The words of the
responsive reading we shared earlier, as well as the words of the hymn we’ll
sing when I finally get done talking this morning, are based, of course, on the
immortal words of St. Paul in his first letter to the church in Corinth:
Now, Paul is among the
last people any of us would probably want to have as a friend or even as a
dinner guest. He seems to have been quite a hard-headed and domineering type of
guy, not to mention something of an encrusted chauvinist, even by the standards
of his own time. (“Women are to be silent in the churches,” he is said to have written,
as well as numerous things about wives being submissive to their husbands, and
so on and so forth.) There is some irony, I know, in citing old St. Paul in a
sermon about the joy of human love, which was going to be my Valentine’s Day
sermon, originally (before all this February weather threw our church schedule
into disarray). St. Paul was also the man, I would remind you, who counseled
all of his followers to remain celibate
while awaiting the Second Coming of Jesus. If everyone had followed St.
Paul’s advice back then, there wouldn’t be very much use for Valentine’s Day
today...
Paul, like all of us, was
wrong about some things. But when it came to speaking of love-- of the workings
of the Holy Spirit both within the individual heart and within the community of
faith-- Paul did speak with the voice of an angel, it seems to me. His words
are worth remembering, and repeating, and even lifting our voices in song about,
as best we are able.
There have been other
songs about love, too, of course. Lots of them.
Remember when John Lennon and Paul McCartney told us that all we needed
was love? “It’s easy,” they sang. “All you need is love.”
With all due respect to
both Pauls-- McCartney and St. Paul-- and to John Lennon, too, of course-- it’s not “easy”, this thing we call love.
Nor is it always, on the day-to-day surface of things at least, always patient
and kind; never envious or boastful; never arrogant or rude.
Way back in the 15th
Century, the French writer Francois Villon complained about the “debasement” of
the word “love” in his own time. That was in the 15th Century! Think of what Villon might
think were he to be transported into our modern age, with all of its squabble
and squeal and meaningless babble and noise of our mass communications and
incessant advertising. Way back in the 15th Century (which had its own
problems, to be sure), Monsieur Villon couldn’t imagine the kind of
“debasement” that still awaited that holiest of words. He couldn’t imagine the
kind of assault that men and women in the modern world would face, day in, day
out, from those forces always anxious to exploit and commercialize and
sensationalize and cash in on the deepest of human emotions.
But the human spirit--
and the love that burns at its heart-- survives and abides, in spite of all
those ads for Hallmark and AT&T and McDonald’s and Diet Coke and Folger’s
and Calvin Klein underwear and the latest “Love Potion #9” that the
pharmaceutical industry is currently peddling.
Love, if we are honest,
is a subject that is better experienced
than written about, or even preached about. For who can doubt that there is a
language of the heart, so much deeper than our imperfect, imprecise human
language?
But because this love
touches us most deeply, we human ones write of it most often, perhaps, and speak of it most frequently, as well. Such
is one of the many paradoxes of love.
Perhaps the most beautiful
words on love in the Western tradition are those of St. Paul. But Paul sets the
bar pretty high for us struggling everyday folk like us to meet:
That’s a very tough bill
to fill. The danger is, of course, that those of us who, in the courses of our
lives, have done our best to love one another, will compare the loves we’ve
felt, the loves we’ve lived, to Paul’s lofty ideal and come away feeling kind
of puny and weak and like failures.
Always patient and
kind? Never jealous? Never boastful? Sometimes, to read idealized
visions of love like Paul’s, we might well feel that try as hard as we can,
we’ll never pass the test; try as we might, we’ll never be able to measure up.
Our best will never be good enough.
It might help, then, to
remember the context in which Paul wrote his words. He wasn’t just writing a
love ditty that he hoped would make the Palestinian Top 40. Nor was he writing a
self-help manual for struggling couples in ancient Anatolia. No, Paul’s ode to love are words found
originally in a letter from a minister to a congregation whose members were
struggling to get along-- who were squabbling among themselves; whose members,
no doubt, were exhibiting more than their fair share of jealousy, boastfulness,
arrogance, rudeness, I’m-a-better-Christian-than-you-are-ness, irritability,
resentfulness-- and probably burnout, too.
So Paul, like any decent
minister, is looking out at the situation and giving his congregation some subtle
advice:
“DON’T DO THAT!” he
says to them.
“DON’T BE THAT WAY!”
he tells them.
