Welcome to Resurrection Parish as we celebrate the 4^th Sunday of Easter.  This is also the fourth week of our Easter message series, “Love Lives.”  In the course of this series, we've seen how the Lord was love in action. Whenever we meet Jesus in the gospel, we see love in action. Sometimes His love was gentle and kind, sometimes His love was challenging and even fierce, but every time you see Jesus, you see love in action.
            Easter is a celebration that love lives. God is love and God lives. It's a celebration that love and light are in fact greater than darkness, doubt, and death. It's a celebration that the same power that gave Jesus the ability to love in such an amazing way is available to us too.
We can use it. Through a relationship with Jesus Christ, we can access the power to love as He did, which is the power to love the people around us, the way we want to love them.
So far in this series we have considered that it is important to see other people as God sees them; to value them just as God values them.  Last week, we looked at what love looks like when there's disagreements, when there's divisions in our relationships. And from the risen Lord, we learned that love goes first.
Today, we're going to look briefly at two aspects of love that seem to be in opposition to each other, but actually go hand in hand. They form a kind of double-edged sword to love. To really love people, we need both these aspects of love that we're going to be discussing. One of them is highly valued in our culture and the other I would argue isn't.
To help us with our reflection, we are going to look at today’s second reading from the First Letter of St. John.  St. John begins by saying, "See what love the Father has bestowed on us that we may be called children of God.  Yet so we are. The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know Him” (1 John 3:1).  God has loved us so much that He grants us this special status, not as servants, but as sons and daughters.
If you grew up coming to church every Sunday this probably seems like a “no-brainer,” however, this revelation really does make Christianity stand apart from every other faith or religion in the whole history of the world.
The pagan gods of the ancient world didn't love human beings. They used them for their own purposes.  Muslims acknowledge that we serve God, we honor God, but they would never presume a familial relationship with Him. And even for the Jewish people, our revered forebearers in faith, while God is understood to hold a father-like role, He's never addressed that way.
The term that Jesus instructed us to use in prayer – Abba, which we could translate as daddy or papa-- is entirely informal and intimate.  God invites us into a childlike level of intimacy.  What do we do to earn that relationship with God? What have we done that makes us so special we get to call God Papa? Nothing, absolutely nothing at all.
We are favored in this way because of the cross of Christ, and we embraced this favor by believing in the cross of Christ, and what Christ did for us there.  That's the first half of this love that St. John teaches about, God loves us and accepts us who we are, as we are, before we do anything for Him. You don't have to clean up your act or start going to church. There are no conditions. It's unconditional, immediate and inexhaustible.
Our society largely promotes and understands accepting people, whoever they are, no matter what. And that's as it should be.
A basic expression of love is acceptance, but that's just one side of that two-edged sword I mentioned. There's another dimension to love that is equally important, and St. John goes on to discuss it. "We are God's children now; what we shall be has not yet been revealed.  We do know that when it is revealed we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is” (1 John 3:2).  God already accepts us as His children, but that doesn't mean that He's finished with us. God wants us to be more than we are now.
God loves us so much that He wants to fashion us into the image of His son. And so, St. John goes on to write, "Everyone who thus hopes in Him, purifies himself as He is pure” (1 John 3:3).  God is not satisfied with our faults, failures, imperfections, insecurities, and all the rest. He wants us to cooperate with His grace to grow, to grow beyond our greed, our anger, our jealousy, whatever, and everything that interferes with the best version of ourselves.
This is a part of love our culture doesn't always get, which makes it more challenging for us. Love accepts people where they are, but it also seeks to positively influence them, to challenge, and change them.  Acceptance opens the door to influence.
Our instinct is to mind our own business and turn a blind eye on any kind of problems or challenges in other people. Sure, there can be a danger of getting too much into other people's business, of becoming nosy, but love doesn't keep quiet when it sees someone needs to be challenged to grow. Love is patient with people and people's faults for sure, but it also helps people beyond that, to the better version that they can be.
As a church, we want to be accessible and easy to get into. That's the first kind of love, but we also want to be a church that is challenging, and that's the second kind of love.
So where does this message fall with you in your relationships? Maybe you're trying to get a friend and her adult child to come back to church, but you can't. And the reason you can't is because they feel you're judging them whenever you bring the topic up. Maybe you see a problem with a coworker and the problem is just getting worse, and you see it, and you know it, but you haven't said anything because you're not sure how it would be received. Maybe as a parent, you can't get through to your teenage son or daughter. And the reason is because in your frustration, you're bringing a lot more challenge to the conversation than you are acceptance. Love cares enough to influence others because influence strengthens the relationship, but it's acceptance that paves the way to influence.