Choosing To Love
Sermon
Sermons On The First Readings
Series II, Cycle A
Object:
The popular notion in our society is that the best way to choose a marriage partner is to wait until we "fall in love" with someone. By that, we usually mean that we wait for some kind of feeling, some emotional response to a person of the opposite sex that convinces us that we can never be truly happy again unless we can spend the future with that person. And often the feeling we experience is one of ecstatic joy and excitement.
But there are a couple of realities about falling in love that aren't quite as exciting. One is that we are just as likely to fall in love with someone with whom we are ill-matched as with someone who is a good match for us. The emotional experience we call falling in love is absolutely no guarantee that the object of our affection is in any way a good marriage choice. We are just as likely to fall in love with someone with whom we will be miserable as with whom we will be happy.
The second reality about falling in love is that sooner or later, just about everybody falls back out of love -- or at least out of the state of high excitement that characterized the first blush of romance. This is because the experience of romantic love is basically an emotion, and emotions are changeable. Whether we like to admit it or not, part of falling in love is physical attraction, which by itself, is pretty shaky ground on which to build a relationship.
But even beyond that attraction, the feelings related to falling in love generally do not last. In fact, at least one author who has written on marriage describes falling in love as a kind of temporary insanity.
In some parts of the world, marriages are still arranged by parents, with the marriage partners themselves having little or no say in the selection of their mate.
Several years ago, I was the associate pastor at Trinity United Methodist Church in a large downtown area. That large church contained a marriage chapel built by donations from several denominations as an ecumenical chapel. One marriage I had there was for a young Muslim couple. The groom was from a country in the Middle East and had come to the States to study at a university. His bride was from the same country, but the groom had only met her a few days prior to the wedding. His parents had selected her and flown her over to America to marry their son.
I asked this young man how he felt about that, and he said he felt good about it. He said that his parents were wiser than he was and had more experience of life than he did. So, he believed, they were able to make a better choice for him than he would by himself.
Well, that kind of arrangement would not be my preference, but apparently it works. And by all evidence, the ratio of happy to unhappy marriages in cultures where arranged marriages are practiced is at least as good as in ours.
In the scripture for today, Abraham arranges a marriage for his son, Isaac, who, we note, is not consulted in the process. Abraham and his clan live in Canaan, but he does not want Isaac to marry a Canaanite woman. So he sends his servant back to Mesopotamia, where Abraham himself was born, to find a suitable bride.
When the servant arrives in Abraham's old home region, he uses a rather unique process of selection. He waits to see which maiden will draw water for him and for all his camels from the local well. The young woman who does this is Rebekah, daughter of Bethuel. The servant speaks with her family, who in turn, asks Rebekah whether she wants to go to Canaan to marry Abraham's son. She agrees, and travels to Canaan with the servant to meet her husband to be. Sort of the ultimate blind date!
When Isaac meets Rebekah, he seems quite satisfied with the selection. He proceeds to marry her, and then, the Bible says, he loved her.
He married her; then he loved her. Given the circumstances, the Bible has the order of things quite right for Isaac. For I doubt that the word "love" as used in this context referred to falling in love. No, it was something else.
Whether we have selected our mate through the falling-in-love experience or had our mate selected for us as Isaac did, what happens after that is very much the same. When the initial excitement wears off, as it almost always does, we are faced with a choice: "Will I love this person or not?"
"So [Rebekah] became his wife, and he loved her." The Bible is telling us that when it came to his marriage, Isaac acted like a grown-up! He realized that real love is a choice, and he chose to love this woman he had married.
So it is for us. We either choose to love or we choose not to. And that kind of decision is something quite apart from any particular emotions we may feel about our mate -- which, as we all know, can come and go like the wind. Real love is a commitment of loyalty and faithfulness to another person, not rooted primarily in emotions.
One very important adult task is coming to terms with the reality that as pleasurable as it is, falling in love is a temporary thing. Falling in love gets us started in a relationship but it is seldom what sustains it. And unless we make peace with this fact, we are apt to waste a lot of time and energy trying to make our relationships conform to some preconceived notion of "the perfect romance."
Of course, there is still plenty of room for romance in our marriages, and we ought to do loving things for each other. Let us not despair because we don't always feel lovingly toward our mate. In fact, it's a revealing picture of our choice to love when we treat our mate lovingly on days when the feelings of love are not particularly strong.
What exactly do we choose when we decide to love?
For one thing, we choose a primary loyalty. The scripture, after telling us that Isaac loved Rebekah, says, "so Isaac was comforted after the death of his mother." One way to read that is that Rebekah helped to fill a void in Isaac's life left by the passing of his mother, Sarah. And there's nothing wrong with that.
