The Park Road Pulpit

Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but love rejoices in the truth. Love bears all things, and believes all things; love hopes all things, and endures all things. Love never ends. (1 Corinthians 13.4-8)

How many times have you heard those words? They represent a magnificent, poetic truth from the pen of the Apostle Paul. Hardly a Christian marriage is performed that they are not spoken. They are immortalized because they are right and true and good and always appropriate. Yet in our over-sentimentalized, over-romanticized, over-sexualized, but much under-loved-world, I wonder how true they ever really ring? Love is patient? (When?) Love bears… believes… hopes… endures all things? (Really?)

Jesus taught his Jewish disciples that if they could love God, and love their neighbor (Mark 12.29) … then there were no other rules, no other laws had any bearing on their lives. “Love” is the sum of the law and the prophets. Love is the only law that still bears weight in an infinite and infinitely strange universe![1] Love is the destination and the journey. In the words of the old hymn, “Love is the theme. Love is supreme. Sweeter it grows, glory bestows.” Love is all there is. Love is the driving energy that gives Christian faith its legitimacy. Love is the fruit of God’s Spirit – all the other “fruits” are just modifiers.

But for many people, “love” is just a sentiment – too often, a sentiment in which they cannot believe, because they think they have never experienced it. For many people, “love” is a quaint notion associated with romance -- and too often, because love hasn’t happened to them like it happens in the movies, or the paperback novels, it becomes as distant and fanciful as the pot of gold at the rainbow’s end. For many people, “love,” through our overuse of the word, and our understatement of its true expression, love, the essential quality of life that almost literally makes the world go round, has been reduced to an ideal – just an ideal – whose time has not yet come. Has love become so much a caricature of unattainable perfection and peace that most people simply let go of its hope?

Three simple words. Perhaps the first scripture we memorized. Undoubtedly the first tenet of theology that we learned as impressionable children. These three simple words are the foundation of Christian faith. If we have not love (God’s love)… we are nothing (1 Corinthians 13.1). And this love is possible in an evolving world of the fittest survivors… because God is. In this kind of world, we can love… because God first loved us.[2] But again I ask you, have we removed the source of love, placing God so far above us, that we have resigned ourselves that we really cannot know love? Have we “pristined” the perfection of Divine Devotion such that the intrinsic character of the one in whose image we are cast (Genesis 1.27), becomes an unattainable quest, a Holy Grail, suitable only for the seekers of fairy-tales? I wonder, and I challenge you today -- let’s be real in our talk, so that love might be real in our lives.

Love is patient. But the heart that loves? But the person who loves? But the God who loves? Patient? Let’s be real when we talk, so love can be real, too.

Did you hear that realism in Hosea? I love this book, for it may be twenty-five-hundred years old, but the expression of God’s love in this poignant book is as current as the last time a mother, speaking in her best mother-voice, staccato-ed through obvious anger, “James - Russell - Dean, - II! - I - have - lost - my - patience - with - you!” Did you hear it? Love is patient. But mothers are not always so!

Hear now a definition. The American Heritage College Dictionary gives as the second definition of the word “schizophrenia”: a condition that results from the coexistence of disparate (that means separate) or antagonistic (that means conflicting) qualities, identities, or activities. Did you hear it? Isn’t this a veritable definition of love, in real life. What mother has ever loved a child, who did not, because of that deep love, lose her patience with a child? Love is patient. But there are times when mothers and fathers must not be.

Love and hate are not opposites. They are the extreme poles of the same, passionate emotion. Whom can you hate more than the one you love the most? Or the one who loves you the most? No one. No one, because love, the vulnerability of love, which causes us to open the depth of our soul to another person, also opens us to be deeply wounded by that person, in places and ways that no one else could ever so wound us. Why are divorces so often bitter? Why can former lovers not put what would seem to be the obvious health and welfare of their children ahead of their own passions? Because love and hate are not opposites. They represent one of the many coexisting qualities of antagonism, inherent in the heart of anyone who loves.

As I turned to the powerful book of Hosea, whose pictures of God’s poignant, self-giving love are some of the most descriptive in all of the Bible I was struck as I read, by the very “human-like” quality of God’s schizophrenic passion for us. Like a lover, pulling petals from a daisy, we hear God’s antagonistic expressions of love: “She loves me… she loves me not.” Did you hear it? Hosea clearly portrays the love of God as the love of one battered by the many, disparate voices of human passion. That might sound heretical to you, but it is right here, in black and white. It is right here today for any who try to love and are swayed by the uncontrollable, polar tides of human emotion. “I love him… I love him -- not!” It is here for us today, that we might understand what it truly means to have God’s Spirit of love.

