Twelfth Sunday After Pentecost: Ephesians. 4:30 5:2 Rev. Darrell Debowey Immanuel Lutheran Church, Springfield, IL August 9, 2015 Ephesians 4:30 5:2: 30 And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption. 31 Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice. 32 Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you. 1 Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children. 2 And walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God. Live a Life of Love TEXT Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen. The text for today s message is the Epistle reading from Ephesians, the 5th and 6th chapters, especially these verses 30 And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption. 31 Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice. 32 Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you. 1 Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children. 2 And walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God. INTRODUCTION One of the excuses you hear in the same-sex marriage debate is that love is love, and so the argument in a nutshell goes something liked this, What right does the Church or the Bible have to tell me whom I can love love is love. In the English language, we have one word for Page 1
LOVE we have to use adjectives to modify love so people know what we re talking about, like brotherly love. The Greek language of the Bible is more specific it has four words for LOVE. The famous 20 th century Christian writer and apologist, C.S. Lewis, wrote a book called The Four Loves. In his book he explores the concept of love and he uses the four words for love in the Greek language to teach that not all love is the same. The first form of love Lewis explored is STORGE, what he called affection. It s the love between a mother and a baby, or between family members, like cousins, who are familiar with each other. I have something like 68 cousins, but I only have affection for a few of them because they re the ones with whom I grew up. The rest are family but I wouldn t know them if I saw them on the street. The second form of love is PHILIA, what Lewis called friendship. Philadelphia is the City of Brotherly Love. Philia describes the kind of fondness that develops between people with common interests or in common situations, like teammates, co-workers, neighbors, or schoolmates. The third form of love is EROS, what Lewis called the state of being in love. Erotic comes from the word EROS. This is romantic love, sexual love, the kind of love that s based upon excitement and sexual attraction. EROS is the kind of love that our culture talks about when it says, love is love. And indeed, since God is the inventor of sex and sexuality, He and His Church can tell you whom you can love in a sexual way. These forms of love require that the object of love whether it s a baby, a friend, or a significant other be in some way lovable. It s hard to be affectionate to someone who is Page 2
cold and distant even if it s a family member; or, to be friends with someone you don t like; or, to fall in love with someone who isn t your type with whom there s no chemistry. For this reason, Lewis describes these three types of love as NEED-LOVES. They re Need-Loves because the person doing the loving the lover is doing so because he or she expects affection, friendship or romantic love in return from the beloved. For example: a mother loves her children but also expects her children to show her affection in return. Friendships come and go as situations change, such as moving to a new neighborhood, changing jobs, or graduating from school. And a couple can easily fall out of love when one person decides the other person doesn t meet his or her expectations. Ultimiately, these three loves are called need-loves because they are centered on needs of the lover, and not on the needs of the beloved. But the fourth kind of love C.S. Lewis explores is different. In the Greek language it s known as agape, or what Lewis calls charity or gift love. In the KJV of the Bible, charity is the word used for agape in 1 Corinthians 13 where Paul says: Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. And Paul concludes: And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity. This kind of love is truly unselfish love, a love that gives without expecting anything in return, a love that focuses on the needs of the beloved as opposed to the lover; it s a love that loves even when love is not returned. In our text today, God Himself, speaking through Paul, demands that we walk in love that is, that we should walk in God s agape kind of love. A whole Bible study could be done on the Biblical meaning of walk. In essence, God is saying that our walk our whole way of Page 3
life should reflect God s gift-love for us. The kind of love we re to show the world and especially fellow-believers is charity agape-love. Those who are in Christ are to be gift lovers to love as Christ loved us. And how did Christ love us? [He] gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God. But our nature since the Fall is to be need-lovers lovers of self, and not gift lovers lovers of others. Agape love is impossible for us to express as sinful human beings because sin has turned us inward always focused on me. In fact, when we re not loved as we think we should be loved, our love quickly becomes cold and we PUT ON what Paul told us to PUT AWAY: bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander along with all malice. Such is our response when our need to be loved or respected, or honored, or remembered, or treated kindly isn