Welcome, thank you! Had a great time here last year, was excited to come back. All so welcoming!

This morning I want to talk about Love. This may have been obvious by my choice of readings: two famous, refulgent passages that drive the beauty of God’s love home in a way that feels like almost too much. Perhaps it is the associations we have with these readings that make them so sugary sweet in our minds: wedding bells, hearts, doves, smiling faces, happy songs “All you need is love.” And surely those good feelings are there. Love is, after all one of the more pleasant emotions.

But that’s not the kind of love I want to talk about this morning. Honeymoons, white dresses, church bells, they have their place. But today I want to talk about love in the midst of much less celebratory time and place: I want to talk about love in the hospital. Replace the bells with beeps and buzzers; replace the tuxes and dresses with johnnys and buttoned up blue gowns, where people walk down the halls with a tree of IVs on their arm rather than their date. Replace the honeymoon suite with an electric bed and a stiff couch.

Richard was just past fifty years old and he was sick, deathly sick. His cancer was spreading and he was out of options. He looked like a walking skeleton, his voice a quiet rasp. Every time I went by their room Pamela his wife, was there, eyes wrung out with tears and lines of grief growing across her face. She never left his side. First time I stopped by to say hello they kindly asked me to leave, he was too tired to even sit up and talk. But I kept coming back, and as it turns out they were strong evangelical Christians whose love for one another was thing holding them up day after day, bad test result after bad test result, and restless night after restless night.

You see this summer, as part of my ministerial training I have been working as a chaplain at Massachusetts General Hospital. And one of my responsibilities is to cover their main in-patient Oncology floor. Now you all may know this already but if you have to be in-patient for cancer treatments, it means you’re very sick. It means you’re too sick to recover from treatments at home. And for a lot of the people on our floor, it means you are getting ready to die, and soon. I’ve only been working their two months and already I’ve lost track of the number of conversations I’ve had with patients and their families about their impending demise. Some people are accepting of this inevitability, some people are afraid, some people are angry, but all of them, when I ask them, “Where are you getting your strength to keep going, from? Where are you finding hope in this situation? What keeps you fighting on?” Turn their glance from me towards the sofa bed in the room, where their loved one either sits presently or has just left, and says, “Them. My wife. My husband. My children. I draw my strength from them.” They find their strength in the Love being given to by the constant devotion, service and sacrifice of their beloved.

Now, this kind of love is not a cure. It is not going to cure the patient’s cancer and it’s not going to excuse them from the sadness and fear of dying. But it can help carry them through. It’s the kind of love that is countless nights on a hospital sofa, eating cafeteria food, counting bowel movements, just to claim every last second of time with your beloved that you can while they are on this earth. The kind of love that reaches down into the depths, the darkest hours of human pain and says I will be your candle, I will keep with you in this time. The kind of love that sits on the Cross of human experience, the kind of love that walks with you through the valley of the shadow of death.

I want to talk about that kind of love, because that love, I have come to believe, is God. It’s not that that love is “divine” or it is “God’s love.” No. I believe that kind of love is God’s very self, His very substance.

The Bible tells us the same. 1 John 4:7 “Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God…. for God is love.” Love is from God, not in the sense of God sent us some love in the mail, it’s from him, it is “of God” because “God is Love.”

How do we know what God looks like? How do we know the attributes of this Love? Because we have the example of Jesus Christ: “God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him.” This is that staying kind of love that is so evident at the hospital, the kind of love which accompanies one to the Cross, that accompanies one through the slow torture that is Cancer, and is there to offer Resurrection after it.

We also, as the author of 1 John writes, have the promise that while “No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us.” You see what I’m getting at here is that when we have love for one another, the kind of self-giving, self-sacrificing, with you till the end, light in the darkness, with you in the pain and the sorrow kind of love for one another, we are encountering God firsthand. He is breaking into our world. For “God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.”

This idea of God’s very substance breaking into our world is sometimes hard to visualize, but imagine with me a pool of water, let’s say the ocean. That water evaporates, rises up into the air, condenses into a cloud and rains down on you thousands of miles of way. That water raining on you is the same substance as it was in the ocean, H20, but it has been transported into your world, into your life such that you experience it for yourself. That’s how I like to think about God as love.

Now St. Paul raises the stakes: he’s no longer talking just about this world, but the next. In the first letter to the Corinthians, chapter 13 he says that if we don’t have love, it doesn’t matter what we do, it won’t last. Because everything ends except love; “Love never Ends.” And this is where we can start to understand why it is so important, not to mention incredible, that we can experience God in the here and now through those whom we love. Prophecies? Knowledge? Tongues? Your life? They will all come to an end. Because we are limited, we are finite, and we have an expiration date. But Love, love never ends. Because Love is God. And God never ends. So for the patients that I talk to, when they tell me that they have experienced the kind of self-sacrificing, self-giving love from their family members who are carrying them through this illness, I take comfort in the fact that they have glimpsed God, who awaits them once they die. For as Paul says, now we see it only in part, we speak it only in part, we know it only in part. But then, “when the complete comes” we shall know it fully: that God is love and where true love is, God himself is there.

And it is that love, that feeling, that emotion that drives our hearts to break with another’s and our hands to reach out and hold another, our feet to remain planted and support another. That is the very substance of God. That is of an order not of this world. It transcends any of our corporeal nature; that goes far beyond the biological designations of life and death.

Love–patient, kind, humble, honest, strong, sacrificial, self-giving love—is God, and we glimpse Him in part, at times, in the reflection through the mirror of another. And that is what we have to look forward to existing in once we die. To have touched it, to have been lead to it by Jesus Christ, to have seen only a flash of it is to have experienced the eternal in the temporal; we have had but a little taste and the whole meal is waiting. That is when we, as human beings, come in contact with that mysterious Something beyond the reach of our comprehension and understanding. And because of that experience, we can look forward to our end with comfort and confidence. For that is Love. And Love is God. And Love never ends.

After a few weeks in the hospital Richard and Pamela left. They had come to the sad realization that there was nothing more we could do medically to fight his disease and they made the decision, with all our encouragement and prayers, to go home to die. I didn’t hear from them again. But this week as I was going through some papers I came across his name. He had died just days after leaving the hospital. And at first I was sad. I would never see him again. But then I said a silent prayer of thanks for the fact that he had known, in the love and devotion of his wife to him and he to her, a bit of the even fuller, more constant more complete existence of Love which is God our Father. And it is in that house of pure, unending love that he abides now, for all eternity.

Let us pray:
Oh God of love, who blesses us with the chance to know you in the people in our lives who give us love and whom we love in return, mercifully fill our lives with an awareness of that love that we may honor those in whom we find it, and by so doing honor you, our Heavenly Father who awaits us, to welcome us home in perfect love.
Thanks be to God for that.
Amen.