Bud was a factory worker with more than a slight resemblance to Archie Bunker. Do you remember Archie Bunker, from the TV show “All in the Family?”

Every single day Bud would come home sweaty and dirty. He’d go in the back door, grab a beer from the frig, and plop himself down in front of the TV until his wife brought him dinner.

He’d sit there until he eventually fell asleep and then at some point later would drag himself off to bed.

One day as he was driving to work he happened across a Christian psychologist on the radio. And something the commentator said stuck in his mind -- that love and marriage are about sacrifice.

And it hit him – that he’d been expecting his wife to sacrifice for him but he’d never really sacrificed for her. It was as though a relational light bulb came on and he knew that he had to do something about it.

So he decided that he was going to surprise her the next day. Before coming home he showered and shaved. He went to the florist and bought flowers and instead of going in through the back door he went to the front and rang the bell.

When she answered the door he held out the flowers and said -- “Honey, they’re for you! I love you.”

She looked at him, her mouth dropped open. Tears filled her eyes.

And she said, “I’ve had a terrible day. Billy broke his leg and I had to take him to the hospital. No sooner had I got home than the phone rang. It was your mother and she’s coming to visit for two weeks. I tried to do the wash but the machine broke and there’s water all over the basement floor.

“And now, you come home drunk!”

Poor Bud. It’s hard to win at love. But he’d finally got the right idea! He was on the right path, at least as mapped out by John in our text this morning. See, true love manifests itself in sacrificial action.

Unfortunately, more often, we tend to think of love in terms of merely intense feelings.

Tina Turner asked in a rock song from the 1980’s the question, “What’s love got to do with it?” The words echoed her life story, which was made into a 1993 movie of the same title.

Indeed, when looking back on her failed marriage to the abusive Ike Turner, it’s not hard to wonder, as the song did, “what’s love got to do with it? What’s love but a secondhand emotion? Who needs a heart when a heart can be broken?”

That’s part of the problem -- we tend to think of love only in terms of emotion.

Therefore we end up “loving” lots of things, from pizza to Budweiser, from warm spring days to our friends new hair do, from a car to that new girl in English class. We have come to confuse love with infatuation and lust.

The main difference is that infatuation and lust are selfish in motive. When we are dealing with those ideas, we are looking out for our own selfish interests. We only “love” the object of our affection so long as it pleases us. We seek our own pleasure over the interests of someone else.

The first letter of John makes clear that our core responsibility as Christians is to love one another. We see this love in what Jesus did for us, when he laid down his life for us, and we act on this knowledge when we “live sacrificially for one another” (1 John 3:16).

The sacrificial love of Jesus is more than a nice idea and a noble concept — it is, in fact, a pattern of behavior that is supposed to be displayed by us in action.

John aptly asks the question: “If you see some brother or sister in need and have the means to do something about it but turn a cold shoulder and do nothing, what happens to God’s love? It disappears. And you made it disappear.”

John is saying that love is more than hot air. We could drag out a number of clichés at this point. We could say, “Put your money where your mouth is.” Or, we could say, “Talk is cheap.” Or, we could say, “Actions speak louder than words.” All of these apply to this situation. But, clichés aren’t enough.

James 2:15 and 16 says, “If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacking in daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace, be warmed and filled,’ without giving them the things needed for the body, what good is that?”

It does no good if we say to someone in need, “Go in peace. May the Lord bless you.” I would even say that it is not enough to just pray for their situation, if there is something that we can do to remedy the situation.

 

Clarence Jordan captured the concreteness of this everyday love and compassionate assistance when he translated in his Cotton Patch Version of 1 John 3:18: “My little ones, let’s not talk about love. Let’s not sing about love. Let’s put love into action and make it real.”

Making it real. Putting it into action. That’s what John is talking about when he challenges us to love one another.

So why is it so hard for us to concentrate on this core Christian responsibility?

• Most of us find it easier to argue with our political opponents than to love them.

• Most of us are more comfortable taking a stand on abortion than taking care of a woman with a problem pregnancy.

• Most of us would rather write a check to a homeless shelter than spend an evening providing job counseling to a person on the streets.

