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Love
A Sermon for Prairie Crossing Unitarian Universalist Congregation
Sunday, February 17, 2008
Rev. Clare Butterfield

Opening Words:
From Song of Solomon 5:1

I come to my garden, my sister, my bride;
I gather my myrrh with my spice,
I eat my honeycomb with my honey,
I drink my wine with my milk.
Eat, friends, drink,
And be drunk with love.

Prayer:
Enlivening spirit, be with us,
Hear the prayers of the people.
Make whole the suffering.
Comfort the lonely and those who mourn.
Let us be a community for one another,
Bearing with one another in affliction,
Celebrating with one another in joy.
Keeping each other in mind and heart. Amen.

Reading #1:
"On Gambling" by Rumi

If you want what visible reality
can give, you're an employee.

If you want the unseen world,
you're not living your truth.

Both wishes are foolish,
But you'll be forgiven for forgetting
that what you really want is
love's confusing joy.

Gamble everything for love,
if you're a true human being.

If not, leave
this gathering.

Half-heartedness doesn't reach
into majesty. You set out
to find God, but then you keep
stopping for long periods
at mean-spirited roadhouses.

In a boat down a fast-running creek,
it feels like trees on the bank
are rushing by. What seems

to be changing around us
is rather the speed of our craft
leaving this world.

Reading #2:
From 1st Corinthians 13:1-13

If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast but do not have love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. For we know only I part, and we prophesy only in part; but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. 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.

Sermon:
Valentine's Day is one of those holidays that I particularly like. Not for all the pressure on relationships and consumerism - I don't care for that sort of thing. But for its dopier aspects like those little conversation hearts (which I continue to inflict on my children even though they are now in their twenties). It's the one day each year that red food coloring is allowed and employed in my house. So I thought we could talk about love today, in honor of Valentine's Day, and more specifically about the ideas of love that are present in the Bible.

After all, love is hard. It can be very complicated, it requires a kind of openness and vulnerability that is very risky. It doesn't always work out. And sometimes it's more about what we need than what the other person needs. But occasionally, in our lives, if we're lucky, we'll get to experience true self-emptying love. Where the self is poured out so that the other may enter. That can be metaphorical, it can be erotic, and if we're really lucky it can be all those things at once.

The people who wrote the Bible knew all of that about love. They wrote about it in all its mysteries, complexities, shortcomings and manifestations. They used erotic metaphors for our relationship to God and they used erotic descriptions for the more earthly sorts of love.

Some of you may hate Valentine's Day, either because it reminds you that you're unattached and you wish you weren't, or because it feels like a minefield between you and your beloved, or something. But that just goes to the point. Love is hard. It's hard to get right. It's worth talking about.

There are different words for different kinds of love in Greek that are used to describe the types of love referred to in the Hebrew Scripture and the New Testament. Remember, of course, that only the New Testament was written in Greek. The Hebrew scriptures were written, as the name implies, in Hebrew. But these words seem to describe different senses of the word love in both scriptures.

I can't give you a straightforward definition of the Greek words for love, because meanings are shifty in ancient languages, and because different people have used the words differently at different times. But generally there are three senses of love that are used in the Bible and they have generally three meanings.

Agape refers to the love of God, or the kind of love that God has for us and we for God. It comes to us unconditionally and as a gift - we do not generate it and we cannot earn it. We tap into it. Greeks also used Agape to refer to the love between spouses and families. What we should take from that is that it doesn't necessarily exclude eros, but it means more than that, and that it is unconditional. It is self-emptying love - it wants nothing in return. It cannot be earned or deserved, and it pours out freely without expectation.

Philios means brother or sisterly love - it is a human kind of love that implies an exchange - so it is not purely selfless. It wants something back, though not something erotic.

Eros is erotic love, and that is also based in exchange.

The Hebrew scripture deal pretty frankly with all three. Eros is specifically celebrated in the songs of Solomon, so we know that this kind of love is canonical - it's really ok, on Biblical terms, and don't let anyone tell you different. But Eros is also used very consciously as a metaphor for the love between God and humans. Agape, they are trying to say, involves the whole being, so it is best understood in metaphors that involve the mind, heart and body.

