Losing That Loving Feeling
Sermon
Sermons On The Second Readings
Series I, Cycle C
The thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians is not only the most memorable passage that the Apostle Paul ever wrote; it is arguably the most familiar passage in all of scripture. Even those who are not especially religious, and whose entire experience of church is that they happened to get married in one, have probably come across these words before. "If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels ... when I was a child, I spoke like a child ... for now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we shall see face to face ... so faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love." For many of us these verses have become like old, trusted friends. No matter how long it's been since we last visited, they express truths so timeless and profound that just sharing their company has a way of instructing and inspiring us.
In a sense, this chapter represents Paul's attempt to describe the governing rule for Christian life. In Jesus' day, as you may recall, the Jewish faith had become a religion saturated with regulations and ceremonial requirements. There were so many, in fact, that they were almost impossible to keep track of, let alone fulfill. The only folks who even came close were the Pharisees and scribes, and that was only because they were the ones chiefly responsible for this ridiculously complex system in the first place. They spent hours carefully dissecting the Mosaic code -- adding amendments, quibbling over exemptions, tinkering with the fine print -- until whatever life was still stirring within the law had all but suffocated in the dense smoke of legalese.
Jesus, on the other hand, saw the law quite differently. It wasn't that he wanted to throw all of the rules out the window. He simply wanted to open a window so that the spirit of the law could breathe again. According to Jesus, the supreme requirement is that we love God with all our hearts, souls, minds, and our neighbors as ourselves. "On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets" is how he put it to the Pharisees (Matthew 22:40). A little later, when he was alone with his disciples, he narrows the focus even further by telling them, "This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you" (John 15:12). The implication being that the only law they really need to keep track of is the Law of Love. If they obey that, they will already be on track in terms of keeping the rest of it.
Love is the one thing, above all else, which our Lord requires of us as disciples, and thus it is the primary characteristic of our faith. If someone were to inquire, "What does it mean to be a Christian?" I don't think you can find a better answer than to say, "It means that we love one another." And if by chance there would be the follow-up question, "What does it mean to love one another?" you can find no better example than the life of Jesus Christ. He did more than merely tell us to love our neighbors; he also taught us how. His intent, it seems, was to move us to the point where we finally love everybody we meet -- including those we just met and even those we wish we never had.
But while Jesus clearly demonstrated love for us, he never actually defines it in so many words. This may be the reason we have come to value the significance of 1 Corinthians 13, because what Paul is striving to do here is to spell out exactly what love entails. It's almost as if Jesus presented the heavenly dimensions of love and Paul provides us with the down-to-earth details. "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" (vv. 4-7).
Without a doubt, this is one of the most eloquent recitals on the qualities of love ever composed. But curiously, Paul leaves out the one adjective I so frequently hear attributed to love, and that is the adjective "confusing." We might as well admit that for a lot of us this many-splendored thing called love is awfully hard to figure out. It may "make the world go 'round," but in the process it's liable to make your head spin too. For starters, we use the word in a myriad of different ways. A single conversation can produce statements as varied as "I love tennis," and in the next breath, "I love my husband," and a little later, "I love strolling on the beach at sunset." We'll speak of loving everything from movies to milkshakes to Mary Tyler Moore, despite the fact that we obviously don't love all of those in the same manner or even to the same degree.
If that weren't confusing enough, we employ the word to explain about any behavior that you could possibly imagine, no matter how imprudent. "I did it out of love" has practically become a one-size-fits-all rationalization. A man gets involved in an adulterous affair and seems persuaded that this is love. The preacher begs to differ and calls it sin. The wife of an alcoholic picks up the pieces after her husband's latest drinking binge. She claims she is doing it because of love, but the psychologist deems it enabling. A parent indulges all of his/her child's wishes, thinking that is love. The family therapist thinks otherwise and labels it codependency. No wonder we're confused. It's not just that the word is commonly misunderstood, it's that it is so casually misappropriated. I guess you could say that the word love is linguistically-challenged.
