LOVE’S ADVENTURE John M. Buchanan
I John 4:7-12 Fourth Presbyterian Church
May 5, 1985 Chicago, IL

On April 9, 1945, forty years ago last month, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was
executed by his 8.8. guards at Fiossenburg prison, As a traitor to the Third
Reich. Bonhoeffer was a young German pastor and theologian with a growing
international following. When the Nazis came to power in 1933 he was a
pacifist. In time, however, his mind changed: he became an outspoken critic
of the government and ultimately joined a conspiracy to assasinate Adolf
Hitler. The plan failed. Bonhoeffer and others were arrested. Several days
before the end of the war he was hanged. On the fortieth anniversary of his
death the Christian Century editorialized: "As perilous as the issues of our
time may seem, Bonhoeffer’s legacy reminds us that we must take sides, that
indifference is the worst form of immorality."

Bonhoeffer is a reminder that ta love God intentionally, to chose to be a
Christian in this world is a very serious commitment. It can be an adventure
at best, a very costly business at worst. Bonhoeffer’s experience is a
reminder to those of us not forced by circumstance to make adecision which
will determine whether or not we live, that there is more to. life, in
Christian terms, than putting in time. His brief but publically faithful
life, is a reminder that by Christian criteria the meaning of a life has more
to do with the choices and commitments made in love than the number of years
it endures. From his prison cell he wrote:

“A person must plunge into life...To be a Christian does not mean
to be religious in a particular way, to cultivate some form of
ascetism...but to be a man." (Letters and Papers from Prison
July 18, 1944, p. 222-223)

That is the prablem — to be a whole human being...How to live life fully;
how to enjoy it; how to get as much out of it as we possibly can; how to go to
sleep peacefully at night with some sense that this day and the accumulation
of all these days I am living has been worth the effort, that it all is adding
up te something. Knowledge of our mortality is a mixed blessing. Without it
we probably would not create anything. Herbert Maslow, recuperating from a
heart attack, wrote to a friend that if you knew you were never going to die,
love, ecstacy and beauty would not be possible. And yet the morbid but
accurate observation that life is merely the process of dying does have a
sobering affect when one stumbles upon it in the wee hours of some sleepless
night. Macbeth’s lament is universal:

"Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time;

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle."

How to live? How to Live with enough intentionality and commitment so
that our lives transcend, are free from, the capitivity of death? That is the
human question. The answer, I submit, is a truth the saints and martyrs have
seen: a truth lived and taught by Jesus Christ: a truth to which the Church
has born witness in its better moments. It is contained in a deceptively

Simple phrase in the First Epistle of John..."For we know that we have passed
from death into life because we have Loved the brethren."

That is an astounding assertion. You move from the morbid captivity of
death into the bright fullness of life by loving your sisters and your
brothers! Church tradition has always linked the three brief epistles which
bear the name John with the beloved disciple. Scholarship has determined that
they were written quite late, however, perhaps seventy years after the fact.
Tf that is the case, the major agenda for the author is to get the essence of
it written down before it became lost. And as he thought about it, as he put
his mind to work on refining seventy or so years of Christian experience into
ideas that would help others to understand, in generations to come he kept
returning to the idea of love.

"See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called

Children of God," he wrote. "There is no fear in love, but perfect
love casts out fear," he asserted. "God is love," he proposed, "and
the person who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in that
person."

Students have always known that the auther of these letters is really a
very gifted thinker who is introducing a whole new category of religious
thought. Most religion, certainly the rich Hebrew religion of Jesus, relies
on the ideas of sin and righteousness, te talk about the human condition.
This author proposes several interesting alternatives. Instead of sin and
righteousness he uses darkness and light, and hatred and love. He wrote: "God
is light, and in him is no darkness at all...The one who loves his brothers
and sisters abides in the light. The one who hates walks in the darkness."

There is a very important Christian point here. It is one we are inclined
to forget. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is not a new set of ideas about God, it
is about an incarnate love that gets itself lived in the life of the Christian
community. The gospel is net a new philosophic system but an invitation to
live a new style of life. We move from darkness to light, from death to life,
this author proposes, not by adopting orthodox doctrine, or by growing in our
understanding of the mysteries of God, as much as we Presbyterians like that,
but by “loving the brothers and sisters,"

Ours is not a receptive climate for that basic Christian understanding, I
fear. Each age has its particular challenges for the church. Some of them
have been in the form of outright hostility and persecution. In other ages
the challenge has come in a seductive sympathy with religion in general which
either doesn’t understand or doesn’t like the essence of this Gospel. That is
our situation. Our culture asks the question of life’s meaning and prospect,
holds up the solitary human self as the answer, and says:

" ..this is it: discover it, get into yourself, actualize it,
realize it, celebrate it, indulge yourself, you deserve a break
teday, you are worth it, look out for number one, be your own best
friend, etc."

The New York Times two weeks ago reviewed an important new book, Habits of
the Heart, based on the four major research studies and edited by Robert
Bellah, a Unviersity of California sociologist. The book is a study of
individualism in America and it concludes that individualism, which when

—3-

balanced with a commitment to equality, is dynamic, has today tipped the
scales. "We are concerned," the authors write, "that this individualism may
have grown cancerous...that it may be destroying (us}..."