Another view is that Isaac realized his primary loyalty on earth now was to his new family rather than his old one. "For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh" (Genesis 2:24). That's how God set things up when marriage was instituted in the beginning. That's how God intends it.
How exactly that works out will vary from situation to situation, but one thing it always means is choosing our primary loyalty among all the people we love.
I know a couple whom I'll call Andy and Sharon. They experienced a lot of difficulties after they first married. They lived not far from Andy's parents. His father had a physical handicap, so when Andy had lived at home, he had learned to handle many of the handyman chores around the house that his father was unable to do.
After he got married, Andy's mother got into the habit of calling Andy at work whenever something at her house needed to be repaired. Like a dutiful son, Andy would stop at his parents' house on his way home to make the repair. Since he was already there, his mother made supper for him. Meanwhile, Sharon had supper waiting on the table at home. Sometimes Andy didn't get home until bedtime.
You can imagine the stress this pattern put on their marriage. Several evenings, Sharon had to cancel plans the couple had made together because Andy wasn't there.
Eventually it all came to a head. Andy had to make some choices. As their pastor, I was involved in helping Andy do that. Andy made the right one. When it was not feasible for him to assist his mother with a chore, he learned to tell her to call a plumber or the appropriate repairman. He's still a good son, and his marriage has improved. Andy and Sharon visit Andy's mom and dad together and there is a healthy relationship between the generations. But it is healthy because Andy chose his primary loyalty.
Still another choice real love requires is choosing to love the actual person we've married. Because falling in love is such a wild and crazy emotional ride, we sometimes fail to see the other person as he or she really is. In other words, we may fall in love with a romanticized ideal image of the other person instead of the actual person. Then later, when the flames of romance have diminished somewhat, the blinders fall off and we discover that we've fallen in love with a phantom, an ideal image that doesn't exist. You discover your wife is neither a goddess nor a vixen, but a human being with both glories and faults. You discover your husband is neither a knight in shining armor nor the most sensitive guy to ever live, but a human being with both glories and faults.
That's the point at which lasting love needs to take hold. That's the point at which the scripture places Isaac. After he had married Rebekah, he loved her. That's when he decided to love not who he wanted Rebekah to be, but who she really was.
The pattern God set from the very beginning was that a man and woman should choose to love each other. So when we do so, we are following the intention of our creator.
"Isaac ... married Rebekah. So she became his wife, and he loved her." That was the decision of a grown-up. Amen.
But there are a couple of realities about falling in love that aren't quite as exciting. One is that we are just as likely to fall in love with someone with whom we are ill-matched as with someone who is a good match for us. The emotional experience we call falling in love is absolutely no guarantee that the object of our affection is in any way a good marriage choice. We are just as likely to fall in love with someone with whom we will be miserable as with whom we will be happy.
The second reality about falling in love is that sooner or later, just about everybody falls back out of love -- or at least out of the state of high excitement that characterized the first blush of romance. This is because the experience of romantic love is basically an emotion, and emotions are changeable. Whether we like to admit it or not, part of falling in love is physical attraction, which by itself, is pretty shaky ground on which to build a relationship.
But even beyond that attraction, the feelings related to falling in love generally do not last. In fact, at least one author who has written on marriage describes falling in love as a kind of temporary insanity.
In some parts of the world, marriages are still arranged by parents, with the marriage partners themselves having little or no say in the selection of their mate.
Several years ago, I was the associate pastor at Trinity United Methodist Church in a large downtown area. That large church contained a marriage chapel built by donations from several denominations as an ecumenical chapel. One marriage I had there was for a young Muslim couple. The groom was from a country in the Middle East and had come to the States to study at a university. His bride was from the same country, but the groom had only met her a few days prior to the wedding. His parents had selected her and flown her over to America to marry their son.
I asked this young man how he felt about that, and he said he felt good about it. He said that his parents were wiser than he was and had more experience of life than he did. So, he believed, they were able to make a better choice for him than he would by himself.
Well, that kind of arrangement would not be my preference, but apparently it works. And by all evidence, the ratio of happy to unhappy marriages in cultures where arranged marriages are practiced is at least as good as in ours.
In the scripture for today, Abraham arranges a marriage for his son, Isaac, who, we note, is not consulted in the process. Abraham and his clan live in Canaan, but he does not want Isaac to marry a Canaanite woman. So he sends his servant back to Mesopotamia, where Abraham himself was born, to find a suitable bride.