t fulfilled the way we think it should be. Think of the bitterness you ve harbored against friends at work who received the promotions or pay increases that you thought you deserved; or the bitterness you hold against a classmate who s dating the guy you like. Bitterness has ruined countless relationships where people feel they have been cheated or disrespected. Paul quickly moves from bitterness to wrath. We re not talking about God s divine wrath here, which is always righteous. In our text wrath means losing your cool. This is an unrighteousness wrath, a kind of rage. All too often this is our response when we think our rights have been violated. Because of rage, minor traffic incidents escalate into violence. This reminds me of the true story of the little boy in Ohio who was driving his toy car in his driveway. His prim and proper mother was horrified when she saw him beating the steering wheel and Page 4
heard him cussing a blue streak. When she reprimanded him, he simply said, You do it all the time, mommy. Then there s the angry shouting that St. Paul calls clamor in our text. All too often, two people who are in love resort to this kind of behavior to win arguments or get their way. And often such behavior is accompanied by slanderous and vile words that are used to inflict emotional pain. Then there s malice the desire to see evil or harm come upon another human being. To wish harm upon someone is the very opposite of giving them love. To hope that someone Get s what he deserves is comes from malice in the heart. All such unwholesome behavior grieves the Holy Spirit of God, and doesn t reflect the state of grace and forgiveness that we have as the people of God in Christ Jesus. And it is necessary for all of us to confess our sins and repent before God that we have not loved, indeed we cannot love, as God has loved us. A friend once asked me, after we had a brief debate about ethical behavior, You have to have God to be good? What do you think the answer is? The answer is, Yes. It s impossible for us to love as God commands because we we re so tied up in need-love that we don t even know what gift-love agape love charity is. Without God, all we are is need-lovers looking for love in all the wrong places. That s why C.S. Lewis calls charity Divine Gift- Love. The other three loves are natural to us, almost instinctual, but charity is unnatural to sinful human beings. Charity is Divine because it s the love that comes from God and must be revealed by God to a fallen creation. It is what John means when he says, We love because God first loved us. Page 5
Such love is unnatural because sin has pushed this kind of love out of our hearts. It s no longer in our nature to love without expecting something in return, or to love the unlovable, or to make sacrifices for someone else because sin has made love all about me. Isn t that what we see in today s same-sex marriage debate? It isn t about God or children or God s institution of marriage it s about me, what I want. Charity must come down to us from heaven above, from God Himself. Agape-love is Gift-Love because our heavenly Father gives such love freely and unselfishly. This is the kind of undeserved love our heavenly Father freely gave to us vile and unlovable sinners when He gave His own Son to be sacrificed on the cross. It s hard enough to die for your friends, but to die for your enemies that s what Jesus did. In His sacrifice, Jesus died for a world that hated Him. And Gift-Love is the love Jesus gave to His heavenly Father when He obediently humbled Himself to be born of a poor virgin, to suffer temptation and pain, and when He made the ultimate sacrifice to die in the place of sinful humanity on the cross. And this is the kind of love that our heavenly Father again gave His Son when He raised Him from the dead and placed Him at the seat of authority in heaven. It s because God first loved us IN CHRIST that we know what love is. And it s God s Divine Gift Love that changes you from need-lovers into gift-lovers. God changed you into gift-lovers when He washed you in the waters of Baptism that s when you put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness. And then, as a forgiven people, you become forgiving people what greater way is there to love people than to forgive them as you have been forgiven? In this forgiveness, Jesus showers you Page 6
with His endless gift-love and empowers you to do as St. Paul urges in our text: to Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you. It s Jesus Divine Gift Love that makes you His brothers and sisters, dearly beloved children of God. And by His love, Jesus empowers you to live a life of love, to be imitators of God. That you are in Christ gives you the power to love as Christ Loved you unselfishly knowing that God will take care of you as He sends you into the world to give His love to others. And part of that love is to teach the world the truth about what love really is: Therefore, having put away falsehood, let each one of you speak the truth with his neighbor, for we are members one of another. May God help us to speak the truth in love about love and about God s love in IN CHRIST. And in Christ, may God help us love and forgive others even those our sinful flesh deems unlovable and unforgivable such as strangers, criminals, prostitutes and drug dealers, the indigent, the unborn, the poor, the selfish, the enemies or our country, the mentally ill, the physically challenged, the deformed and disfigured In other words, may God help us give love as we have been given love by God in Christ Jesus. In Jesus name. Amen. Page 7