12/23/18 “The Courage To Be Loved” by Nancy Petty
Text: Luke 1:39-56
Proclaiming an Extravagant Love! That’s the theme the Worship Council chose for this fourth Sunday of Advent, the Sunday when we light the Candle of Love. We are 48 hours from Christmas morning when we celebrate the birth of Jesus and thus the incarnation of God’s love in the world. So I want to make this Advent message simple this morning by asking one question: Do you have the courage to be loved. Do you have the courage the let yourself be loved with an extravagant love?
We talk a lot about love as a society. We have all kinds of holidays and rituals to celebrate love. We are obsessed as a culture with selling and buying love. Buy your love one of these diamond rings to show just how much you love her. Buy him this “fill in the blank whatever the blank is” and show him you love him. Some even buy expensive cars to celebrate love. Did you hear about the pastor in Greenville, South Carolina who, this month, bought his wife a $200,000 Lamborghini (for some of you that’s a car) to celebrate their love on their 8th wedding anniversary? It’s a true story. There’s even a culture in our society that makes one feel less than if they don’t have that special someone to lavish on love with gifts and things.
We also talk a lot about love in the church, and for a good reason. In our faith story, the Christian story, we are admonished time and time again to “love one another.” Jesus says: Love your neighbor as yourself. He also said I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. Paul writes: Let your love be genuine; hate what is evil and hold fast to what is good. And then there is Paul’s most famous writing on love: If I speak in tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal…And now faith, hope and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love. Peter, not to be left out, weighs in on loving one another. He writes: Above all, maintain constant love for one another, for love covers a multitude of sins. Peter’s take: Love others if for no other reason than CYA. You gotta love Peter.
Those committed to the social gospel really zero in on love. And again, rightly so! We proclaim and believe in a love for others that is stronger than the hate that comes from some. We profess a love that demands justice for others, for all. Walter Rauschenbusch, the great social gospel preacher, said: “We never live so intensely as when we love strongly. We never realize ourselves so vividly as when we are in full glow of love for others.” And while he was not a social gospel preacher in the literal sense, Victor Hugo the poet who wrote better theology than most theologians, said: “Love each other dearly always. There is scarcely anything else in the world but that: to love one another.”
My point is that this message of loving others is the very essence of what our religion is all about. And while we often have a hard time doing it (especially when we get outside of our circle of people) we know we are supposed to love others, that our faith expects it of us, and that from a moral perspective it is the “right” thing to do. To love one another. We get the message loud and clear.
What we are less clear about and where religion, and by “religion” I mean Christian teaching, has been somewhat silent is on what our faith has to say about having the courage to be loved—to accept love—to actually allow ourselves to feel that we are loved. In reality, we, and by “we” I mean many of us who grew up in more conservative churches, were taught that we were unworthy to be loved, wretched human beings, flawed from our very beginning. To be worthy of love, especially God’s love, meant that we had to basically deny every part of our humanity, and even then we could never be good enough for or deserving of God’s love. Feeling loved by God was risky because always just around the corner was a judging God who was ready at any little slip on our part to snatch that love away. And some of us are still healing and in recovery from this understanding of what it means to be loved.
Still, years after walking away from that old theology, I find it easier to lean into the “love others” message, even when that is challenging, than to muster up the courage it takes to believe that God loves me with an extravagant love.
Now, I was one of those Southern Baptist kids that often got the little pin for perfect Sunday school attendance. However, I started wondering this week if my childhood Sunday school teachers fudged on my attendance record. It seems to me that I missed at least one lesson a year: the lesson on Luke 1:47-55 Mary’s Song. How did my early theological education miss this beautiful song that clearly speaks of the courage to be loved with an extravagant love?
In case you missed it, too, in your early theological education; and if you missed it again just a few minutes ago when Brian read it, listen again.
“My soul magnifies the Lord,
and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
48 for God has looked with favor on the lowliness of this servant.
Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed;
49 for the Mighty One has done great things for me,
and holy is God’s name.
50 God’s mercy is for those who fear God
from generation to generation.
51 God has shown strength;
and has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.
52 God has brought down the powerful from their thrones,
and lifted up the lowly;
53 filled the hungry with good things,
and sent the rich away empty.
54 God has helped God’s servant Israel,
in remembrance of God’s mercy,
55 according to the promise made to our ancestors,
to Abraham and to his descendants forever.”
Mary’s soul sings of an extravagant love. As I listen to its melody, the essence of Mary’s song is about Mary having the courage to be loved, to feel God’s love for her, and to bless that love by accepting it. From beginning to end, Mary sings of God’s love for her. Not in a boastful or arrogant way. But in a humble, astonished way, as if to say, I know this to be true, and yet, it is still too good to believe. And isn’t that how real love always feels? Like you’ve won the lottery – which means you won something that you really didn’t earn, or deserve, instead you got incredibly, unbelievably lucky!
But all of that is over on the safe side, once we can actually feel confident in love. I want us to back up and zoom in on the exact moment when we have to decide—will I take the enormous risk of allowing myself to be loved? Let’s put ourselves in Mary’s spot for a moment. An angel shows up, says you’re having the son of God. You’re a teenager. You’re not yet married. And you probably can’t read or write or vote. You don’t qualify for health care. And you can’t sue God for reckless impregnation. Think how easy it would have been to feel cursed by this news! Even more likely, think of how easy it would have been to just feel unworthy. I can hear her own voice saying, “What? God, what are you thinking? I can’t be the mother of your Son! I don’t have the right gene pool! I’ve never given birth or raised a kid! You’ve got the wrong Mary!”
And yet, this young, frightened girl did not listen to the inner voices of inadequacy and insecurity and unworthiness. She accepted her blessing! She did it with humility and deference, but she accepted that she had been chosen, that she was incredibly special, that she was uniquely loved.
Have you had a moment like this in your life? When someone looks you in the eye and tells you that you are the beloved? When someone sees who you really are, and offers you their heart? This isn’t about a lover or a romantic ideal. I’m talking about the universal heart of love – the golden gaze of a mother, the adoring unbroken eye contact of a toddler, the hysterical laughter of a dear friend.
In those moments, when we are graced with the opportunity for love, we make a choice to step courageously toward that love. And in stepping toward love, we participate in the beating of the universal heart of love. It may not always be conscious, and it may not always feel clear, but know this, when you allow the love of another, of the other, or the creator, to seep into your awareness, your sensing, your consciousness, you are making a choice—a choice to be loved. And when we dare to have the courage to make that choice we find ourselves blessed.
As we turn our attention to the birth of the baby Jesus, I ask, do you have the courage to be loved this Christmas? I know what you’re thinking – nobody loves me like that. I mean, they love me, but not like that. And that’s where you’re wrong. We participate in love. It doesn’t just happen. The love that is offered us is not a static commodity; it is a dynamic potential. When we meet the love that is offered with the courage to be loved, we activate that potential. And Mary, in her song, shows us how powerful such love can be when we have the courage to accept it. Now I don’t mean that we will always be loved well, or the way we want to be loved. But only in stepping toward the love that is always available do we begin to play our own part in creating and sustaining the love that undergirds all of creation.
And so I ask again, do you have the courage to be loved, even with an extravagant love? Will you accept the love that is offered to you, in the form of a baby, tender and vulnerable and completely dependent on your care. Will you step toward the love that is offering itself to you as your very life? I can’t tell you how to make the choice. And most importantly, I can’t promise that you won’t be hurt. But I can tell you that if you want to live into the heart of Christmas, it’s going to require you, all of us, to muster up the courage to be loved with an extravagant love.
Where is love being offered to you this Christmas? And will you have the courage to welcome and bless that love in your own life? Such is the meaning of what we will celebrate in less than 48 hours.
