Love Your Neighbor

 

Ah, February! The month when we celebrate love.

Our culture today seems obsessed with the idea of love. Songs, movies, dating apps, clothing, fragrances, advertising, cars, and entire industries revolve around the promise of fulfillment through the love of another person. The Beatles gave us the promise and hope quite succinctly (and repetitively):

All you need is love, love is all you need.

America has taken this to heart. As pastor Glenn McDonald writes: In our society, true love is the ultimate prize. If the Bible says God is love, America says love is god.

The Bible does, indeed, say that God is love. Not only that, the Bible says that God is the source of all love.

This is love: it is not that we loved God but that God loved us.
We are able to love because God first loved us.
1 John 4:10&19

The Bible also says a great many other things about love, as well, most of them being commands to love and instructions about how to love. This is easily missed by a lot of people.

Perhaps you know that many other cultures often have many different words for our single English word, love. The Greeks were one of these cultures and when Jesus talks about love or Paul writes about love, there are often different words with subtly different meaning that are used – all translated as the same word, love. Eros is sexual love; storge is strong affection for; philios is deep and abiding friendship; and agape is a deep, abiding, unconditional, covenantal love. (The Greeks had others, but these are the ones used in the New Testament.)

The one most used to describe how God loves us and how God calls us to love him and others in return is agape. It was a word that was rarely used in Greek culture, maybe because it was so rarely seen or thought possible. When Paul writes about love in 1 Corinthians 13, this is the word he uses. Agape is the love we are called to show one another and the world. This can only be done if we recognize that the one and only source for this love in all the universe is God. And when God is the source, there is always more than enough love to go around.

There was a song written by Hal David and Burt Bacharach that was recorded and made popular in 1965 by Jackie DeShannon. Perhaps you remember it – What the World Needs Now Is Love. I don’t know whether Mr. David had the idea of agape love in mind or not when he wrote the lyrics to this song. I do know, however, that the idea expressed in this song has never been more relevant than it is right now.

The world needs the agape love of God more than ever, needs to hear the message that God loves them unconditionally. More importantly, the world needs to feel God’s agape love through the love of those who claim to know and follow him.

To that end, Second Presbyterian is excited to partner with other houses of worship along Kingston Pike for the third year in a row in the Love Your Neighbor 2022 event on the weekend of February 11-13. On this weekend, faith communities of various denominations will share an uplifting, affirming message that is centered on the power of love. We hope it will serve as a powerful signal to Knoxville that our diverse faith communities always have more in common than we have that divides us.

We have a limited number of yard signs available, should you like to place one in your yard to advertise the event. There will also be a sign in front of our church on Kingston Pike advertising our participation in this event. I hope that you make plans to join us for worship that weekend – even if we are still virtual – as we proclaim the power and the unity of God’s love. I can’t think of a more important message for our world right now.