In one of my favorite passages in all of scripture, we read of God, taking his wayward son and instead of disciplining the child, God teaches him to walk. Can’t you just see God smiling? Don’t you remember pictures of your children, or of you with your parents, toddler bobbling in the foreground, delighted parent beaming in the background?

It was I who taught Ehraim to walk… I led them with cords of human kindness, with bands of love. I was to them like those who lift infants to their cheeks.[3]

It is my favorite way to hold babies. Right here, cheek to cheek, because you can feel their tenderness, smell their innocence. God knows that feeling and that delicious smell, but God also knows the rage that can boil within, rage born of disappointment or embarrassment or shame or resentment – rage born of love – toward that very same child, when the child whom you have taught to walk. Walks… but walks, away.

The Hebrew Bible is not afraid to portray the “coexisting antagonisms” that rest uneasily within the very heart of God’s love. In the disturbing story of Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 19), a disappointed God, we are told, destroys his wayward child. Hosea alludes to this destruction, yet here, God’s conflicted love is turned inward. My heart recoils within me… “Recoil” is the exact word that the writer uses of Sodom’s destruction, yet in Hosea’s account, God takes this pain within. God’s heart is shattered, utterly broken, for his wayward child. My compassion grows warm and tender. I will not execute my fierce anger… I will not again destroy my child.[4] Can this be the action of the self-same God?

Yes. But only because God Is… Love. And love, as anyone who has ever tried to know it can attest, is no soothing balm, no calming peace – it is that fire of disparate voices, that raging theatre of “coexisting antagonisms” within that drives us to fight for what is right and good and true, when anyone in her right mind would have long since let go!

God is love. And God’s fruit, that we are to bear, is love. But what is love’s essential character if it can be found in our rage and in our rest? If I may be so bold, let me dare to tell you exactly what it is: Love is simply, never letting go. Love is hoping when there is no hope. Love is believing when there is no reason to believe. Love is persisting with the power of presence,[5] when there is no other power. Which is to say that in quality, much more than in quantity, love is that which makes God’s character eternal.[6] For on the last day love alone will remain.

[1] The idea behind my sermon February 22, 2004 sermon, “The Final Law of the Universe: Gravity and the Golden Rule,” was based on a quotation from John Locke, who suggests that there are only two laws in the entire universe, gravity and the Golden Rule. In that sermon, I pointed to some recent reports from the world of Quantum Physics, beyond my technical understanding, which suggest that in the quantum world, gravity may not be as absolute at Sir Isaac Newton thought. If this finding holds true it would make the Golden Rule (here, “love”) as the final rule which bears weight (pun intended) in the entire universe.

[2] Though I affirm the contemporary scientific consensus regarding (what is believed about ) the beginning of our universe and its evolution to its current state, I am taking a veiled shot here at those pure naturalists whose science dis-allows the affirmation of God’s presence and activity in our world. What I understand about evolutionary theory does not satisfy me that true, self-giving, sacrificial “love” is explainable in a purely Darwinian fashion, hence, I will continue to affirm the biblical claim that we love, “because God first loved us.”

[3] I love the irony of Hosea’s words, that God leads with “human kindness.” What does this suggest of God’s “divine love”? In his book, The Human Being: Jesus and the Enigma of the Son of the Man, Walter Wink says, “What does it mean to say that God is revealed as human? Why does God turn a humanlike face to Ezekiel? Perhaps because becoming human is the task that God has set for human beings. And human beings have only a vague idea what it means to be human… Ezekiel’s vision intimates that only God is, as it were, really Human, and since we are made in God’s image and likeness, we are capable of becoming more truly human ourselves.” (p. 26)

[4] I cannot cite a source for this insight, but the point has been made that the Hebrew word for “recoil” was unique enough, that to be found in both Genesis 19 and Hosea would strongly suggest that the later writer (Hosea) knew, and alluded, directly, to this story in his own writing.

[5] I thought here of parents, whose children have, in fact, walked away. Sometimes we are only allowed to express our presence in our absence, which leads me to consider what theologians have long called Jesus’ “cry of dereliction” from the cross: “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me.” The “absence” of God has been a source of great theological conflict for centuries. It is, however, a reality for many who love. “Persisting,” or “hanging on,” then, might mean necessarily doing so “in absencia.”

[6] My friend, Dr. William E. Hull, likes to explain that the biblical concept of “eternity” does not (just) refer to linear time (without end, chronologically), but to the quality of the essence of someone or something. To live “eternally,” then, might take a considerably different significance to us. (Does “heaven” refer to “living forever,” or to fully knowing, fully living, “abundance” (John 10.10) in every dimension available to us?)

Selected texts from Hosea, and 1 John 4.7-8