Love for the Unlovable Luke 6:27–38; Genesis 45:3–15
Grace, mercy, and peace to you, from God our Father, and our Lord, Jesus Christ, who loves the unlovable.
Love for the unlovable is our message today, taken from our Gospel, verses 27 and 28, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, 28 bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.
Thanks be to God that He loves the unlovable, because if He didn’t, He wouldn’t love me and you, nor anyone. And where would we be if God didn’t love us?
God created us to be His family, but we made ourselves into His enemies by choosing to sin against Him. That’s not what God wanted, but its’ what we did.
But because God loved us, He didn’t give up on us. He sent us His Son, and then, His Spirit, to make us His friends again; more than that, to make us His family.
Which is remarkable, considering who we are, and who God is. He’s the Holy One; we’re the fallen ones. And yet He loves us with an unconditional love.
God knows our sinful condition, even better than we do.
He knows the true nature of our sins, how destructive and devasting sin is, all of it, all our sins, but that doesn’t keep Him from loving us.
Our sins have made us unlovable, still God loves us completely.
He withholds none of His love from us; He pours His perfect love and blessings upon us, even though our sins have made us completely undeserving.
It takes a great love to love the unlovable, but that’s what God has, and that’s what He does, and that’s what He calls us to do, to love even the worst of humanity, even those whose evil deeds horrify us.
Not to love their deeds, but to love them.
There are those sins that we find appalling, and there are those sins that we may be tempted to dismiss or overlook, to see as relatively harmless.
Our sinful nature, combined with the sinful culture, work together to cloud our moral judgment, so that we fail to see that all sins are terrible.
The sins that may seem not so bad to us, and the sins that may seem worse, even terrible to us, they all offend and horrify God.
That’s because God is holy, and nothing clouds His judgment.
Recently I read about a mother and father who tortured their baby in a motel room, and then left their baby for dead.
We think, “Who could do that? How can anyone be so evil?”
How can God possibly love such terrible people who commit such atrocities?
Surely He has no love for them; surely they are unredeemable.
If they’re unredeemable, then I’m unredeemable, and you’re unredeemable.
To think that the worst of people are unredeemable is to greatly devalue the suffering and death of God’s Son to redeem the world.
To think that God cannot love sinners of every kind, is to greatly underestimate Him, and His love.
To think that we are more deserving of God’s love than the really bad people are, is to greatly overestimate ourselves.
We are, all of us, as Paul says in 1 Timothy 1: 15, and as we sing in the hymn… chief of sinners.
Paul confesses, and we confess: Here is a trustworthy saying that deserves full acceptance: Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners—of whom I am the worst.
To see our sins as they really are, all we need do is look to the cross.
That Jesus needed to die, and to suffer so severely for our sins, shows how horrible and repulsive sin is, all sin.
When we look to the cross, we see that there is no such thing as a relatively harmless sin; all sin is devastating.
Every sin harms someone, actually two people, at a minimum. It harms the person being sinned against, and it harms the person who is doing the sinning.
And that’s why sin is so horrifying and repulsive to God, and why He punished it so severely on the cross.
God didn’t make us to be harmed, nor to harm others, but to serve others, with a holy, selfless love. And so He hates sin and all the harm and destruction it brings on us.
So where does all this leave us?
It leaves us devastated about our sin, and it leaves us amazed and uplifted in God’s redeeming love.
As horrible as our sins are, all our sins, God’s grace is greater.
Our sins have made us into selfish, disgusting, unlovable creatures. But that doesn’t keep God from loving us with a renewing and redeeming love.
At Lutheran High, one of the teachers my daughters had was Mr. Gustin, spelled… G-U-S-T-I-N.
He liked to say, “You can’t spell disgusting without Gustin.” They got a kick out of that.
Whatever our name, there’s something sickening and disgusting about us – our sin, all of it.
As repulsive as our sin is, as much as God abhors our sin, it didn’t keep Him from sending His Son to save us.
And it didn’t keep Him from sending His Spirit to live in us. That’s how much He loves us, and wants to be with us.
So… how does all this make you feel?
It makes me feel remarkably loved, miraculously loved… and incredibly empowered.
It takes so great a love to love a sinner, and God loves repentant sinners to perfection.
The greater the love, the more it empowers.
With God’s great love in our hearts, we have an amazing love to love others with.
In our Gospel, Jesus challenges us to love people more in the way that God does:
Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, 28 bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.
For the sake of His Son, God loves the unlovable, and He calls and empowers us to do the same.
Who in your life is hard for you to love? What happened to make it that way?
Whatever happened, God’s love is greater.
The Holy Spirit, through the power of God’s Word and Sacraments, would give you a miraculous love, a love born of God, a Christ-like love, a healing, forgiving love to love that person with.
For Joseph in today’s Old Testament, it was his brothers who were hard for him to love.
But before that, he was the one who was hard to love, because he was their father’s favorite, and he liked to rub it in his brothers’ faces.
So they decided that they would kill him. Definitely an overreaction, but that’s what sin can do if we give it free reign to cloud our judgment.
But then they backed off a bit; instead they sold their young brother to be a slave in Egypt – still a cold and heartless thing to do.
Years later, when Joseph saw his brothers again in Egypt, he had every reason to hate them; but he had a better reason to forgive them.
Because God was with Joseph, loving him with a great and lasting love; and because God loved Joseph’s brothers with that same love, even after what they had done; because God would send His Son to die for Joseph’s sins, and for the sins of his brothers, and for the sins of the world; because Joseph believed that, and lived in that grace, he forgave his brothers, and was reconciled to them.
God loves us with a love so great, that it can overcome any sin or conflict, any desire for revenge.
The desire to get even is a powerful thing, but love from God is more powerful. That’s what we hold on to.
As deeply flawed as I am, God loves me for the sake of His Son.
Jesus is my power to love others, no matter how flawed they are, even though they’re just as flawed as I am.
God’s love for me is my love for others, including those who are hard for me to love.
There is that part of me doesn’t want to love and forgive that difficult person, but the better part of me does; the Holy Spirit in me, leads me to forgive.
God teaches us to abhor and rebuke the sin, all sin, but to love the sinner, including ourselves.
Though I am hard to love because of my sin, for Christ’s sake, God loves me dearly, and He loves you dearly.
His love is our power to love those we never thought we could.
God gives us love for the unlovable.
May it be our life’s purpose to share that amazing love with one and all.
And as we share and show His love, His peace, which passes understanding, will guard our hearts and minds, in Christ Jesus, who loves us with an extraordinary, everlasting love. Amen.