sermons

All Of Us

What Does Love Look Like?

Steve Watson

Dec 21, 2025

When I was a baby high school principal, 16 years ago, I was in over my head. I was younger than half the faculty at the school. And while I was qualified and licensed, there were a lot of experiences I hadn’t had yet. The school had some problems – graduation rates that were inching downward, behavioral problems and mental health challenges that were racing upwards. And because of some weird school district politics that were beyond my control, a group of influential teachers were rooting for me to fail.

Welcome to your new job, Steve, right?

I only stuck around for three years. There was this church I loved that thought maybe I should be a pastor and not a principal and head-hunted me away, and off I went….. So it’s not like I made any big, lasting difference in the life of that school. 

But I learned some important stuff.

• I learned not everybody’s got the same sense of humor.
• I learned that kids and grownups may handle our business differently, but inside we’re mostly the same.
• And I learned what I think is the best and most important question in the universe.

Which is: What does love look like? 

What does love look like? 

When I showed up at this school, what a lot of people wanted was a principal who would really crack down on misbehavior.

• How can we have more surveillance?
• Who will more strictly enforce the rules?
• What more aggressive punishments can we implement?

And don’t get me wrong, there’s a place for rules and accountability, but I came to believe these were the wrong questions. When our students were misbehaving, they were bored and unmotivated and looking for attention and power and were pretty sure no one really cared about them. And so we had to ask and keep asking:

• What does love look like?
• Not niceness?
• Not turning away and enabling, but what does real love look like?

And the same with our students who weren’t causing troubles for anyone else but were hurtling themselves in a sea of despair. Back then, I was shocked to learn through our annual youth risk behavior surveys that our LGBTQ students were hurting in some powerful ways and at risk for a lot of self-injurious behaviors and risks, not because of their sexuality itself but because of the stigma and disapproval with which they were met. 

And honestly, at that point in my life, I wasn’t yet clear yet on how I reconciled my faith and my relationships with gay, queer, trans folks. I was raised as a kid in the 70s and 80s, and I was formed in my faith in the 80s and 90s, with more old-fashioned, conservative – some would say homophobic – views on different sexual orientations and identities. And to this point, I’d been taught that the most important question here was:

What does the Bible teach?

As if the Bible ever teaches just one thing, and then you just go and believe and do that thing.

And don’t get me wrong, friends, I still love the Bible. I read it just about everyday. I am, amongst other things, a professional scholar and teacher of these ancient, beautiful, complex founding documents of our faith. I care about the Bible.

But through prayer and study, and a desire to just love my students, try to keep them safe, help them belong and learn, I realized that on sexual ethics and sexual identity and on everything else really, the first and most important question is not:

What does the Bible say? 

The first and most important question is:

What does love look like?

What does love like? Get curious about that question first, and then let it shape what comes next.

And friends, that’s today’s Christmas sermon for the fourth week of Advent.

What does love look like? 

Because it’s the traditional word of the fourth week of Advent – these four candles standing for hope, peace, joy, and love. And it’s the question I find myself coming back to again and again these past 16 years, including this week.

What does love look like?

Let’s read a couple of short Bible passages and take it from there.

Galatians 4:4-7 (Common English Bible)

4 But when the fulfillment of the time came, God sent his Son, born through a woman, and born under the Law.

5 This was so he could redeem those under the Law so that we could be adopted.

6 Because you are sons and daughters, God sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba, Father!”

7 Therefore, you are no longer a slave but a son or daughter, and if you are his child, then you are also an heir through God.

John 3:16-17

16 God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him won’t perish but will have eternal life.

17 God didn’t send his Son into the world to judge the world, but that the world might be saved through him.

So friends, I’ve of course pulled these verses out of their context. I’ve given you the shortest of readings without all the stuff before and after.

Suffice it to say, there are big topics mentioned here – Law, salvation, eternal life. 

The whole letter that the apostle Paul writes to these little house churches in Galatia is about their relationship to the Jewish law tradition they are learning about as new followers of the Jewish teacher named Jesus. As new Gentile participants in this breakaway Jewish sect of the Way of Jesus, they’re asking –

What is the Law? And what is our relationship to that Law?

Law – that’s a big religious topic. 

And the whole of the apostle John’s memoirs of the life of Jesus is obsessed with this question of eternal life. It’s sort of asking –

What life exists for us beyond the grave?

Life that continues on past death.

It’s even more asking –

What is the good life?

Like what is full life, the eternal kind of life for us here and now? 

Eternal life – that’s another big religious topic.

