"Doing Small Things with Great Love"

December 20, 2009
Douglas S. Long
Umstead Park United Church of Christ

Text: I Corinthians 13

The Apostle Paul, when reflecting on love, offers beautiful prose (…and yes, I know this poem may have pre-dated the Apostle but it's beautiful prose, never-the-less.)
…and as much as we love this speech of love, we are left wanting something done… It's the doing of love we're after…the embodying…
The trick is in the doing.

I've shared before that the question “What does love mean?” was asked to a group of precocious 5 to 8 year olds. Their answers were anything but theoretical. A couple of the responses:

"When my grandmother got arthritis, she couldn't bend over and paint her toenails anymore," said Rebecca, age 8. "So my grandfather does it for her all the time, even when his hands got arthritis too. That's love."

…and especially for this season of the year—

Bobby, also age 5, remarked: "Love is what's in the room with you at Christmas if you stop opening presents and listen."

I want to go to the heart of the matter this morning, or part of the heart, anyway.
We light these candles every Advent… we focus on hope, peace, joy and love… love being, the central of our Advent desires and waiting.
Even the Apostle Paul agrees… faith hope and love, he speaks of… but the greatest of all is … love.

So do we take love seriously?
I don't think so… more often than not.
We relegate love to the annals of sentimentality and keep our distance in public. Love is not a virtue we value in the arenas of commerce and the body politic.

Let me offer an illustration… and I know it will sound a little odd, but—
Barack Obama ran a campaign last year largely focusing on the word… hope.
What if he had said… love?
He'd have been a laughingstock. True? (Hope was impractical enough, for some… but love?!!)

And yet, says the Apostle Paul, the greatest of them all is love.
What's going on here?

Is love so foreign to our mindset, that we speak of it often, but do not take it seriously in… the real world?
I'm not talking about romantic love. I'm not referring to sentimentality. I'm asking if we believe that love can change the world …the kind of love that values the other enough to make oneself vulnerable. Perhaps the best word we have for this kind of love is compassion …the kind of love that seeks to deeply know the other, and when it does that honors and respects that which is outside ourselves.

And so we come, to the story of Jesus' birth. The Christmas Story.
What was God doing, if God came in Jesus of Nazareth?
There was an empire, the Roman Empire, ruling the world through force, through military might, through legions strategically based in outposts of the farthest reaches…
Distant lands were taxed and the proceeds sent back to support the lavish lifestyles of those who controlled the strategic weapons of the day.
The world was held captive to the ruling class…
and God mounted a counter offensive.

What was God doing but becoming vulnerable? What was God doing but taking a far different tack than the status quo of that day?
What was God doing but countering the crisis with… human love.

And so… we have the story of a baby, in an out of the way country, to an unimportant couple.
I'm reminded of the words sung by Judas to Jesus near the end of Jesus Christ Superstar:

Every time I look at you I don't understand
Why you let the things you did get so out of hand
You'd have managed better if you'd had it planned
Why'd you choose such a backward time and such a strange land?

Why did God choose such a backward time and such a strange land?
…or is that all times are backward, and all places where God is present are strange to the empires of the day?... and their citizens.
I think so, fellow citizens… I think so.

… a baby, in an out of the way country, to an unimportant couple.
By the way, some of you know that the letters of Paul were written a good bit earlier than the Gospels that record the stories of Jesus' birth (Matthew and Luke). The Gospel of Mark was written before them as well.
So, it's more than interesting to note that neither Paul nor Mark, the earliest writings, find it important to mention the birth stories or traditions that surround them.
I don't want to stir up too much for some of you but there are several implications derived from this:

-for the earliest believers, the birth stories weren't central or necessary
-but for Mathew and Luke, there was something extremely important they wanted to emphasize by inserting these stories.

In a nutshell, it is this:
God's way is a counter-offensive to the way of the Empire.

About a month ago I plopped down on the couch on a Saturday afternoon- I flipped on the television to some college football and I immediately experienced a little disconnect trying to figure out what was going on. It seems the University of South Carolina football team honored the US military during the Nov. 14 home game. (It was strategically near Veteran's Day, and they were playing the then rated top team in the country.)

On their jersey's, across the back of the shoulders where the players names are normally listed, were one of seven characteristics to honor service members—Duty, Honor, Courage, Commitment, Integrity, Country and Service.

My reaction to this, besides laughing when Integrity was picking his nose, was … where is the Love?

Love as a core value of a soldier?!!!!
It doesn't mesh. It doesn't compute.

Hmmm… we're on to something here.

So what would it mean to add love to the list? ...and, for that matter, how would love temper each of the other attributes?

Commitment without love?… is empty.

Country without love? … is blind patriotism and leads to all manner of exploitation and violence upon others.

I thought about courage, and I thought about courage without love.
I wondered what I'd get if I Googled exactly that, 'courage without love' and … BINGO!
Listen to this:

Love without courage and wisdom is sentimentality, as with the ordinary church member. Courage without love and wisdom is foolhardiness, as with the ordinary solider. Wisdom without love and courage is cowardice, as with the ordinary intellectual. But the one who has love, courage, and wisdom moves the world. ~Ammon Hennacy

Just in case you're wondering, I confess that the thought of love tempering other attributes is not original to me. I remembered I ran across it last year in Peter Gomes' The Good Life: Truths That Last in Times of Need. In that book he includes a whole list of such attributes divorced from love.

