Rev. Jared Buss
Pittsburgh New Church; March 23, 2025
Readings: Mark 12:41-44 (children’s talk); Luke 6:37-45; Secrets of Heaven §2057.2
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What we’re going to talk about now is the love that the Lord wants us to have for our neighbors. We know we’re supposed to be loving. Nobody says otherwise. But there’s loving and then there’s loving. Believe it or not, we can love the people around us more and better than we do right now. When it comes to love, the ceiling is high. Astonishingly high. And the more we love the better our lives will be. The Lord challenges us to love more than we do right now—and He also promises us that we can.
To begin with, we’re going to revisit what He says in the gospel of Luke, chapter 6—the passage from which our recitation was taken. The recitation is all about love. I’ll reread the recitation, and then we’ll hear what the Lord says in the verses that follow [read vv. 37-45].
We already talked about giving in full measure. That’s what the Lord wants us to do. Give to other people. Give them your all. He’s going to take the measure that we give Him and fill it to overflowing (v. 38)—and the best response to that spirit of generosity is to gratefully pay it forward. In another part of the Gospel he says, “Freely you have received, freely give” (Matt. 10:8).
There’s a resonance between the beginning of that reading from Luke and the end of it. Near the beginning the Lord says, “Give, and it will be given to you” (v. 38), and near the end He says, “A good person out of the good treasure of his heart brings forth good” (v. 45). What He wants us to do is take the good things—the treasures—that are in our hearts, and bring them forth. Give them away.
It's important to note that He also says that our love can be like His love. “A disciple is not above his teacher, but everyone who is perfectly trained will be like his teacher” (v. 40). He is our teacher. We can’t be above Him, but our love can be like His love.
The next thing the Lord says in that reading is that we’re not here to fix other people. We’re not here to tell other people what they’re doing wrong, or how they could love better. It’s not the speck in our brother’s eye that we need to worry about—it’s the plank in our own eye (vv. 41, 42). At the end of that reading He talks about bringing forth good fruit. He says that “every tree is known by its own fruit” (v. 44). Are we bearing good fruit? That’s the question that we need to concern ourselves with. Not what that guy’s doing, or that guy or that guy. Are we going good, or doing evil? That’s the measurement that matters.
The message of today’s sermon, if it’s distilled into a single statement, is that giving to other people in full measure will make us happier than any other thing can. You could also simply say that loving other people will make us happier than any other thing can. This is not a revolutionary idea. It’s not hard to accept. But it’s one thing to nod when we hear statements like these, and another thing to really live like they’re true. In practice, today’s message is challenging. It challenges everybody in at least two ways.
First, the Lord asks us to love so much—to be so unselfish. The ceiling is so high! It can be hard to believe that we’re capable of that kind of love. It’s much easier to say, “Sure I’ll be loving… but on my terms. I’d like to stay in my comfort zone, thank you.” Which amounts to saying, “I like the idea of love, but I’m not sure I can love that much.” And the second reason why today’s message is challenging is that there’s always that part of us that simply doesn’t agree that putting others first is what’s going to make us happy. There’s always the voice that says, “Actually it’s my turn to be first. This time it’s about me. I do want the biggest piece of cake.” There’s something in us that insists that we’re happiest when we do what we want. The Lord’s message in Luke 6 and in other parts of the Word contradicts that part of us. In that sense, His message is challenging. It’s easy to nod and accept what He says, but hard to really believe it—because to believe it is to do it.
What we’re going to do now is consider some teachings that illustrate why it is that loving as the Lord wants us to love really does make us happier than any other thing can. These teachings also make it easier to see what it means to love as He wants us to love—because love and the happiness that comes from love are inseparable. If we understand one, we understand the other. And finally we’re going to consider the most important question, which is: how do we receive this kind of love? How do we learn to love more or to love better than we already do?
We’re going to turn, now, to a teaching from the Heavenly Doctrine of the New Church, from a book called Secrets of Heaven. This teaching is about heavenly love, which is also called mutual love. In other words, it’s about the love that’s shared by everyone who goes to heaven. And it makes it easy to see why unselfish love makes people happier than selfish love. The teaching is printed on the back of your worship handout, in case you want to follow along while you listen. We read: [§2057.2].
The angels in heaven love their neighbor more than they love themselves. Angels, by the way, are simply people who have died and woken up in the spiritual world, and chosen to live in heaven, because the love that fills the heavens matches the love that they have chosen for themselves. The Lord hopes that we will become angels. But the angels in heaven love everyone else in heaven more than they love themselves. That’s a high bar. The thing is, the angels still get more than they give. They give everything away, and they still get more than they give. Because everyone in heaven loves unselfishly, there’s a sense in which each of them is at the center of heaven. The reading said that, “The heavenly form is such that everyone is at it were a kind of center, thus a center of communications, and consequently of happinesses, from all.”