When the servant arrives in Abraham's old home region, he uses a rather unique process of selection. He waits to see which maiden will draw water for him and for all his camels from the local well. The young woman who does this is Rebekah, daughter of Bethuel. The servant speaks with her family, who in turn, asks Rebekah whether she wants to go to Canaan to marry Abraham's son. She agrees, and travels to Canaan with the servant to meet her husband to be. Sort of the ultimate blind date!
When Isaac meets Rebekah, he seems quite satisfied with the selection. He proceeds to marry her, and then, the Bible says, he loved her.
He married her; then he loved her. Given the circumstances, the Bible has the order of things quite right for Isaac. For I doubt that the word "love" as used in this context referred to falling in love. No, it was something else.
Whether we have selected our mate through the falling-in-love experience or had our mate selected for us as Isaac did, what happens after that is very much the same. When the initial excitement wears off, as it almost always does, we are faced with a choice: "Will I love this person or not?"
"So [Rebekah] became his wife, and he loved her." The Bible is telling us that when it came to his marriage, Isaac acted like a grown-up! He realized that real love is a choice, and he chose to love this woman he had married.
So it is for us. We either choose to love or we choose not to. And that kind of decision is something quite apart from any particular emotions we may feel about our mate -- which, as we all know, can come and go like the wind. Real love is a commitment of loyalty and faithfulness to another person, not rooted primarily in emotions.
One very important adult task is coming to terms with the reality that as pleasurable as it is, falling in love is a temporary thing. Falling in love gets us started in a relationship but it is seldom what sustains it. And unless we make peace with this fact, we are apt to waste a lot of time and energy trying to make our relationships conform to some preconceived notion of "the perfect romance."
Of course, there is still plenty of room for romance in our marriages, and we ought to do loving things for each other. Let us not despair because we don't always feel lovingly toward our mate. In fact, it's a revealing picture of our choice to love when we treat our mate lovingly on days when the feelings of love are not particularly strong.
What exactly do we choose when we decide to love?
For one thing, we choose a primary loyalty. The scripture, after telling us that Isaac loved Rebekah, says, "so Isaac was comforted after the death of his mother." One way to read that is that Rebekah helped to fill a void in Isaac's life left by the passing of his mother, Sarah. And there's nothing wrong with that.
Another view is that Isaac realized his primary loyalty on earth now was to his new family rather than his old one. "For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh" (Genesis 2:24). That's how God set things up when marriage was instituted in the beginning. That's how God intends it.
How exactly that works out will vary from situation to situation, but one thing it always means is choosing our primary loyalty among all the people we love.
I know a couple whom I'll call Andy and Sharon. They experienced a lot of difficulties after they first married. They lived not far from Andy's parents. His father had a physical handicap, so when Andy had lived at home, he had learned to handle many of the handyman chores around the house that his father was unable to do.
After he got married, Andy's mother got into the habit of calling Andy at work whenever something at her house needed to be repaired. Like a dutiful son, Andy would stop at his parents' house on his way home to make the repair. Since he was already there, his mother made supper for him. Meanwhile, Sharon had supper waiting on the table at home. Sometimes Andy didn't get home until bedtime.
You can imagine the stress this pattern put on their marriage. Several evenings, Sharon had to cancel plans the couple had made together because Andy wasn't there.
Eventually it all came to a head. Andy had to make some choices. As their pastor, I was involved in helping Andy do that. Andy made the right one. When it was not feasible for him to assist his mother with a chore, he learned to tell her to call a plumber or the appropriate repairman. He's still a good son, and his marriage has improved. Andy and Sharon visit Andy's mom and dad together and there is a healthy relationship between the generations. But it is healthy because Andy chose his primary loyalty.
Still another choice real love requires is choosing to love the actual person we've married. Because falling in love is such a wild and crazy emotional ride, we sometimes fail to see the other person as he or she really is. In other words, we may fall in love with a romanticized ideal image of the other person instead of the actual person. Then later, when the flames of romance have diminished somewhat, the blinders fall off and we discover that we've fallen in love with a phantom, an ideal image that doesn't exist. You discover your wife is neither a goddess nor a vixen, but a human being with both glories and faults. You discover your husband is neither a knight in shining armor nor the most sensitive guy to ever live, but a human being with both glories and faults.
That's the point at which lasting love needs to take hold. That's the point at which the scripture places Isaac. After he had married Rebekah, he loved her. That's when he decided to love not who he wanted Rebekah to be, but who she really was.
The pattern God set from the very beginning was that a man and woman should choose to love each other. So when we do so, we are following the intention of our creator.
"Isaac ... married Rebekah. So she became his wife, and he loved her." That was the decision of a grown-up. Amen.
