Will Preach For Food Podcast

It Starts and Ends with Love (EHR 1)

September 24, 2022 Doug Season 3 Episode 28
Will Preach For Food Podcast
It Starts and Ends with Love (EHR 1)
Show Notes Transcript

Hello, and welcome to the Will Preach for Food podcast. I’m Doug, a pastor here at Faith Lutheran Church, based out of Shelton, Washington, a congregation of the ELCA. “It Starts and Ends with Love” is this week’s podcast title. That “EHR” you see in parens stands for “Emotionally Healthy Relationships.” This Fall Faith Lutheran is leaning into our congregation’s vision and dream to become “closer to and more like Jesus.” Today’s message is the first in an eight week preaching, devotional, and small group series based on the work of Pete and Geri Scazzero.

You can learn more about Faith and about Emotionally Healthy Relationships at our website, www.faithshelton.org. Thanks for listening today. 

They’ll know we are Christians by our LOVE, the old song says. So why is it that so much of Christianity that we see all around us is so judgmental, angry, and fearful? It seems like we used to be able to have differences of opinion, but still be friends, right. We could work together, go to church together, care for each other. Yet these days it feels like we’ve all been pushed into opposite corners. Earlier this week I used the word “progressive” in a conversation about my faith, and just about got my head bit off. And I’m a pastor! I can only imagine how it is with you. So, what happened? Where did love go?

The Greatest Commandment

As we start a fall emphasis on being Emotionally Healthy followers of Jesus Christ, we must start—and end—with love.

Dear friends, let us love one another, the Bible teaches, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. 8 Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. 9 This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. 10 This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. 11 Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. 12 No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us (1 John 4:7-12).

Jesus taught and modeled the life of love: love God with everything you’ve got, and you do that by loving your neighbor—and yourself—with everything you’ve got (Mark 12:30-31). 

If you’ve ever been to a Christian wedding you probably heard some bit about love being patient and kind, that faith, hope, and love abide, and the greatest of these is…love (1 Corinthians 13). Faith and love are inseparable. “Ever since I heard about your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love for God’s people,” Paul writes to a beloved congregation in Ephesus, “I have not stopped giving thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers” (Ephesians 1:15-16).

[The story of Lazarus in Luke 16 portrays a wealthy man who fundamentally lacks love, showing no care or compassion or sympathy for a beggar at his doorstep.]

Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. Yes, they’ll know we are Christians by our…love.

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It Start and Ends with Love (EHR 1)

Introduction

Hello, and welcome to the Will Preach for Food podcast. I’m Doug, a pastor here at Faith Lutheran Church, based out of Shelton, Washington, a congregation of the ELCA. “It Starts and Ends with Love” is this week’s podcast title. That “EHR” you see in parens stands for “Emotionally Healthy Relationships.” This Fall Faith Lutheran is leaning into our congregation’s vision and dream to become “closer to and more like Jesus.” Today’s message is the first in an eight week preaching, devotional, and small group series based on the work of Pete and Geri Scazzero.

You can learn more about Faith and about Emotionally Healthy Relationships at our website, www.faithshelton.org. Thanks for listening today. 

They’ll know we are Christians by our LOVE, the old song says. So why is it that so much of Christianity that we see all around us is so judgmental, angry, and fearful? It seems like we used to be able to have differences of opinion, but still be friends, right. We could work together, go to church together, care for each other. Yet these days it feels like we’ve all been pushed into opposite corners. Earlier this week I used the word “progressive” in a conversation about my faith, and just about got my head bit off. And I’m a pastor! I can only imagine how it is with you. So, what happened? Where did love go?

The Greatest Commandment

As we start a fall emphasis on being Emotionally Healthy followers of Jesus Christ, we must start—and end—with love.

Dear friends, let us love one another, the Bible teaches, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. 8 Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. 9 This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. 10 This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. 11 Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. 12 No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us (1 John 4:7-12).

Jesus taught and modeled the life of love: love God with everything you’ve got, and you do that by loving your neighbor—and yourself—with everything you’ve got (Mark 12:30-31). 

If you’ve ever been to a Christian wedding you probably heard some bit about love being patient and kind, that faith, hope, and love abide, and the greatest of these is…love (1 Corinthians 13). Faith and love are inseparable. “Ever since I heard about your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love for God’s people,” Paul writes to a beloved congregation in Ephesus, “I have not stopped giving thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers” (Ephesians 1:15-16).

[The story of Lazarus in Luke 16 portrays a wealthy man who fundamentally lacks love, showing no care or compassion or sympathy for a beggar at his doorstep.]

Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. Yes, they’ll know we are Christians by our…love.

Agape Love: More than a feeling

Christian love, agape in the Greek, is so much more than a warm fuzzy feeling. Eros is the Greek word for sexual love. Philo is the word for “brotherly love.” Agape is God’s kind of loving—unconditional, active, healthy, generative, wholesome, good, genuine, and, well, Christ-like. 

