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Give attention to the reading of God's Word as it is recorded in the Gospel according to Luke, the 23rd chapter. I begin the reading at the verse numbered 50. "Now there was a man named Joseph from the Jewish town of Arimathea. He was a member of the council, a good and righteous man who had not consented to

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their purpose and deed, and he was looking for the kingdom of God. This man went to Pilate and asked for the body of Jesus. Then he took it down and wrapped it in a linen shroud and laid him in a rock-hewn tomb where no one had ever yet been laid. It was the day of preparation and the Sabbath was beginning. The women

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who had come with him from Galilee followed and saw the tomb and how his body was laid. Then they returned and prepared spices and ointments." And may God bless to us this reading from his Word. Pray with me. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, amen.

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The Calvary experience, the cross experience, ends with a sigh of relief, a breath of tenderness, a touch of kindness, if you will. For Joseph of Arimathea goes and claims the body of Jesus and puts it in a new tomb where no one has ever lain before. It's interesting, isn't it, that the body which was so dishonored in

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life is now so honored in death. The Scriptures say that Joseph was a generous man, a righteous man, that he was a member of the Council of the Jews, and that he voted against the crucifixion of Jesus. He was a man who in his heart had come to, or was coming to, faith and did not hesitate to take his

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stand with the man from Galilee. So the last act on Calvary becomes the act of Joseph of Arimathea. And what he says to us by it is this, that while there it was too late for everything else. It was not too late for love. It's never too late for love, for love is stronger than hurt. I cannot imagine how

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hard it must have been for Joseph to have stood there and watched Christ crucified, listened to him in the midst of that, pray prayers such as "Father forgive them for they know not what they do." I don't know if I could have stood and watched that, and you might ponder that question in your own heart and

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spirit. To see the love of God poured out in such awesome measure is almost more than any single mind or heart could observe. I read about a youngster who in church was bored with the service and so began to write on the bulletin, and after having written in big letters which tilted up as it went across the page, he

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handed what he had written to his mother and it read, "Dear mommy and daddy, I love you. Do you love me? Put an O around yes or around no." That's the question of course of everyone. Dear God, do you love me? And what Joseph saw on Calvary was God putting a great bloody O around the

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affirmative. Now you know when we think of the love of God we must remind ourselves that love is more sublime and also more susceptible to suffering the higher the rank of the one who is loving. What I mean by that is this, a stone does not suffer, but higher in the order of creation than a stone is an insect. An

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insect can suffer. Higher in the order than an insect is an animal. An animal can suffer more than an insect. There are levels than animals. Some are considered to be higher orders than the others and the higher orders have greater capacity to be wounded and hurt and at the apex of creation stands humankind and we can

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suffer more in body and spirit than anything else that God has made. Of course at the sublime pinnacle of everything that is stands God himself in the perfection of his holiness and this means beloved in Christ that God has a capacity to suffer that is far beyond our own. What I'm saying is that as long

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as you love only yourself then only that which impacts upon you will hurt you. But as soon as you extend the circle of your love and make it large enough to include another or others then what hurts them is also going to hurt you. And when one thinks of God who holds within his mighty heart an infinite love for

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everything and everyone that he has made, when one contemplates that, one gets a vision of how much he can hurt. Now the fact that love can hurt so leads some people to say well then one should never love and that of course is foolish counsel. I have never stood with parents

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beside the grave of their child and heard them say as they laid the little one away we would have preferred that she'd never been born rather than go through this. I've never stood with a woman as she said goodbye to her dying husband. I've never sat beside a friend who was weeping beside his departing

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friend and heard that woman or heard that friend say well I would have preferred that we'd never been married or never met. That would be easier than going through what I'm going through now. The fact of the matter is love is worth what it costs but it does cost. That's what the poet means when he says it is

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better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. The world of course cheapens love, makes it into a thing of romantic Valentine cards and ballads. But that is mere sentiment and feeling. Had Joseph of Arimathea on Calvary give vent only to his feelings then perhaps he would have stood there

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enraged or stood there sobbing but he did more than this. He reached out in love to his Lord and gave him a grave which is the only thing he had to give. Love you see, love as evidenced in Joseph was stronger than the hurt he knew because the love in him was like the love in his Savior. There were two

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ministers who were talking together and one said to the other I wonder how it would feel to love as Jesus did and the other immediately replied we could never know that feeling because if we love like Jesus did then we would be thinking about the ones that we love and not how we felt about our loving. So

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Joseph, terribly hurt, put his love before his feelings. Love you see is stronger than hurt. And love is also stronger than hate. There must have been anger in Joseph that day. It took courage to stand before the Roman procurator Pontius Pilate and

