Three things abide: faith, hope and love. And the greatest of these is love.
Today’s sermon is the third in a series of reflections on the Apostle Paul’s famous passage in his first letter to the congregation in Corinth. In the two previous sermons in this series I considered faith and hope.
Faith, I proposed, should not be thought of as a matter of what we believe. I suggested we view faith in its original biblical sense. In this view of faith, faith is a relationship. Faith is a question of being faithful — faithful to our sense of what is sacred, faithful to each other and to what matters most in life.
Hope, I suggested, is founded on our sense of what is possible — a sense based on our experiences of love, beauty and ecstasy. Our hopes need to be balanced between impossible fantasy on the one hand and self-imprisoning narrowness on the other.
And yet Paul tells us that love is greater than faith and hope, that without love we are nothing. Paul writes, “If I speak in the tongues of mortals and 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.” Without love I am nothing.
The writer of the Gospel of John goes so far as to create a theology in which God is love and love is God. From this perspective, when you and I express love we are like God. When we love God lives in is and we are one with God.
What is this love that Paul and the unknown author of the gospel of John write about? What is this that is the center of a religious life, that will save our souls, that is the essence of the divine?
It is hard, especially now, to speak of love. Love. What do you think of when you think of love? It almost certainly is not what Paul and other New Testament writers wrote about.
“Love” has come to mean so many things.
Mostly, of course, love in our culture refers to romantic, erotic love. Love is the stuff of flowers and greeting cards and thousands of saccharine songs saturating the airwaves and filling iPods everywhere. Then, too, there is lust masquerading as love—but perhaps that is a topic for another day.
As wonderful as romantic sexual love can be, we know one thing for sure: this is not what Paul is writing about. In English, you see, we use the word “love” to talk about affection for that special person with whom we “fall in love” — the person with whom we enter into a committed loving relationship. And then we use the word love to talk about love for children, siblings and parents. And we go on to talk of love for friends. And we talk of love for our fellow humans whom we have never met. And we talk of a love of the sacred, of God.
If that were not confusing enough, in our consumer culture we “love” our homes, our cars, our computers, our cell phones, our skis, our clothes. And, of course, there is our other modern favorite: self love that easily becomes self absorption and narcissism. The word “love” in English covers everything from love of the sacred to lust, idolatry and self absorption.
But it doesn’t in Greek, the language in which the New Testament was written. Greek uses three distinct words to speak of love: eros, philia and agape. Eros is the word for erotic, sexual, romantic love. The word “eros” never appears in the Christian scriptures. Not once.
The two words that do appear in the early Christian scriptures are agape and philia. Philia refers to friendship and love in the family, to the deep non-romantic bonds we form with those people with whom we share common purpose. Agape has been translated as “compassion” and “charity.” (By the way, this is why some people have mentioned to me that they remember the biblical passage as speaking of “faith, hope and charity. “Charity” was probably a better translation of “agape” at one time. Today, however, “charity” has come to mean donations to the poor. Centuries ago its meaning was broader.) Agape is about the desire to reach out to people who are outside our inner circle. Agape is based on our capacity to empathize, to recognize the other person as being like ourselves, to share another’s joy and pain. Unlike eros and philia, agape deals with all human beings, not just those we know deeply. It is founded on our ability to feel empathy and connection, on our wishing others well. In its most extreme form, agape means even caring about our enemies. The concern for prisoners that Shann speaks of in her chalice lighting is a kind of agape. All the people in this congregation who have donated to help Guatemalan children, victims of the tsunami and victims of Katrina are expressing agape. The volunteers who just returned from the Gulf Coast were motivated by agape, and so were the hundreds who volunteered during our social action weekend.
Think again about the times in your life that you have felt truly loved. What was that like? How would you describe that feeling of being deeply loved?
For me, feeling loved is like a long, warm embrace. It is a sense of being held. Sometimes that feeling is indeed a physical embrace, an actual touching. But I can have that feeling across the miles. For most of us, that feeling begins in the family, with people who first love and care for us. Later in life, we are both cared for and do the caring. We commit ourselves to others we care for deeply. This is eros and philia.
When I am the one who is expressing love, that too feels like an embrace, an abrazo. When love wells up within me I experience it as a reaching out; I feel the wall between myself and another breaking down. In time, this personal love of eros and philia matures into a love that reaches out beyond our intimate circle. This is the love of agape. This is the love of which the bible writers speak.
Love, though, is not a thing. It is a relationship.
A loving relationship is a mutual reaching, a mutual extension. Love is not just reaching, it is connecting — connecting so strongly that to lose that connection is to lose part of one’s self. In love our individual selves overlap and intertwine. In a loving community we are like atoms in a DNA molecule — our bonds of love create something alive and complex and wonderful.
And while love is a sense of being held and holding in return, it also goes beyond this. We are truly loved only when we are loved for who we are. A true love is an honest love. While love is a deep, powerful emotion, there is a cognitive side to it. A deep love involves knowing and being known. Love cannot last if it is based on pretense and posturing. And love is also the awareness that we are connected, that we do need each other, that connections are life giving. Love sees clearly that to be self absorbed is to lose our true self; that to reach out and embrace others and embrace life is the way to find our truest and highest self.
