St. Paul’s United Church Sunday, December 18, 2011

What Is Love? Rev. David Mundy

1 Corinthians 13:4-8a Luke 1:26-38

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The cable guy came to our house a few weeks ago. You know the cable guy: he – and for some reason it’s always a “he”– comes to fix what you figure shouldn’t have needed fixing in the first place, and expects you to be around when he arrives between six in the morning and midnight.

It turned out that this cable guy, whose name is Suresh, was very pleasant and competent. He even offered to fix any computer problems we might encounter and sell me multivitamins. That’s full service!

As he left the guest bedroom where he was working he told me he liked our poster and asked if he could take a photo with his cell phone. He wondered where we purchased it because he wanted to get one. I had to think about the poster to which he was referring – you know how it is with stuff tucked away in spare rooms.

It turned out to be a poster called What is Love? which, other than a rather cheesy image in the centre, is made up of about fifty different quotations about love written by the great and not so great. It used to be above our ironing board so we saw it often, but for some reason it is now “out of sight and out of mind.” I have shared this poster with you in the past but I will mention some of these quotations. Some are poetic such as William Shakespeare’s “love sought is good, but given unsought is better.”

Two of the shortest are “Love is letting go of fear” by Dr. Gerald Jampolsky and “Love is all you need” by some fellows named Lennon and McCartney.

Some are anonymous yet profound, including“Our lives are shaped by those who love us and by those who refuse to love us.”

“If you have love in your life it can make up for a great many things you lack.

If you don’t have it, no matter what else there is, it’s not enough.”

This is the perspective offered by Ann Landers, the advice columnist from another day.

There are several quotes from religious writers, but the lengthiest of all these quotations is one from the bible, from Paul’s first letter to the congregation in Corinth, which we heard this a moment ago but is worth repeating, at least in part:

Love is patient and kind: love is not jealous or boastful;

it is not arrogant or rude.

Love does not insist on its own way; it does not rejoice at wrong,

but rejoices at the right.

Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things,

Love never ends. 1 Corinthians 13:4-8a

You might think that this is an idealized and romanticized assessment of love and perhaps that’s why so many couples want this passage read at their weddings. But it’s not what the apostle Paul intends. This is both the high calling and practical expression of love for those who are the followers of Christ, although I have to confess that even though I have read this passage hundreds of times it never occurred to me until this week that this chapter doesn’t mention Jesus or God at all, at least not directly. This is about how we will attempt to live, as daunting as it may seem, once we have ourselves experienced the life-changing love of Christ.

What is love, on this Love Sunday? We could admit that after thousands of years of human history we don’t really have a clue. We know that love is not measurable in any tangible way. Its amazing isn’t it that we have instruments that can measure microscopic “parts per billion” of elements in the air, and tests that give us accurate readings of blood sugar and cholesterol, yet quantifying love eludes us.

Maybe what confuses us at times is the whole notion of being “in love” which is promoted relentlessly in our culture. One of the big musical stars of this year is a singer and song writer named Bruno Mars, which, it might surprise you to know, is not his real name. Bruno’s had a couple of big hits including a hurtin’ love song called Grenade, with the chorus:

I'd catch a grenade for ya

Throw my hand on a blade for ya

I'd jump in front of a train for ya

You know I'd do anything for ya

This guy obviously has issues! Smart though, because it sure sounds passionate, and we figure passion is love, and the implication is that when passion wanes, love is over. There’s another, gentler Mars song called Just The Way You Are and its chorus says:

When I see your face, there's not a thing that I would change
Cause you're amazing, just the way you are
And when you smile, the whole world stops and stares for a while
Because girl you're amazing, just the way you are.

Far be it for me to be a cynic about romantic love, but we do learn that in order for love to endure and flourish there has to be something more than the first blush of excitement in a relationship. We probably all know someone who is “in love with being in love” and seems to bounce from one relationship to another without ever finding satisfaction. We hear from them about the latest love who is “the one” and we bite our tongues and just nod and smile.

Somehow our culture has glorified love and created expectations which are so unrealistic and yet there are so many people who feel unloved, unworthy, unaccepted.

Isn’t what we really desire is the love which sustains us through a lifetime, a love which creates a generosity of spirit which cannot be quenched by the up and downs of daily life? Last week as I was doing Christmas visiting I spent time with two couples who have loved for a long time. One couple has been married for sixty-three years and the other for sixty-nine years. The one couple now live in different seniors’ residences because he requires more care, but she is there virtually every day to sit with him. He is deaf as a post and can be rather crochety but he expresses his appreciation and affection for her. These folk will never fit the “love song” profile, but you can’t tell me that they don’t understand love.

As Christians we respond to the question “what is love?” by speaking of the person of Jesus, God present with us in human form, first of all as a vulnerable child, a baby.

Last Sunday a girl came bounding up the stairs at our entrance and I didn’t recognize her for a moment because her head was turned and she is growing so fast. I mentioned this to her mother and she laughed and said that her daughter’s questions are getting grown up as well. They were driving recently when she asked “where do babies come from?” She got the standard “from mommies” but her little investigative reporter wanted more: “how are babies made?” she wondered.

Her mother responded that mommies and daddies make babies. The next question was “what’s the recipe?” Mom deftly countered this question with one of her own ”what do you think the recipe is?” Her daughter’s answer? Love! Out of the mouths of precocious kids.

Which brings us to our other scripture passage this morning, which is a love song, even though it doesn’t mention love. You might recall that a couple of weeks ago I mentioned that Advent is the season which prepares us for Christmas rather than being Christmas itself. The birth of Jesus, the Christ is coming, but as one writer puts it in Advent we are just showing.

Well, Mary gets news, straight from the angels mouth that she will soon be showing, she will give birth to a child. This isn’t good news for Mary, at least not to begin with. She may have been a teenaged girl but she knew where babies came from and she is “thoroughly shaken” and afraid of the implications of her pregnancy. The angel Gabriel assures Mary and offers her the recipe for this particular birth. This birth will be love in the world, for the world, and – oh yes – nothing is impossible with God.

This morning we celebrate the impossibly possible love of Christ which transforms us, if we accept that love and allow it to be the source of forgiveness and new life.

You may be struggling with your own sense of acceptance this morning and wonder whether this could be true. Your whole life you may have felt uncertainty about your own worthiness. In this moment we can hear that our past, the rejection of others, the mistakes we have made, cannot take away the possibilities for love. In God’s eyes you are lovely, just the way you are, and today Christ’s love is for you.

You may be dealing with a personal situation, or maybe a bunch of them, where love has been lost, and bitterness and resentment are simmering or have taken over in relationships. I don’t need to tell you that this time of year can heighten those feelings. It’s tempting to think that our situation is different, that what has happened in our lives is beyond any reasonable expectations for love. Maybe. We can choose to dwell in those hard feelings or we can choose to forgive, even if you can’t forget or reconcile. We know that any lasting love relationship requires letting go and forgiveness along the way.

Of course, the story of the love of Christ is more than a tale about the birth of a baby. That’s the beginning, not the end. This is the last of Advent and Christmas is close at hand – we can see Christmas from here. And always there is a glimpse in the distance of Good Friday and Easter.

When we look to the manger of Bethlehem there is the shadow of the cross which is the powerful symbol of God’s love with us and for us. One of the great hymns Holy Week and Easter is When I Survey the Wondrous Cross and the final verse speaks of Christ’s self-giving love:

Were the whole realm of nature mine,

that were a present far too small:

love so amazing, so divine,

demands my soul, my life, my all.

What is love? It is the redeeming Christ of Christmas and Easter. Thanks be to God.