As a Christian, you might ask “what’s love got to do with it?” And today’s readings respond with a resounding “everything!” In both Leviticus and Matthew, we heard about the importance of loving relationships. As Jesus says “on these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.” In essence, love is at the core of Christendom. So today, we’ll explore what this is love is.
But before I get going, let me put a rumor to rest. It is often said, such as in our gospel hymn today and by St. John, that “God is love.” That is simply not true. God is not love because God is God. To say that God is love is to over simplify God, it is to subvert other attributes of God. If God truly is love, then we might as well worship unicorns and rainbows, or some other overly simple and sentimental god. Now, we know through scripture and revelation that God is loving and is the source of love. But let us not confuse the object with the giver. And I realize that saying “God is love” is just often just shorthand for saying that God is the fountain of love, that God deeply loves all of Creation, but there is a danger when we become lax with this phrase and unintentionally water down our theology and God’s substance. So in our discussion of love, let us remember, we do not worship love, but instead, we worship God; a God from whom love emanates as light and warmth shine forth from the Sun.
So let’s answer three questions about love- what is love, how do we love, and why do we love?
What is love? Shakespeare had a lot to say about that, so did the Greek philosophers, as well as poets such as Pablo Neruda. I’m sure you all have your favorite authors who have wrote about love. But today I’m in the pulpit, so I get to pick my favorite author. CS Lewis wrote a book called The Four Loves. In it, he talks about storge, philia, eros, and agape love. So let’s briefly walk through those.
Storge is the Greek word for affection. Lewis says that this is often a sort of automatic love, the love we experience in families. I think it’s safe to say that some of the reasons why we love family members don’t really make sense. People we see only once a year, if that; people who might annoy us; people who we’d never spend time with if they weren’t family. Now this isn’t to talk down on family or familial love. This sort of affection is an important kind of love. It is a love of respect. It broadens our minds, as we come into contact with people whom we normally wouldn’t.
Next is philia, or friendship. It is a love of association, a love that we choose to enter into, but it’s a fairly weak love. It isn’t terribly binding, and it can change rapidly. An interesting question for us today is what does friendship mean? In the age of Facebook, who are my friends? According to Facebook, I have 440 friends. But do I love them? For the vast majority, the answer is no. Our culture is a transient one, people no longer die in the same towns that they were born in; people don’t retire from the company that hired them in their twenties. Loyalties are not what they once were. But that does not mean that the love of friendship is dead. Friendship is a place to start in our love for each other. Friendship, you might say, is the mustard seed that will grow into the greatest of all the bushes of love.
So we come to eros. Now normally, you would expect a preacher to bashfully say a few vague things and quickly move on; but let’s spend a little time here. Erotic or intimate or physical love, whatever you want to call it, is very important in our lives and our culture. I was at clergy conference recently and we were discussing young adults in the church. We watched a video where young adults spoke about their experience of the church, and a comment that was made more than once was that the church seemed irrelevant to their lives because the church didn’t talk about the things that really matter- sex, politics or money. And isn’t that the truth? We avoid those topics like the plague in church.
And this confuses me. Don’t we say that our faith is the most important thing in our lives, that it is our moral compass? And I don’t think I have to tell you how much attention we give to erotic love- just watch a television show, flip through a magazine or think about your dreams, and I think you’ll soon realize that this sort of love is important to many of us. And shouldn’t our faith guide our thoughts and actions on something so important? Shouldn’t the Church have something substantive to say about this?
What needs to be said is that intimacy is a neutral thing. By that I mean, it is neither good or bad, but it can be used for evil or for good. Erotic love is a wonderful way to express emotional love, it is a way to deepen your connection with someone whom you love and are committed to. But you and I both know that it is very easy for this love to be a negative force. Too many people are exploited, abused, sold into slavery, manipulated, and objectified by erotic love.
Another way that eros is used negatively has been in the Church. For centuries, the Church’s position, whether stated or assumed, as been that pre-marital relations are wrong and sinful. People will note that in the Bible, this is simply how things were. But what people forget is that for most of history, people have gotten married much younger than they do today. Now this isn’t a case of faith bending to culture, but if our faith cannot speak to our culture, then what good is it? And is isn’t to mention the fact that marriage is not something to which all people are called. Marriage is not the goal of life, and some people will never marry. So should they live a life without experiencing the good of this love?
Now I’m not going to tell you all what to think about this; I don’t want to prescribe to the Church how to handle this. But we need to start having this conversation. In our relationships of erotic love, how can we be just and true? How can we honor the divine love in our practice of erotic love? How can we honor and love each other in our intimate relationships?
And finally we come to the highest of the loves- agape. Theologians often say that this is the love of Christ for the world on the cross. Sometimes this love is called charity. St. Paul says that it is the greatest thing, even higher than faith or hope. It is the goal for all of our loves- for our loves of affection, friendship and eros, we seek to transform them into agape love. This sort of love is constant, true, and pure. It is thoughtful, not something that we fall into or take lightly. It is a sacrificial, forgiving, and unconditional love. Very few of us will ever be able to love like this, or experience love like this. This is the love of the Kingdom of God. As we work to make God’s kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven, we seek to love the way that God loves in heaven. The journey of getting to agape is as important as the destination.
