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“Relationships Are Life – The Rest is Just Details”
Mark 12:28-31; Corinthians 13:1-8
February 11, 2007
Rev. Tonya Arnesen

Perhaps you’ve seen the T-shirt – usually worn around high school and college campuses in the fall by strapping guys weighing over 240, the shirt shows a big football on the front with the motto: FOOTBALL IS LIFE – the Rest is Just Details.

The shirts started showing up during football season over ten years ago, and were so popular that other sports began to take up the battle cry. How many of you have seen shirts that read Soccer Is Life; Baseball Is Life; Basketball is Life; Volleyball is Life – the Rest is Just Details?

I wonder, if Jesus wore a t-shirt, what would it say? Maybe this: if Jesus wore a T-shirt, it might read, I am Life – the Rest is Just Details. But then the Apostle Paul – Jesus’ #1 fan – comes along and says, “If I speak with the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a nosy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.” Do you know what Paul’s T-shirt is saying? How about this: Relationships are Life – the Rest is Just Details.

Relationships are life. Have you got smarts? Without love, your knowledge is merely data. Have you got power or authority? Without a heart-connection to people, power can be downright dangerous. Have you got faith? Without someone to share it with, the fire of faith grows cold. According to Paul, all the things we think are important, are just the small print. Because Relationships Are Life – the Rest is Just Details.

Certainly Jesus would agree, don’t you think? You remember in Mark’s gospel, when asked, “Teacher which is the greatest commandment of them all?” (And what he was really asking was, “What’s the point of life? What the main thing we should be thinking about and working towards?” Jesus said, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength AND you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Amazing, isn’t it? Jesus had fourteen hundred years of Jewish law and tradition to choose from, and what does Jesus say is the main thing in life? Relationships are life – the rest is just details.

Friends, God has created you for relationship. God designed you to love and be loved. Whatever else you achieve or accomplish, however much stuff you pile up, no matter how high you climb the corporate ladder, if you ignore your need for relationship, you miss the main reason God put you on this planet! I’ve heard it said that God created each person with a heart condition: we are born with a God-shaped hole AND a human-shaped hole in our hearts. Only God can fill the God-space in your life and only human connection can fill that void, because it is God’s design and desire for you to be in relationship with Him and with others.

Relationships are life – the rest is just details. Dr. Kenneth Boa says, "The Bible is all about relationships. The greatest theologians of church history have agreed on this. Obviously, the first example would be Jesus. When he was asked to sum up the God-centered life, he said that it was quite simple. Love God; love others. Later, Augustine, the great theologian of the early church, observed that everything written in Scripture is meant to teach us how to love either God or our neighbor. More than a thousand years later, a converted Augustinian monk named Martin Luther echoed this same thought when he declared that the entire Christian life consists of relating to people around us--particularly by serving our neighbor. As Michael Wittmer says, ‘The one truth that everyone seems to agree on, from Moses through Jesus and on to Augustine and the Reformers, is that it’s virtually impossible to please God without loving our neighbors.”

You know it. I know it. We can’t truly follow Jesus unless we learn to love. A psychologist in Atlanta says he meets two kinds of people. The unhealthy ones go through life crying, "Please love me, please love me." The other group consists of people healthy enough to give love, not just receive it. He says that the best cure for those who cry, "Please love me, please love me" is to help them attain a place of wholeness where they can give help and love to others. In giving love to others, they will automatically fill their own deep needs for attention and love.

No person can a healthy, whole person unless they are able to give and receive love. And love is our primary responsibility as followers of Jesus Christ.

Now, whom are we to love? We begin, of course, with those closest to us, those for whom we are responsible. Tom Tewell, the pastor of Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York, tells of a wedding he once conducted. Tewell was asked to perform this wedding, not in a church, but on a farm. The reason was because the bride’s mother had an advance case of Alzheimer’s. She was barely conscious. She never responded with words; all she could do was groan, which she did most of the time.

The couple wanted to be wed on the family farm so that the mother could attend her daughter’s wedding.

Tewell arrived to find a large front porch that had been beautifully decorated with ornate white chairs. The members of the bridal party were there. They were graduates of Harvard, Stanford, Duke and Dartmouth. They all had either MBAs or law degrees. They were bright, beautiful young people who had the misfortune of being aware of their elite status in life and showing it. (In other words – they were pretty “stuck up.”)