“BE THIS WAY (the “more excellent way”)
instead.”
Don’t act toward each
other in arrogance or rudeness or through lording it over one another or
through coercion-- but act toward one another in a spirit of love. And I
will show you what real love means...
Paul isn’t saying that
love between two people has to be perfect for it to be valid. Nor is he saying
that it has to exhibit all of these highest characteristics all of the time.
Paul is simply saying that our love for one another is a gift from God, and that it is the most powerful gift—the
most excellent gift--that the Holy Spirit offers us. It is the empowering force
in human life which can ennoble us and deepen and strengthen us and make us so
much more than we would be without it.
“Love bears all
things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things...”
With love energizing us
and inspiring us, we can survive anything that fate and circumstance might
mount against us. We can find triumph in tragedy, comfort in affliction, and
peace and promise even at those times when our lives seem confused or dreary.
Because we have love, we can bear any burden, believe in life, hope for the
future, and endure the dark nights of our souls-- not only in our individual
lives, but in the lives we share together in community, in our families, and in
our world.
Love might not be all we
need to get us through life. We need faith and hope, too. We need wisdom. We
need courage.
Sometimes, we just need stubbornness and perseverance. But would
we even have a place for faith and hope in our psyches if the fire of love
didn’t burn within our souls?
Love gives us patience,
as well. The patience to bear all things, to suffer through even the
insufferable (for there may well be great gifts enveloped where least expect
them, and suffering can teach us many important spiritual lessons).
In the Jewish tradition,
there is a story about Abraham and Sarah. Abraham was a devout man of God, and
so his tent, it was said, was always open to anyone. He believed that it was
his religious obligation to provide hospitality to all who needed it, and to
befriend those who wearily traveled across the sands of the desert.
One day, an old man happened
by, looking for a place to rest from the heat of the midday sun. So, of course,
Abraham and Sarah took him in at once; they were only too happy to oblige, to
give the old man a place to rest, and something to eat and drink.
But, to put it mildly, the
old man and Abraham didn’t hit it off—not at all. The traveler was loud and
obstreperous; he had an opinion about everything-- opinions which Abraham
disagreed with just about in their entirety. (I don’t know: it must have been
like being trapped in a tent with Rush Limbaugh.) But not only that—this guy was
a hog, a real glutton! He devoured every bit of food that Sarah put before
him-- and even had the gall to ask for more! He was eating them out of house
and home, consuming far more than his fair share of the stores they had so
carefully laid up.
Finally Abraham could
take it no longer. “Out of my tent!” he shouted at the old man. “I will have no
more to do with a man like you! I can’t even bear to be in your presence! Get
out! I’ve wasted enough of my hospitality already!”
So, the old man stumbled
out, back into the heat of the desert. But before the traveler was even out of
sight, Abraham heard the voice of his God, Yahweh, calling his name: “Abraham!
Abraham!”
Abraham was used to this:
“Speak, Lord, your servant hears you,” he answered.
Yahweh responded: “For
eighty years, I have cared both for you and for the old man you threw out of
your tent. I continued to claim you as one of my own, even though at times you
seemed to forget all about me, and thought you had done it all yourself. You
are interested in only your own voice, and don’t listen to mine. You satisfy
your own wants, and forget about those of others. But I have waited patiently,
because you are one of my children. If I could bear with you for eighty
years, certainly you could put up with that old man for another hour or
so.”
So, we are told, Abraham
went out into the desert and found the old man, and brought him back to his
tent to rest.
Love might not be the
answer to all questions our world faces. But it helps us to open our eyes, and lets
us know where to look first for the answers we need.
Love deepens us toward
compassion. And compassion is the source of justice and the fount of wisdom. Compassion
for all living creatures, for all life. Transcendence of the mundane earthly
reality, toward the deeper reality of the Spirit. Transcendence of the illusion
of our separateness, toward the deeper truth of our unity and interdependence.
Love is the voice of our God,
of our higher power, speaking in our souls, moving in our actions. Love gives
us the power we need to welcome the stranger (the other, the lover, the sister
and brother) back into our tents, back into the innermost sanctuaries of our
very beings.
Love does not make life
easy. But would there even be a life worth living if there wasn’t love?
The many forms our human
love takes are the closest we human ones approach unto the ways of the divine.
That we love as imperfectly as we do is our greatest tragedy. But that we are
able to love at all is the greatest miracle there is-- and our most profound hope for the future.
