Unconditional Love

Sunday, May 9, 2004

Rev. Ronald Burcham

Typed from audio transcript

Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.

Bill decided that Monday was the day. Monday was the day he was finally going to approach his boss about a promotion. A new position had just opened up. He felt confident he was qualified, that he could do the job well. So Monday was going to be the day. He stewed about it all weekend long. Even that morning when he was getting ready, his wife was extra patient with him because, although he knew he was qualified and he should get the position, this wasn't something he was comfortable in doing. It just didn't come easy to him to approach somebody in that way.

All morning long, he worried about it. Finally, just before lunch, he shot off an e-mail requesting a meeting with his boss, scheduled for 2:00 that afternoon. At 2:00, he walks in and, to his surprise and to his delight, the boss agreed. He was the perfect person for the position. It was his along with a pretty good-sized salary increase. Bill was having a great day. Couldn't wait to get home and surprise his wife and tell her the good news. He walked through the door and knew something was up because, on the dining room table, there was the finest china all laid out. Two candles were lit. He could smell from the kitchen his favorite meal was being prepared. The kids were nowhere to be seen. Someone at the office must have tipped her off to the good news.

He was a little bit disappointed because he couldn't tell her but not really. He went into the kitchen, gave her a hug, and told her he got the promotion. She appropriately looked surprised when he said it, and the two of them sat down for dinner. As he sat down next to his plate, there was a little card. And the little card said, "Honey, congratulations on your promotion. You deserve it. These things are to tell you how much I love you." They had a great meal. The meal was over. They were cleaning off the dishes and getting ready to go over and get the kids from the neighbor's house. And all of a sudden he looked down and there on the countertop, it looked like an identical note to the one he read next to his plate, so he pulled it out and he read it. And it said, "Honey, don't worry about the promotion and you not getting it. You deserved it anyway. These things are here to tell you how much I love you." That's unconditional love. That's total acceptance.

Her love for him was not based on whether he got the promotion or not. It wasn't based on his career track. It wasn't based upon how high his income was. Her love was unconditional, and her acceptance was total and complete. If he were rejected at work, he would always be accepted at home.

It's that kind of love that every person needs. It's that kind of love which is the basic building block of every family, that strong, powerful love, that unconditional love. It's the same kind of love that Jesus was talking about when He said to His disciples and He says to us, "As I have loved you, now you must love one another." It's a love that doesn't have any strings attached to it. It's a love that doesn't have any conditions. So often our relationships are conditional relationships, and even our love is maybe a conditional love. We'll say if not overtly in our mind, "I'll love you as long as you love me. I'll be your friend as long as you're my friend." We live by the rule that we'll treat others the same way they treat us. If they're nice to us, then we'll be nice to them. If they're mean and nasty to us, well then we'll be mean and nasty to them. In fact, don't we even say that we are justified if somebody is not pleasant to us, we're just going to give them a piece of their own little medicine now, aren't we?

Most times, our relationships and the way we treat people are conditional. We can even feel justified in hurting somebody else if they hurt us first. But the kind of love God has for us and the kind of love He wants us to have in all of our relationships and especially in our families is an unconditional love. Could you imagine what our life would be like if God treated us the same way we treated Him, if God acted towards us the same way we act towards Him at times? But God doesn't do that. God puts no conditions on His love for us. He puts no conditions on how He treats us. In fact, no matter how we treat God, God is always going to love us. Even if we don't love God, God still is going to love us. Even those times when we turn our back on God, we reject God, we go against His Word and His ways, God still loves us. That's a strong kind of love. That's a powerful love. It's an unconditional love. It's a love that only gives and doesn't look for anything in return. It's the love that God has for you and now God says you can have that love for other people.

Jesus said, "Love one another in the same way that I've loved you." Well, the gospel writer, John, in his first letter, put it this way, "We love because God first loved us." Once we've experienced God's unconditional love, once we know that we have total acceptance with God for who we are and where we are, no matter what the circumstances are, once you've experienced and you really understand that love, then we're empowered to love that way to other people. That's foundational. It is foundational and vital for our families to have that kind of strong and powerful love, to know there is one place we can go that we'll always be accepted and we'll always be loved. Even those times when we are unlovable. And if we're honest with ourselves, there are lots of times when we're unlovable, right? Usually when we're sick, we're not feeling well. We're grumpy. We're irritable. It's not times we're really pleasant to be around, but it's those times we need to be loved, to need to know we are accepted. Those times when everything goes wrong in our day, the times when we don't make the team, when we don't get the promotion, when everything goes wrong on the trip home, you have the accident, to know there is a place to come where you're going to be loved and you're going to be accepted for who you are. Every family needs that kind of love, that kind of unconditional love. We need to be able to give that love, and we need to be able to receive it.

Well, unconditional love is demonstrated in many ways. And I would suggest today that we need to start demonstrating that love first to our families and then to others. One of the most powerful ways we can demonstrate this powerful kind of love is to admit when we're wrong. There may be nothing more difficult than to say to someone you know and you care about that what you did was wrong, to admit your mistakes, to admit your sins, a willingness to ask for forgiveness for somebody else. Usually, we can come up with a million and one reasons on why we did something. We can feel justified, and we can rationalize everything out. But it's this kind of love that motivates us to admit when we're wrong and to seek forgiveness.