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insist upon the body and yet Joseph didn't hesitate to run the risk of that. Commonly the bodies were left to rot or thrown into a nearby valley where they were burned with the day's garbage. He would not tolerate such a thing and faced down the Roman until he got what he came for. When we think of love we

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must not think of the weak or the pusillanimous. I sat one day and talked with Gerald Kennedy who was at that time the famous Methodist Bishop of Los Angeles and we were talking about the Green Bay Packers football team and their coach at that time Vince Lombardi. And Kennedy laughed. He said he had heard

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one of the members of the Packers football team being interviewed on the radio and this player had said, "Coach Lombardi treats us all the same, like dogs." Well I guess Vince Lombardi was a very tough man that he took a bunch of losers and made them into a bunch of winners and someone asked him on one

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occasion how it was that his team had such unity, that there was such cohesion within the group, how they approached the task so much in one spirit and he replied without a moment's hesitation, "My men respect one another, indeed they love one another." When the New Testament speaks of love it is not speaking of a weak and

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sissified thing. It's speaking of the love of football players. It's speaking about that which is tough. It's speaking about that which endures. When you read 1st Corinthians 13, the great love chapter in the New Testament, don't read it with the smell of flowers and with the sounds of violins and harps. Think

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instead of a team moving down the field in unity and strength pursuing its goal. That's what the passage speaks of. It says patience, not possessiveness. It says the elimination of touchiness. It says endure. It says love outlasts everything. I like the way J.B. Phillips translates that. He says love is the one thing that

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still stands when everything else has fallen. That is what New Testament love is. And that's what we see in Joseph. And that of course is what he saw in his Savior. And the tough love he saw there, he mirrored in himself. And that kind of love is stronger than hate. I read a short story about a woman who was called Gertrude

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Gillespie. And she was, according to the story, a very ugly, a very homely woman. So much so, in fact, that she very rarely left her home, stayed indoors, ashamed of her appearance. And then, according to the story, there moved into the town a man who called himself Mr. J. And he was a beautician. And he sought to serve the

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women of the community. And they went to him, and he made them all look wonderful. And Gertrude, sitting alone in her home, ashamed of her appearance, wished that she would be able to talk to Mr. J. But of course she wouldn't go outside to visit his shop. Much to her wonder, one day Mr. J. came to her home. He came and said that

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he had come to do for her everything that she was willing to allow him to do. And she yielded immediately to his skills and his efforts. And he made her quite beautiful. He made her quite lovely. It's said in the story that when she first left her house, the women stared, the men looked, and the traffic

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stopped in the streets just to look at her. But unfortunately, as time went on, and as she became more and more accustomed to the beauty of her countenance as she saw it in a mirror, she began to criticize other people's appearances. She didn't like the way they dressed, the way they stood, the way they

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carried themselves. She had little accusations, little criticisms, little peccadillos on which to pick. And on one occasion, she reduced a young lady to tears as she attacked the young lady's appearance. And in the midst of her tears, this little girl cried out to Gertrude Gillespie, "But who made you beautiful? And

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who made you so attractive?" And Gertrude looked at her for a moment and said, "This is the way the story ends." Really? I can't remember. There are some people who, blessed in life, don't remember the ones who have

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blessed them. There are some people who, richly endowed by Mr. J, forget altogether the part that Mr. J has played in their lives. But Joseph of Arimathea was not one of these. He did not forget the love that he saw in Christ, this strong and powerful love, this love which is spent with, this love

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which keeps no accounts, this love which leaves the arithmetic at home, this love which is always running in the red, that kind of love which stands when everything else falls, that which he saw in his Savior he claimed for himself. He had the courage to do what he did in the face of Rome's might.

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Love, you see, is stronger than hate. And just one last thought for our sharing. We need also to remember that love heals. You know, Calvary was a place of brokenness. The victims' bodies were

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broken there, the executioner's consciences were broken there, and the spirits of those who watched were broken there. Here is Joseph, having pinned his hopes on Christ, now seeing Christ pinned to a cross like some butterfly with a label overhead, and still loving, still reaching out and touching with his

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prayers, with the very expression on his face. Seeing that, Joseph, wanting to do whatever there was to do, and discovering that all he could do was offer a tomb, did that one thing. Love is not, of course, something that we just

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think about. Love is not something that we just talk about. Love is always something that we do. So he begged the body of Jesus and laid it away with love. And in that act, he began his own healing. I know some folks who live in California named Alan and Jean Seaman, and they had

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four wonderful children of their own, but they decided they would like to take a foster child into their home. And when they were first called to receive a foster child, it was a very difficult case. It was a little baby who had been in the process of being born for 48 hours. The birth was finally accomplished