And salvation. That was a Roman word. The emperor Augustus claimed to be a savior. Roman propaganda claimed that their empire, their power saved its own citizens, and saved the people they conquered as well. But it was also a Jewish word – that for a little tribe of ancient near Eastern people and one day for all the people of the earth, God longs to rescue and help and heal. God saves us.

So salvation – that’s a big religious word. ((I have a whole chapter on what that word might mean in the dissertation I finished this year that might be getting published this spring in a book. Just what the world needs – thousands of my words on big religious topics. (I have some mixed feelings about this venture….)

And law, eternal life, salvation – big words even outside of religion. In a lot of ways, the community I joined at my old high school where I was head of school was kind of fixated on laying down the law more effectively. 

And here in what feels like this very apocalyptic 21st century of life on earth, we are often very much wondering about what it means to save our democracy, and save the species we’re eliminated, and even to save our species’ life on earth, as we talk about saving the world. 

So all these big questions aren’t going anywhere. But in the whole of the good news of Jesus, and in these spots from Galatians and John I read in particular, there’s a deeper question underneath these questions about law, and salvation, and eternal life.

And that question is:

What does love look like? 

God sees a people group that worships him, the ancient Jews, wondering how to be faithful as time changes, and their religion evolves, and they face new questions and new troubles. And as centuries go by, as the ancient Jewish people face some triumphs as a people but also a lot of defeats, a lot of hardships, God sees them wondering about the faithfulness of God. And God does not wonder –

• How do I reward them?

• Or how do I punish them?

• Or how do I teach them pure religion?

No, I think God first wonders,

What does love look like?

And then in the fullness of time, the text says God sends them his son, born of a woman. Because love participates as much as possible. Love joins in. And so God joins the human adventure in a deeper way. 

And for Jews who wonder if God has abandoned them, God says:

No, no, no. In my love, I call you my sons and daughters and children. 

And for the many in these little house churches who are literal slaves in Roman society – subject to cruelty, abuse, and all the other sufferings of the disinherited, God says:

This is not the truth about you. You are not slaves but heirs of all that is the birthright of children of God. 

The gospel of John makes the connection to love in the life of God explicit. Seeing all the ways that humans lose our way. Seeing all the ways we are perpetrators in the sufferings of fellow humans and the rest of creation. Seeing all the ways that we are perpetrators in our own persistent suffering, God’s first question is not –

How do I punish them? How do I conquer or fix them? Who’s to blame? Who has some hell to pay for all that’s wrong?

Religious people mostly forget this. We mostly wonder if God’s trying to win God’s next battle, like God’s constantly at war. This is the Donald Trump, Pete Hegseth, Franklin Graham, Christian nationalist vision of God. The God of the bullies and tyrants, the fake God that big parts of the American and global church are starting to worship – God who is on our side and against our enemies. 

But God isn’t like this at all… 

The message of Christmas – the incarnation of God in Christ – is radically anti-imperial, anti-bully, anti-arrogance and narcissism. As far as God is concerned, the crucified and risen Christ is the rightful leader and certainly the leader of the church that bears his name. Any priest or pastor, any celebrity or boss or influencer, any elected official or corporate higher-up, anyone we consider rich or beautiful or important is just another part of the community, just another piece of God’s body – no higher or lower than any other. When we get self-important or self-entitled, we’re outside of the truth. Sometimes love helps us get smaller. It’s time to sit down.

In reaction to all this religious nonsense, or in reaction to the hardships of life, and our suffering and fails, maybe we don’t have a puffed up version of God but an absent or dying one. Maybe we mostly wonder if God’s not all we thought God was, like God’s not so real, or like God’s given up on us, or maybe we’ve given up on God. 

But the message of Christmas – the incarnation of God in Christ – is also radically anti-despair and nihilistic as well. Every one of us who is misunderstood, disregarded, unsuccessful, uncounted, unknown, unworthy in our eyes or any others is an important part of the community, a special part of God’s body – no lower or higher than any other. When our hopes and worth shrink before our eyes, we’re outside of the truth. Sometimes love helps us get bigger too. It’s time to dare to stand up. 

It turns out this isn’t just our best question, it’s God’s best question –

What does love look like?

Love starts by seeing and then by feeling, because you can’t love what you don’t notice. And you can’t love what you notice but don’t care about. 

So the stories of the first Christmas are all about seeing and noticing who and what have gone unseen and uncared about. 

God sees this poor, young woman named Mary, a nobody, barely a person in the eyes of the big world. And God thinks – you are one of my favorites, and asks her in a dream –

Would you like to give birth to God?