I ran across the story about a mother and a son. It said at the bottom, "Author unknown." Maybe that's purposeful because I think any parent probably could write their name in as writing this story. The way it goes is this: A mom and son are on their way to school one day, and it's a particularly busy day like all days seem to be busy for moms. And she has a million and one things she has to get done, and the first thing on her list is a bunch of errands. The first errand is to drop her son off to school. As she's driving to drop him off at school and she's figuring out between traffic and everything else, how can she make all the other stops, they stop at a red light, and the son, of course, is oblivious to all this. He's looking around and he says, "Oh, Mom, look at the cool car over here." And she responded the way every parent does, without looking, without moving her head, "Um huh, yeah, that's really cool." Well, that didn't sit too well with her son, and he's kind of disgusted at her. They get to school. He doesn't say a word. He just gets out of the car and slams the door, and he goes off into class. Well, things didn't change for her all day long. Traffic was worse than she suspected. The lines were longer at the stores. Finally, she picks him up from school, takes him home, feeds him dinner, gets him off to practice, back home from practice, now shuffles him off to the bath, gets him out of the bath, and it's time to shuffle him into bed. And she's looking forward to maybe five minutes where she can sit down, so she's hustling him down the hallway, putting him into bed, tucks him in, goes to close the door, and as she's walking out the door, "Wait, Mom, wait. I've got something for you." "Not now," she says, "in the morning." "No, it can't wait, Mom. I need to show this to you right now." A little bit more terse, "Not now. You can show me in the morning." Now he pushes his luck. "No, you won't have time in the morning, Mom. It will be just like this morning. You won't have any time in the same way you just blew me off when I wanted to show you that cool car. You'll do the same thing tomorrow morning." Now she's angry for two reasons, one the tone of his voice and, two, because he's striking too close to the truth. "No," she says, closes the door, "Tell me in the morning." She gets down the stairs. With each step, more regret comes into her heart. She gets into the living room and tells her husband what happened. He says, "Well, you know, you could go back up. He's probably still awake." She heads back up the steps slowly, opens the door, looks over at him. There crumbled up in his hand was what he wanted to give her. So she pulled it out and evidently they had made hearts that day in school, and he wrote a poem. It was entitled Why I Love My Mother. It said, "You always take time to play. I love you, Mommy, because I'm the biggest part of your busy day." Well, that just tore it for her, didn't it? She went back downstairs and made two cups of hot chocolate and got some cookies out of the cupboard and went back upstairs, sat down on the bed, and slowly stroked his cheek until he woke up kind of bleary eyed. He looked at her confused like what was going on, and she said, "I just want to tell you I'm sorry. I'm sorry I didn't listen to you and I didn't see what you had for me. I want you to sit up and I want you to know you're the most important part of my busy day."

I suppose there are lots of things we could learn from that story. This morning, the most important is: It is not a sign of weakness to admit when you're wrong. It's a sign of strength and love. It's a sign of love to be able to swallow your pride and you have to walk up to your son or your daughter, your mom or your dad, your husband or your wife and to say, "I was wrong, and I'm sorry. Would you forgive me?" That's a strong love. That's a powerful love.

This powerful love also is a love that is forgiving. It is an unconditional forgiveness. In fact, it is an unending forgiveness. It's this kind of love that enables us to put no limitations on the forgiveness that we'll offer to someone else, in the same way that God has no limitations in how many times He will forgive us and how many times He will forgive us for the very same thing. How often have you come before God confessing the very same act again and again and again but God forgives you each and every time? There is no limit to how many times we'll forgive somebody else even if this is the tenth time he's done this. But if it's the tenth time that he sincerely asked for forgiveness, then that forgiveness is granted. And the forgiveness that is granted is an unconditional forgiveness. There's no bargaining going on. There's no saying, "Well, I'll forgive you if you promise never to do it again." Forgiveness doesn't work that way. Forgiveness is freely offered and it's given away with no conditions, and the forgiveness is a complete forgiveness. Complete forgiveness means that once it's given, the incident is never brought up again. Scripture puts it this way. God says, "I choose not to remember your sins." He says, "I will remember your sins no more," through the prophet Isaiah. That means when we come to God and we confess a sin, God forgives it and He chooses not to remember it. It's gone. It's never to be brought up again. Oh, if we could only learn to do that with each other, if we could learn to do that with our families. How often times does an argument start and, by the time you finish that argument, you don't remember what started the argument? That's because you've covered so much territory in between, it's turned into a history lesson. Everything that person has ever done, you like to bring up again. That's not healthy. Complete forgiveness says if an incident has been forgiven, you're going to choose not to remember it. And when the next disagreement comes up and those memories start flooding into your mind, you're going to make a decision. You're going to decide not to remember those memories. You're not going to bring it up again, because they've already been forgiven.

Could you imagine the relationships that would be healed if forgiveness could be there in your home? True forgiveness, unconditional forgiveness, complete forgiveness. That's what unconditional love is all about. An unconditional love is about putting the other person first, making them number one in your life. God put it this way in Romans, "He did not spare His own Son for you." God put you and your needs above His own. God put your salvation above the life of His Son. Jesus put your salvation above all of His suffering and all that He would go through because He cared more about you than He did Himself. Unconditional love is demonstrated when we put other people above ourselves, when wives put their husband first, husbands put their wives first, when we put our children first and the children put each other first. That's the kind of unconditional love. This is the kind of thing that explains why your mom didn't have the latest fashions but you did because she put you first.
This is the kind of love we need to have for each other where siblings actually put each other first and family members think about everyone else. Now I know part of that comes with maturity but sometimes I think the youngest children are more giving than the oldest adults. They understand.

This is the kind of love we need in our homes. It's an unconditional love, and it's demonstrated throughout our lives, demonstrated in many ways but it is the basic building block of a healthy family because strong families are built on love, the strong and powerful love God has for us. And what a fitting day for us to celebrate that as we come together on a day in which we celebrate and appreciate our moms, moms who seem to, more often than not, demonstrate that kind of strong love, that kind of unconditional love.

So this is the perfect day for us to make a commitment to ourselves and to our families, the commitment to start loving them, to love them with the same love that God has shown you, a strong unconditional love. Amen.

Copyright 2004 Gloria Dei Lutheran Church