Sermon by Rev. Kathleen McTigue, February 9, 2003
I realize that we're still a full five days away from Valentine's Day, but looking ahead in my handy-dandy palm pilot, which lets me go years and years out into the future, I find that the next time February 14 is actually a Sunday doesn't occur until Valentines' Day of 2010. So I decided five days was close enough to devote a sermon's worth of attention to the small topic of love.
This decision brought to mind an anecdote I heard years ago in seminary, probably in the context of a sermon class in which we were being warned about which topics not to tackle in the space of a sermon. The Scottish author Thomas Carlyle once listened to a sermon preached on love, and when it ended and he was on his way out of the church he was overheard to murmur, "The minister reminded me of nothing so much as a flea struggling in a barrel of molasses." It's a sobering image, but for better or worse I didn't let it stop me, partly because the proximity of Valentines' Day offers us so many ready illustrations of what love surely is not.
Our culture has developed all kinds of expectations and assumptions around the word 'love'. Nearly all of them have to do with the very narrow and fleeting band of experience we think of as romance, and most of this is narrowed still more into its most adolescent manifestations.
Valentines' Day is a time when we're saturated with the language and imagery of this limited understanding; so by the time it's over, even those of us who really like chocolate and red roses get pretty tired of it all. We know perfectly well that all of the gooey excesses of the romance-centered sales pitch have nothing to do with real love. Instead, the common tricks of the advertising trade are used to sell us new slices of the sometimes heady, often illusory and always transient feeling of being in love.
It's hard to imagine what it would be like to live in a culture with some other understanding, some broader concept of love between people. The narrow one, so focused on romance and happily ever after, saturates our culture so thoroughly that it takes real work, often through many years of our adulthood, to free ourselves from its grip. And freeing ourselves is important, because this skewed notion of love has some serious consequences for how we understand ourselves and our connections to each other.
The most pervasive consequence is objectification, both of love and of ourselves. We learn to see love as a commodity, a thing we've got to strive for, as Philip Roche described in our first reading. We talk about it as something real and yet inert: we have it, lose it, give it, withhold it, fall into it, fall out of it, take it away, beg 'baby please don't take it away'.
With that notion of love as object, many of us grow through our adolescence and into our adulthood trying, sometimes desperately, to make ourselves the most attractive package of qualities we can manage so we can snag some of that love stuff. And the advertising, on every level and for every conceivable product, reinforces the notion. If we'll only clip and polish and shape our bodies the right way, douse them with the right brand of shampoo or lotion, deodorant or perfume or after-shave, drink the right kind of beer, drive the right kind of car, wear the right brand of jeans -- we will be winners. We will win love.
Any of us who pay attention to the advertising around us can easily come up with our own most loathsome ad by way of illustration. My own favorite is one that showed up in the New Yorker magazine some time ago. It showed a gorgeous model in a full-length fur, with winter trees in the background. A man was in the act of putting a gold chain around her neck and the caption read, 'In this cold, hard world, give her real warmth. Give her gold."
This strange notion of how we're supposed to get and then hold onto love is helped along by the general devaluation of our language. We live in an age of superlatives, in which words like 'excellent' and 'awesome' and 'ultimate' can be used to describe a t-shirt! The word 'love' has fallen victim to the same tendencies around language. We say we 'love' a person, but we also say we 'love' a new haircut, the latest movie, a favorite food or our new laptop computer. Even when we get into the more important affections such as love for other people, our language doesn't help us distinguish the love we feel for a friend, for a hero we might never have met, for our spouse, for a child.
Our limited understanding and our indiscriminate use of the word would have seemed ludicrous to some of the great thinkers in other ages. The philosophers and theologians of old devoted a lot of their formidable brain power to an attempt to understand and articulate human love. Plato's best sound-bite on the topic was, "Love is the pursuit of the whole" (of wholeness). Socrates considered love the binding agent in human existence. He said, "Love is the mediator which spans the chasm that divides human beings and gods, and therefore in love is all bound together."
In neither case was romantic love even considered. To Plato and Socrates, love is the redemptive will toward union: union with God, with the inner self, and with those who people our world. Love is not something that 'happens' to us, some feeling that arises or something we stumble on or fall into like a hole in the ground. Instead, love is fundamentally intentional: it is not a feeling, but an act of the will. It's a choice we make in our living, a stance we choose toward the world.
If we were to believe this and really take it to heart, it would mean a radical reorientation. If we understood love as an act of the will, it would put a full reversal on the shallow concepts of love tied into Valentines' Day and into all the focus on romance. Because it would mean that instead of trying to make ourselves lovable, we would put our attention to learning better how to love.
This points to a very different way of being in the world, but it's a way we can see clearly when we look at the heroes and heroines we remember as our inspiration. They are people who learned how to love. They understood it not as a private, inward feeling but as an action, a way to engage the world. They incorporated love in the root sense of that word: they put flesh on the concept, made it human and manifest.
And it doesn't live only in the grand or heroic gestures of those we remember as heroes. This sort of love is a daily thing too, something that can show up and touch the world in the small ways. This past week I was on a very long plane trip home from visiting my father, who is not well. I was tired and sad and not the least bit inclined toward interaction with my fellow passengers.
On one long delay when the plane was stuck on the ground I drifted asleep and got very cold, so I was wrapped around myself for warmth, probably shivering and not looking very comfortable. And suddenly the young man next to me -- with punked-out hair and several piercings -- tucked his coat over me and around my shoulders, tenderly, as though I were his mother or his girlfriend. Later, I watched him play with the bored and twitchy child across the aisle; help the elderly woman two rows up when she couldn't retrieve her bag; and soothe the man behind us when he spilled his drink. There are lots of words for it: kindness, decency, extending oneself. It is also, quite clearly, a choice. And in this sense it works as an example of love: love as the will toward union and connection; love as the ability to see oneself in the other; and love as a commitment to what serves wholeness.
