In Love

Scripture: The Fifth Sunday after Epiphany, A.D. 2015 B

Sermon:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.  AMEN.

There is a very old story about a king named Lear. And by “very old,” I mean that he is said to have ruled in Britain some thousand years before King Arthur.

Lear was something of a bully, an old man who never really grew up. As he aged, he grew weary of ruling his kingdom and longed to retire—simply to spend his time carousing with his large retinue of courtiers and partiers, making merry his final days with song, drink, and debauchery. He called together his three daughters and promised to split up amongst them his kingdom, with the greatest portion going to the one who loved him the most.

Immediately, two of his daughters fell over themselves in lavish praise, flattering their father though they hated him so. But the youngest, his favorite, refused to lie. She told him the truth: that she had always loved him, and saw no justification for having publically to prove the fidelity that she always maintained in private. Outraged, Lear disinherited her—his favorite, the only daughter who truly loved him—because she maintained that love is not mere show, not a parody of itself. Love doesn’t mean being falsely nice or sickly-sweet. Love means placing the needs of the other before one’s own, even if your love causes you to come to harm. Such is the tragedy of King Lear, that he could not distinguish true love from false appearances. It is an affliction from which we still suffer in our own day.

What is love? Certainly we throw the word about rather casually, especially during the second week of February. We most often mistake love, I think, for feeling in love, which is a very different thing. More seriously, however, we often mistake love for something primarily about us, about our needs, our desires. But that’s not love. That’s just appetite. True love comes to us in every stage of life, and our understanding of it deepens as we age.

The first sort of love we encounter is the love of family. This is often called storge, or affection. It is the love of a child for her parents, her siblings, her aunts and uncles and grandparents. It is a love born of necessity, yes—we need our parents, our families, simply to survive our youngest days—but it goes deeper than this. Children can certainly be selfish, but they can also be selfless. There is no love quite like that of a toddler for his mom and dad. He will be sad that they are sad. He will be happy that they are happy. He will be affectionate because it is natural, because he loves them. Our families, with all their flawed beauty, first teach us how to love.

As we grow older we encounter philia, the love of real friendship. Friends teach us about trust and companionship and fresh new discoveries. They help us sally forth into the real world and the adventures of growing up. These are loves of choice, of common bonding, rather than of necessity. These are loves we choose to forge. Real friendship, deep friendship, can be every bit as strong as the love between blood brothers. More so, in many cases. We all have friends who will love us and know us and greet us with joy no matter how much time and distance separate us. We aren’t talking about simple acquaintance, mind you, but we should never denigrate friendship as something less than love. Philosophers and statesmen have hailed it as the greatest of life’s achievements, without which even kings are miserable.

And, ah, then we come to romance—eros, erotic love, sexual love. It’s quite a moment in your life when you lay eyes upon someone and feel for the first time that passion, that pain, that magnetic attraction so very distinct from affection or friendship. In childhood and youth we share our lives with family and friends, but in maturity we long to give our lives entirely to one other person. We want to give her everything we are, and we want to revel in everything she is. Romantic love is the Copernican revolution of the soul: the moment we cease to be the center of our own little universe, and begin to revolve instead around someone else, someone who becomes as integral to our happiness as the sun is to the earth.

Romance teaches us things about love that up until now we’ve taken for granted. For example, love has to be reciprocated. We simply take for granted that parents and friends love us, because that’s who they are. But a romantic love that’s unrequited cannot fully blossom, and cannot be pursued by one. Love must be accepted and shared. By its very nature it cannot be forced. Nor can it be something that exists only in the head of one person. That’s just obsession, which leads to all manner of unhealthy behavior.

Romance unites body and mind and soul in the desire, every bit as spiritual as it is physical, to truly become one with another living human being. It culminates in marriage, when two people sacrifice their lives as individuals to begin, to become, a new and better life together. It is a death that leads to life; it is a sacrifice that births a new Creation. Sounds downright religious! No wonder the Bible so enjoys the image of God marrying Himself to humanity.

This all leads us to love’s ultimate and highest form: what the Bible calls agape, or spiritual love. Spiritual love is universal in scope. It consists of a life lived for others, a life when our needs become secondary, yet somehow more fulfilled. Agape is the unconditional love that Jesus Christ shows for friends, strangers, enemies, even His own murderers—the unconditional love that He pours out upon us, and asks only that we pour it out upon others in return. This love is not an emotion. We do not love others and forgive them their sins and put their needs before our own because we feel like it. We do it because we share in the superabundant love of God, which cannot help but overflow for the world.

Love is an act of will, an act of surrender. This is why angels, who experience no human passions, can love more fully than we. They choose to love God with everything they are, and to love their neighbors, to love us, as themselves. Of course, as we saw with King Lear’s daughter, love doesn’t mean that we have to be wilting lilies. Love may require that we tell hard truths, to admonish the sinner. But we must do so out of compassion, out of real love, rather than judgment.

This is also what we mean when we say that God is Love. We aren’t talking sappy sentimentality. And we aren’t talking about simple emotion. Our God is a Trinity, a Holy Three-in-One, consisting of a family of three divine Persons Who so fully give themselves to one another that they are truly one inseparable Being. The Father eternally generates the Son out of self-giving Love; the Son eternally gives Himself back to the Father out of self-giving Love; and the Holy Spirit is the actual Love that they share, so powerful that He too is truly One God.

When God created the world, it was an act of love, not necessity. God wasn’t lonely; He didn’t need us. God is perfect as He is, ever Three and ever One. But God created the world out of selfless love, emptying Himself to make room for us. And God the Father gave this Creation completely to His Son, Who in turn fills it with the Holy Spirit and gives it completely back to His Father. It boggles the mind!

We, as human beings, are caught up in this dance of divine love, as Jesus now gives to us everything He is—pours out His very Spirit and Flesh and Blood for us, in His Passion, on the Cross, and in the Meal of Holy Communion. He dies for us that we might live. And we die to ourselves that He might live in us. There’s nothing sappy or sentimental or cliché about it. Rather, this understanding of love is immensely powerful—indeed, it is the foundation of the world.

We read today about how the God found in the Bible is higher and more powerful than any of the gods which our fevered imaginations have produced, yet He cares more tenderly for the smallest and weakest among us than we can ever conceive. It is almost impossible for the pagan mind to grasp a God of infinite power, of infinite elevation, Who nonetheless shows infinite compassion, infinite mercy. It seems utterly incongruous that one so big should care for those so small. Yet it makes perfect sense when we realize that God Himself is infinite Love.

Love cannot be forced, but neither can Love give up. Love will go to any lengths to seduce the beloved, to call us back home—even so far as to be born in a manger and die on a Cross. That’s how far God loves us: all the way to hell and back. Remember that the love between parent and child is the love that God holds for you. The love between the most intimate of friends is the love that God holds for you. The love shared by the most passionate of lovers is the love that God holds for you. And the eternal love of Jesus Christ on the Cross is the love that God holds for you.

There is nothing this Love will not suffer, nothing this Love will not forgive. Know, my brothers and my sisters, that this Love is now and always for you.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. AMEN.