• Most of us would prefer to make pronouncements on homosexuality than to do the hard work of figuring out what it means to be gay and Christian.

•  Most of us find it so much simpler to define our religious duty in terms of attending church and making offerings, rather than doing the complicated and challenging work of feeding the hungry, welcoming strangers, clothing the naked, caring for the sick, and visiting the imprisoned.

Basically, we’re lazy.

No kidding. We take a fairly easy path when we forget what true love means and put our energy into fighting about politics, abortion, homelessness and homosexuality.

These topics give us the comfort of a black- and-white view of the world, one in which there are good guys and bad guys, angels and demons, winners and losers.

But Jesus was never about crushing his opponents — instead, he challenged his followers by saying, “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven” (Matthew 5:44-45).

If we want to truly follow our Savior, we are going to have to take the difficult path of putting love into action and making it real. It is much harder to love one another than it is to fight one another.

But speak up we must.  During Hitler’s rise to power, some (but not many) Christian pastors fought against Hitler’s attempt to control the church.  One of them was the Rev. Martin Niemoller. He and others started the Confessing church movement in German as a way to combat Hitler’s ever increasing influence. One of Niemoller’s most famous statements was this:

“In Germany, they first came for the communists and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a communist. Then they came for the trade unionists, but I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew. Then they came for the Catholics. I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Catholic. Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak up.”

Our world is in desperate need of a church that puts love into action and makes it real. People all around us are searching desperately for a community that actually practices what it preaches.

Over 100 years ago, the Christian philosopher Søren Kierkegaard made the point that Jesus was looking for followers, not admirers — he wanted people who would walk with him, do his work, and serve in his name.

One of Kierkegaard’s own parables told of a man who was walking down a city street when he saw a big sign in a window that said, “Pants pressed here.” Delighted to see the sign, he went home and gathered up all of his wrinkled laundry. He carried it into the shop and put it on the counter.

“What are you doing?” the shopkeeper demanded.

“I brought my clothes here to be pressed,” said the man, “just like your sign said.”

“Oh, you’ve got it all wrong,” the owner said. “We don’t actually do that here. We’re in the business of making signs.”

We don’t do these things, he was saying. We just talk about them.

And that, said Kierkegaard, is often the problem in the church. We advertise ourselves as a place that is showing Christ’s love and doing Christ’s work.

But when people show up looking for real love and real Christian action, they don’t see it. “Oh, no, we don’t love people out there in the world. We just talk about loving those people.”

The movie “Batman Begins” has a scene in it that I like – Bruce Wayne aka Batman puts on the playboy act—meant to keep people from connecting him with the crusading hero Batman. 

Wayne’s girlfriend from his past and now a zealous district attorney, sees the Bruce Wayne act and believing it hook, line, and sinker, relates her disappointment in what she thinks he has become.

Wayne wants to defend himself but she tells him, “It’s not who you are underneath, but what you do that defines you” and then asks him, “What chance does Gotham have when the good people do nothing?”

What you do defines you!!! What you do matters... And if the good people do nothing what chance will the world have?

If we are going to advertise God’s love, let’s actually practice God’s love. It’s time to return to the core responsibilities we have as Christians: the abilities to believe in Jesus Christ and love one another – not just those sitting next to you but those out in the world as well.

Last week during some down time I got to thinking about who I was and what I wanted to be known for when I died. What would I want put on my tombstone.  I guess I was in a kind of morbid mood. 

Then I thought about who we were as a congregation – as Santa Teresa Hills Presbyterian Church. What are we known for?  Who do people say that we are? 

For both I felt like we would be known for how well we love one another.  And I was pleased.

Then as I prepared this sermon, I realized that wasn’t enough.  That is only the beginning.  I think Jesus would be disappointed if my love was so limited. 

God is calling us to live our love in active service not just to one another, but mostly to those who are unable to effectively help themselves. 

That is what I want on our tombstones.  They loved enough to not only help one another, but to love others through active service.

We don’t do that very well – yet.  But we are on the right track.  We are in the right place.  I am excited to be here and to have the opportunity to get it right.  With all of you.

It is my hope and prayer that for the rest of our time here at STHPC we can reflect that kind of outward and active love in all we do.

AMEN.