LOVE!
a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Sunday February 15, 2004
[extemporaneous introduction]
You know, there’s been so much written and said about the subject of Love that
sometimes it seems impossible to come up with a fresh approach to the topic. We
see it everywhere, talk about it constantly, but do we ever truly understand it?
that is, see love as love truly is, rather than simply being swept away head-over-heels
by its irresistible power, often when we least expect it...as so many of us have
in our lives (and maybe even hope to again). There are so many truisms, so many
fantasies and clichés, yet Love the Cliché will lose out to Love the Irresistible
Power every time. And even in the fairy tale, it's rarely "happily ever after."
No wonder Shakespeare cautions us to "speak low, if you speak love." Clichés do
not become clichés by accident, of course; behind each cliché there is a fragment
of a larger truth which mere words simply cannot express with the same intensity
and freshness as the experience itself. And yet we inevitably struggle to find
those words, as if, by giving a name to what we feel, we might just gain a little
control over the experience, just as the Miller's daughter gained control of Rumpelstiltskin
in that classic fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm.
What is true of Romance is also, in many ways, true of Religion as well. For example,
every Sunday morning here at the First Religious Society we stand up and declare
proudly that "Love is the Doctrine of this Church." But what do we really mean
when we say this? Typically, when I think of Love in a Religious context, my mind
is almost immediately drawn to Paul’s famous description in 1st Corinthians 13:
"Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or
rude. It does not insist on is own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does
not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. Love bears all things, believes
all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends." Or I’m reminded
of the one Great Commandment of both the Gospels and the Hebrew Bible: to love
the Lord our God with all our heart, and all our soul, and all our strength, and
all our mind, and to love our neighbors as ourselves. Or I may even be tempted
to try to make sense of the Scriptural admonition to love my enemies, to "do good
to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you"--
perhaps one of the more troubling and problematic edicts of Christian Ethics.
And yet, there it is. "For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten
son.... " "Greater Love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his
friends..." What are we to make of statements like this, in a world where some
people are willing to blow themselves up simply to take the lives of a few of
their enemies, all in the perceived service of God? And does this somehow in turn
justify pre-emptive violence based on fear and suspicion: doing unto others BEFORE
they get a chance to do it unto you? Or does Love teach us a better way?
In his famous sermon on "Loving Your Enemies," Martin Luther King Jr. attempted
to make sense of these Biblical injunctions by talking about the three different
words for love in Ancient Greek: eros, philia, and agape, observing
that in each instance it is agape which is elevated to the staring role.
King described agape as an "understanding and creative, redemptive goodwill
for all" -- a love that empowers us to dwell together in peace. He continued by
saying: "An overflowing love which seeks nothing in return, agape is the
love of God operating in the human heart. At this level, we love [others] not
because we like them, nor because their ways appeal to us, nor even because they
possess some type of divine spark; we love [them] because God loves them. At this
level, we love the person who does an evil deed, although we hate the deed that
[they do]."
Empathy, Compassion, Divine Forgiveness...this is the level at which agape
functions. Yet it's often seemed to me that agape love is highly overrated,
while eros and philia have gotten something of a bum rap. In the
lives of all but the truly saintly, agape rapidly becomes distant and abstract:
it lacks the intensity, the immediacy, of the other two types of love. How can
we have compassion if passion itself is missing? Where is empathy without a glimmer
of understanding?
Erotic love is passionate by nature: intense, immediate, powerful and often irrational.
Erotic love frequently manifests itself as the painful hunger to possess, fully
and completely, another individual, and to be possessed by them in turn: a union,
a mutual joining, a desire to become whole and fulfilled in partnership with someone
whose absence makes us suffer, and leaves us feeling fragmented and incomplete,
empty and alone. This momentary satisfaction is an illusion, of course: a temporary
fusion too intense to be prolonged indefinitely. And yet we crave it with an intensity
beyond all other appetites. In the Symposium, Plato has Socrates use the
word eros to describe the philosopher's passionate desire for wisdom: a
craving, a hunger for the knowledge that will complete us and make us whole, make
us one with the truth. When we "seek the truth in love," our search must be a
passionate search, our desire for truth something which takes possession of us
and drives out all the easy answers and facile explanations: irrational to the
extent that it scorns mere rationalization, and satisfied only by a complete and
utter union with "The True," however ephemeral it may at first appear.
Philia, on the other hand, is a far more rational form of love. The word
is frequently translated as "friendship," but this really doesn't do it justice.
Philia is a form of love which grows out of our ability to recognize differences
of opinion, of preference, of whatever, and still honor that person's integrity
and worth, whether we agree with them or not; or indeed, whether we even like
them or not. It's the love which enables us to survive our disagreements, and
the ebb and flow of our passions, and ultimately to affirm the power of our common
humanity: not God's love "operating in the human heart," but an essentially human
love born of our ability to perceive and understand our connectedness, and mutual
interdependence, with one another as human beings. And the basis of this friendship,
this philia, is not so much Affection as it is Respect.
I think the most articulate description of this I’ve ever heard was Kurt Vonnegut
Jr’s Ware Lecture "Love Is Too Strong a Word," which he delivered at the UUA General
Assembly in Rochester, New York way back in 1986. (I can’t begin to tell you how
hard I had to search to find this again, so I’m going to quote it at some length).
