“All You Need Is Love”

Since the development of human speech, poets, prophets, preachers and performers have been talking about, singing about and proclaiming love. In the 1960’s we heard “All you need is love” and “I love him, I love him and where he goes I’ll follow,” and many other songs and poems about love. Of course, the Bible proclaims love in many of its various books: Micah 6:8, “He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” and Luke 10:27-28, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.”

About 100 A.D., a teacher of the Johanine School (1 John 4:7-21) proclaimed,

Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love. 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. In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us.

The teacher goes on to proclaim that, “as God is so are we in this world.” That is, if God is love, then we too are love in this world!” And after God’ promise, the challenge: “those (of you) who say, I love God, and hate your brothers or sisters 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 commandment we have from God is this: those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also.

And who are our brothers and sisters? I believe they are the same people Jesus describes as neighbor in his parable of the Good Samaritan related in Luke 10:29-37.  I share with you a “Southern Version” of that Parable, as told to me by the protagonist who I will call “Reverend Bob.”

In the late 1960’s Rev. Bob was pastor of a small, Southern, rural Methodist church. He was invited to lead the devotion at a Klan Rally. He was picked up, blindfolded and driven into the mountains where the paved road turned into a dirt road. At the end of the dirt road he was lead down a foot path to the circle where the cross was burning, at which point the blind fold was removed. He began to preach, telling a story of a black man who drove his car into a ditch. Amid cheers and applause, Rev. Bob told of the local Methodist preacher, Baptist preacher and Police Chief who stopped, looked over the situation and drove on. And then . . . a Klansman stopped, saw the man and helped him to the hospital. The cheers turned to boos.  The fire was extinguished and Rev. Bob was left alone in the mountains in the dark. Slowly he found his way back to the paved road where a member of his congregation picked him up and took him back to his car.

Who is our neighbor? Who are our brothers and sisters? I believe Micah, John, Jesus and Reverend Bob help us see who they are.

“May we seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving our neighbor as ourselves.”