“Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God.”

“God is love, and those who abide in love

abide in God, and God abides in them.”

“If we love one another, God lives in us,

and his love is perfected in us.”

1 John reads like poetry.

In fact, it isn’t really a letter at all, though we call it an epistle.  Most modern scholars consider it a teaching given by a circle of teachers in the Johannine tradition.

And you can tell from this passage of the teaching, that love is central to the entire Way of Jesus.  That to follow Jesus and to come to God requires love.

Love has always been, is, and will always be the central tenet of our faith.

Love is not an option on the way of Christians and the Way of Christ.

Love is the Way.  Love is the path.  Love is the very thing that brings us to God.

In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus says that the two greatest commandments are love…love God and love your neighbor.  “And on these hang all the Law and the Prophets.”

Paul writes in Corinthians:

“If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy going.

And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries

and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains,

but do not have love, I am nothing.

If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body,

but do not love, I gain nothing.”

Love is an inescapable part of this path and tradition.  And yet, I don’t know how well we understand that crucial concept: love.

I will take the risk and say all of us have been socially trained and conditioned since little children to think of love as a feeling.

That it is a kind of automatic feeling.  It just arises when the connection is “right.”  Love has a kind of mind of its own and it comes sometimes without much awareness or intentionality…but it also can just go away.

And on top of that, we’ve been taught that love is a very special kind of feeling.  A feeling that you share with only a few people, people who you trust and know very well.

Now hopefully many of you who have lived many years and have gone through a lot of ups and downs, hopefully you know about a more mature understanding of love.  Love as commitment.  Love as going through difficulties and trials together.  Love as a conscious choice, daily, to choose the good for another person.

And this is all very good and true…but I think for many of us, it’s always been hard to shake that early seed of sentimental love that we were conditioned into.

And so I want to invite us to consider yet another dimension to this term “love.”

Join me in considering love, not as a feeling.  But as an ability.

Love as a skill that one builds and develops.

Can you consider and think about love as a spiritual practice?

And that this practice of love will ultimately bring us to God.

That is love’s purpose.

The only way we come to God is through love.

I want to invite us to explore this idea of love as a spiritual practice that brings us to God from a couple of different angles.

I’ll start with yourself…and myself.

Our relationship with ourselves is one of the most fundamental relationships we have in life.  It is most certainly our longest relationship.

And thus, it needs to be the most fundamental place that we practice this spiritual practice of love.

But what does that look like?

Is self-love the same thing as feeling good about ourselves all the time?

Does self-love mean I don’t ever say bad stuff about myself to myself?

Not at all.

In fact, the best moment to practice self-love and to understand what it is…

Is precisely those moments when we are hard on ourselves, fixated on some flaw or mistake we’ve made.

So in one of those moments when you’re feeling down about yourself…

The practice of love would be to notice the self-judgment…

and not push it away,

or try to overcome it with positivity…

but maybe to have compassion for that voice.

“Oh wow…that thought, that self-judgment is attached to a lot of fear…or sadness…maybe guilt, or shame”

In some traditions, this step of the practice is called “inviting the judgmental thought in for a cup of tea.”

Just sit with it, and don’t freak out that it’s there…but calmly accept that it is part of you.

But the practice of self-love doesn’t stop there.

Giving that empathy to the self-judgment separates you from it, helps you step back from it and notice who else is in the room.

Self-love notices the pressures and pains you were in when you did or did not do whatever it is you’re upset about.

Self-love notices the ways you want to make things right.

Self-love notices and celebrates the person who is in there, doing their best to get it right every day…the person who is in there trying to care for other people, trying to live with kindness and compassion for others.

Self-love sees you.

All of you…the good and the bad…the stuff you like about yourself, and the stuff you don’t.

And it doesn’t change any of it.

You won’t magically come to enjoy your inner critic.  You’ll still not like it when that self-judgment comes back again.

But your also not held captive by it.  Through a practice of self-love you begin to see yourself not as sin would see you.  Sin being a state of alienation and wrongness.  Not through that lens.  But instead through the lens of how God sees you.

That you see yourself through the eyes of Jesus…warts and all…the parts of health and disease.

You see yourself as a fellow child of God…no matter what you’ve done or not done…no matter what someone else has told you about who you are.

You are a child of God.  Which means that at your core there is a basic dignity which no self-judgmental voice or thought can ever, ever snuff out entirely.

Loving yourself brings you into connection and awareness of this basic dignity…which is God’s presence dwelling in you.

And of course this basic human dignity…this basic identity as a child of God…is not unique to you.

It is shared by all humanity.

And really, by all creation.

This is the second angle I want to explore this spiritual practice of love…loving one’s neighbor.

Here things get interesting, because now there is another body involved.

So the practice isn’t just about moving beyond judgment, at this dimension it is also about an actual relationship with another human being.

And this practice begins with good basics like helping others, give money and donations to the poor, and trying to fix the systemic problems in our community.

But those embodied ways of physically enacting love of neighbor hopefully cultivate in you a deeper awareness.

It is an awareness that I find is articulated particularly well by Black theologians and Black theology.

It has been phrased in many ways in that tradition, but one way that might be familiar to many of us is the quote from Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail in 1963:

“Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.

This is the deep awareness that the practice of caring for and helping and being in solidarity with your neighbor is cultivating in you.

And this is the practice of loving your neighbor as yourself. It isn’t “like” yourself.

As yourself…as a part of you.

The practice of loving your neighbor is the daily practice of seeing all those you come into contact with…and all those who you don’t come into contact with but you are aware are suffering in some way…seeing all of that as one body.

One single garment of destiny and mutuality.

This is where we find God in humanity.  When humanity is reconciled through love to one another.

But I would be remiss if we didn’t cover the final angle of this truth:

Love is a spiritual practice that brings us to God.

And this final angle is the angle of loving our enemies.

The authors of 1 John did write:

“Those who say, ‘I love God,’ And hate their brothers or sister,

are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister

whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen.

The enemy is whoever you have placed outside of your heart.  Those people in the world that we have decided are not capable of much good…and who loving seems the most preposterous and even profane.

Now don’t let poetic hyperbole of 1 John scare you.  This is not and was never meant to be a test of whether you a really a good Christian or not.

This is about a spiritual practice you work at daily…because it is hard!

It is hard to love those who have hurt you…those who have hurt others.

It is hard to love people who have broken our trust again and again…people who have demonstrated a harmful pattern of disease.

But in loving them…in loving those people who we have no good reason to love…that is where we encounter God most profoundly.

So the trick to this practice is to start slow.  Maybe don’t start with the first people that popped into your heads.

Maybe pick someone who you just don’t like.

Someone who gets on your nerves, someone who irritates you…frustrates you.

Start there…what does it look like to practice love?

It’s actually Paul’s letter to the Corinthians that shows us that:

Love is patient; Love is kind;

Love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude.

Love does not insist on its own way; Love is not irritable or resentful;

Love does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth.

Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.

What if that were our creed for how we dealt with irritating people?

Maybe it would lead us to encounter and noticing that God given identity, that innate dignity, given by God to all, even in those who are our enemies.

It would be on that day, that all of God’s children could finally come together and say to one another: Alleluia!  We are Free at last!  Alleluia!