Sermon for 1/31/10 RE Love

I dislike Meatloaf. Now my mother was a child of the great depression and spent her formative years in England during WWII, so I was raised to eat what was in front of me and like it. There was ONE time when I was young and foolish enough to tell my mom that I liked our neighbor’s meatloaf better than hers, but that was a mistake I will NEVER repeat.

The Meatloaf that I am referring to today, is a singer/songwriter of pop songs who goes by the name Meatloaf. There are a lot of things that I don’t like about his work. He tries to be gritty and pounds out lyrics that are dull and uninspiring. He repeats himself over and over again in his writing to attempt to provide a hook for his songs - it falls flat. His music is monotonous and his appearance is grungy with stringy hair and sloppy antics. A sort of Jack Black without the ability to engage.

But what I dislike about him so much is that he is typically so far off base from human reality. One of his song lyrics goes, I want you, I need you, but there ain’t no way I’m ever going to love you, but don’t be sad, two out of three ain’t bad.

Really poor writing, isn’t it? Set to raging music, it’s even worse. But where it really gets under my skin is at the very heart of what he writes. There are different types of love. Eros – which is usually a physical yearning or as the song says - it is a need; a need that starts with self and involves another in an amorous or desirous way. The word need is intrinsic in this type of “love”.

Another type of love is affection – and this is the easiest. It is pretty casual and can be felt for anyone from crazy Uncle Harvey to the neighbor’s funny looking puppy that tears up your plants and all the other characters that make up the wonderful patchwork of your life. Affection is so casual it overlooks a great deal, homeliness, quirky personalities; lack of consideration, things that would make us say, well, that is just their way. Things that would probably get in the way of a more long term relationship. In fact, affection is often what we feel for those that God puts in our lives only for the timeframe or the gap that we need them. My best example of this type of person is someone I met through work – his name is Steve. By coincidence I ended up seeing him through a nasty bout of jaw bone cancer. It seemed that there was no one else who stood by him, not his coworkers, not his family, not his community – but at that point in time, he found in me someone he could communicate with and someone who didn’t care that the bottom of his face was missing for many months.

Now, Steve is not typically the type of person that I would call my friend – I do not like that he is bigoted and egotistical and bitter towards his family. There is little that he respects about me – a far too independent, but strangely liberal woman who has two major strikes against her. I was born north of the Mason Dixon line and worse yet, I am an Episcopalian - the same religion as his ex-wife. In short, if we didn’t have affection for each other, we would probably intensely dislike each other. But affection, by its nature allows us to dislike almost everything about the other person and still be able to have affection for them.

Friendship, another form of love has other characteristics. It is a bit more demanding than affection because it needs commonality. I bet many of you have friends that you can finish their sentences, not see each other for months and pick up the conversation just about where it left off. You know each other’s hearts, but don’t possess them. If it is true friendship, it is expanded by sharing with others, a more the merrier sort of thing where groups can get together and enhance the various friendships. If you have these people in your lives, you have friendship.

The most desired of all is love. It is very interesting that during the homely at most weddings we hear the words that we hear from 1^st Corinthians: “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”.

When I stood at this very alter and heard those words, it scared me to DEATH. I knew I loved the man I was about to say my vows with, but I am not a patient person, I could be jealous as all get out and I really, really like having my own way. Oh, and I also like to be right, to even his detriment or maybe particularly to his detriment. Who among us hasn’t gotten a smug look on their face when their spouse is proven wrong about something. On top of all that, the divorce rate at the time was about to climb above the 50% mark. The independent, liberal person that I was and still am, was about to pop a cork – was that really what was expected of me when I married? Had I never REALLY listened to those words before? Did I really need to forsake who I truly am?

Well, yes, no and ideally. If I wanted my marriage to work, and what newlywed doesn’t, I should be supportive and faithful, and have faith in my husband and hope the best for him, for me for us. Where the “ideally” comes in is in what St. Paul really wrote. He used the classical Greek word “agape” or self-giving love. This is the love that “bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things”

This is the love that God has for us, the love that is truly capable of doing all of these things. As a followers of God and since he has made us in his image, we are called to work beyond our human nature and strive to give the type of love to each other that God gives to us.

Where does that leave us in relation to all the types of love that we talked about? Are they flawed, inappropriate or inferior? Are we less like God when we feel yearning or fear or turn to him for help or are we closer to God when we feel strength and charity and love for our fellow man? When we feel all is right with the world and feel no need to seek God’s help are we strong and god-like or god-less? Should we set aside the human feelings in favor of striving for the agape that it is suggested is the “real love”. Do affection and passion and friendship have less value?

Looking at the word agape again gives us guidance in two ways. Agape has been discussed as akin to charitable love and that gives us a good clue. Consider that in addition to the fact that agape is Godly love. God’s all-giving, all-inclusive love for us whether we are a saint or a sinner, the love that gave us his only begotten son. God’s love is not instead of friendship or passion or affection, it is all of those things combined with charitable love.

A love that can forgive human foibles - be they that which allowed Jesus to continue to love Peter after being betrayed or the love that does not send couples to divorce court because of the way our mate squeezes the toothpaste tube. It is the love that allows us to see the people in our lives the way God sees them. To love them, to have passion for them, to be their friend and to have charity toward them. When we are able to give up our grudges, our old wounds, to see with affection a face scared from the ravages of cancer, to reunite with a friend who has let us down in the past, or to feel love for a family member who has repeatedly hurt us and not become victims ourselves we are allowing God to love through us.

I rarely understand the writing of C.S. Lewis the first several times I read his work, but he puts so well what the way God’s all-encompassing love enhances and balances and guides passion, friendship and affection:

“When I have learnt to love God better than my earthly dearest, I shall love my earthly dearest better than I do now. ...”

Amen