However, from what I've observed, the problem actually goes much deeper than that. As I counsel with people regarding their relationships, what I find is that far too many of us view love as a feeling rather than a choice. That is, we see love strictly as an emotion instead of an act. To some extent, this confusion is entirely natural -- indeed, it's almost to be expected -- because it stems from our earliest encounters with love as adolescents. That is when most of us initially stumbled into this magical, dreamlike, rose-colored, and hormone-driven world called love.
Don't you remember the first time you fell in love? There you were, hovering above the ground as your feet bounced from cloud to cloud. Suddenly the whole world seemed different to you -- flowers bloomed, birds sang, stars twinkled. During class you would doodle the other person's name on your notebook, and whenever you saw him/her, your heart skipped a beat. Both of you would ride home together on the school bus holding hands, and then rush to call each other on the telephone -- because, my goodness, it had been a whole five minutes since you last spoke! All of the symptoms were there and they all pointed to the same diagnosis. You were hopelessly, head-over-heels in lo-o-ove.
Fortunately, most of us eventually discover that that's not really love; it's infatuation. However, the feelings which accompany it are so intense -- and let's face it, so euphoric -- that we can't help but desire to experience those feelings again. As a matter of fact, a lot of us go out looking to experience them again. I'm not sure if there's a twelve-step program for this sort of thing, but perhaps there ought to be, because the sheer excitement of being "in love" is addictive. That's why, even when we move beyond adolescent infatuation and enter into a more mature relationship, we still expect that it will give us the warm, wonderful sensation of walking on the clouds with our heart all aflutter. In short, the emotions that were involved the first time we fell in love begin to define every other time.
I frequently run into this during premarital counseling, as I try to persuade couples that their wedding is not an opportunity to demonstrate how madly in love they both are. What I point out is that neither bride nor groom are ever asked if they happen to feel lovingly toward one another. Everybody already assumes that -- and besides, usually it's so obvious that even the flower girl and ring bearer are blushing. The reason we have gathered is to witness their promises to act lovingly "in plenty and in want, in joy and in sorrow, in sickness and in health, as long as we both shall live."
But despite my efforts to convince them otherwise, most couples still seem to think that, hidden somewhere in those vows, is an unspoken assurance that their marriage will always have that certain blissful feeling. And for a while it does! It's what we call "the honeymoon." However, as I'm sure many of you will attest, that doesn't last. It never lasts. Indeed, it cannot last, precisely because it's a feeling -- and feelings, by definition, come and go.
Perhaps an illustration will prove helpful. Let me briefly describe what a feeling is. It's the fourth component of an emotional response. For example, consider the feeling of fear. Imagine that you are out on a hike this afternoon. You're strolling down a wooded path, and suddenly in front of you -- just a few feet away, coiled and ready to strike -- is a copperhead snake. Needless to say, for most of us this is going to elicit an emotional response (and judging from the panicked look on some of your faces, it already has). That response is made up of five components.
The first part is an involuntary action. You stop. You don't say to yourself, "I think now would be a good time to stop." It happens automatically.
Then comes the second part. Within your body, all kinds of internal changes begin to take place -- your heartbeat increases, the blood starts pumping, your adrenaline kicks in, and so forth.
Next is part three. You react. You run, you jump, you scream -- whatever is your custom when you meet up with a copperhead snake.
The fourth part is a feeling. All of these internal changes produce a feeling. In this case, it's likely to be the feeling of fear.
And then, once you're safely out of danger, comes the fifth part, as your body adjusts back to normal.
But here's the thing -- all of this, from start to finish, is involuntary. It's not something that any of us choose to do or even contemplate in advance. Our bodies are already predisposed to react in this manner, and part of that automatic, involuntary reaction is that we feel something. This is why, with regard to adolescent infatuation, we often characterize it as "falling in love." It isn't a conscious decision. No one plans to fall in love. Most of the time we're not even prepared for it. We're just making our way through life, minding our own business, and in glides old Cupid with his quiver of amorous arrows, and -- zing! -- that's it, we're smitten.
Incidentally, the Greeks had a word for this. They called it eros, and it was actually one of three words that they had for love (the other two being the sympathetic philia shared among friends and the merciful agape of God). Eros, though, was the most common, and it was used to describe any relationship which develops as a result of our needs and desires. It's what we keep hoping will satisfy our cravings, and assuage our appetites, and, ultimately, fill the emptiness we all seem to carry around within us. It's that love which is forever crying out, "I want! I need!"