The Times review included a most thoughtful paragraph:

"We have never before faced a situation that called our deepest
assumptions so radically inte question. Our problems teday are
not just political. They are moral and have to do with the
meaning of life...we are beginning to understand that our common
life requires more than an exclusive concern for material accumu
lation. Perhaps life is not a race whose only goal is being
foremost." (New York Times, 4/14/85)

it would seem at first that if the goal is to get as much out of life as
possible, we cught to do as much for ourselves as possible. We ought to focus
our energies, our creativity, our time and resources on this project. The
only trouble is that it doesn’t work. It ought to but it doesn’t. Our best
humanity is net affirmed by egotism. The best in us is not celebrated by self
indulgence. In fact, there is a sense in which the more we live for ourselves
alone, the less we are alive.

Theologian Dorothy Seelle has written a provocative little book with the
title Death by Bread Alone, in which she describes in personal, behavioral
terms how deadly self centeredness becomes.

"Being alone and then wanting to be alone: being friendless,

yet distrusting and despising others; forgetting and then being
forgotten; Living only for ourselves and then feeling unneeded;
being unconcerned about others and wanting no one to be concerned
about us; neither laughing nor being laughed at; neither crying for
another, nor being cried for by another." {p. 1-2)

The poets have understood it clearly...as a life style, self indulgence
ends up denying, not enhancing life. T.5. Ebiot once wrote that an apt
description of our civilization might read:

“Here were decent godless people
Their only monument the asphalt road
And a thousand lost golf balis."

Even 2D. H. Lawrence, not an artist one would normally characterize as self
denying, once confessed...

"T was weary of the world
I was so sick of it
Everything was tainted with myself." (New Heaven and Earth)

The Gospel of Jesus Christ suggests that life becomes good and exciting
and interesting when we get out of self. Life is an adventure of love. That
is the Christian secret. In Jesus Christ, God our creator summons us toa
realize the fullness of our humanity, and to discover the meaning of life by
shifting the focus ~ away from ourselves to others; to redirect the energy
from introspection to the world outside ourselves. It is not a philosophic
shift, by the way. The author of the Epistle of John moved from soaring

abstractions to concrete realities: "We move from death to life because we
love,” and then several sentences later..."if anyone has the world’s goods and
sees someone in need, yet closes his heart, how dees God’s love abide in that
person?"

Martin Marty recently cited a prayer which if we haven’t prayed we surely
understand. "Use me, Lord, use even me...preferably in an advisory capacity."
Christian love, the love that is an adventure, is tangible, practical: it has
to do with flesh and blood people and institutions who need us.

So today, in the life of this church, the rhythm is from theology to the
Board of Trustees: from thoughtful reflections on the meaning of life to the
lengthy meetings of the Education Committee; from sermons on love to the
budget. The people who are teday ordained and installed, and all those who
serve the church in everyday, pragmatic ways, are eloquently expressing the
truth of the Gospel. Love is practical. Love reaches out and makes life
better, happier, safer, healthier, for others. Love discovers that the
happiest thing in the world is someone else’s happiness.

How to live? The noble example of Dietrich Bonhoeffer suggests that there
is more to the answer than managing to stay alive for 70 or 80 or 90 years.
Tt is a matter of toving deeply. It is a matter of taking sides, of caring
deeply about the world and all its agonizing complexity. The Christian
prescription for full life is to care deeply about life everywhere: to make
choices: to learn and to develop informed opinions about some of the thorni-
est, most controversial problems facing the human community; to take a stand
for life in those arenas where it is not always popular, or acceptable to do
BO.

The Christian prescription is to love life everywhere: to become vulner—
able; to risk a broken heart everyday for the sake of love; to love so much
you actually experience the hurt whenever and wherever human life is denied,
diminished, oppressed...to love so much you experience the ecstacy whenever
and wherever human life is affirmed, enhanced, celebrated: in freat art and
music, a walk by the lake on a sunny day, when justice is down, when the
miracie of another’s love happens to you.

To the ancient question: "How shall we live fully?" the faith answers;
Love...love the people God gives you to love; love them with strength and
kindness and ultimate loyalty. Love them by listening to them, by taking into
your own hearts their joys, hopes, aspirations, disappointments, and fears.
Love school and church and community. Love your nation enough to expect it to
be as noble as its noble principals. Love it enough to weep when it is less
than that. Love the whole wide wonderful world God has given, and love the
God who made it to give.

The meaning of our humanity is established, when we love enough to make
choices and commitments; and when in love we put our lives in the service of
some cause.

Each of us decides, therefore, to live fully or not to live fully.

What makes those propositions a proclamation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ
and not just sound psychological advice is that their truth has been
demonstrated. God has put his life on the line. God has allowed himself to

be defined as love — love fully lived out
healing, teaching, and dying. The truth is, you and I have been loved —- are

loved by God. And in Jesus Christ, summoned to all the glorious Fullness of
life as Ged conceived and created it.

We are invited toa love’s adventure -
for life, and forever.

in Jesus: love lived in serving,

Praise and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and
strength to our God for ever and ever. Amen.