The Bible is one people’s account how they experienced God’s faithfulness and love over a period of hundreds of years. The Old Testament is a brutally honest and unflattering telling of what happens when people don’t love each other or creation very well. The New Testament tells us about how Jesus Christ—the Son of God—embodies agape love and how the God sends the Holy Spirit to activate and empower this same love in each one of us. To be more like Jesus is simply another way of saying that we want to be more loving. Christlikeness is not about perfection: it’s about love. Here is that passage from 1 Corinthians 13:

4 Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 5 It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 6 Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 7 It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

Growing in Love

Easier said than done, right? Agape love is what we were made for, but it needs to be taught and practiced. It is a growth process, like how bodies mature. We start out as infants, entirely dependent on others to take care of us. As we become children we start to learn how to walk, how to swing a baseball bat, how to form sentences, how to negotiate friendship, how to drive a car, or how to run a marathon or perform open heart surgery. 

That’s how it is with learning love. Trial and error. Muscle-memory. Practice, practice, practice. At some point we can claim some level of maturity, competency. This is true with our bodies and brains. It is true with love as well.

Something else we know: use it or lose it. Once we attain some level of maturity, we have to keep using those muscles in order to keep them. If we don’t exercise, and even if we do, our bodies naturally deteriorate. As we age, we become less flexible, less adaptable. We lose brain cells and muscle tissue. We lose mobility, independence. Once again we are entirely dependent on others to take care of us. And eventually we die: we are dust, and to dust we shall return. 

Love is the same way. If we do not tend to agape in our lives, our agape capacity diminishes over time. Our hearts “harden,” the Bible says. Like arteries. Our hearts become like stone: hard, cold, unfeeling, dead. 

Emotional/Spiritual Inventory

What is the state of your heart? Are you a spiritual infant? Teenager? Adult? Invalid? Is your relationship with God and with people thriving or limping along? Is it where you want it to be? Where it used to be?

EHR goes over the basics of healthy relating: clean communication skills, clear boundaries, active listening, recognizing blind spots, dealing with trauma and grief. And then it tries to measure, evaluate where you’re at: you may be thriving in some categories, but limping along in other areas. EHR small group participants work with a questionnaire called the Emotional/Spiritual Health Inventory to try to assess where they are at now, what areas they want to improve, and then, hopefully, see more maturity and growth by the end of the course. It is pretty subjective, but at least it is something, one way to measure growth in our goal to be more like Jesus.

Quiet Time and Prayer

It starts with love. God’s love. Agape love doesn’t come from here. It comes from God. That means that, if we’re going to love well, we need to drink deep and regularly from God’s well of love. Jesus stayed connected to and strengthen by the Father through prayer. As a devout Jew, he prayed at least three times a day. He began his earthly ministry with a forty-day prayer retreat in the wilderness! The gospels regularly note that he frequently went off by himself to pray. 

Now how a person should pray is a whole ‘nother sermon series. But for EHR, the place to start is with stopping. Silence. Two minutes in the morning. Two minutes at night. And maybe two minutes in the middle of the day. Six minutes a day. One tenth of an hour a day. 

Now, some of you already practice quiet time, centering activities: a daily morning walk; saying grace before meals; yoga; home huddles or bedtime prayers. Emotionally Healthy Relationships has a 40-day devotional book that has a short Bible verse, a reflection, and a prayer for two times a day. Many of you already do something very much like it: Christ in our Home devotionals, like the ones we give away at Faith. Or there’s one called “Our Daily Bread,” and another one called “Portals of Prayer.” Those both have free apps. “Daily Grace” is for women of the ELCA, Faith’s denominational affiliation. 

These devotional resources all do pretty much the same thing: they create space for stopping, finding silence, and for listening to God, for having your love tank filled by the Holy Spirit. To paraphrase an old seminary professor: the best devotional resource is the one you use. Stop. Listen. Pray. Because love starts with God. Love comes from God. A loving life is and can only be sustained by God. Drink deep from the well of God’s love, so that you can grow to love well.

Community Temperature Reading

It starts with love. We are drinking deep from the well of God’s love. We have a point of reference for our own state of emotional maturity and spiritual health. Then EHR groups get together and go to work. We practice in our conversations the hallmarks of love: patience, kindness, gentleness, self-control. We relate to one another with a deliberate Christlikeness. Again, this is not about pretending to be perfect. It is about loving relationships.

But this is radically counter-cultural. Turn on the news, go to a family gathering, scroll through your twitter feed, and you will see and hear some common tendencies: defensiveness, blaming, judgment, finger-pointing, low self-awareness, everyone in their own little bubbles of perspective, fear, anger. Lots of fear and anger. 

And in fact the reason Pete and Geri Scazzero started working on these materials was they saw their people growing in their love for God, but it wasn’t translating into their love for other people. People were still acting like emotional adolescents toward each other—that pettiness, defensiveness, fearfulness, lack of honesty and transparency. But you can’t be spiritually mature while remaining emotionally immature. This is not about salvation or works righteousness: it’s about agape love.

