If an alien arrived on our planet and went looking for “love,” I wonder what he would find. Here is what I imagine happening. He starts by looking at the sexes. Our species now spends countless hours absorbed in media. So, he begins by tuning in to some “reality TV” like “Jersey Shore” and “The Bachelor” to get a feel for our “culture”… (I use that word loosely). What he sees in these shows about friendship and the romantic bond turns out to be about nothing more than desire, abuse, and competition for affection.

Then he goes online. And what does he find there? He doesn’t find much “love” on the Internet. He does find roughly 1500 online dating sites raking in billions in revenue, sites which reduce the mate selection process to the social equivalent of ordering take out. He discovers some hugely popular ones that assist people in cheating on their spouses and he finds a plethora of pornography. He shakes his head and wonders, “Who are these people?”

Being the expert anthropologist that he is, he next inquires into our parenting skills. He gets a hold of Amy Chua’s popular 2500 word essay “Tiger Mom” from the Wall Street Journal. A great piece on how to breed and train highly successful accomplished children, worthy of the superior parents who begot them. He is surprised to note that there is not a single mention of the word or the concept of “love” in the entire treatise. He concludes that human children must only exist to inflate the egos of their parents.

Having seen us on a sexual and familial level, our little green friend is very curious about our politics. He tunes in to the evening news. “Will I,” he wonders, “find any love there? Surely a society that is worth anything must ask the following question of its citizens, ‘What does love demand of us?’” But, he watches and he wonders and he scratches his little antennae. No one asks that question. All of the debate is about money. There is a lot of anger and posturing and elbowing. Never any talk of love.

He spends a lot of time on CNN, C-SPAN, and FOX. He wonders if religion has any effect on us. He finds that we are a religious species, and notes that there are almost no atheists among our politicians. Being “religious” will get votes, so of course, they’ve all got “religion.” Many of them blow their horns loud, trumpeting to the world that they are “Christians”. “Ah”, he says, “These people will have to bring love to the table. They know that God is love. Their language will have to be different, ‘grace seasoned with salt’ (Colossians 4:6). They will be ‘slow to anger’ (Ephesians 4:31). They will have to be about more than egotism, naked self-interest and the worship of money. In their behavior and in their agenda “we will know they are Christians by their love.” However, he soon discovers that while they are good at throwing the word “God” around, that the word “love” is entirely absent from their political discourse. … and their demeanor. And, money is what they really care about.

So he concludes that there is not much place right now for “love” in human sexuality, the family, and least of all, in politics. However, having given up on the current scene, he wonders if it was always this way. He picks up a few old books. One of them contains the speeches of a long dead Republican President, a man whose religiosity was often questioned, not much of a churchgoer, but a man who actually did believe that God controls the affairs of men and that He is not mocked…a guy named Abraham Lincoln. Our friend reads the Second Inaugural Address and here, finally he finds someone who did take the demands of love seriously. A tear comes to his eyes as he reads this speech to a nation torn apart by its Sin:

“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

He notes that this speech was written only a month before Lincoln was assassinated.

Then, our friend finds the speeches of a descendent of those slaves liberated by Lincoln, a guy named Martin Luther King. He reads the “I Have a Dream Speech”. Again our visitor is moved to the depths of his being. He decides that in Lincoln and King, our planet had the greatest orators in the galaxy. And he notes that this second speaker too, was assassinated. “How peculiar,” he thinks to himself, “Love will get you killed on this planet.”

Finally, he picks up a book, a book that both King and Lincoln revered. Here, he reads of One greater than either of them, Someone like himself an “alien.” He reads about Him, and cannot help but note that this One too, was assassinated. “And yet,” he thinks,” there may be hope.”

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. – John 1:1-5 (NIV)

and

For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son. This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed. But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what they have done has been done in the sight of God. – John 3:16-21 (NIV)

“Yes,” he says, ”These people may not realize it; they may think Love irrelevant; but Love will be the last word…even on this planet.”