The Golden Rule
Text: 1 John 4:7-21
Rev. Lori M. Lewis
May 14, 2006

The first letter of John told us “Beloved, let us love one another; for love is of God and anyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love, does not know God for God is love.
We spend a lot of time wishing that we had a closer relationship to God - a stronger faith and we spend a lot of time wishing that our human relationships were more loving.
We all want that, don’t we - to know God’s love and to feel loved by other people. We at least want to feel loved within our families and by our friends - there is nothing more painful than being treated unlovingly by our family and friends and it even hurts to be treated badly by people we don’t know.
The first letter of John is clear as to why this is all true.
Knowing God means being loving because love is from God.
The popular scripture at weddings is from 1 Corinithians 13 - Love is patient is patient and kind; love is not jealous or boastful; it is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right. When our behavior becomes impatient, unkind jealous, boastful, arrogant, rude, insisting on our own way, irritable and resentful - in other words, when we are not loving, we grow farther away from God.
Love comes from God. Whoever claims to love God and does not love his or her brothers and sisters is fooling themselves because one cannot love God and not love the God’s children. God’s commandment to those who follow Jesus is "those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also." This becomes Jesus’ commandment also (John 15:12). This love is not optional; if we do not love our brothers and sisters whom we have seen, we cannot love God whom we have not seen.
Today is not only Mother’s Day, it is also Festival of the Christian Home, a day each year in the United Church of Christ to celebrate the family and what better time than on Mother’s Day.
The concept of the Golden Rule begins in the Old Testament and continues throughout the New Testament - Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.
Love your neighbor as yourself - treat others like you’d like to be treated - the concept is there, but all too often I think we miss the impact that it is supposed to have on us - not on others.
The Golden Rule is not to help us point out how others should be acting or to think about what we expect from other people.
It’s not about what others are doing unto us at all. It is about us and only us.
To give us a guide for treating others, we can think about how we would want to be treated.
How would I want to be treated and shown love by my family, by my friends, by the people I work with, the people I meet during the week.
When we think about how we would want to be treated by all of those people, our next step is not to go off about how so and so isn’t treating me that way, our next step is to work to treat everyone in our life with the love that we want to receive - not just if they deserve it, not just if they appreciate it - we are to work to treat everyone in our life with the love that we want to receive period. We need to treat others with the love that is our gift from God, the love that when we give it away, makes us closer to God, the love that when we give it to others, helps us experience God’s love for us.
C.S. Lewis wrote, “Do not waste your time bothering whether you love your neighbor - act as if you did. As soon as we do this, we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him. If you injure someone you dislike you will find yourself disliking him more. If you do him a good turn, you will find yourself disliking him less.
It’s like the story of the marriage counselor working with a couple who both wanted to get a divorce and felt no love for the other. They were both hurt and wanted to get even so the counselor told each of them privately what to do to really get back at the other one.
For 3 months, act like you love your spouse, give them compliments, offer to do kind things for them, give them respect, share funny stories and laugh with them, tell them what you appreciate about them, point out the times that they do great parenting, spend time asking them about their day and sharing yours - then at the end of the 3 months tell them that you want a divorce.
That will really stick it to them. As you can guess, after acting like that for 3 months, it became real and the couple found themselves once again loving one another.
Love is not easy, it is not pure sentiment, but it is a decision - we can decide to love others because loving others is not meant to be dependent upon what they do. That’s what keeps us from loving people as much as we could - we can’t get over judging their behavior and loving them based upon that behavior.
Love is not dependent upon us doing the right things.
That’s what God’s love is all about - it’s given to us like a parent’s love - unconditionally - no matter what we do - because love exists because of God’s goodness not because of how good we are.
As parents, we love our children because they are our children and it has nothing to do with how good they are. The same is true of God.
A teacher asked a boy this question; “Suppose your mother baked a pie and there were seven of you - your parents and five children. What part of the pie would you get?” A sixth replied the boy. I’m afraid you don’t know your fractions, said the teacher. Remember there are seven of you. “Yes, teacher, said the boy, but you don’t know my mother. Mother would say she didn’t want any pie.”
Too often, mothers especially have the tendency to put everyone’s needs ahead of their own and not taking care of oneself is obviously not a good thing, but what if as a whole, as a society, we made other people’s needs as important as ours - imagine the love others would feel.
You know how good it feels when someone simply lets you ahead of them in line at the grocery or when someone holds the door open for you, or when someone goes out of their way to thank you or compliment you, imagine if we did that for others with the bigger things in life like offering respect when it is undeserved or listening when someone is angry, or offering compassion to someone who has brought a problem on themselves, or talking with instead of avoiding someone we disagree with.
In the Hebrew language of the Old Testament, the word for compassion comes from the root word “womb” - something new being born.
If we apply this to human experience, it means that our compassionate acts always give the other person another chance.
If we do not hold past failures against them, we offer a fresh start, new life.
Imagine how offering that kind of compassion would change the way we relate to each other.
One anonymous writer said that if we discovered that we had only five minutes left to say all we wanted to say, every telephone booth and cell phone would be used by people calling other people to stammer that they love them.
Why wait until the last five minutes?
Why not appreciate and love people now.

What a shame that it takes us so long to really realize how much we love our family, our friends and how much we can benefit from loving those we don’t know and those we don’t right now like.
Talk of love is not just some polyanna topic for Mother’s Day, it is the core of our Christian belief, it is the core of the gospel of Jesus Christ, it is the core of the 10 commandments and of the new commandment that Jesus gave - “that you love one another; even as I have loved you, that you also love one another.” And love goes beyond Christianity - it is a part of all the major world religions.
From Hinduism’s book the Bhagavad Gita - “I am ever present into those who have realized Me in every creature. Seeing all life as My manifestation, they are never separated from Me. They worship Me in the hearts of all, and all their actions proceed from Me. Wherever they may live, they abide in Me. When a person responds to the joys and sorrows of others as if they were his own, he has attained the highest state of spiritual union.”
From Buddhism - “Le none deceive another, nor despise any person whatsoever in any place. Let him not will harm to another out of anger or ill-will. Just as a mother would protect her only child at the risk of her own life, even so, let him cultivate a boundless heart towards all beings. Let his thoughts of boundless love pervade the whole world; above, below and across without any obstruction, without any hatred, without any enmity. Whether he stands, walks, sits, or lies down, as long as he is awake, he should develop this mindfulness.”
From Judaism - The book of Leviticus tells us “Love your neighbor as yourself.”
From Islam - “A man is a true Muslim when no other Muslim has to fear anything from either his tongue or his hand.”
From Confucianism - Confucius said, “He whose heart is in the smallest degree set upon Goodness will dislike no one.”
And from Christianity- our scripture today from 1 John and of course from Jesus - story after story of love - especially love for those who are hard to love.

Teacher story - Todd and I were volunteering in the library at Zachary’s school and one of the children hid the book of another little boy in attempt to be mean to him. He is a child that was annoying to many of the kids. He is from Mississippi and was displaced from his home during Katrina hurricane. Zachary’s teacher sat the class down and told them all the boy has been through and how upset she is with whoever did this to him. She said they needed to think about how they would feel if they were in his position and she said that her heart was bleeding for the child!
When the little boy who hid the book told the teacher that he was the guilty party, he said to her “Teacher, I didn’t mean to make you bleed”

God’s heart bleeds too when we do not love one another

Love is more than romantic or sentimental, it is the core of our faith. Love is the very thing we can all give more of - it’s the very thing we need more of ourselves. When we give and receive love, it is of God - it is a gift - it is our faith in action.