I want to start by asking you a question: How many of you have seen the Disney movie Brother Bear?
I love the movie Brother Bear. I’m offended that the critics at Rotten Tomatoes, when they ranked Disney’s animated films, put Brother Bear in 70th place—70th out of 74!
That is an unfair assessment. It's a travesty, is what it is!
That’s lower on the list than The Black Cauldron, a movie so bad that, for a while, Disney tried to pretend it didn’t exist.
Brother Bear deserves better.
I love Tanana, the shaman in the movie. Of all the depictions of spiritual leaders in movies, she’s my favorite: The way she leads sacred ceremonies with reverence, yet welcomes the interruption of a curious child. The love she has for her village, and the love they have for her in return. Tanana, from Brother Bear, is the type of religious leader I want to be.
But the real reason I like Brother Bear so much is the circumstance surrounding my first time seeing the film.
The movie Brother Bear was released in the fall of 2003. My two children, Ethan and Tristan, were 6 and 2 at the time. I took the two of them to see this film in the theater; it was the first time taking them both to a movie theater.
Sometimes I wonder: can that be right? Do you really take a two-year-old to the movie theater?… But then I remember that Tristan was always old for his age, so I think that my memory is, in fact, correct.
In the movie, there are three brothers. Which means I’m taking my two sons, who are brothers, to see a movie about brothers.
The younger brother in the film—Kenai—is about to have his coming-of-age ceremony.
The two older brothers, Sitka and Denahi, have already had their coming-of-age ceremonies, in which they each received a totem from Tanana.
Sitka, for his totem, was given the eagle of guidance. Denahi was given the wolf of wisdom.
As his ceremony is about to begin, Kenai is full of anticipation. He’s excited. He really hopes and expects that his totem will be something really good, something really special, like a saber-toothed tiger of bravery, or strength.
But instead, he gets…(what?) the bear of love.
What a disappointment! The bear of love? What teenage boy wants to be the bear of love?
He mutters under his breath: “Who wants to trade?”
But Tanana bonks him on the head and says: “There is no trading!” (You gotta love Tanana!)
So he’s stuck with the bear of love as his totem.
Tanana tries to convince him that love is the most precious of totems. But Kenai doesn’t believe her. He wants to be a man. And what use is love to a man?
Like many people, Kenai fails to appreciate the power of love.
But, by the end of the movie—with the help of a new, adopted, younger brother—he finally learns that love is, indeed, the greatest, most powerful gift of all.
I have on a shelf in my office a rather large book called A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr.
It’s amazing how often Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote or preached about love. Not in a vague, general—or sentimental—sense, but really delving into the biblical definitions of love, and ways that God calls us to practice love in our world today.
King was well-acquainted with the three main types of love that appear in the ancient Greek language. Each, in fact, has its own word in ancient Greek.
One of these words is eros. During a speech he gave at U.C. Berkeley in 1957, King said, “Eros is a sort of aesthetic love. It has come to us to be a sort of romantic love and it stands with all its beauty.”
Eros love is a gift from God, and it’s the type of love we associate with Valentine’s Day; but in that speech King quickly moved on to the second type of love.
He said: “The Greek language talks about philia and this is a sort of reciprocal love between friends.” It’s the kind of love that we in the church have for each other. It’s brotherly love. Sisterly love. The love of family and friends. Philia.
Then King said: “The Greek language comes out with another word, and it is agape. Agape is understanding, creative, redemptive goodwill for all… It is an overflowing love which seeks nothing in return.”
In other speeches and writings, King pointed out that agape love recognizes that all humans are interrelated, that there is some of you in every person, and it recognizes that both you and that other person are created in the image of God. That’s why agape is a love you show even to your enemies.
All three types of love are powerful. All three types of love are good. All three types of love have the power to change lives. But only agape love has the power to change the world.
What the apostle Paul is talking about in First Corinthians is agape love. The scripture is often read at weddings, and everything it says about love can be applied to love in marriage, but Paul has in mind an even bigger love.
Paul is writing about agape.
Which means Paul is talking about the love that shows itself in acts of kindness; the love that leads people to do things for others, for strangers, without asking for anything in return. The kind of love that leads people to volunteer in their community, to do acts of service, to donate to churches and non-profit organizations that benefit the community.
