As people of faith, we know love, a deep abiding, life changing, life giving love, not because we earned it, not because we deserve it, not because we are better than anyone else. We know love because God first loved us. God first claimed us and named us. God created us in God’s image and called us Beloved.
May 3, 2026
Hope in Bloom: Practicing Spiritual Gardening
Part 1: “Love as Advocacy”
1 John 4:7-21
Rev. Dr. Heather W. McColl
As I shared earlier, we are beginning a new worship series today, “Hope in Bloom: Practicing Spiritual Gardening”. Through Lent, we talked about being rooted in the good news. This rootedness helped us become a new Creation in Christ. Now as new creations, we are growing, becoming the person God created us to be, becoming the person God calls us to be by cultivating the Fruit of the Spirit. This new series centers around the question: “What does it mean to ‘grow in the Spirit’ in a world that often feels divided and exhausted?
In this series, we are invited to move beyond seeing the Fruit of the Spirit as a checklist for individual perfection. Instead, we will explore these nine virtues—love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control—as collective practices which bring healing and wholeness, which restore and renew us as people of faith.
Drawing on our Disciples’ identity as a ‘People of the Table,’ we will explore how the Spirit’s work in us expands our capacity for radical hospitality and social justice. We aren’t just growing fruit for ourselves. By cultivating the fruit of the Spirit, we are inviting hope to bloom in our community and in our world, opening ourselves to God’s Spirit which is always moving us toward inclusion, wholeness, and the Beloved Community of God”
The first fruit we are looking at is Love as Advocacy. I know that word, advocacy has some negative connotations. It can bring up images of angry people talking over one another, trying to make a point without anyone really listening. It can also bring up images of pity or one giving charity to another person without connection, almost as if we are saying, “look at me, I did a good thing, you should be grateful that I deemed you worthy of my time and resources”. Let me be clear; that is not love as advocacy. That is love as a transaction, something the narrative of this world encourages us to buy into because it cannot comprehend any other way.
As people of faith, when we cultivate love as advocacy as a fruit of the Spirit, at its core, there is support for one another. There is the empowering of others to bring about positive change. When we view Love as Advocacy this way, it changes the narrative. No longer is about transactions and what can you do for me if I do this for you. Rather instead, when we cultivate love as advocacy, we move from simply feeling love, you know the feel good, hearts and rainbows type of love which often is passive and offers no connection or relationship, surface only, to embodying agape, a deep relational, authentic connection in community, active, transformational type of love. When we embody love as advocacy, we embrace a deliberate, selfless commitment to the well-being of all God’s people. And if we have any questions about it can be done, we simply need to turn to our text for the day because that is exactly what the author of 1 John is talking about…love as advocacy when he says these words….
Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love. God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us, and his love is perfected in us.
By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit. And we have seen and do testify that the Father has sent his Son as the Savior of the world. God abides in those who confess that Jesus is the Son of God, and they abide in God. So we have known and believe the love that God has for us.
God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them. Love has been perfected among us in this: that we may have boldness on the day of judgment, because as he is, so are we in this world. There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love. We love because he first loved us. Those who say, “I love God,” and hate a brother or sister are liars, for those who do not love a brother or sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen. The commandment we have from him is this: those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also.
Love as Advocacy 1 John 4:7-21
Those who say, “I love God,” and hate a brother or sister are liars, for those who do not love a brother or sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen.
Why is it so hard? There it is in black and white. We can’t misinterpret it. As people of faith, we have one standard. To love as God loves us. All are equally accountable to this one standard as people who have claimed and named Jesus as our own Risen Savior. How are we not getting this? There it is in black and white. We can’t misinterpret it. We certainly can’t pretend we don’t know what the author of this letter is talking about when he shared these words.. After all, he knew the guy who said these words quite well. He spent a lot with Jesus, following him around, listening to him preach, becoming Jesus’ disciple. These words from 1 John have been handed down from generation to generation. No one can say we as followers of Jesus Christ, do not know what we are supposed to do when it comes to following Jesus’ teachings. No one can say we didn’t know we were supposed to love another because God loves us first.
Yet, as I continue to hear all the stories of hate and hurt which fill our world, I am beginning to wonder how we keep misinterpreting this again and again, how we continue to practice a cruel religion based on judgement, fear, and separation.
Over this past week, I have given some thought to this “supposed misinterpretation” we continue to keep having when it comes to the whole idea of God is love therefore, we are called to love another. Maybe we aren’t getting it because it has become so ingrained in us that for us to function as a society there has to be insiders and outsiders, that there has to be people we love and people we don’t love, that there has to be people we accept and people we don’t accept. Or maybe we are not getting it because we think love is a limited resource. Maybe we have tricked ourselves into believing that if we share it with others, there won’t be enough for us.
Or maybe the reason why we aren’t getting this whole God is love therefore we are called to love one another thing is because it is simply too hard. It requires too much from us. It requires too much of us. It requires that we tear down the walls that separate and divide our communities. It means that we would have to start seeing each other as made in the image of God. It means recognizing that we don’t get to pick and choose who is worthy of God’s love.
And come on, who really wants that? That would be messy. That would be complicated. That would mean we don’t get to live out a narrative which allows me, actually encourages me to think I am better than you. Why on earth would we choose to live out our lives based on humility, connection, relationship and authenticity? Because that is how Jesus lived out his life and calls us as his followers to do the same.
You see, what we tend to forget is that when it comes to God’s love, we don’t get to decide who is worthy or not. God does. And God has already decided that all are chosen to be named and claimed as God’s beloved children. As people of faith, we know love, a deep abiding, life changing, life-giving love, not because we earned it, not because we deserve it, not because we are better than anyone else. We know love because God first loved us. God first claimed us and named us. God created us in God’s image and called us Beloved.
People of God, how are we not getting this? Especially now when our world is so in need of understanding, is so in need of healing, especially now when our world is so in need of experiencing the life-transforming reality that love is not a limited quantity resource. Our world needs to know that there is more than enough to go around. Our world needs to see what can happen when we all begin to love as God has loved us.
May it be so. Amen.
See also: Theology Tuesday for Sunday, May 3, 2026 – Love as Advocacy 1 John 4:7-21.
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*(from sanctifiedart.org)
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