"Too Much of a Good Thing is...WONDERFUL!" Mae West

“Too Much of a Good Thing is…WONDERFUL!” Mae West
The Radical Power of Love

I have said for many years now that the greatest unused power of the Church is love. Oh yea, I know…our bumper stickers shout the contrary. “Honk if you love Jesus”, “I love you, and God loves you MORE!”, “We Love you at (fill in the blank with your church name)”. I am personally allergic to bumper stickers. I break out in curmudgeon like sounds every time I see one, particularly embarrassing Christian bumper stickers.

I’m sorry…I verbally did what I physically do when driving my car and seeing stupid bumper stickers…veer off the road and head for the ditch.

Leonard Sweet (E. Stanley Jones professor of evangelism at Drew Theological in Madison, New Jersey) said, “If Christianity really wanted to get radical, the first thing it could do would be to stop privileging Western rationalization.” What this means to me is that we must intentionally take a dive in the deep end of the pool of God’s true character.

For instance, the rational Western theologian looks at a scripture passage that says, “Christ is the head of every man, and the man is the head of a woman, and God is the head of Christ” (I Corinthians 11:3) and deduces that men are the only legitimate power brokers in the church. The problem is that rational thought and the radical love of God are quite often incompatible. The radical love of God proclaims that now, in Christ and His obliteration of the letter of the law through His death, burial, resurrection and ascension to the Right Hand of God, there is now neither Jew or Greek, male or female, for we are all one in Christ (Galatians 3:28).

This messes with my head! No pun intended. How can one verse be so permissive of male dominance and the next one explicitly rip that notion right out of my manly hands? It can because now we believers are no longer permitted to be in the lock-down of the law and prophets. Jesus said in Luke 16:16 that John the Baptist was the exclamation point of the law and prophets and now the Kingdom of God, and its radical law of outrageous love is being proclaimed, and everyone is fighting their way into the atmosphere of this new message!

Here’s an instant replay of I Corinthians 11:3 through the rose-colored lens of Love: “Christ is the head of men. He told his believers before He left the earth, ‘you’ll do My works and even greater works than Me’, thus providing that ‘headship’ is love’s empowerment, not the law’s need for external controls. Furthermore, God is the Head of Christ which is easily understood when you know that Christ said, ‘If you’ve seen Me, you’ve seen the Father’, and with that Word Jesus lived out His Father’s love with an obedience born from intimate unity. And man is the head of a woman by being so filled with the Love of God that he is not afraid of her empowerment.”

Love goes where the Law stops.

Ah, this love thing might just catch on! Would you like another example that explodes harsh legalistic religious bigotry? OK….any suggestions? What’s that? You two there, waaaay in the back row….say it loud. Ah yes, politics and lifestyle choices… Well, maybe I shouldn’t….but since you asked, I’ll take a stab at it.

Remember that annoying sermon Jesus preached from a mountain? Matthew heard Jesus say something like this, “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor, and hate your enemy. But I say to you, love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you.” Here’s something that really juices this up…ready? Jesus literally took an Old Testament scripture, in this case, and tore it to shreds!

The reference is from Deuteronomy 23:3-6. I will spare you the rigid details in this venue, but I would invite you to read for yourself the complete history behind this narrative. Here’s my take; Jesus is saying, “Remember how God told you that you should not seek to bless or support an old political rival with peace and prosperity? Blam…that’s done. Now I want you to pray blessing and prosperity on Republicans, Democrats and Independents all in the same breath! AND do it with your heart completely healed by the irrational reach of real love for your very real enemies. I want people to look at you and honestly wonder what ‘side’ you are on because your love is so completely all encompassing.”

“BUT, if I love people like that they’ll think I’m approving of their lifestyle! If I love like that my Christian friends will think I’m compromising! If I love like that people won’t know what my moral stand is!”

As to “lifestyle” question, Jesus completely loved one group of people so much He was called a “drunk” (Matthew 11:19). As to what my “Christian friends” think, I have found that living to please them is too exhausting and soul draining to matter. And, on the “moral stand” matter, if I am not being perfected in the Love of God, my moral stand is completely irrelevant and without merit. Christianity in 2009 can not afford to be known more for moral convictions than we are known for fanatic love!

There’s a lot of talk in church circles these days about, “world-view”. I have not read it all nor have I had the inclination to do so. What I have seen simply makes me nervous because it takes a squeaky-clean, hard edged approach that our culture and the church is in trouble due to an anemic Biblical “world-view”. Frankly, I think if the church really had a complete revelation of God’s true world view, some church folks might want to have God excommunicated.

The only world view I want is LOVE. God’s value for the world is in direct relationship to the value He holds for His own Son (John 3:16). That love THEN is the same love NOW, for THIS world. Crazy, huh? Yes, it is. But that’s the wonder of love out of heaven’s unlimited bounty. Mae West was right! “Too much of a good thing is WONDERFUL!” Does that make me a friend of Mae? I sure hope so.