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