Love Who Christ Loves

My first ever Administrative Board meeting, she threw a book across the table at another member. As church treasurer, “June” once demanded to hold an emergency meeting after worship on the fourth of July to approve the payment of an $11 ham. When I declined to call that meeting, she visibly shook with range. By that time, I was not surprised by June’s outbursts. But it wasn’t the outbursts that wore on you so much as the constant low rumble of complaint and unpleasantness. I once thought, “If I can love June, Lord, I can love anybody.”

We all have our own Junes, examples of difficult people and bad behaviors that we would rather live without. Most of the time we do. We live in avoidance of difficult and unlovely people. To paraphrase Donald Miller, we love the people who like us. This is what passes for our definition of love. We love at our convenience.

John Ortberg tells of a time he and his wife were on a plane and he was inconvenienced. He was reading a book on the Christian life and trying to prepare for a talk he was to give. “There was a small girl, maybe two years old, sitting behind him, kicking the seat just constantly. I started to get irritated. She was one of three small children traveling with their parents. Her six-month-old brother was screaming. I wanted to ask the flight attendant if they could play outside. Then the thought occurred to me. I’m reading a book on Christian heroism and martyrs, and I’m bitter because of a two-year-old. I turned to the mom. “You know, it wasn’t all that long ago that my wife and I had three children your kids’ ages. I remember how hard that was. If there’s anything my wife can do for you on this flight. . .” People are people at inconvenient times.

But let me call you to consider this inconvenient truth – you are the church, which means you are called to love whom Christ loves. And when it comes to that party, well, everyone is coming through the door.

Look who Jesus attracted as a baby even. By legend we call them “three kings” or “wise men.” But the scripture names them “magi.” What is that, honestly? They are pagan star-gazers, much closer to horoscope-reading astrologers than scientific astronomers – think Jean Dixon not Carl Sagan. But these magi, these Iraqis, are among the first to journey to see the Messiah. Being gentiles, they don’t know the Scriptures and so they must inquire of the Temple and King Herod where to find the babe. Can you believe that the Savior who dies for us also suffers for gullible, pagan Iraqis like them?

Surprise! Jesus came for everybody. This was a surprise to the Jews. To be one of the Chosen People was to belong to God’s own. You belonged to God, but very implicitly, God belonged to you. Now here comes a Messiah and his followers who begin to offer good news and forgiveness to the very unchosen, unseemly, and unlovable Gentiles. This was hard to take.

Paul wrote to the Ephesians, reminding them of this truth. . . “I’m sure you have all heard of the great mystery that is my calling to preach God’s grace to the Gentiles. . .It is now plain that God has made the pagans fellow heirs of what we are receiving in Jesus Christ.” Ephesians 3.1-5

The first Jewish Christians struggled mightily with this truth. But it’s not only Jews who struggle with this. Ever since, church people have had a hard time with who gets to come, who really belongs.

C.S. Lewis addressed this problem early on in his book, The Screwtape Letters, a fictional account of how one demon might instruct another on tempting and harassing a human being. The junior devil’s (Wormwood) “patient” has, regrettably, become a Christian. This is what his senior devil writes to him soon after:

One of our great allies at present is the Church itself. I do not mean the Church spread out through all time and space and rooted in eternity, terrible as an army with banners. . .fortunately (that Church) is quite invisible to these humans. All your patient sees is the half-finished sham Gothic erection on the new building estate. . .When he gets to the pew and looks around him he sees just that selection of his neighbors whom he has up to this point avoided. . .Provided that any of those neighbors sing out of tune, or have boots that squeak, or double chins, or odd clothes, the patient will quite easily believe that their religion must therefore be somehow ridiculous. . . All you have to do is to keep out of his mind the question, ‘If I, being what I am, can consider that I am in some sense a Christian, why should the different vices of those people in the next pew prove that their religion is mere hypocrisy or convention?’ You may ask whether it is possible to keep such an obvious thought from occurring even to a human mind. It is, Wormwood, it is!


Church, we are supposed to love each other! I am tempted to say that we better love each other if we are to love the world. But we can’t afford to wait until we have all our house in order. Maybe if we stretch ourselves to love the world, we will find that we have come to love each other as well. Maybe the feeling will come in the doing.

Our world begins here in Duncansville and Altoona. I’m restless for us to do more for those whom Christ loves. I think we can do a lot more. Our problem is that we have learned how to avoid people. We are going to have to intentionally work hard to get close to needy and unlovely people.

Pastor Rick McKinley talks about how his church began to reach out to people on the margins:

“When we started looking at the needs of our city, we have a very honest moment. We admitted that we didn’t really want to love broken, sinful people; we didn’t really want to love Portland. We prefer safe and protected lives. . .But Jesus is ruthless. He’s not ignoring the lepers and the people pushed into invisible places. Jesus goes right to them.

So we had to repent of our attitudes. We laid out the needs and we prayed.”

If we are gonna love our community, it must begin with our hearts changing. We must repent. And we must actively pray for the needs around us. This takes time. People take time. But Jesus doesn’t lose interest. When someone asked him a question, he never said, “Huh, I wasn’t listening.” Will we love and pay attention over time just like Jesus does?