The need for connection is absolutely fundamental to human wholeness. The great irony that all religious traditions teach is that we are truly ourselves, truly whole, truly in a state of grace, when we connect. And we connect when we let go of our petty egos. Listen to Paul describe love: “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…” In other words, love is going beyond a preoccupation with our individual desires. Love is the reaching out that lets us transcend our barriers, that makes wholeness and vitality possible.
Our fundamental need for love is most clear, alas, when we do not love, when we do not connect. I just invited you to reflect on those times when you have felt loved. Think briefly about the times when love is absent. How does that feel?
When love is absent I feel rejection, pretense, superficiality, and coldness. When love is absent I feel used and isolated, hurt and angry. Instead of an embrace, I feel rejected or ignored. I feel bitterness growing in me. Without love I feel alone, isolated, cold, disconnected, and lost. It is a kind of death.
Paul’s passage about love has become famous because through the centuries people have recognized its essential truth. Without connection we feel hollow. Our knowledge loses its meaning, our efforts gain us nothing. Just like the people in Corinth in the first century, we too are creatures who have a deep need for connection. We want to love and be loved; we want to belong; we want to be held.
Why then do so many of us spend so much of our time feeling unloved and unloving?
Part of the answer, I believe, is that while being loved and loving is wonderful, it is not easy. Loving and being loved takes work. Loving and being loved makes us vulnerable and can cause pain. Reaching out involves risk. When we reach out we risk being misunderstood, rejected, ignored. Yes, love is risky and hard, but it is worth it.
How can we bring the kind of love Paul talks about into our lives? We are so fond of thinking that love is something we fall into. There is much truth to that. Relationships begin with an attraction, an affinity, a feeling of comfort and delight. But no loving relationship, not eros, not philia, not agape, can be sustained without effort. Falling in love is easy; staying in love is hard.
Love takes time. Love needs space. Love takes energy. Love demands a commitment.
If I am going to have a loving relationship with another person, a relationship that is based on sharing, on profound knowledge of each other’s aspirations and histories — if I am going to achieve a level of honest intimacy and mutuality — that is not going to happen in a day or a week or a month. And it is not going to happen by spending a half hour of “quality time” together now and again.
Perhaps the most difficult question for me and for you is this: do we want to love and be loved enough to make the necessary commitment of time and energy? Are we willing to make time for conversation, for sharing a meal, for going on a walk, for working together hand in hand on a social justice project? Are you and I willing to create the emotional space, the calm and the vulnerability to really listen to each other? Are we willing to go off line, to turn off the tube, to put down the magazine, to put off that project, to see fewer clients, to make less money? Are we willing to make time to support activities that make our culture more compassionate? When love reaches out into the social world, it becomes justice, equality and compassion.
How might our lives look if we committed ourselves to make love a top priority? Let me share a couple of obvious, simple ideas.
First, we would make time and emotional space for those people already close to us. We would make time when we are not exhausted or distracted. We would find time for sharing, for playing, for exploring the world together. We would find time to write a note, make a phone call, drop by for a visit.
Second, we would make time for those we do not yet know and love. I am convinced, for example, that a religious community needs many small groups — groups that learn and play and laugh and seek truth and meaning. As we dream a future together, we need to create times and places and settings where our relationships can develop and blossom. As a community we would also be mindful of visitors and new members, making sure we are open and embracing of new relationships.
It is so easy, and so tragic, to make the mistake of not taking time for relationships because we have so much to do. The truth is that connecting, truly loving, is our life’s work. That is what it is to be fully human, fully alive. This is what it is, in traditional theological language, to know God. Without love all our personal accomplishments are nothing. Without love life can become a living hell.
Faith, hope and love. Love is the greatest of these. Why? Because we are creatures who have an innate need for connection. Love is the center of the religious life because the religious life is all about compassionate connection. Love is the greatest because without love we can have no faith. That is, without connecting in love we have nothing to be faithful to. Without love our hope, our vision and experience of life’s possibilities, implodes into a black hole of self-absorbed narcissism. Hope must be shared with those we love or it is trivial. My deepest hopes transcend my petty desires; my deepest hopes transcend my physical life.
Our task, as people striving to live religiously, is to create a container where love can grow and thrive. May we recommit ourselves to creating times and places for love — time and place in our homes, time and place in this community of compassion, and, most of all, time and a place in our hearts.
Tomorrow, you and I may be gone. One day we will no longer be here. Let’s not wait. Let us take each other’s hands. Let us make time to reach out to each other. Let’s let love give us the gift of life. Let’s allow our love for each other rekindle the fire in our hearts and give us warmth and light.
Paul was right. The keys to life are to be faithful, to live with hope, and to love. And the greatest of these is love.
May the love that lives in your heart and in mine guide our lives.
Amen.