And what we see in this epitome of love is that love begins not with us, but with God. We love because God has first loved us. We also see that this sort of love is not passive- it works, it accomplishes things, it is active. Love, in its truest sense, is not an emotion, but is action. Love is not something you feel, it is something you do. Love is an affair not of the heart or the mind, but of the will.
But our culture has monopolized love for capitalism. One theologian said “we are to use things and love people, but in our world we love things and use people.” We love our cars, we love our new phones, we love a good movie. It’s disgusting to use the same word to express our fondness of a book or website as we do for our relationship with our spouses, children or parents. Love has become just a catch phrase. And maybe that’s why so many marriages end in divorce, why so many families are estranged, why we have so many fights in Washington. We don’t know what love is anymore. We’ve been trained that you can love lots of things, and that when the new version comes out, you’ll love that one even more. Love is easy in our culture. And it’s no surprise people struggle with relationships; where agape love is required, too many folks are ill prepared, because they’ve never been exposed to this sort of love.
This is a good segue into how to love. The short and sweet answer is, to borrow from Nike, “just do it.” Put a bit more eloquently by CS Lewis- “do not waste time bothering whether you love your neighbor; act as if you did. And as soon as you do, you’ll discover the secret. When you are behaving as if you love someone, you will presently come to love them.”
The place to start is to realize and know that God loves everyone. One translation of Peter’s sermon in the book of Acts reads “God has no favorites.” And this is because we are all God’s favorites. If you are a Republican and you ask God, hey, how about that socialist president we have, God would say “he’s one of my favorites.” Obama supports might ask, “hey God, how about that crazy Bachmann, and God would say, she’s one of my favorites.” How about Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, “he’s one of my favorites.” How about my neighbors whose dog always uses my yard for a toilet, “they’re among my favorites.” And how about me God, what about me. Well, God would respond- “you’re one of my favorites too.”
If we can realize that God loves us all as if there is no one else to love and loves us as if we were all but one, then we can start to love others. There is a great story about Jesus that you won’t find the Bible, it’s an apocryphal story about Jesus found in some of the writings that didn’t make it into the Bible. One day Jesus is walking through a town with his disciples, and as he walks down the main road, people come out of their homes to spit on him, curse him, throw rocks and insults at him. And to each person that curses him, he turns and blesses them. When they get out of the town, one of the disciples immediately asks Jesus- “Lord, why is it that you blessed each of those people who cursed and spit upon you?” And Jesus responded “I can only pay out what I have in my purse.” If we know that God loves us, if we bask in this love daily, if we carry this love in our hearts, then it is that much easier to pay that love out to others.
You can pay this love out in a lot of ways- it might be in praying for others, it might be in filling you’re your pledge card in a honest and sincere way, it might be in calling a friend or family member who is going through a tough time, it might be in leading Children’s Chapel, it might be visiting someone in the hospital, it might be donating your time or money to a charity, it might be in adopting an animal from the shelter, it might be in standing up for justice. But whatever you do, don’t sit around and think about how you love someone, go out and love them.
And finally we come to why do we love? If we turn to our reading from Leviticus, which is echoed in Jesus’ words in Matthew, we come to a reason. If you were to sit down and read the 19th chapter of Leviticus, one phrase would pop out at you- “I am the Lord.” That one phrase shows up 16 times in the chapter. This chapter is a series of comments: if this situation happens to you, then you should do this, because “I am the Lord.” An example is “you shall not strip your vineyard bare, or gather the fallen grapes of your vineyard; you shall leave them for the poor and the alien: I am the Lord.” Because God is God, we love others as ourselves. And don’t miss that point, you have to love yourself so that you can love others. So if you need to work on loving yourself, on seeing yourself as a wonderful person, then I encourage you, work on that. Visit with Michael or me, see a therapist, talk to family. Be sure to love yourself.
Early in our reading, God says to Moses “you shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy.” Holy is a word which means “set apart or sacred.” Why do we love? Because God is Lord. Why do we love? Because God is holy. Why do we love? Because we are sacred. We are holy to God, we are set apart. Each of us is a unit of God’s grace, unrepeatable, unprecedented and irreplaceable. Why do we love? Because that is simply what we do as children of the loving Creator of all heaven and earth.
Now you might say, but Robert, look at the world, obviously, love does not triumph; clearly not everyone loves other people. I am reminded of the words of St. Augustine, “our hearts are restless, O Lord, until they rest in thee.” A lot of people have found other places for their hearts to rest; other places that might fulfill them. But as we all know, glory fades, wealth diminishes, property breaks or gets stolen, reputations tarnish, but love endures. Things can fill us, but only love can satisfy our deepest desires. We were created in love by God, and it is for love that we live: love of what God loves, which is everyone; love of God’s kingdom; love of God as Lord; love of self; and love of neighbor.
Much more could be said about love, but I’d never cover it all. Instead, let’s experience all the joys, all the blessings, all the graces of true agape love. Let us seek that highest form of love- a love which is true, just and seeks to love the way that God loves us. Let’s transform our loves of affection, friendship and erotic love into vehicles of God’s love in this world which desperately needs more love. Let us know that each and every person, including ourselves, in the beloved of God. Let us practice this love daily. And let us know that we are holy, and it is our sacred task to welcome this love, and to share it with all of Creation. My brothers and sisters- I love you. I know that you love me. Let us share this love and transform our world.
Amen.