Agape is the kind of love that convinces someone to spend a week keeping our Helping Shelf stocked, or to do any of the other things that so many of you do, because of your love for our church and our community; the love you have for people you haven’t even met.
Agape is the kind of love that convinces a parent to forgive the person who murdered their child. Can you imagine having your child murdered, then reaching out to the murderer to offer forgiveness?
I once met someone who did just that. The life of this man’s own son was destroyed because of that murder, but this man was so filled with agape love, that he didn’t want that killer’s life to also be destroyed. So he reached out to him, forgave him, and worked with him so that he could redeem himself from the terrible decision and action he made.
I didn’t say agape love was easy.
It’s the kind of love that convinced Martin Luther King, Jr. to resist racism and oppression nonviolently. King wasn’t just seeking the liberation of Black Americans, but also White Americans. He believed that those who are oppressed as well as those who do the oppressing are enslaved by racism, and he sought redemption and freedom for all.
Agape the kind of love that Jesus showed. Often, throughout scripture, Jesus encountered people who were sick or excluded or looked down upon, and the scripture says he had compassion on them. He felt for them.
Why? He had never met them. What were they to him? It’s not like it was his mother, or his brother, or his friend - these were people he had never met…
And when Jesus and his disciples gathered for the meal we call the Last Supper, Jesus invited them all to eat with him, and then, afterward, he did the unexpected: he took an apron, the symbol of a slave or servant, and put it on. Then he began to serve his disciples. He showed them kindness. He washed their feet, which is a task of a slave or servant. He did that act of love for them…
And you might say, well, he did that because these were his friends. Except that Jesus knew that, very soon, they would all desert him when he needed them the most. They would abandon him. They would deny him. They would betray him.
He knew this. He knew they would fail him and turn against him.
Yet he still showed them this act of love.
So I think it was the power of agape love that enabled him to do that.
That’s powerful stuff: showing love like that to those who would turn against you…
It’s the most powerful force in the world.
It’s the one thing that can overcome injustice.
It’s the thing that can bring us fully into the reign of Christ, the kingdom of God: the world of wholeness and shalom that God intends for us.
But because it is such a challenging thing for us, we need to practice it. We need to meditate on it. We need to pray that the Spirit might grow this gift within us.
I don’t know about you, but there are some days when I just don’t want to be loving. I get tired of trying to love everyone. It’s so much easier to judge, or mock, or just hide away from the world’s problems.
That’s why Paul wrote a whole chapter on this one spiritual gift. And that’s why love is talked about so often by Jesus, and by the other epistle authors, who even say that God is love; that love is the very essence of who God is.
Something else Martin Luther King, Jr. said about love: he said that love must always accompany power.
King said that power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.
I also heard someone say recently that “love oughta look like something.” After his resurrection, Jesus asked Peter—the disciple who denied Jesus three times—if he loved him. “Peter, do you love me?”
“Yes, Lord,” Peter said.
“Then feed my lambs.”
Then Jesus asked Peter again: “Do you love me?”
“Yes, Lord.”
“Then tend my sheep.”
Jesus asked Peter a third time: “Peter, do you love me?” Peter was upset that Jesus asked him a third time, and said, “You know I love you.”
And Jesus replied, “Feed my sheep.”
Love is more than sentiment. Love is action. Love is tending and feeding the sheep. Love is compassion, shown concretely to those who are vulnerable. Love is working for justice, which is just another way of saying working for what is right. Love is good news to the poor, release to the captives, sight to the blind, and freedom to the oppressed, as we heard last week…
In the movie Brother Bear, it takes the whole movie for Kenai to learn what it means to truly love. He makes many mistakes along the way, and faces many trials.
It’s no different for us. We are all on a journey of learning how to love; how to love like Jesus; to grow in love with every step we take, so that, hopefully, we are able to express our love in action a little better today than we did yesterday, and a little better tomorrow than we did today…
…And we keep doing this, day after day, until one day, at the end of our journey, we will have finally learned what love truly is, and we will experience that final loving embrace of God, whole and complete.
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