Duty without love breeds weariness;

Responsibility without love breeds unconcern;

Righteousness without love breeds hardness;

Wisdom without love breeds rifts;

Friendliness without love breeds hypocrisy;

Order without love breeds pettiness;

Knowledge without love breeds dogmatism;

Power without love breeds violence;

Honor without love breeds arrogance;

And, of course, the attributes with love produce something altogether different, and desirable.

Possessions without love breed avarice (greed);
possessions with love breed generosity.

Faith without love breeds fanaticism;
faith with love breeds peacemaking. (The Good Life, pp. 330, 331)

And then Gomes goes on to say…(p. 342)

“Love is not something we believe, have, keep or give: it is something we do, and in its doing, love shows forth works. The world is a work of God's love. Children are the work of the love of their parents. Forgiveness is a work of love toward one another. Love is the supreme virtue—because in comprehending us as we are—and not as we ought to be or would be—it has the capacity to effect in us a transformation…

Can we change the world through love?
That is, I believe, what the incarnation is all about.

But all this talk is still too theoretical. Let me be specific for my last few minutes.
Can we change the world through love?

It was Mother Teresa who gave me the title of this sermon. It's a quote from her:
“We cannot do great things, but we can do small things with great love.”
…and remember, I'm not talking about sentimentality and I'm not talking about romantic love. I'm speaking of the kind of love that grounds us in the heart of God. The kind of love that seeks to deeply know, and when it does that honors and respects that which is outside ourselves.

Now there is another word for this kind of love, as I mentioned before. Compassion.
The work of love… the work of compassion.
This is the kind of love that makes us human.

Some supplementary materials from one of the "Living the Questions" series offer some wonderful illustrations. (Living the Questions. Session 19 'Compassion: The Heart of Jesus Ministry.') I'll pass them on to you.

A student of anthropologist Margaret Mead once asked her to describe the earliest sign of civilization in a given culture. The young student expected the noted student of cultures to say that clay pots or crude axes or grinding stones were the first clues of civilization. Dr. Mead’s answer was “a healed femur,” the human thighbone. She went on to explain that a healed femur indicated that someone cared. Someone had to do the injured person’s hunting and gathering until the leg healed. The evidence of compassion, she said, is the first sign of civilization.

Doing small things with great love.
Walter Wangerin reminds us that

“Every time you meet another human being you have the opportunity. It’s a chance at [love as compassion.] For you will do one of two things, then. Either you will build them up, or you will tear them down. Either you will acknowledge that they are, or you will make him sorry that they are — sorry, at least, that they are there, in front of you. You will create, or you will destroy. And the things you dignify or deny are God’s own property. They are made, each one of them, in God’s own image. Turn your face truly to the human before you and let her, for one pure moment, shine. Think her important, and then she will suspect that she is fashioned of God.” – Walter Wangerin, Jr. Ragman and Other Cries of Faith pp. 129-130.

Is it possible for us to step out of our self-absorbed lives, and be with another. Isn't that too, what love is? Being with another? Again, I'm not just talking about romantic love, but interpersonal dynamics… when I honor you, when I see you, when I fully acknowledge you, I love you.

A final illustration-
Stephen Covey, author of the best seller, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, relates an encounter on a subway in New York one morning. People were sitting quietly, reading newspapers, lost in thought, or resting with their eyes closed. At the next station, a man and his children entered the subway car. The children were so loud and rambunctious that instantly the whole climate changed. The man sat down next to Covey and closed his eyes, apparently oblivious to the situation. The children were yelling back and forth, throwing things, even grabbing people’s papers. It was very disturbing – and yet the man next to Covey did nothing. It was difficult not to feel irritated. How could this man be so insensitive as to let his children run wild like that and do nothing about it, taking no responsibility at all? It was easy to see that everyone else on the subway felt irritated, too.
Finally, with as much patience and restraint as he could muster, Covey turned to the man and said, “Sir, your children are really disturbing a lot of people. I wonder if you couldn’t control them a little more?” The man lifted his gaze as if to come to a consciousness of the situation for the first time and said softly, “Oh, you’re right. I guess I should do something about it. We just came from the hospital where their mother died about an hour ago. I don’t know what to think, and I guess they don’t know how to handle it either.”
Covey was stunned.

“Can you image how I felt at that moment?” he asks. His understanding shifted. He relates, “Suddenly I saw things differently, and because I saw differently, I thought differently, I felt differently, I behaved differently. My irritation vanished. My heart was filled with the man's pain. Feelings of sympathy and compassion flowed freely.” "Your wife just died? I'm so sorry. Can you tell me about it? What can I do to help?” Everything changed in an instant.
– adapted from Stephen Covey
The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, (Fireside, NY: 1989) p.30-31

To see another person, even a stranger, as a sister or brother, is the beginning of love and a life centered in God.

“We cannot do great things, but we can do small things with great love.” Mother Teresa

So how 'bout it, people? Can we change the world with love?
I don't know….
but I do know we can change OUR world, our worlds, with love.
We can do small things, with great love.
And that will make all the difference.

The trick, we know, is in the doing.

Amen.