In this sense of the word, this radical understanding, the biblical story I used for our reading is a love story. This story about Jesus is one that shows up only in the gospel of John, the least reliable of the four gospels, so it is almost certainly apocryphal. Lucky for us, that doesn't keep it from being useful. It is very congruent with the stories about Jesus that have more claim to authenticity in that so many of them illustrate this radical quality of willful engagement that he seemed to bring.
In his time, Jesus irritated and confounded nearly all prevailing attitudes about what was seemly or legal behavior. He sat with people one was forbidden to sit with and taught those who were considered unworthy of teaching.
He angered the Zealots who wanted to rebel against Rome because his injunctions to love the enemy seemed a supreme and suicidal absurdity. He angered the ruling powers of Judaism with his insistance that the religious and legal code of their day was irrelevant in the face of human need, and could be abandoned for the simpler and singular injunction to love. He provoked the Roman authorities by preaching and acting on a subversive disregard for class boundaries, urging by his actions a radical reordering of priorities.
Behind all these irksome teachings lies a message about the deep intentionality and unpredictable power of love. And that message comes through vividly in the story of Jesus and the woman caught in adultery. Like all good teaching stories it deserves to be retold, in the rich Jewish tradition of midrash, so each new audience might discover new truths in the telling.
It is a hot and dusty day even though it is still early in the morning. Off on the shady edge of the small town square next to the temple, Jesus of Nazareth sits telling stories, and the people crowd close and quiet so they can hear him. From around the corner of the building a new group suddenly arrives, not quiet at all but chortling and jostling each other as they push into the crowd around Jesus. They are the local bureaucrats but at the moment they look more like a mob, with a cluster of followers gleefully ready for action.
They are contemptuous and rough with the woman they drag along with them, but it's clear that their real target is Jesus, and as they begin to talk they are very sure of the ground they stand on. They'll get him this time, the heretic! All of the law and all of the arguments are on their side. The woman was caught in the very act, and the law is absolutely clear about the consequences. She has to be stoned to death, and in the face of this mandate they catch Jesus neatly between the only two possible choices, both of which will doom him. Either he bows to the mandates of the law and admits the ludicrous error of his own teaching; or he will stand blatantly against the law and be arrested as the communist he is, out of their hair for good.
So they balance on the balls of their feet like boxers, sure of themselves and eager for the victory. They push the miserable woman down in the circle that opens up around Jesus and they ask him, loud and clear, for his judgment, calling him 'rabbi' and 'teacher' with a sneer no one could miss. Doesn't he agree that the law says she should be stoned? Won't he join them then in fulfilling the sacred law?
But he seems not to hear them, he doesn't even look at them; he squats in the dust and draws idly with his finger the way a child would. The woman is crumpled in the dust, dully wondering about the delay and the depth of the silence around her, but aware mostly of the rocks clenched in ready fists, wondering when the first one will hit.
Suddenly Jesus stands up and looks at the crowd and then just says, 'Yes'. They're right, of course, these upholders of the law; they've studied it well, and all of their lives. But something in the way he says the word 'law', something about the fierce light in his eyes, keeps them still and uneasy.
And then he says again, 'Yes, this is what the law commands. This woman clearly has violated the law; she is guilty, there can be no question. Purity must be reclaimed for our community. And just to be sure of it, just to be quite positive that purity is in fact what we're after here, let's have the honor of casting the first stone go to the one among you who has never been guilty. The one who is without sin -- you lead us off."
But he doesn't glare at them or dare them; he bends down to the dust again and starts his aimless doodles as though he were alone in the square. But now the air hovers electric and extraordinary around him, around the condemned woman, around all of them, until at last in the stillness the eldest moves slightly. It is the smallest of motions but the most important: his fist unclenches, and the rock falls from his fingers as he turns away. One by one the rocks drop from shamed hands. One by one the mob dissolves into a collection of individual hearts and consciences, and a life has been saved. Or maybe all of their lives have been saved.
This is a love story. It's a story about what love looks like as will: love as a radical stance toward our world and our connections to it. It's a story that teaches us something about the way love in this deep sense, love as an act of the will, can help break us out of our assumptions.
Jesus had only two options, both of them leading to violence; but he refused them both, and instead broke open a third way, a path that, at least in the happy ending of this story, led to liberation not only for the victim but for the perpetrators, Jesus' enemies.
The story illuminates the difficult admonition to love ones enemies. If we think of love in any of the sentimental or wishy-washy ways so familiar on the surface of our culture, loving our enemies is absurd. How could we generate warm feelings toward those who wish us harm? But to love our enemies doesn't mean we feel nice things toward them, or even that we like them. It means only that we recognize our connection to them, and that we hold to the truth of those connections whatever our conflict.
So -- what about Valentines' Day this year? You may have already picked out the humorous card for your sweetie, or you may be hoping -- even expecting -- that you'll have a nice dinner out together, or come home from work that day to a bunch of flowers, or at least a little chocolate. I admit I've come to expect some Valentines' gesture from my spouse and would probably be at least mildly irked if he failed me, though I'm probably the one more likely to forget. The urge to indulge a little, even in the sillier or more maudlin dimensions of the day, is pretty common among us, and so what?
But I hope that on this day meant to honor romantic love, we might also remember there is a love never mentioned at this time of year, which invites us into a challenging, fierce path of living in the world. As Erich Fromm has written, "To be loved, and to love, needs courage: the courage to judge certain values as of ultimate concern -- and to take the jump and stake everything on those values." AMEN.