So the Emotionally Healthy Relationship materials have a group exercise in healthy relating, much like the Faith 5 patterns we encourage at the end of each day. We practice intentional affirmations and appreciation. When a person surprises us or hurts our feelings, we seek clarification through I statements like “I notice,” “I wonder,” and “help me understand.” We set clear boundaries. We articulate hopes and expectations. We listen to each other. We accept responsibility for our actions. We honor one another’s perspectives, even if we don’t agree with everything they say. Like I say—this takes practice, intentionality. 

Not Good Enough

To this point, three pages into this sermon, I don’t think I’ve said anything surprising. God loves us, and we’re supposed to love others. Jesus models and teaches us what love is. The Spirit of God empowers us to love. Learning to love is a growth process. Quiet time with God is an essential component of the Christian life. Love is counter-cultural. Practice active listening. Use “I” statements. Tell us something we don’t know, Pastor. Ok, how about this: 

When you make loving God and loving others your aim, when you make growing closer to and more like Jesus your primary goal, you will be a disappointment to other people. It won’t be enough. You…won’t be enough. They might stop hanging out with you. They might stop going to church with you. They might even put you on a cross.

I think we are seeing a crisis of emotional immaturity across our nation, and maybe especially in our churches. We have sorted ourselves into good guys and bad guys; right and wrong; left and right; with no room for nuance or negotiation. And we see that in our life together here at Faith. Each one of us has family and friends who have left us, given up on us, moved on, gone away because Faith and love aren’t enough. We aren’t enough. They won’t talk to us—well, actually, they’ll talk to US, but aren’t interesting in hearing anything we have to say.

They state their reasons why Faith “doesn’t meet their needs anymore:” wrong music, bad preaching, hurt feelings, political convictions. As a Council, we talk about membership growth and retention. Maybe we could call them and ask them to come back. Sure. 

As the pastor, I wonder what I could do differently, what I could do better. Mostly, I simply notice that my heart aches, and I grieve the lack of love in our world, and I lament how hard it is to be Christlike community together. I know that my younger self would wish that I would just try harder. I hope when I get older that my heart will not prematurely harden. 

How broken is your heart today, precious children of God? What can we do? And God the Father says: “Welcome to my world.”

We Need Each Other

It starts and ends with love. These days it feels like there is an expectation that every Christian is supposed to look the same, think the same, and vote for the same candidate. This idea is a sign and symptom of the immaturity of our society and of our churches. 

People are dying to find a place of worship that welcomes radically, teaches the Scriptures faithfully, where love trumps politics and takes priority over anything else that hinders the kingdom of God. A place where you—or maybe your grandkids—can safely worship, no matter the color of your skin, no matter your preferred pronouns. A community in which we can explore our faith without judgment—accountability to be sure, but not judgment. A place where we can talk about climate concerns, about the ethics of abortion, about how to make the world a better place. A community of broken-hearted sinners, doing our best to grow closer to and more like Jesus.

Faith isn’t perfect, but I see Christ in you. I see Christ in you on Wednesdays via Zoom as we study the Bible together. I see Richard over there on Sundays. He and I could argue politics til we’re blue AND red in the face, and at the end of the day, I don’t know anybody with a bigger heart for Jesus and for helping others. I see sweet Barbara in the congregation as well. She has been singing in the presence of Jesus since she was a child, left alone at a bus stop with only a sign around her neck with her name on it. Keep singing, beautiful Barbara.

I see friends meeting every Tuesday to make sandwiches for the homeless and hungry. I see a worship team that has been singing and worshiping and cheering for the Seahawks together for a hundred years. 

Paul might have heard about the faith and love of the Ephesians, but I SEE first hand YOUR faith in the Lord Jesus and your love for all God’s people, and I am once again slain by the Holy Spirit, carried like Lazarus into the bosom of Abraham, held in the love and mercy and grace of the Father, and maybe love is enough. Maybe Jesus is enough. Maybe you and I are enough.

Welcome home, everybody. Faith is a welcoming community, growing closer to and more like Jesus, making Christ known, serving one another, our neighbors, and all creation.

Love be our song and love our prayer and love our endless story; May God fill every day we share and bring us at last into glory. Amen. (Haugen, ELW 242)

Conclusion

Thanks for listening, folks. EHR resources, small group schedules and sign-ups are at Faith and at our website, www.faithshelton.org. Keep listening to this podcast for more in this Emotionally Healthy Relationships series. It is available on most podcast platforms, including Spotify, Apple, and Google. Preview the EHR videos on our YouTube channel. While you are there, like us, subscribe, donate, or sign-up for our newsletter. Thank you, Chas and Nadia, for your production and tech support for this podcast. 

It starts and ends with love:

Dear friends, let us love one another, the Bible teaches, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. 8 Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. 9 This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. 10 This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. 11 Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. 12 No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us (1 John 4:7-12).