But essentially, that evening Vonnegut said to the assembled Unitarian-Universalists
(myself included):
I will tell you what my theory is: The Christian preachers exhort their listeners
to love one another, and to love their neighbors and so on. Love is simply too
strong a word to be much use in ordinary, day-to-day relationships. Love is for
Romeo and Juliet.
I'm to love my neighbor? How can I do that when I'm not even speaking to my wife
and kids today? My wife said to me the other day, after a knock-down, drag-out
fight about interior decoration, "I don't love you any more." And I said to her,
"So what else is new?" She really didn't love me then, which was perfectly normal.
She will love me some other time -- I think, I hope. It's possible.
If she had wanted to terminate the marriage, to carry it past the point of no
return, she would have had to say "I don't respect you any more." Now --
that would be terminal.
One of the many unnecessary American catastrophes going on right now...is all
the people who are getting divorced because they don't love each other any more.
That is like trading in a car when the ashtrays are full. When you don't respect
your mate anymore -- that's when the transmission is shot and there's a crack
in the engine block.
I like to think that Jesus said in Aramaic, "Ye shall respect one another."
That would be a sign to me that he really wanted to help us here on earth, and
not just in the afterlife. Then again, he had no way of knowing what ludicrously
high standards Hollywood was going to set for love....
And look at the spectrum of emotions we automatically think of when we hear the
word "love." If you can't love your neighbors, then you can at least like them.
If you can't like them, you can at least not give a damn about them. If you can't
ignore them, then you have to hate them, right? You've exhausted all the other
possibilities. That's a quick trip to hate, isn't it? And it starts with love.
It is such a logical trip, like the one from "white hot" to "ice-cold" with "red
hot, hot, warm, tepid, room temperature, cool, chilly, and freezing" in between.
The spectrum of emotions suggested by the word "love" again: "love," and then
"like," and then "don't give a damn about," and then "hate."
That is my explanation of why hatred is so common in that part of the world dominated
by Christianity. There are all these people who have been told to do their best
at loving. They fail, most of them. And why wouldn't they fail, since loving is
extremely difficult. Most of these people are also failures at pole vaulting and
performers on the flying trapeze. And when they fail to love day after day, come
one, come all, the logic of the language leads them to the seemingly inevitable
conclusion that they must hate instead. The step beyond hating, of course, is
killing in imaginary self-defense.
"Ye shall respect one another." Now there is something almost anybody in reasonable
mental health can do day after day, year in and year out, come one, come all,
to everyone's clear benefit. "Respect" does not imply a spectrum of alternatives,
some of them very dangerous. "Respect" is like a light switch. It is either on
or off. And if we are no longer able to respect someone, we don't feel like killing
him or her. Our response is restrained. We simply want to make him or her feel
like something the cat drug in.
Compare making somebody feel like something the cat drug in with Armageddon or
World War Three....
******
God’s overflowing love operating in the human heart. The passionate desire to
be United-And-Made-One with That-Which-Makes-One-Complete. And Respect for one’s
neighbor, (and even for one’s enemy) based on a more fundamental sense of self-respect,
whether you “love” that other person or not.
Love manifests itself in our lives, and through our lives, in as many different
ways as life itself. God is Love. Love makes the world go round. Love is the Answer
(could you please repeat the question?). Or recall the passage I read to open
the service: “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child,
I reasoned like a child; but when I became an adult, I put an end to childish
things. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face.
Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.
And now Faith, Hope, and Love abide -- these three. And the greatest of these
is Love.” Think about this for a moment: what does it mean to “know fully, even
as one has been fully known” -- to become an adult, to see life, to see one’s
beloved, to see the Creator of the Universe, face to face? Maybe this is really
what love is all about -- the ability to look into the face of one’s neighbor,
or even a stranger, and see one’s beloved reflected there as well, or to look
into the face of one’s enemy and recognize that they too were created in the image
of God. I can’t really be certain about this, of course; just because I read it
in the Bible doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s so. But at the very least it is
worth a second look, a closer look. Because who knows what one may see in a mirror,
if one looks closely enough.
I also want to point out just one more thing here this morning, which is that
the Latin word used to translate the Greek agape in this passage (and many
of the others I’ve mentioned here this morning) is caritas, which some
of you may recognize from the King James Bible as “charity.” God’s overflowing
love operating in the human heart manifests itself in the world as Charity. And
charity is more than simply giving assistance to those less fortunate than ourselves.
It is a tangible expression of God’s love for us all -- an act of generosity inspired
by a feeling of gratitude, which encourages us to share our good fortune with
others because we realize that we ourselves have been beneficiaries of God’s many
gifts to us in ways that we can never fully repay. And so we learn to express
our love of God, and more importantly, our appreciation of God’s love for us,
by acting in a loving way toward all of God’s creation. And I know that this is
a Unitarian Church, and that there are probably a lot of folks here who don’t
even really believe in God, at least in any conventional sense of the word. And
that’s perfectly fine, because it doesn’t really matter either. What matters is
that God believes in us, and trusts that through the power of love, we will eventually
grow to our full potential as kind, loving, generous and understanding human beings
-- the very people that God intends for us to be.
“When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; but when I became an adult, I put an end to childish things. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now Faith, Hope, and Love abide -- these three. And the greatest of these is Love.”
--1st Corinthians 13: 11-13.
If you are proud of this church, become its advocate.
If you are concerned for it future, share its message.
If its values resonate deep within you, give it a measure of your devotion.
Its destiny, the larger hope, rests in your hands.--Michael A. Schuler