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by cesarean, but there were many times in the 48 hours when the child had insufficient air. The head was terribly swollen and lacerated and cut with wounds from the forceps. The doctors did not give the child much chance to live. It went into convulsions and tremors just about every three minutes. They

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expected the infant, if it lived at all, to be hydrocephalic. The child was so withdrawn because of the trauma of its birth that during all of the weeks it was in the hospital before being allowed to go home, it never cried once. It never made a sound. Even when an injection was put into its tiny little frame, even then

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it never cried out. Totally withdrawn. So the Seamans took this little one home. They called him Timmy, and they got their four children together and they said, "We shall launch a campaign of love," and they loved that little boy. They loved him around the clock. He was never alone. They cared for him, kissed him, coddled him,

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fondled him, lifted him up, laughed with him. They did everything love could do, and it was a great victory some weeks after they were home that he, for the first time, cried. And it was a greater victory some weeks after that when he made other emotional response, and it was a tremendous victory when one day he was

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put upon the bed and he threw back his little arms and opened his hands the first time they had not been clenched into fists. And then there was the day he smiled. Well, the doctors were quite amazed at all that transpired. When Tim was two years old, they put him up for adoption, and of course the Seamans

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adopted him, for he was part of their hearts. He's 14 years old now. Normal, wonderful, beautiful love. Love can do, you see, what nothing else can do. Love does have the power to heal. So Joseph saw the love in Jesus and did the only loving thing there was for him to do. Just a tomb in a garden, the only kindness of

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which he was capable. But with that act, he began his healing. Love is oftentimes three parts pain. Love is not just feeling, it is obedience. Love is not just talking, it is something that you do. And that is what Joseph demonstrated, that that kind of loving heals, and that that kind of loving is

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never too late. Well, one day I stood on a little hillside looking down on the beach in Malibu, California, and there were some little boys there playing cowboys and Indians or something of that kind, and they decided in the midst of their game

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to take one of the boys and to tie him to a piece of driftwood that was there, you know, like the cowboys and Indians used to do. And the little boy who was being tied did not object, but there was one little brown-headed boy, I think he was a cowboy, there was one little brown-headed cowboy who objected. He didn't think it

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was right to tie him up. He might get hurt, and besides that, it just wasn't good to do those kinds of things. And the leader of the group, who was a youngster about 11, said, "We don't care what you think about anything. If you don't want to play the game, then go somewhere else. We don't want to play with you. We don't

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like you." And with that, this boy and the other boys began to move down the beach, and the little cowboy standing here cried out to them, "But I like you!" And they stopped, and I thought for a moment that that might heal the rift, "But I like you!" And they turned.

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But then the bully who was in charge said, "Well, you may like us, but we don't like you." And they turned and ran down the beach, playing their game. And I watched the little cowboy as he walked the other way, his shoulders drooping, and he got smaller and smaller as he got farther away,

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till I could just barely hear upon the sea's breezes his words, "But I like you." And I thought to myself, "It costs you to say that, little cowboy, and you're learning that love is something you do, and that in the doing of it, you pay a price. I hope you'll keep on being a lover. I hope you'll meet Christ and see in his

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cross what real loving is meant to be, for that's the love that will stand you strong on that day when someone in the world says to you, "Get out of our game!" What is it the song says? What the world needs now is love. Sweet love. Well, I know one person who agrees with that. He's a teenager here in Pittsburgh,

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and he wrote me a note, and I'm going to read it to you. He watches our television show, and this is what he wrote me. I'll read it. I won't leave out a word. Here's what he said, right from the top to the bottom. "Somehow pot and pills and assorted academics aren't enough anymore, and I'm tired of a four-hour high or a

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12-hour trip or a book that changes my whole life for the better part of a week, and I'm tired of religion and Ralph Nader and George Bush and Bono with U2 and Bruce Springsteen and all those distant men with their distinct philosophies that somehow work for them but do not work for me. I need something

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more, more than a pill or a promise or a pipe or a poem. I need the hard stuff. I need love." For him, and for you and me, and for the planet, the lesson of Christ and Calvary and Joseph of Arimathea is simply this. In this world, it's really too late for

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anything else, but it's never too late to love. Let us pray. [Prayer]

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O thou who dost see down to the center of us, O thou who dost know whether our most desperate need is to love or to be loved, O thou who dost love us with an everlasting love,

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O thou who dost enable us to love precisely because thou hast most loved us, O thou who art love, so fill us with thy spirit, that we might go away but by cross this day, committed, like Joseph of old,

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to do what it's never too late to do, to love. We pray our prayer in Jesus' name. Amen.

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