me that I had it all wrong. Figuring out what it means to say that God is love has nothing to do with trying to get away from what we know and reaching up to where God is. No, it has everything to do with understanding that God came down to be with us.

We look around our world and see so many things that are wrong and convoluted and messed up beyond repair and worthy of our fear, and we, who are vulnerable, do all we can to protect ourselves. But God, who could’ve just stayed up in heaven, came down into the world. Isn’t it strange, when you think about what a difficult place the world can be? God wants to be here. God loves it here. God loves here. There’s something about that kind of love that can only be described as reckless.

Let me give you an example. It comes from the Book of Hosea in the Old Testament. Hosea was one of the prophets. When the people of Israel had departed from God’s law, Hosea was one of the people God sent out to call them back into the fold. God’s words about the situation are described this way in the book of Hosea:

When Israel was a child, I loved him,
and out of Egypt I called my son.
The more I called them,
the more they went from me;
they kept sacrificing to the Baals
and offering incense to idols.

Yet it was I who taught Ephraim to walk;
I took them up in my arms;
but they did not know that I healed them.
I led them with cords of human kindness,
with bands of love.
I was to them like those
who lift infants to their cheeks.

It sounds nice, doesn’t it? God taking care of Israel, even though they aren’t always good children. But it’s a love given even in the midst of disobedience. God sticks with us even when we betray God. This kind of love is so hard for people to conceptualize in the ancient world that there are actually three Hebrew verbs that try to describe it. The first one gets translated as God’s love, but then there’s a second one that means God chooses to love this way, and there’s a third that says that when God makes a choice to love, God’s heart is set on it. God will not be moved from love. The God who has been betrayed time and time again, this God is the same one who has before and will yet again “lead the people with cords of human kindness, with bands of love.” This is the God who “lifts them like those who lift infants to their cheeks.” Is it not striking how reckless that is?

It seems worth noting on Mother’s Day that though God’s reckless love is impossible to describe, parenthood is the most common analogy. It’s not that any one of us is expected to be like God, and yet it is through our families and perhaps especially in the imperfections of loving our families that so many of us learn a sense of God’s presence. The recklessness of God’s love comes to us in these family metaphors as often as anything not only because families love, but because families love recklessly.

Jesus knows God as a parent. Jesus tells stories about parents and children. You all know the story of the Prodigal Son, the one who asks for his inheritance early, leaves home, blows it all on wine and women, and then returns home, expecting at best to become a slave, but instead he is honored with a feast and given a chance to start over. God’s story is all about the parent who celebrates the return of a child, even when that child has betrayed the family. It’s a story about reckless love.

We know that for good parents, the reckless love they have for their children is not the same as a free ride. The reckless love is there, but it’s there because we never stop believing that this time change must happen. God’s reckless love for us does not mean that everything is OK here and nothing needs to change. That’s not it at all. God’s love wants to change the world, and that’s perhaps another sermon for another day, but the point I’m making today is that God’s love is reckless because it doesn’t magically take us someplace else. It is supposed to change our life in this world. There are parts of the Christian tradition that would suggest that we are waiting for God to change things for us, that God is about to create a completely different world and doesn’t expect anything from us along the way except to hide and wait. You can find verses here and there in the Bible that may make it sound that way. But that isn’t consistent with the story of what God has been like up to now. God loves this world, and God wants us to be a little more reckless so that we can help it get better.

God likes object lessons in trying to show us reckless love. I can think of no better object lesson than baptism. I don’t have children of my own, and so I can’t claim to understand the reckless love of a parent, though I’m sure I’ve benefited from it more than a few times. In baptism, God calls us to a new way of life, and it’s worth noting that when we baptize infants in the Presbyterian church, we don’t expect them to understand that way of life or how to get there. Clearly these infants are in no position to make a bold confession of their faith or commit their lives to Christ, and yet they are recipients of God’s reckless love. These children who have been baptized today will grow and begin to get a sense of parental love for them and of God’s love, and they will wander and disobey, and through their wanderings they will come to know the recklessness of that love. Sometimes it will be a difficult road for these children and for their parents. But I don’t need to be a parent myself to look at these precious children of God and know that no matter what life in this world may be like, loving these children is worth the recklessness. In baptism, as in so many other ways each and every day, God takes all the mess that is a part of life in this world and claims it; God says, like those who teach children to walk, like those who lift infants to their cheeks, “I love it here!” Amen.