Not so with agape (the kind of love Paul is speaking of here). Agape does not want. It gives. Agape does not need. It serves. Agape is not an emptiness desperately trying to be filled. It is already overflowing. Indeed, part of Paul's intent throughout this chapter is to get us to recognize the distinction between eros and agape. Agape is patient, he says. Eros is restless and moody. Agape is accepting and willing to endure all things. Eros stubbornly clings to its own agenda and accepts nothing less. Agape never ends, while eros -- even in its noblest forms -- ceases the moment the object of our attraction becomes unattractive. In a word, eros is something we feel and agape is something we choose.
For the Christian, therefore, love is not primarily a feeling. It doesn't happen automatically, because it's not an involuntary response. It's something we have control over. That is, we can choose to love. When Jesus said, "Love your enemies," he wasn't implying that we should have warm, fuzzy feelings about them. If that were the case, he would be asking us to do something that we simply don't have the power to do. You can't manufacture a warm, fuzzy feeling anymore than you can manufacture a sneeze or a yawn. What he's saying is: "Choose to love them. Decide to love them."
Some of us might object, "But, Jesus, I don't even like them that much." To which Jesus would respond, "So what? I'm not asking you to like them; I'm asking you to love them."
"But, Jesus, I don't know if I can feel that way about them."
"I'm not asking you to feel something," says Jesus, "I'm asking you to do something."
"But, Jesus, don't you have to feel it first? Doesn't it have to come from the heart to be authentic? I don't what to be phony about it."
"I can appreciate that," says Jesus. "But if you're the one who decides to do it -- sincerely, earnestly, willingly, honestly -- how can it be phony? It's not something you just felt like doing. It's something you chose to do."
Of course, there's a catch to all of this. You knew there would be one, right? Here's the catch. If you decide to love someone -- putting their interests ahead of yours and working for their happiness and well-being, even if it means sacrificing your own -- you may find that, in the end, you start feeling something for them too. The Apostle Paul says that, of all the gifts God has given us, love is the greatest. It is the most powerful force that exists. But to some extent, it is also the most powerless, because it can do nothing except by our consent. We need to decide to love. It's not a feeling; it's a choice.
In a sense, this chapter represents Paul's attempt to describe the governing rule for Christian life. In Jesus' day, as you may recall, the Jewish faith had become a religion saturated with regulations and ceremonial requirements. There were so many, in fact, that they were almost impossible to keep track of, let alone fulfill. The only folks who even came close were the Pharisees and scribes, and that was only because they were the ones chiefly responsible for this ridiculously complex system in the first place. They spent hours carefully dissecting the Mosaic code -- adding amendments, quibbling over exemptions, tinkering with the fine print -- until whatever life was still stirring within the law had all but suffocated in the dense smoke of legalese.
Jesus, on the other hand, saw the law quite differently. It wasn't that he wanted to throw all of the rules out the window. He simply wanted to open a window so that the spirit of the law could breathe again. According to Jesus, the supreme requirement is that we love God with all our hearts, souls, minds, and our neighbors as ourselves. "On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets" is how he put it to the Pharisees (Matthew 22:40). A little later, when he was alone with his disciples, he narrows the focus even further by telling them, "This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you" (John 15:12). The implication being that the only law they really need to keep track of is the Law of Love. If they obey that, they will already be on track in terms of keeping the rest of it.
Love is the one thing, above all else, which our Lord requires of us as disciples, and thus it is the primary characteristic of our faith. If someone were to inquire, "What does it mean to be a Christian?" I don't think you can find a better answer than to say, "It means that we love one another." And if by chance there would be the follow-up question, "What does it mean to love one another?" you can find no better example than the life of Jesus Christ. He did more than merely tell us to love our neighbors; he also taught us how. His intent, it seems, was to move us to the point where we finally love everybody we meet -- including those we just met and even those we wish we never had.