And she says,

May it be, let it be. 

And through Mary, God sees a people who are conquered and colonized, one group among all the disinherited of the world, people who have to migrate and move at the whim a cruel politician, people who don’t own their own home, people who can’t plan for a secure future for themselves or their children, and through Mary, we get this radical prayer of God turning the world upside down. Because in Christ, there are no nobodies. Everybody is a somebody. 

And in the Christmas story, God sees a whole lot of so-called nobodies – magicians from a far-off land, dirt poor minimum wage night-shift workers called shepherds, lonely elders, at the tail end of their lives full of loss, and in seeing them God feels, these are people who could use some good news, and they become the first witnesses to the good news that begins in the birth of Jesus. 

Because in Christ, everybody is a somebody that God’s looking to love. 

Way back then, and still now. This is the story of the Spirit of God – still sending Godself, gently, humbly present with us all by God’s spirit, seeing, feeling, joining, drawing near, in hopes that we can believe good news again, about ourselves, our world, and our future possibilities. 

Friends if this question – what does love look like? is good enough for God, then maybe it’s good enough for us as well.

This is why churches at our best are relentless in running these little experiments in what love looks like for us. In a small way, you’ve seen that here this Advent.

We raised a bunch of money for our partners with Victory Programs, who open the door to hope, recovery, and community for individuals and families facing homelessness, addiction, or other chronic health conditions in Greater Boston.

And Victory programs’ CEO is a member of our community, and they are a Reservoir partner too – meaning we support them financially through our partnerships team, who gives out 10% of our churches tithes and offerings to organizations and people we believe in. And meaning we look for ways to learn about and connect with their work when we can.

And Victory Programs was putting together winter kits of hoodies, socks, hats, stuff like that to help vulnerable folks in our city get through the winter a little safer, and with a tangible sign that they matter, that someone cares.

And so individuals and groups in our community raised extra funds for these kits, to buy all these supplies. And our partnerships team kicked in some of its remaining year end funds to this project, so that every one of you who’s given a dollar to Reservoir this year participated. And then folks in our community packed up all these supplies and transported them to Victory Programs, whose team is getting them into the hands and onto the bodies of folks who really need them. 

Because when parts of our city can’t get through the winter, love looks like doing a little something to help. 

And that’s a beautiful thing, but maybe it’s also just a little way to get back into that question

“What does love look like?”

in a bigger way.

Because maybe love looks like remembering we’re all connected, so that when you live in a city or neighborhood or state where there are vulnerable people on your streets, you don’t think of them as a plague or menace that someone needs to fix or get rid of. Instead, you think of them as people like you who are worthy of love. 

And maybe love looks like when you live in a city or neighborhood or state where there are vulnerable people are talked about in public life, you vote for people and support policies that include those people in the hopes and dreams of this nation, since “we the people” doesn’t just include “we the people” who already have enough and “we the people” doesn’t just mean the people who have been here for a a few generations but the newcomers too and “we the people” doesn’t just include me and mine but all of us. 

And then maybe if we’re participating in Victory Programs’ winter kits campaign, and we’re a little radicalized to see our whole world through the lens of the question “”What does love look like?” then maybe in our homes and in our dang selves, when a vulnerable person or a vulnerable part of ourselves needs tender loving care, we’ll have the compassion in us to try. 

Because after all, the word in today’s Advent guide is from the 13th century mystic and teacher Saint Bonaventure, who taught –

“If you do not know your own dignity and condition, you cannot value anything at its proper worth.” 

O Holy night! The stars are brightly shining

It is the night of our dear Savior’s birth

Long lay the world in sin and error pining

‘Til He appeared and the soul felt its worth

A thrill of hope the weary world rejoices

For yonder breaks a new and glorious morn

Sometimes it’s the soul on the street who needs the new and glorious morn. Sometimes it’s the kid in our family or in our classroom who’s shuffling through life in despair who needs that new and glorious morn.

Sometimes it’s the hurting little kid in ourselves who needs that new and glorious morn. 

God’s here for all of it, friends. What if this is the Christmas story, that the God who sent Godself to us in God’s Son Jesus Christ is the God who is still asking:

What does love look like?

And still moving accordingly…. 

–Will we join God in this great love story? 

Hear the good news of Christmas….

God is here, asking as God always does, what does love look like? And friends, your lives are seen and known and felt by this living God of this question. You are sacred, you are worthy, you are somebody, you are loved. And you are invited to wonder with our living God, in all the corners of your life, what does love look like? And take your next steps in participating in all the great love stories of our living God, and all the great love stories of our lives.

Amen.