Rev. Paul Sundberg + July 21, 2024
Love Fits Week 3 - Pieces of the Heart: Loving Each Other
For the third week in our Love Fits worship series, guest preacher and former TLCS pastor Paul Sundberg focuses on the transformative power of sharing pieces of our hearts with others, mirroring Jesus' unconditional love. He highlights the importance of hands-on, face-to-face interactions in demonstrating God’s love in a tangible way. Small acts of kindness and compassion can make a significant impact, and Rev. Paul invites us to be vessels of God’s grace, spreading love in our communities without expecting anything in return.
Sermon Transcript
From automatically generated captions, lightly edited for readability by Chat GPT
Perhaps a couple of personal notes before I get started. Anybody who knows me knows and expects me to choke up, and I'm going to. And so, if it's a... I don't know. Pastors don't always do this, but I do frequently, and it really does come from the heart.
The first is a confession. I wrote that poem in 1993. There are two people over here who probably heard it because I know I used it at my congregation in Monroe. I think I did it here a long time ago, but pretty much anybody who has heard this is old enough to have kids and perhaps even grandkids at this point. But the message remains the same: the gospel calls us to love. And on a personal side, sometimes that love shows up in surprising ways.
The fact that I'm standing here is the result of an extraordinarily gracious invitation from Pastor Hector. This is a rare thing for a former pastor to come back on some day that's not a giant anniversary of the congregation. When we have those sorts of anniversaries, usually we just expect the old pastors to stand to the side and wave. It's always a little risky to give him a pulpit. And I also want to say about the wisdom with which the decision came to because the invitation came from Pastor Hector, but he also had a conversation with the staff and the council to say, "Does this fit?" And that's so profoundly wise to draw as many people into the decision as you did, Pastor Hector.
So I am grateful beyond imagining. Dorinda and I joined some time ago, and it has felt like home. But what has given me the most joy, I will say, is not the fact that I see so many of you that I have known for years. What gives me the greatest joy is seeing so many of you whom I have never met before. The congregation is alive and thriving and coming out of a difficult time that I may have had something to do with. But it is showing grace to the community, grace to the world, and grace to each other in ways that are worth remembering.
I think I shall stop there, or I will keep just going because I don't get a microphone all that often. So, grace to you and peace from God our Father, our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit—God active, moving in us, among us, and through us in this moment.
I am a dissectologist. In case that confuses you a little bit and you've never heard the phrase before, I'm not surprised. It makes it sound like I'm somebody who likes to cut things apart. I want you to know it's really quite the opposite. I like to put things that have been cut apart back together, especially—but not exclusively—jigsaw puzzles. You pour out those thousand pieces that Pastor Hector was bemoaning last week, and I'm thinking, "Oh yes, there's color, there's shape, there's blessed frustration, that urge to find the way to an answer, to complete the picture, to find a way to beauty, and then to the next puzzle."
I used to think this is new to me, this is a retirement discovery on my part. I used to think that there could hardly be anything more boring than jigsaw puzzles. For me, they rated right with fishing and golf. But when I finished my first puzzle, which I reluctantly took on because it was a gift, I discovered that I wanted to keep going. So far this year, I've done eleven 1,000-piece puzzles. I've had to take a break because I've been doing a lot of supply preaching, and that takes a lot of time when you're out of practice. But I love the puzzles. Along the way, it's given me some insight not just into this little weird thing I like to do but into the reality of my life, which is that I have been working on a bigger puzzle most of my life—the 8.1 billion-piece human puzzle.
I really mean puzzle. I mean, we're not all shaped the same way. None of us are shaped easy. We have funny edges, some blanks—that's the part in a puzzle that's carved out so that other parts will fit in. Some of our blanks are squished down, some are tiny, some lean in a particular direction, and some fit lots of the tabs—that's the part that fills the blank. But it doesn't mean that you've got the right pieces together. Sometimes the pieces fit together reluctantly, sometimes they fit together obviously and easily, and sometimes the fit is so specific it seems like nothing is ever going to fit at all. Sometimes you're pretty sure you've lost the pieces.
In most puzzles, for those of you who don't do this kind of thing, some pieces make the core image of the picture and some are part of the background. The background pieces are important, and these days in my human puzzle, some of the background pieces look like an oversized dog that we've been dog-sitting for a couple of weeks, or they look like the 80-plus degree signs on my weather app. They look like arthritic joints, and some look like, unfortunately, news alerts that keep popping up on my phone. All of those things, each one of them, demands its own special place in the puzzle, and each one of them affects where other things go. It's not always easy to figure that out.