In the Rumi poem we may be dealing with that kind of metaphoric use of eros. Rumi used erotic imagery in his poetry a lot and because he was a Sufi mystic, and therefore Muslim, it is presumed that he was being metaphorical and talking about the love of God. Having read a lot of his poetry I'm not so sure he was always being metaphorical, but I think the metaphorical reference to eros is helpful because every human being is erotic whether we are currently in a relationship or not. So this is language that all of us have some kind of access to.

The prophet Hosea in Hebrew Scripture uses erotic metaphor for the relationship between God and the human also, expressing God's disappointment as both that of a betrayed spouse and that of a loving parent. It's interesting to use this kind of metaphorical analogy because it says a couple of things - God loves us, and God's love is like something we know we have experienced.

Eros tends not to be talked about much in the New Testament. This is probably because the writers of the New Testament were expecting the imminent return of Jesus the Christ. Imminent - like in the next couple of weeks. It just kept not happening. The delay of the parousia is what Biblical scholars call it. And yes, that parousia (the return of Christ and the ushering in of God's reign) has been rather extensively delayed.

But because they expected things to come to an end pretty quickly they were not so big on marriage or erotic relationships - this is why Paul seems a little dismissive about marriage. Do it if you must, he is saying, but don't expect it to last - none of us are going to be here long.

But love is talked about all over the New Testament. And that is because the New Testament is the story of the ministry of Jesus, and love was central to Jesus' own idea of his ministry.

In the gospel of Matthew when the Pharisees are quizzing Jesus to try to trip him up and show the authorities that he isn't the teacher he claims to be, they ask him "Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest." At this point Jesus isn't playing any more. He says "'You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.' This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets." [Matthew 22:36-40]

That is at the very crux of what Jesus saw his ministry to be - that our love for one another holds a higher priority than any of the laws we like to use as weapons to prove our superior position.

While the synoptic gospels seem to switch back and forth between agape and philios when they talk about love, and not to use them consistently, in this case by Jesus' language we can hear the difference. We are supposed to offer agape to God - to love with all our hearts, souls and minds. We are supposed to offer (at least) philios to the neighbor - the same love we expect from him.

So love plays such a role in the New Testament because it plays that kind of role in Jesus' ministry. And in his case the central story is that of completely unselfish, self-giving love. The crucifixion and resurrection are a story about the depths and the heights of agape. Greater love has no man but to lay down his life for his friend - so Jesus said and so he did. This is love in its fullest and starkest form of self-emptying. Love takes courage. If you're not prepared for that you're not prepared to love another person.

The highest form of love in Jesus' ministry seems to be the kind the Greeks called agape, for which the Bible uses a combination of metaphors of erotic love and parental love for children to help us understand that this is the kind of love in which the lover is fully present with the whole of their being.

What this kind of love is like is what Paul was talking about in his letter to the early house church in Corinth. That passage from 1st Corinthians gets read all the time at weddings. I think it's very beautiful and I've done a lot of weddings in which it was included. But Paul wrote it for a particular reason. The early church in Corinth apparently had a lot of religious virtuosos hanging around in it. They were carrying on and speaking in tongues, and displaying their spiritual gifts for all to see. And they were apparently bickering and implying by their display of spiritual gifts that those who could speak in tongues were more spiritually gifted than those who couldn't. Paul was writing to settle them down - to recall them to their larger purposes as a church.

And once you know that you can hear the lines very differently, can't you? "If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast but do not have love, I gain nothing."

Suddenly words that seemed like awkward metaphors become literal references to specific behavior in a given place and time, and the whole thing not only makes more sense than it ever did before, it holds more meaning. This reading, by the way, is not some cryptic analysis of hidden clues - the rest of the letter is quite explicitly about how the church should be as the body of Christ, and how spiritual gifts such as speaking in tongues should be both discerned and used. It's just that chapter 13 is pretty much the only part of the letter that you ever hear.

Pretty clearly, Paul is calling the early church to higher love. At least philios - at least treating one another with the love of brotherhood. But preferably the more self-offering agape. The love that we will know when the complete comes.
In the gospel of John, apparently, there is more consistency in the use of agape to refer to the unconditional love of God and philios to refer to the more conditional brotherly love where something is given and something is expected.

