Sermon
The
Spirit of Love
The Rev. Jack D. Bryant
First
But Naomi said to her two
daughters-in-law, “Go back each of you to your mother’s house. May the Lord deal kindly
with you, as you have dealt with the dead and with me. The Lord grant that
you may find security, each of you in the house of your husband.” Then she kissed them, and they wept
aloud. They said to her, “No, we will
return with you to your people.” But
Naomi said, “turn back, my daughters, why will you go
with me? Do I still have sons in my womb
that they may become your husbands? Turn
back, my daughters, go your way, for I am too old to have a husband. Even if I thought there was hope for me, even
if I should have a husband tonight and bear sons, would you then wait until
they were grown? Would you then refrain
from marrying? No, my daughters, it has
been far more bitter for me than for you, because the
hand of the Lord has turned against me.”
Then they wept aloud again. Orpah
kissed her mother-in-law, but Ruth clung to her.
So she said, “See, your sister-in-law has
gone back to her people and to her gods; return after your sister-in-law.” But Ruth said,
“Do not press me to leave you or to turn back from following
you!
Where you go, I will go;
Where you lodge, I will lodge;
Your people shall be my people, and your God my God.
Where you die, I will die –
There will I be buried.
May the Lord do thus and so to me,
And more as well,
If even death parts me
from you!”
When Naomi saw that she was determined to
go with her, she said no more to her.
Second
A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth
as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so
many thinkers. The truth – that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man
can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning
of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to
impart: The salvation of man is through
love and is love.
For five weeks beginning next Sunday, our
religious education program will offer lessons based on the Five Smooth Stones
of Liberal Religion. The five smooth
stones are a reference to the biblical story of David and Goliath from the book
of Samuel. According
to the story David “chose five smooth stones from the stream bed” (1 Samuel 17)
and with sling in hand set out to face the giant. In liberal religious tradition, those five
smooth stones have come to represent five core ideas. James Luther Adams, a Unitarian theologian,
popularized the idea. In summary form,
they can be described as follows. First,
revelation is continuous – which means we never stop learning. Second is the idea of being in right
relationship with one another. Third is the obligation to work for
justice. Fourth is the obligation to
make our social institutions reflect the demands of justice; and fifth, to live
our lives with an attitude of hope. They
are great ideas – and it should be fun for the kids. I hope that all of you who are parents will
take the time to talk with your children about what they are learning. I believe this is important because in our
tradition it is parents who are the primary religious educators.
As I listened to
Love is a difficult topic. Like the word “hero,” I believe it is often
misunderstood and misused. I remember
one of my professors in seminary who talked about love one day. He said whenever he was feeling in a
particularly impish mood – which for him was almost every day – he would ask
couples who wanted to be married why they wanted to do so. He said he always received the same answer: “We’re in love.” To which he would respond, “Okay, but why do
you want to get married?” He did so
because he was convinced most couples weren’t really in love, they were in
lust. Lust is an idea that is frequently
condemned – or seen as something for which a confession is required. I remember Jimmy Carter publicly confessing
he had lusted in his heart after other women.
That was more than I wanted to know.
There are, of course, aspects of lust that aren’t appropriate, but I
want to go on record as saying that I believe a person needs a little lust in
his or her life. I can just imagine how
some of you may report on what I’ve just said.
But I’m not suggesting a person should go overboard on this. Lust is about excitement and desire, two
important ingredients for life. What
kind of life would we have without them?
And what would love be without some excitement and desire. In fact, what would our church be without
some sense of excitement and desire for what happens here? But there are churches dominated by desire
and excitement. They are the churches
where there is whooping and hollering and jumping and shouting as the answer to
everything. I think that’s the
theological equivalent of a lustful church.
It’s not my style. Although who
knows? I might surprise you
sometime. But I believe a life – or a
church – dominated by lust, dominated by desire and excitement is one
dimensional and shallow and narcissistic.
Love is more than lust – and
the spirit of love in this church or any church is more than excitement and
desire or whooping and hollering – even if the whooping and shouting invokes
the word love. I’ve heard a lot of
people in churches shout and scream about love, but I’ve never sensed much love
in what they do. Nor
is love a blissful state of mind.
And it is more than being able to say one has been saved. It is more than a feeling – far more than a
feeling, although love evokes feelings – just as it evokes words – words such
as the passage from First Corinthians that was our responsive reading this
morning.
“Love is patient; love is
kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude.” That’s what the bible says. “It bears all things, believes all things,
hopes all things, endures all things.” The words sound beautiful, but it is apparent
that their author, the Apostle Paul, never heard of tough love. As a parent I do not believe that love means
I should not sometimes run out of patience – or that I should bear all things
and believe all things and endure all things.
I believe there are some things that don’t deserve patience, that don’t
deserve to be believed or to be endured.
And I believe it is love that requires a person – sometimes – to say
no. But the words of First Corinthians
are still beautiful – and in their beauty they point to the truth of love.
I believe that’s true of
many of the words written about love.
For me none have more beauty than the words of Viktor Frankl that I read
a few minutes go.
