Love is a verb

Matt Sturtevant, preaching

July 12, 2009

Ephesians 1:3-14

When I was in youth group in high school, there was one album that stood out above the others – D.C. Talk’s Free at Last.  Every youth group meeting, every church trip we took, we would hear at least one song from the Christian hip hop CD (or tape, in those days).  Free at Last, the Hardway, Lean on Me, Jesus is Just Alright, and the first track: “Luv is a verb”.

“Luv is a Verb” claimed that love was more than happy words or a mushy emotion – Love is a verb. 

When I read today’s passage of scripture, my first thought was of this song and the reminder that Love is a Verb!  Today I want to go back and look at the images that Paul uses to highlight this theme – Love is a verb.  The passage is filled with all these verbs and they are all bunched together – kind of like an impressionist painting…Paul uses a blob of blue paint here and a streak of red paint here and a little yellow and if you look at each one separately, they don’t make much sense, but when you step back, you realize the picture that he has painted.  In the same way, Paul, uses one image here and another next to it, and when you step back, you realize the picture of love that he has created.

The first image is actually a story.  It will be familiar to those of you who have seen the recent movie Gran Torino.  It stars Clint Eastwood as a gruff old Korean war veteran living in a neighborhood in downtown Detroit.  When he bought the house, the neighborhood was safe and pretty homogenous, but as the movie progresses, we see how much the neighborhood is changing.  He resents the fact that families of different races are moving in with their strange traditions and annoying habits.  He is angry, bigoted, and prejudiced.  It gets worse when the boy next door tries to steal his favorite possession…his Gran Torino.  The boy is Hmong, from southeast Asia, and has no good male role models.  So when the local gang tries to recruit him by getting him to steal the car, he falls right in with them.

But he gets caught in the act and as the boy works off his debt of dishonor, Eastwood’s character gets to know him and his sister a little better.  Before he realizes it, he has adopted these youths as grandchildren.  He does things for them, gives them gifts, protects them from the neighborhood gangs, and loves them in ways greater than a blood relationship would offer.  Meanwhile, the confused boy becomes a man: strong character and sense of self…he has been forever changed by this adoption.  By the end of the movie, Eastwood’s character has been changed and has forever changed this family.

Adoption is a powerful image of love as a verb.  My guess is that many families here are somehow touched by adoption…either they have been adopted or they have adopted another.  You know the power of a love that says “I choose to make you my own”.  I choose to meet your needs.  I choose to sacrifice for you.  I choose to love you in a way that is beyond expectation.  That, according to Paul, is a perfect image of the love that God has for us.  “…For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love 5 he predestined us for adoption to sonship through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will….”  Just like the family who welcomes a child into their home through adoption, God has chosen to meet our needs, sacrifice for us, to love us, beyond our imagination.  God loves us…because he adopted us.

Love is a verb: welcome, care, sacrifice, adopt.
The second image might be a little untidy for Sunday morning.  But it doesn’t need to be.  What comes to mind when you think about blood?  Halloween slasher movies?  ER or CSI special effects?  AIDS or other blood-transmitted diseases?  Blood and guts and gore?  Our culture has portrayed blood more often than not in a negative light.  It is seen as something disgusting, dirty, diseased.  But to the ancient Hebrews, and thus to the early church to which Paul spoke, blood was something very different.  Instead of death, blood represented life!  It represented the gift of life that we are given and should never be taken for granted.

A few in our society are doing their best to portray blood as life instead of death.  Francis Collins was the head of the human genome project, the long-term scientific project designed to map the human genome – to map the strands of DNA that determine our genetic make-up.  Those who were involved in this project saw blood as a snapshot of the life that we all share.  In a drop of our blood, we hold a tremendous primer for life.  Collins and his colleagues found that there are approximately 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes that determine life.  While this sounds like a lot, the reality is that it is roughly the same number as very simple organisms, such as insects and worms.

