Extravagant Love

Extravagant Love

Song of Solomon 8:6b-7; John 21:15-19 NLT

A sermon delivered by the Rev. Dr. Randy K. Hammer on Feb. 16, 2020

“Do you love me?” John 21:15

Do you love me?  Is this not one of the most persistent, most pressing, most pertinent questions to be asked since the beginning of human relationships?  Do you love me?

On the positive side, marriages have occurred, homes have been established, and families been conceived as the result of the question and subsequent answer in the affirmative, “Do you love me?”  “Why, yes, I love you!”

And by the same token, marriages have dissolved, homes have fallen apart, and murders have been committed as the result of the question and subsequent negative response.

As the writer of the Hebrew book of love reminds us, “love is strong as death, jealousy is fierce as the grave” (8:6).  So, yes, whether you are the one doing the asking, or whether you are the one providing the answer, “Do you love me?” is, perhaps, the most crucial question of all.

In the post-Easter passage read from John, Jesus poses this most crucial, most pressing question to Simon Peter: “Simon, do you love?”  “Do you love me more than these?”  What did Jesus mean by use of the pronoun “these”?  The most logical answer is that Jesus was asking Peter if he loved him more than these other followers who were standing by loved him.  It might appear that Jesus was seeking to determine which one of his disciples loved him the most and was most willing to go the distance in order to prove that love.  Which one of them would prove to be the most dedicated, the most dependable, the most capable of carrying on Jesus’ movement in the world?

But Jesus doesn’t just ask the question once and then let it go at that.  No, he presses Peter three times: “Simon!  Do you love me?”  It made Peter sad that Jesus had asked him the question three times, as though Peter had not been truthful the first two times.  Or does asking Peter three times if he loved Jesus correspond to the three times Peter had previously denied Jesus?  Or could it be that in saying, “Yes, Lord, you know that I love you,” Peter didn’t, or couldn’t, really realize the full import of either the question or his response?  Did Peter really know what was meant by the word “love”?   The Greek form Jesus uses here is agape, God-like, sacrificial love that proves itself in action.  Did he really comprehend the nature of true love, and the demands that love would place upon him, and the sacrifices that lay ahead, if he did indeed love Jesus as he said?

The truth of the matter was, if Peter committed himself to Jesus in agape love, it would take him places that he could not imagine and to situations where he would not willingly choose to go.  Tradition says that Peter endured great persecution and an early death by crucifixion.  But not wanting to die in the exact manner that Jesus did, Peter asked to be crucified upside down.

Yes, the reality is, extravagant – exceeding reasonable bounds, unrestrained, profuse, agape – love often calls for extreme sacrifices.  Some ten years and two months ago, we were told (two days before Christmas 2009) that our granddaughter would be born with some severe disabilities.  As you can imagine, the news was devastating.  I was sharing this news with one of our United Church members who was and always has been a tremendous friend and support to our entire family, and she said to me, “But you know what?  You are going to love her just as much as you would if she were to be born with no issues; and you will love her just as much as you love your other grandchildren.”  And you know what, she was right.  Our love for Bethany Grace could not be any stronger than it is.  Life for her has not been easy.  There have been a host of challenges for all of us.  And we have gone places with her that we could have never envisioned that we would go.  But love took us there.

And I have made the statement that if Bethany Grace or any of our grandchildren or children needed a kidney transplant, I would not think twice about being the first one to step forward to donate one if I was a match and could do so.  Perhaps you feel the same way about your children and/or grandchildren or best friend.  That is love, wouldn’t you say? But could we say it is “extravagant love?” Extravagant love takes us to far-reaching places of sacrifice.

But speaking of kidneys, I saw a story where a man needed a kidney transplant and an anonymous donor came forward who happened to be the perfect match.  It was later revealed that the donor was a neighbor down the street who knew of the man’s plight and agreed to donate one of her kidneys that her neighbor so desperately needed.  That is true love in action, isn’t it? 

But wait, there is more.  There was a story on Good Morning America not long ago about a young man named Chris who at the age of 16 began having problems.  The first sign that something was wrong was when he was playing football with his brothers, and when he tried to throw the football, it fell a couple of feet in front of him.  Then he couldn’t even lift up his arm to throw a football.  His family rushed him to the emergency room.  He ultimately was diagnosed with Lupus and his kidneys began to fail.  Chris was told that dialysis was becoming his only option, short of a kidney transplant. 

Abraham, another young man and complete stranger to Chris, had signed up to become a kidney donor after reading an article on it.  Abraham agreed to a test and learned that he was a match for Chris.  The transplant surgery was a success, and recently Chris appeared on Good Morning America and met for the first time on live tv Abraham, the young man who had saved his life.  Now that, I think we would all agree, is extravagant love.  It is a degree of love that many of us have not yet excelled to.  Love that leads one to donate a kidney to a child or grandchild is one thing.  But love that would lead one to donate a kidney to a complete stranger is a love of a different degree, is it not?

Now, obviously, there are a thousand different ways to demonstrate extravagant love, with organ donation being just one of them.  But what all of this says to me is human love tends to be by degrees; that is to say, the love we hold in our hearts and demonstrate in our lives grows stronger by degrees the closer we get to home and those closest to us.  But also, the more we grow and mature, the stronger the degree of our love grows, not just for those close to us, but for others around us, as our circle of concern grows ever wider and wider. 

None of us, I suspect, is yet perfect or completely mature in our love for God and love for others.  Few of us might be able to boast of having or demonstrating extravagant love.  But hopefully, all of us are growing in our degree of love, ever straining higher and higher to a more perfect, more agape-like, sacrificial love.

Yes, the question, “Do you love me?” is one of the most persistent, most pressing, most pertinent questions we are ever asked to answer.  But may our commitment be, as we sang in that beloved hymn a bit ago, “Lord, I want to be more loving in my heart.”  May it be so as we continue to strive toward the ideal of extravagant love.  Amen.