This becomes easier to understand if we make the scale a lot smaller. Imagine a room occupied by ten people, and each of the people in that room loves their neighbor more than they love themselves. Everyone in that room would lay down their life for anyone else in the room, if they had do. Everyone in that room is therefore receiving all of the love that nine other people have to give. Now imagine a room occupied by ten people who love themselves most of all. When push comes to shove, each of the ten people in that second room will take what they want, even if that means taking it from somebody else. Everyone in that second room is receiving all of the love that they can give themselves—and that’s it. They’ve each got one person looking out for them. But the people in the first room each had nine people looking out for them.
And if the number of people in each room was increased to a hundred, then everyone in the first room would be surrounded by ninety-nine other people who were prepared to sacrifice something for their happiness, while the people in the second room would still only have one person looking out for them. Selfish love can never be bigger or more powerful than we are ourselves—and we aren’t very big or very powerful. At least, not when it comes to spiritual things. But unselfish love is boundless. It only grows the more it’s shared. So the reading from Secrets of Heaven says, “on this account, as the Lord’s kingdom increases, so the happiness of each angel increases.”
In another part of the Heavenly Doctrine—in a book called Divine Love and Wisdom—we find a passage that says, “to feel another’s joy as joy in oneself, that is loving” (§47). This is a really good definition of love. And this statement also illuminates how it is that unselfish love makes us so happy. When we love other people, we feel their joy as joy within ourselves. Imagine watching a child that you love at play. Let’s say she has a doll, and she’s feeding toy vegetables to her doll, and she’s having a grand old time. Left to yourself, you’d probably find no delight whatsoever in dolls or wooden onions—but because you love that child, you rejoice to watch her play. Her joy gives you joy. And think how happy we would be if we could rejoice that much in all of the good things that all of our neighbors enjoy.
That passage from Divine Love and Wisdom goes on to say, “But to feel one’s own joy in another and not the other’s joy in oneself is not loving.” And this qualification is important, because sometimes we think we’re loving unselfishly when actually we aren’t. Sometimes we feel our own joy in someone else, and we think that that’s the same thing as loving generously, the way the Lord teaches us to love. In other words, sometimes we mistake “this person makes me happy” for “I love this person.” If we value someone primarily because they make us happy, then we’re liable to stop valuing them as soon as they stop making us happy. And of course this isn’t love. It’s fundamentally selfish. Real love looks to the other person’s happiness, not to our own. “To feel another’s joy as joy in oneself, that is loving.”
So we come back to the idea that love—the love the Lord wants for us—involves giving it all away. Giving in full measure. Being willing to put ourselves last, if that would be useful. This spirit that gives away all the love it has always ends up with more than it had to begin with.
Now we come to our final question: how do we love this way? How do we learn to be so unselfish? How do we find it in ourselves to give so much, when we don’t feel like we have that much to give? The Lord gives us an answer to these questions, right there in our recitation from Luke: “Judge not, and you will not be judged. Condemn not, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven. Give, and it will be given to you” (6:37, 38).
It will be given to you. Love is the Lord’s to give. Our job is to prepare our container—our measure—to receive what He gives. And the first thing we need to do is make sure that that container isn’t full of judgment and condemnation and unforgiveness. If contempt or resentment is governing the way we regard people, how can we expect ourselves to feel a generous outpouring of love towards those people? In Isaiah the Lord says, “cease to do evil, learn to do good” (1:16, 17), and it’s pretty clear that we need to do those two things in that order. Evil is like dirt. If you’ve got dirt in your cup, and you want to give your neighbor a drink of water, the first thing you need to do is clean your cup. We love better when we put effort into cleaning up on the inside.
The hard part is that contempt and self-righteousness and unforgiveness—and all other evils—like to hide. The parts of our minds that house these things do their best to stay out of the light. That’s what last week’s sermon was all about. This is why spiritual growth takes time. This is why the ability to love as the angels love is something that we grow into—not something that we have as soon as we decide that we want to have it. We need to work with the Lord to bring His light all the way down into the caverns of our hearts, so that He can drive away the things that inhibit our ability to love. This takes time, and that’s okay.
In the meantime, it’s good to know what the goal is. It’s good to remember that the Lord thinks we’re capable of loving like the angels love. He believes that we can learn to give in full measure. He made us to love that way. Love is the Lord’s to give; and if it’s His to give, and our hearts have room to receive it, then who or what can stop us from loving? In the 23rd psalm, the psalmist says to the Lord:
You anoint my head with oil;
My cup runs over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me
All the days of my life;
And I will dwell in the house of the Lord
Forever. (vv. 5, 6)
Amen.