But while Jesus clearly demonstrated love for us, he never actually defines it in so many words. This may be the reason we have come to value the significance of 1 Corinthians 13, because what Paul is striving to do here is to spell out exactly what love entails. It's almost as if Jesus presented the heavenly dimensions of love and Paul provides us with the down-to-earth details. "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" (vv. 4-7).
Without a doubt, this is one of the most eloquent recitals on the qualities of love ever composed. But curiously, Paul leaves out the one adjective I so frequently hear attributed to love, and that is the adjective "confusing." We might as well admit that for a lot of us this many-splendored thing called love is awfully hard to figure out. It may "make the world go 'round," but in the process it's liable to make your head spin too. For starters, we use the word in a myriad of different ways. A single conversation can produce statements as varied as "I love tennis," and in the next breath, "I love my husband," and a little later, "I love strolling on the beach at sunset." We'll speak of loving everything from movies to milkshakes to Mary Tyler Moore, despite the fact that we obviously don't love all of those in the same manner or even to the same degree.
If that weren't confusing enough, we employ the word to explain about any behavior that you could possibly imagine, no matter how imprudent. "I did it out of love" has practically become a one-size-fits-all rationalization. A man gets involved in an adulterous affair and seems persuaded that this is love. The preacher begs to differ and calls it sin. The wife of an alcoholic picks up the pieces after her husband's latest drinking binge. She claims she is doing it because of love, but the psychologist deems it enabling. A parent indulges all of his/her child's wishes, thinking that is love. The family therapist thinks otherwise and labels it codependency. No wonder we're confused. It's not just that the word is commonly misunderstood, it's that it is so casually misappropriated. I guess you could say that the word love is linguistically-challenged.
However, from what I've observed, the problem actually goes much deeper than that. As I counsel with people regarding their relationships, what I find is that far too many of us view love as a feeling rather than a choice. That is, we see love strictly as an emotion instead of an act. To some extent, this confusion is entirely natural -- indeed, it's almost to be expected -- because it stems from our earliest encounters with love as adolescents. That is when most of us initially stumbled into this magical, dreamlike, rose-colored, and hormone-driven world called love.
Don't you remember the first time you fell in love? There you were, hovering above the ground as your feet bounced from cloud to cloud. Suddenly the whole world seemed different to you -- flowers bloomed, birds sang, stars twinkled. During class you would doodle the other person's name on your notebook, and whenever you saw him/her, your heart skipped a beat. Both of you would ride home together on the school bus holding hands, and then rush to call each other on the telephone -- because, my goodness, it had been a whole five minutes since you last spoke! All of the symptoms were there and they all pointed to the same diagnosis. You were hopelessly, head-over-heels in lo-o-ove.
Fortunately, most of us eventually discover that that's not really love; it's infatuation. However, the feelings which accompany it are so intense -- and let's face it, so euphoric -- that we can't help but desire to experience those feelings again. As a matter of fact, a lot of us go out looking to experience them again. I'm not sure if there's a twelve-step program for this sort of thing, but perhaps there ought to be, because the sheer excitement of being "in love" is addictive. That's why, even when we move beyond adolescent infatuation and enter into a more mature relationship, we still expect that it will give us the warm, wonderful sensation of walking on the clouds with our heart all aflutter. In short, the emotions that were involved the first time we fell in love begin to define every other time.
I frequently run into this during premarital counseling, as I try to persuade couples that their wedding is not an opportunity to demonstrate how madly in love they both are. What I point out is that neither bride nor groom are ever asked if they happen to feel lovingly toward one another. Everybody already assumes that -- and besides, usually it's so obvious that even the flower girl and ring bearer are blushing. The reason we have gathered is to witness their promises to act lovingly "in plenty and in want, in joy and in sorrow, in sickness and in health, as long as we both shall live."
But despite my efforts to convince them otherwise, most couples still seem to think that, hidden somewhere in those vows, is an unspoken assurance that their marriage will always have that certain blissful feeling. And for a while it does! It's what we call "the honeymoon." However, as I'm sure many of you will attest, that doesn't last. It never lasts. Indeed, it cannot last, precisely because it's a feeling -- and feelings, by definition, come and go.
