Sermons

When you think of scandalous love what words come to mind? Affair. Monica Lewinski. Tabloids like National Enquire. Desperate Housewives.  What about a pastor who falls in love with a parishioner; would that be a scandal? We probably could sit here for hours and list off these kinds of scandalous love we see every day. Our headlines are filled with such scandalous reports. And of course as you faithfully and daily read your Bibles you have seen that even the Bible isn’t exempt from these types of scandals. A Pharaoh caught in a love triangle. A king murders his lover’s husband. A prophet marries a prostitute. Again we could go on and on talking about these gossip-filled tales of scandalous love.

Scandalous is defined in the Webster’s New World Dictionary as “causing scandal; offensive to a sense of decency or shocking to the moral feelings of the community.” Now, this is not the kind of love we would typically associate with our passage today, is it?  Rather agape, the Greek word for sacrificial God-love is what we perhaps expect to hear in these verses. Agape is in fact the word for used in John 3:16-17. And it might be hard to associate agape with scandalous, or to associate scandalous with our God. Because when we think of scandalous love, what comes to most of our minds is more along the lines of Eros—the Greek word for physical or erotic love. So, I’m guessing for most of us have never thought about God’s incarnation in Jesus Christ, what John calls God’s love gift to the world, as scandalous love. We could read these verses: “God so loved the world that he so scandalously loved the world that he gave his one and only son.”

But before you tune me out, thinking this might be just a little too radical for you; go with me for just a minute, because while our lives and bibles are filled with the kinds of scandalous love we named before—the kind of scandals that sell tabloids—I would say that behind all these kinds of scandals that we tend to gravitate to and focus on and gossip about is an even bigger scandalous love story of God’s scandalous love affair—his passionate pursuit of a broken, rebellious and sometimes lukewarm people that despite how many times we as God’s children turn from God, we still remain the apple of God’s eye, the people of God’s love.

There are many stories of God’s scandalous love for us, his people, in the bible. The Bible is one big story of God’s unrelentless, scandalous love for us. Think about. What stories come to mind? Maybe the parable of the prodigal son. Or what about a persecutor of Christians turned world’s most well-known evangelist? And then of course in the Old Testament there is that story of the prophet who did marry a prostitute. This prophet’s name was Hosea, and he was a good man chosen to speak on behalf of God. If you don’t know or remember this story, you may be thinking what went wrong with this supposedly great man of God? Unlike King David who entered into an illicit and scandalous affair on his own, God told Hosea to go marry a woman everyone knew would not be faithful to any husband. But since Hosea was an obedient, trusting man of God, Hosea married a prostitute. And just as expected Gomer—Hosea’s prostitute wife—cheated on him, ran around with all the men in town, loved everyone and everything except her faithful, committed husband.

God uses this story of the prophet Hosea as an illustration to show us just how much God loves us. There is nowhere else in our Bible where God is so explicit in showing us just how scandalous his love for us is, just how far God will go to love us. God compares his love for us to a husband’s unrelenting and merciful love for an adulterous wife. Shocking? Yes. Offensive. Yes. Goes against our community morals? Yes. God is the Hosea in our own story with God, which makes us who? The unfaithful lover. This seems all too especially true during this Christmas season as so many of us sell ourselves to the gods of materialism and consumerism. We live our daily lives as if we have no need of God. I think we play Gomer, the unfaithful lover, all too well sometimes. We give ourselves over and pay way too much attention to unworthy lovers like greed, pride, selfishness, addiction, deceit, hedonism and we could go on and on listing unworthy lovers we choose over God.

But...before you feel guilty and unworthy to be in this church, or unworthy to even call upon God’s name and before you flog or flagellate yourself, the message of Christmas—the message of that little baby Jesus who was God incarnate is about a love so scandalous—so shocking, so merciful, so undeserved, so mysterious, so incomprehensible, so other-worldly—that it was willing to leave the court of heaven and the throne of grace, take on human flesh, dwell among us, live a perfect life, be ridiculed, slandered, falsely accused, betrayed, abandoned, condemned to death, beaten, nailed to a cross, and forsaken by His Father in heaven—all because, as John 3:16 says, he loved us—he loved YOU—so much. God loves and wants us even while we remain under the influence of unworthy lovers like greed, pride, selfishness, addiction, deceit or whatever occupies and has hold of our hearts and minds outside of God. In the midst of maybe our messy, chaotic, imperfect and consumer-driven Christmas, God shows up. God meets us where we are and doesn’t turn away from us no matter where we are, what we have done or where we have been. Why? Simply because he loves us. He loves you so much that nothing you will ever do will stop God from loving you, will stop God from pursuing you, or from ever leaving you.

Aren’t you glad God doesn’t choose us based on merit!? Come on, we might not be Baptist but that deserve an “amen!” Right? Yesterday we had a parents’ day out, and we were playing games where team captains chose teammates. Do y’all remember choosing and picking for gym class like kickball, tag football and all those other games we played in gym? Who got chosen first? It was always the most athletic, the fastest, the strongest. The world around us down to elementary gym class may operate out of a “survival of the fittest” mentality, but God does not love us because of anything we’ve done or do—not because we’re the smartest, wealthiest, strongest, holiest, prettiest, kindest, or happiest. If anything, we give God daily reasons not to love us, but 1 John 4 tells us that God is love and God chose to love us first—to meet us where we are and love us and pursue us anyways. This is scandalous love that God would take on human flesh to be with us, to show us how much we are loved, and to never leave us.

Christmas exemplifies how God’s ways are not our own ways. Just like we saw last week in Luke 1 in the story of Mary, God works miracles in unexpected places and in unexpected ways through his scandalous love. This scandalous love has a name—grace. Grace is God’s scandalous love for each one of us, and it is the heart of the Christmas message. In spite of our failures, our imperfections, our bent-toward-sinning as Charles Wesley wrote in one of his hymns—God simply wants us, and God pursues us not just once, but over and over and over again. God came for one purpose—to redeem us, to reconcile us back to him; his pursuit will never end. Do you believe God loves you this scandalously, this madly? Do you trust God’s promise to redeem your life—our church? Do you trust God to love and want your love in return, no matter what kind of mess your life has been? God’s scandalous love changes us from the inside out. This is the scandalous love we testify to when we profess faith in Jesus Christ—not just with our lips and not just in this time and place every week—but with our entire lives—in all we think, say, and do—we are witnesses of Christ’s bold and scandalous, unconditional love. So, how is your life—how is our church—making God’s unconditional and unrelentless scandalous love more visible in the lives of the people you and I come into contact with on a daily basis? You just may be the only scripture anyone ever reads. Are people coming to know Christ’s love in and through you? Amen.