That's where the most crucial pieces come into play. I don't know if they have an official name, but I call them the connectors. They're not quite the core image—they might have a little bit of it. They're not quite background—they don't have designs or anything—but they are so important because we can't complete the puzzle, we can't make the picture real, until we put them in place. As I reflected on the text and the theme of the last couple of weeks, love—at least Jesus' kind of love, which the Bible calls agape—is that kind of connector piece for the human puzzle. The Jesus kind of love gives us the vision, the understanding, the compassion, and the possibility to put the pieces together and to keep going. If we aren't putting our puzzle pieces together with that kind of love, we'll never see the whole picture emerge.
Jesus' kind of love, which is to say God's kind of love, is pretty unique. It's a little like love between friends. It's a little like love between lovers. It's a little bit like the love between family members. But it really isn't any of those kinds of love, because those are all sort of an exchange. Every one of them is sort of a "you give me a piece of your heart and I'll give you a piece of mine," and everything is fine until one of us holds back, and then love is strained, damaged, maybe done. Those are the kinds of love that have kept recording companies from Motown to LA to Nashville in business, kept singers from Aretha to Taylor in the money. They're important signs of love, but they are only shadows of the love First John is talking about. That love is given freely, fully, with nothing expected, demanded, or required in return.
I want you to hear that again: the love of God is given freely, with nothing expected, demanded, or required in return.
Which takes me to the unfortunate words "commandment" and "obey." This is the educational portion of the sermon. The English word "commandment" always carries with it a sort of "or else." "I command you to do this." It's military, it's authoritarian, it's royal. Honestly, it's a fair translation of the Greek word that's used in the New Testament, but it's just fair. The Greek word is a poor translation of a Hebrew word that's really at the root of our faith, and that's the word that's most important here. I understand that the "or else" sort of thing made sense in the imperial "or else" world of John, but it misses the depth of the Hebrew word that takes us back to Moses. Moses came down from the mountain with the Ten Words. That's what gets translated as commandment. The Hebrew word for "word" is Devar. I would suggest that it would best be understood in the context of Moses and the people traveling from Egypt to the Promised Land, that what he meant was "ten ways to enact God's presence in the world." It's more of a "how to" than a "must do."
There's not much in our sort of authoritarian world at the moment that leads us to that "how to" and wants us to find the "must do." But God's word, this commandment that we have, is an invitation to enact God's presence in the world, which makes the word "obey" a little difficult as well. Obey is one of my least favorite words in the English language. When I was five and a quarter, "obey" was not in my vocabulary. When I was a quarter of the way through fifth grade, it was still not in my vocabulary. It may not yet be part of my vocabulary. All my personal preferences aside, the Greek word here is really best translated as "to hold close, to take to heart." The idea is to let something shape our heart and mind from within, not to have our behavior imposed or dictated from outside or on high. Love is poured into our hearts, and what John is saying is that the way to show the presence of God in the world is to let it out.
So, I want to be clear: Jesus isn't just a better emperor than Caesar. He isn't an emperor at all. Jesus called people to follow. He invited people to follow. He longed for people to follow, but he never commanded anyone to follow. Instead, he gave himself to all of us fully, freely, expecting nothing in return. "Father, forgive them," he says from the cross. "Father, forgive them," the judgers, the crucifiers, the deniers, the betrayers, the silent onlookers, the ones who don't think they need forgiveness at all. Forgive them.
His life laid down for us, every piece of his heart given away: healing the sick, feeding the hungry, welcoming the outcast, teaching the curious, challenging the rigid, the unjust, the self-righteous. Every little piece of his heart for them, for us. To this day, it's still happening in the bread and the wine. We come forward, and he gives us a piece of his heart. He gives us his whole self.
So, it seems to me that the key to making the human puzzle pieces fit together is taking to heart Jesus' way of giving his heart away, which was pretty much hands-on, person to person, face to face. To riff a little bit on First John, thoughts and prayers aren't a bad place to start. But to put the pieces of the human puzzle together, we have to put our hearts into it—our lives and our living, hands-on, person to person, face to face—what we can, where we can, when we can, in the name of Jesus, expecting nothing in return. That's the hard part. Lives may not be turned around by our love. Anger may not be turned away. Divisions may not turn into bridges. But when we pray, we pray first of all that the love of God would be active in the world, be made real through us, and that will happen when we give away pieces of our heart for the sake of this human puzzle God so loves.
Now, if you like, you can call it obedience if that works for you, or like John, you can call it action and truth. But I think the puzzle will fit together best in your hearts and your mind if you just call it giving a little piece of your heart. Amen.
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