For some scientists, this realization led to a type of spiritual despair or apathy, claiming that we are not that different than a fruit fly.  For many other scientists, including Collins, this is an incredible sign of the work of God…that a Creator could and would take the same 20,000 protein-coding genes and create such an incredible variety of organisms.  In a drop of blood, we hold the building blocks for every type of life and every human personality throughout history.

Collins, a strong Christian, calls this principle “biologos”.  He says that biologos “expresses the belief that God is the source of all life and that life expresses the will of God.”  Instead of seeing such striking genetic similarity from species to species as an example of our weakness or simplicity, he chooses to see a creative and imaginative God at work in a single drop of blood.

This principle of biologos is much closer to the Hebrew and early Christian understanding of blood as the life force that God uses in creative and powerful ways.  Hear now Paul’s words with this understanding: “In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, in accordance with the riches of God's grace…”  Our redemption comes through blood.  God chose to come to us in the form of Christ – “the Word became flesh (and blood) and dwelled among us”.  Christ chose to sacrifice his life blood for our sake.  On the cross, his blood was transformed from something ugly and disgusting – a Roman torture/execution – to something that brings life and eternal life to us.  Through his blood, Christ took that which was ugly and turned it into something redemptive.

Love is a verb: dwell, sacrifice, bleed, redeem.

If the second image – the microscopic building blocks of life – are too tiny for us to see with the naked eye, the third is too large.  The ancient Hebrew understanding of the cosmos was very different than what we know today.  They assumed that the Earth was the center of the cosmos and that a sphere surrounded the Earth that included the sun, moon, and planets (as far out as Saturn).  For them, they were amazed that God could be the God of that which was earthly, terrestrial, and also heavenly, beyond our world.

Imagine their awe if they would come to understand the picture that we have of the universe today.  It is impossible for us to completely understand the size of the universe in which we live.  In youth group every once and a while, we will do this activity where we try and demonstrate how big the universe is.  We take a peppercorn to represent the size of the earth and then we start walking, using different tiny items to represent the scale of the solar system.  And by the time we get to Pluto, we are past Burlingame Road.  And that is just one solar system…a small one…in the midst of billions of solar systems in our galaxy, which is one of a hundred billion galaxies.  But if Paul were here today, the message would be the same: “With all wisdom and understanding, he made known to us the mystery of his will according to his good pleasure, which he purposed in Christ, to be put into effect when the times reach their fulfillment—to bring unity to all things in heaven and on earth under Christ.”  He has made us a centerpiece of this massive universe in the way that he loves us.  Whenever we see the photos from the Hubble telescope or read in our science textbooks about how massive the universe is, it should be a reminder how much God loves us.

Love us a verb: create, plan, make known.

So Paul uses all these random verbs: adopt, bleed, redeem, create, sustain…and he paints this impressionistic painting that seems weird and random and unrelated.  He hits you again and again with these verbs describing God’s love for us.  In all of them, God has been the subject – every verb describes something that God has already done.  God did this for us and this for us and this for us and as we read it, we cannot help but be overwhelmed in the details.  And then we step back and with this huge conclusion, Paul says, for first time using a subject of the verb different than God “in order that we, who were the first to put our hope in Christ, might be for the praise of his glory”.  In other words, God does all this that we might exist for one thing and one thing only – to praise our creator, redeemer, adoptor!  This impressionistic painting of gratitude and love shown leads to only one thing – the total and humble praise of the one who has done all of this for us.  It is our calling.  It is what we were created for.  In the face of all that God has done for us, it is the only verb that we can muster…PRAISE.  And whether it comes out in an Amen! Or a Holy, Holy, Holy! Or a quiet “thank you.”  It is our love verb…our response to all that God has done for us.

Traditional: If Paul does it with words, Tom Fettke does it with music.  In one of my favorite anthems, The Majesty and Glory of Your Name, Fettke begins with this impressionistic word painting of all that God has done and created and worked in us and in a pregnant moment in the middle of the piece, it resolves to capture that switch, from the verbs of God’s grace to the one true verb that we can handle – praise: The Majesty and Glory of Your Name.  Sit back and listen or watch the images on the screen as you praise your God…