First New Testament Reading—1 John 3: 10-18
Second New Testament Reading—1 John 4: 7-13
In his book on how to raise children compassionately, the nonviolent communication teacher Marshall Rosenberg recalls a time when his son Brett was three years old. Being a conscientious father, he was worried whether he was failing to communicate an unconditional love to his children, so he asked his son, “Brett, why does Dad love you?”
Looking at his father, Brett immediately replied, “Because I make my potties in the toilet now?” Hoping to get another answer, Rosenberg said, “Well, I do appreciate that, but that’s not why I love you.” Brett then said, “Well, because I don’t throw my food on the floor anymore?” Disappointed, Rosenberg said, “Well, here again, I do appreciate it when you keep your food on your plate. But that’s not why I love you.” Intently, Brett then asked, “Well, why do you love me, daddy?” Momentarily befuddled by this abstract conversation about love he was having with his son, Rosenberg eventually blurted out, “Well, I just love you because you’re you.”
Despite feeling his answer was “trite and vague,” Rosenberg was immediately convinced his son got the message. Brett’s face brightened and he said, “Oh, you just love me because I’m me, daddy. You just love me because I’m me.” Rosenberg recalls that over the next two days it seemed like his son ran over to him every ten minutes to pull at his side and say, “You just love me because I’m me, daddy. You just love me because I’m me.” With unconditional love, the rewards are many, but learning how to communicate it takes work. Choice of words, tone of voice, and attention to another’s feelings can all influence whether one communicates the consistent, unwavering respect of unconditional love regardless of where someone else potties.
If you think about it, families—whether they are biological or chosen—are often laboratories of love. They can be places where we learn how to love, how to communicate with respect and compassion. In thinking about families as laboratories of love, we might also say that they can be places of spiritual insight. In our scripture for today, John gives us a tip for becoming more spiritually literate. He gives us a decoder for discerning God’s presence in the world when he says, “God is love.” But before we wax poetic about the potential for discerning God’s presence amidst the love of families, let us recall that John, in our first reading, also indicates that families can be places where we witness the exact opposite of love. There is Cain who killed his brother Abel. Then, there are brothers and sisters who do not share with each other even when one of them is in need.
While not all of us experience such extremes, families still can be a tough training ground for love. Celeste Schroeder writes, “…so often it is easier to love your neighbor than it is to love your own family. We at least don’t have to live with our neighbor, rub shoulders and feet day after day. Yet what closer neighbor can there be than those we live with: roommate, sister, brother, spouse, child, partner, parent.” Mother Teresa often recognized that it was sometimes easier for some of the wealthy matrons who visited her to serve the poor of Calcutta than to tend to the relationships in their own families back home. In families, while violence and abuse are certainly widespread problems, it might be the less pernicious but still troublesome “shadow sides” of ourselves that often cause us difficulty. It might be a propensity to criticize others incessantly. It might be a tendency to launch passive aggressive retaliatory strikes. “Oh me, I’m not angry. I can’t help it if you’re always irresponsible.”
Well, how is it that Christianity helps us to deal with these problems? Do we even need to be Christians to address these effectively? One obviously doesn’t have to be a Christian to love and learn how to put it into practice in one’s daily life. Still, as I was wrestling with this question over the past week I remembered something that made me see the matter differently. I remembered how I learned to write cursive. I was in the third grade. At the time, I was a cannonball of energy always running about playing soccer and other games. Whether I was at school or at home, I had solely one desire: outdoor play. Eventually, this got me into a bit of trouble. After all the other kids had learned cursive, I still had not, and I had no interest in catching up. But then one day my mother started making sure I spent some time practicing my letters everyday after school sitting at our dining room table. Somehow she managed to find a way to get me to sit still long enough to learn. She gave me assignments and looked at my work. Every time I came to a letter I didn’t know how to write, she would show me what to do. She would write her lower case q’s and capital s’s nice and slow, so I could watch where her pencil went as it looped and curled.