A thought transfixed
me: for the first time in my life I saw
the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final
wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth – that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man
can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning
of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to
impart: The salvation of man is through
love and is love.
I believe his words point to
part of the truth about love – “that love is the ultimate and the highest goal
to which man can aspire.” It is a bright
shining star that guides one’s life, what I call the lure of God. The ultimate and highest goal is, however,
always beyond our reach, always beyond description. Therefore, it is unobtainable, so how can one
possess love? I think the answer is that
there is great beauty – and hence great truth in what Frankl says, but it still
isn’t quite love. Rather, love may
better be understood as the human response to the ultimate and highest goal to
which a person can aspire.
I believe this is where we
find the meaning of the spirit of love.
Love is the spirit of this church because our tradition challenges us to
aspire to the ultimate and highest goals that we can imagine – and not just in
words, but in deeds. We do not offer
easy answers. We offer a religious
community that says no one is going to give you eternal life just because you
are willing to recite a creed and say you believe it. However you understand the universe, whether
you believe there is one God, a hundred gods, or no God at all, each person, each and every person, must hear and respond to the still small
voice – whatever one may call it – that lures us to the good. It is in living one’s life in response to
that voice, in response to one’s aspirations, that one lives in the spirit of
love.
I believe that is the real
basis for two people deciding to marry or to commit to becoming life
partners. It’s far more than lust. It’s the commitment to live with and to act
towards another human being in a way that aspires to the ultimate and highest
values one can imagine. I always tell
couples I am going to marry or partner that they are entering into a covenant,
not a contract. A contract says who will
go to work, what time you’ll be home, who will fix dinner and who will take out
the garbage and do the dishes. But
marriage is a covenant – it is a commitment – to spend the rest of your life
with another person in the spirit of love – in the spirit of living in a
relationship with that person in a way that is a response to the ultimate and
highest values you can imagine.
Ruth’s husband had
died. Naomi, her mother-in-law, was
returning to her native land. Naomi
turned to her two daughters-in-law and released them from any obligation they
owed her. “May the Lord deal kindly with
you,” she said, “as you have dealt with the dead and with me.” “Then she kissed them, and they wept
aloud.”
But Ruth felt a bond with
Naomi that transcended any idea of contract or agreement. She felt the bonds of love. She felt the need to live her life in
response to the ultimate and highest values she could imagine – values that
called for her to be steadfast and loyal to Naomi – wherever she went – even
unto death. So Ruth spoke to her:
“Do
not press me to leave you or to turn back from following you!
Where you go, I will go;
Where you lodge, I will lodge;
Your people shall be my people, and your God my God.
Where you die, I will die –
There will I be buried.
May the Lord do thus and so to me,
And more as well,
If even death parts me from you!”
This is the kind of
commitment that arises out of the spirit of love and reveals that love is not a
feeling or a state of mind or a condition of bliss. Love – genuine love – as a human response to
ultimate values is an act of will. Ruth
did not tell Naomi how she felt. She
didn’t describe warm and fuzzy feelings.
Instead, she expressed herself in an act of will.
“Where you go, I will go;
Where you lodge, I will lodge;
Your people shall be my people, and your God my God.”
That is why you should be careful about
joining this church.
Membership in this church is not like a
club. It is not about paying dues for
specified privileges. It is not about
saying what you believe. It is about
making a commitment, making a covenant to be a part of a community where each
person strives to make his or her actions towards others a reflection of the
ultimate and highest goals imaginable, where each person is called to
demonstrate love as an act of will. That
does not mean that we are perfect. Far from it. Each of
us makes mistakes. Each of us will
sometimes fail to live up to, to respond to the lofty goals we would
honor. I know that I do that from time
to time. But because we gather in the
spirit of love as an act of will we commit to being patient and kind, not envious
or boastful or arrogant or rude. And
love never ends. So when patience is
exhausted, on those occasions when we must recognize one has not lived up to
the highest of expectations, we covenant to respond not with anger, but in a
way that reflects and models how a person should have acted. And we recognize that this is not always easy
– so we act and speak with humility and the awareness of our own shortcomings.
This spirit of love is set
forth in the words of one of the songs in our hymnal. Its words are adapted from one of the
best-known poems of the poet Rumi.
Come, come, whoever you are.
Wanderer, worshiper,
lover of leaving.
Ours is no caravan of despair,
Come, yet again coming.
But there is another line to his poem
that I wish had been included in the song. It says, “Even though you have
broken your vows a hundred times, come, yet again come.”
Come, come, whoever you are.
Wander, worshiper, lover of leaving,
Ours is no caravan of despair.
Even though you have broken your vows a
hundred times,
Come, yet again come.
Come
to this place where love is the spirit.
Come to this place where we covenant with each other to live our lives
as an act of will in response to the ultimate and highest goals we can
imagine. Know that here is a place not
of despair, but of hope. Even if you
break your vows a hundred times, come, yet again come, for we are not perfect,
but together, in the spirit of love, we will not turn away from each other.
Love is the spirit of this
church and service is its law. This our
great covenant: to dwell together in
peace, to seek the truth in love, and to help one another.
Amen.