And here we have an especially poignant expression of the difference between agape and philios. At the end of the Gospel of John, Jesus talks to Simon called Peter - an exchange that takes place during one of the post-death appearances of Jesus and after Peter has denied Jesus three times following the crucifixion.

So the exchange between Jesus and Peter become particularly poignant. Jesus says to Peter (who denied him) "do you love me more than these?" Meaning, do you love me more than you love the other disciples. And Peter replies "Lord, you know that I love you." Three times Jesus asks Peter if he loves him and three times Peter replies that Jesus knows that he does. But the first two times Jesus asks he uses agape, and Peter replies with philios. Peter do you love me with self-emptying love? Lord, you know that I love you with brotherly love. Peter do you love with me with self-emptying love? Lord you know that I love you with brotherly love.

And then Jesus brings himself down to where Peter can meet him. Peter do you love me with brotherly love? Lord, you know that I love you with brotherly love.

Then feed my sheep.

Love is all about human limitation and failure as much as it is about human transcendence of limitation.

To love someone with self-emptying love is to make the self completely vulnerable - it is not to assume love in return, because true agape assumes nothing in return. It is a very risky place to be. It's hard to let yourself be that vulnerable and really want so much the good of the other that you let go of caring what happens to you. Although to let go of the self in the love of the other is also a very liberating thing to do.

It's the sort of thing, in my experience, that happens more easily or naturally in parenthood than in relationships between adults. Maybe that's only healthy too. Parenthood is one of the oddest, most one-sided relationships you can ever find yourself in. Especially if you are the parent who physically gave birth to the offspring. Then the balance is something like: I'll be a parasite on your body, sap the calcium out of your bones so you get osteoporosis later, deprive you of sleep, and then as soon as I can be physically independent of you and mobile I'll spend the rest of my life trying to establish how I'm not you. And you say, "fine." "That's fine." In a weary sort of tone, but not really objecting at all, because you don't ever really stop being besotted with your children. At least as far as I know you don't.

A relationship between adults that was this one-sided would be written up in a college psychology textbook under dysfunctional. But it still offers insights into the kind of selflessness that all our love should have behind it. The adults we love may love us back, and we should be as capable of receiving their love as we are of reciprocating it. But we don't love them because they love us. We love them for themselves. We offer what we can offer because they need it, not because we need to give it to them (though sometimes that is present too). Though we do this because of the other, in both our relationships with our children and our relationships with other adults we do get something back. We get back the sensation of giving love to another person. Which I could describe as pleasure, and invoke the erotic experience to help us understand what I mean, but if you love people I think you know already that it isn't exactly pleasure. Or it isn't solely pleasure. It feels really good, but it's bigger than the good feeling. It the experience of having tapped in, in your finite way, to something infinitely larger than you. The erotic experience is a good metaphor because it is so beyond words.

And, of course, the more we do this for another person the more vulnerable we become to things affecting that person over which we have no control.

In fact, one of the crueler ironies of love in the real world is that the deeper it is the more impossible it is that it can end well. I mean that in the sense that eventually we will all go over to the other side separately, and the timing is usually not optimal for someone who loves us or whom we love. Jesus probably symbolizes the worst-case scenario - where we actually have to die in order to love the other perfectly. And yet, our brother Paul tells us that love never ends. In love we do not attempt to create a legacy for the future, but to live completely in the moment at hand. In loving one another we are removed from time - and made most like the living God whom we embody.

I look at the newspaper every day, listen to public radio, absorb politics through my pores - I am a voracious citizen of the world. But I am surprised myself by how old-fashioned the thing I am talking about today can sound in the snarky (or worse) reality of the modern every day. "Half-heartedness doesn't reach into majesty," Rumi says. "You set out
to find God, but then you keep stopping for long periods at mean-spirited roadhouses." And he's absolutely right. We do it all the time.

But I believe with all my heart that the great disembodied store of love that is infinite in space and time is out there. And that human beings have not lost the capability of tapping in to it. And that this tapping in is not only the source of the greatest pain and vulnerability and separation that we will ever experience in our lives - it is the source of the only true meaning. The only unequivocal pleasure. The only real joy.

"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."

Amen