John paints for us a similar picture in different words. At first, we might not know our spiritual alphabet. We might not know what God is all about, we might not know anything about love or how to love, but then Jesus comes along. He sits down with us and begins to teach us our spiritual q’s and s’s. John says, “God's love was revealed among us in this way: God sent God’s only Son into the world so that we might live through him.” John in essence tells us that Jesus came not only to teach us our spiritual alphabet but also to call us to be co-authors with God. God calls us to love one another, and John says, “God’s love is made complete in us.” In other words, each of us has the opportunity to write in the language of God’s love. Each of us has the opportunity to join with God in writing divine love letters to others.
A lot has changed since Jesus first taught us our spiritual alphabet, but the basics remain the same. God is love, and those who abide in love, abide in God. As the living body of Christ, we stay true to the building blocks of our faith, but we also realize that times change and humans evolve. For this reason, we sometimes need to seek out the best resources available to us. These resources might be found in a book, a workshop, or the upcoming conference on nonviolent communication. They might also be in the stories and experiences we share with each other.
Celeste Schroeder shares one such story. She once knew a mother who made her life more rich and meaningful by viewing parenting as her way of entering “Christ’s journey.” It was in parenting that she gave of herself and found her identity as a Sunday-through-Saturday Christian. I want to be careful to add that there is of course a difference between self-giving that is freely and willingly tendered as a parent and sacrifice that is imposed by the patriarchal expectation that women alone should bear the burden of childrearing.
So it is that parenting at its best can be one possible way to enter into the laboratory of love and begin writing letters with God, but there are other ways too. Writer Kath Weston tells of a self-
created family of three women. Every Thursday night, Kath and her partner had dinner with their friend Liz. The three of them juggled everything from work schedules to basketball practice in order to share in this common meal. At first, they shared gourmet meals, but eventually they settled for “everyday fare with a special touch, like avocado in the salad or Italian sausage in the spaghetti sauce.” They rotated responsibility for planning, preparing, and hosting the meals. They divided the cost equally after debating whether the wealthier among them should bear more of the burden. Following dinner, they played cards, told stories, discussed politics, exchanged recipes, told of their daily struggles, swapped cost-saving strategies, or reorganized “the Forty-Niner offensive line-up.” Weston says, “After a few months of these dinners we began to apply the terms ‘family’ and ‘extended family’ to one another.” Coinciding with this growing sense of familial ties was “the behavior of Liz’s cat.” Weston recalls, “Once an unsociable creature that took to hiding and groveling from the other room when strangers invaded her realm, now she watched silently from beneath the telephone table and even ventured forth to greet her visitors”—something she didn’t do for everyone, Liz noted.
Kath’s story is one example. Yet, perhaps, for one reason or another, some of us aren’t always able to share meals with those we love. In her book, Everyday Sacred, Sue Bender tells a story about her son almost literally sending love letters, not to his sweetheart at school, but to his grandmother. Bender writes that “almost every week” her son David sends a card to his eighty-nine year old grandmother. On a regular basis, David “spends a lot of time looking for just the right card, one he thinks will please her.” He’s been doing this for three years. He finds it a challenge to keep finding new cards, but after he visited his grandmother for her birthday, he saw how much she looked forward to getting mail and how happy she became after receiving a few birthday cards.
In the end, there are countless ways for us to co-author love letters with God. Right here at this church, we have our own ongoing laboratory of love where we can sit down and practice our spiritual q’s and s’s. Through our church’s social groups and potlucks, we can swap stories, offer moral support, and maybe even reorganize the Seattle Seahawks starting lineup. At any time of the week, we can also pick up a pen and write a letter to a member who might not be able to make it here on Sundays or maybe a write a letter to a member who has done something you really appreciate. If we stop and imagine the possibilities, I am certain that we will find opportunities for writing love letters all around us. With pen in hand and Jesus by our side, let us all sit down and continue the practice of writing as best we can in the language of God’s love. Amen.