Perhaps an illustration will prove helpful. Let me briefly describe what a feeling is. It's the fourth component of an emotional response. For example, consider the feeling of fear. Imagine that you are out on a hike this afternoon. You're strolling down a wooded path, and suddenly in front of you -- just a few feet away, coiled and ready to strike -- is a copperhead snake. Needless to say, for most of us this is going to elicit an emotional response (and judging from the panicked look on some of your faces, it already has). That response is made up of five components.
The first part is an involuntary action. You stop. You don't say to yourself, "I think now would be a good time to stop." It happens automatically.
Then comes the second part. Within your body, all kinds of internal changes begin to take place -- your heartbeat increases, the blood starts pumping, your adrenaline kicks in, and so forth.
Next is part three. You react. You run, you jump, you scream -- whatever is your custom when you meet up with a copperhead snake.
The fourth part is a feeling. All of these internal changes produce a feeling. In this case, it's likely to be the feeling of fear.
And then, once you're safely out of danger, comes the fifth part, as your body adjusts back to normal.
But here's the thing -- all of this, from start to finish, is involuntary. It's not something that any of us choose to do or even contemplate in advance. Our bodies are already predisposed to react in this manner, and part of that automatic, involuntary reaction is that we feel something. This is why, with regard to adolescent infatuation, we often characterize it as "falling in love." It isn't a conscious decision. No one plans to fall in love. Most of the time we're not even prepared for it. We're just making our way through life, minding our own business, and in glides old Cupid with his quiver of amorous arrows, and -- zing! -- that's it, we're smitten.
Incidentally, the Greeks had a word for this. They called it eros, and it was actually one of three words that they had for love (the other two being the sympathetic philia shared among friends and the merciful agape of God). Eros, though, was the most common, and it was used to describe any relationship which develops as a result of our needs and desires. It's what we keep hoping will satisfy our cravings, and assuage our appetites, and, ultimately, fill the emptiness we all seem to carry around within us. It's that love which is forever crying out, "I want! I need!"
Not so with agape (the kind of love Paul is speaking of here). Agape does not want. It gives. Agape does not need. It serves. Agape is not an emptiness desperately trying to be filled. It is already overflowing. Indeed, part of Paul's intent throughout this chapter is to get us to recognize the distinction between eros and agape. Agape is patient, he says. Eros is restless and moody. Agape is accepting and willing to endure all things. Eros stubbornly clings to its own agenda and accepts nothing less. Agape never ends, while eros -- even in its noblest forms -- ceases the moment the object of our attraction becomes unattractive. In a word, eros is something we feel and agape is something we choose.
For the Christian, therefore, love is not primarily a feeling. It doesn't happen automatically, because it's not an involuntary response. It's something we have control over. That is, we can choose to love. When Jesus said, "Love your enemies," he wasn't implying that we should have warm, fuzzy feelings about them. If that were the case, he would be asking us to do something that we simply don't have the power to do. You can't manufacture a warm, fuzzy feeling anymore than you can manufacture a sneeze or a yawn. What he's saying is: "Choose to love them. Decide to love them."
Some of us might object, "But, Jesus, I don't even like them that much." To which Jesus would respond, "So what? I'm not asking you to like them; I'm asking you to love them."
"But, Jesus, I don't know if I can feel that way about them."
"I'm not asking you to feel something," says Jesus, "I'm asking you to do something."
"But, Jesus, don't you have to feel it first? Doesn't it have to come from the heart to be authentic? I don't what to be phony about it."
"I can appreciate that," says Jesus. "But if you're the one who decides to do it -- sincerely, earnestly, willingly, honestly -- how can it be phony? It's not something you just felt like doing. It's something you chose to do."
Of course, there's a catch to all of this. You knew there would be one, right? Here's the catch. If you decide to love someone -- putting their interests ahead of yours and working for their happiness and well-being, even if it means sacrificing your own -- you may find that, in the end, you start feeling something for them too. The Apostle Paul says that, of all the gifts God has given us, love is the greatest. It is the most powerful force that exists. But to some extent, it is also the most powerless, because it can do nothing except by our consent. We need to decide to love. It's not a feeling; it's a choice.