When Tewell checked on the bride about thirty minutes before the service, she asked if it would be all right if her father took her mother up to the first row? She assured him that if her mother’s groans grew too loud, they would take her out. Tewell said "Of course, that would be fine."

The hour arrived, the father carried in his frail little wife. He sat down on the front row, and held her in his arms like a child. The groomsmen walked in followed by the bridesmaids. They all looked arrogant and aloof.

When the bride and groom took their places, the minister repeated the traditional vows that all of us have heard. ‘I, Andrew, take you Melissa, to be my wedded wife; and I promise before God and these witnesses to be your loving and faithful husband; in plenty and in want, in joy and in sorrow, in sickness, and in health, for as long as we both shall live.’

"And that’s when it happened," says Tom Tewell. "God’s Spirit penetrated those groomsmen, and they heard those words in all their fullness. You could see it wash over their faces. Suddenly they were not so assured of being bright, beautiful people whose future was based on money and power and prestige and all the things the world says will make your life complete. It was as if they realized for the first time that despite their young, brilliant lives, something someday might go wrong.

"Fifty years earlier, the father of the bride and his wife, now cradled in his arms, had spoken those same vows. And everyone in that wedding party was saying, ‘Look at them now. She can’t even respond.’ And the tears welled up in their eyes as they realized that life doesn’t always play out as you plan. You can run into problems you never dreamed of encountering.

"That husband, cradling his wife of fifty years, earned a Ph.D. in loving," says Tom Tewell. "He finished the race and kept his vows. He cared for his wife until the end." Relationships are life – the rest is just details. Can you love like that husband loved? Can I? Love begins with those closest to us.

But Christ-like love, does not stop at home. It’s relatively easy to love the people closest to us. But how about the server in a restaurant? How about the clerk in the convenience store, especially the one who barely speaks English? How about the person talking on her cell phone who cuts you off on the freeway? How about the homeless man who approaches you for a handout? The test of our relationships is not how we treat people closest to us – the test of Christ-like love is, how we treat those who may seem undeserving of our love.

Michael Brennan was a homeless man who spent most of his nights sleeping in a cemetery near Harvard University. Brennan had used drugs since he was 13 and eventually became addicted to heroin. In 1990 after a detoxification program, he went to Boston determined to carve out a new life for himself. His motto was, "Don’t do drugs and see what happens." He worked part-time moving furniture, but when he wasn’t working, like many homeless persons, he spent his time in the Boston public library where it was warm and hospitable. Unlike many of his kind, however, he began to take advantage of the library for more than a place to hang out. Knowing things had become the goal of his life; seeking knowledge gave him a direction to pursue.

Since he was a child he had wanted to write. It was a passion with him. He found books about freelance journalism. "I didn’t even know where to put the address on a cover letter. I had to start with that," he said. Brennan learned all he could from how-to books in the library and then started to write.

One day he was in Cambridge wandering the campus of Harvard University. He came across a room full of computers and asked a student if could use one of them. The young man said, "sure," and lent him some software. It was this act of kindness, this treatment that gave him some dignity, which Brennan says was crucial to his recovery. Treating him with compassion instead of scorn, he was allowed to use the Harvard computers. His first major article for a local newspaper netted him $1,000 which put a roof over his head. Since that time he has had articles published in Newsweek and other major magazines and papers as well as a book.

An unknown college student helped change this homeless man’s life. Now, let me ask you something: wouldn’t you like to make that kind of positive different in someone’s life? The word is love – Christ-like love. Love that sent Christ to die on a cross for unworthy folks like you and me. Love that notices the needs of others. Love that includes all persons in its circle. Love like that of a husband cradling his frail wife in his arms as their daughter takes her wedding vows. Love that redeems even the most difficult situation.

Do you know that kind of love? There’s only one place I know that it can be found. In the heart of God. And if you will open your heart to the heart of God, you will discover what is the height and depth and length and breadth of God’s love for you – and when you are able to experience the fullness of God’s love for you – you will also discover a growing capacity to love people – all kinds of people.
Love God. Love your neighbor. Jesus says, “That’s what life is all about.” Because you see, Relationships are life – the rest is just details!
Rev. Tonya M. Arnesen

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