“What Love Is and Is Not”
Pr. David Hewitt – Jan. 30 & 31, 2010
[Sings] “Where is love? Does it fall from sky above? Is it underneath a willow tree that I’ve been thinking of?” We often wonder where love is…and what love is all about. Think about times when you wish you were more loving. Could it be that what keeps us from loving fully is that we don’t understand love? That we don’t understand God’s love?
There is a “Peanuts” strip by Charles Schulz that has Peppermint Patty saying to Charlie Brown, “I don’t understand love!” Charlie Brown answers, “Who does?” Patty says, “Explain love to me, Charlie Brown.” He comes back with, “Well, you can’t explain love. I can recommend a book or a poem or a painting, but I can’t explain love.” Patty, who has a crush on Charlie Brown, pleads, “Well, try, Charlie Brown, try.” He tries: “Well, let’s say I see this cute little girl walk by….” Patty, hurt ‘cause she’s not ‘cute,’ interrupts, “Why does she have to be cute, huh? Why can’t someone fall in love with someone with freckles and a big nose? Explain that, Charlie Brown!” And poor Charlie, oblivious, replies, “Well maybe you are right. Let’s say I see this girl walk by with this great big nose.” But Patty interrupts again, “I didn’t say a great big nose!” Well, by this time Charlie Brown has had enough. He sighs that typical, woe is me sigh of his and says, “You not only can’t explain love, you can’t even talk about it!”
One reason we can’t even talk about love is because we’ve overused the term. There’s a recent beer commercial where a couple, who obviously have become very close, are at a restaurant and in the middle of a humorous and engaging conversation. The gal then tells the guy “I love you” for the first time, and the fella has a very difficult time responding with the word “love.” “I luur…I leer you.” The waitress asks if he wants more beer and he says, “Sure, I love the stuff!” His girlfriend then gives him the evil eye. He can say he loves beer but can’t say he loves her.
In his 1978 best-selling book about “love, traditional values and spiritual growth,” The Road Less Travelled, psychiatrist M. Scott Peck – a man who was, at the time, on the road to being a committed Christian – noted that there is a deeper problem for all of us because we live in an age where we say and think that we “love” everything. He writes:
“As long as we continue to use the word ‘love’ to describe our
relationship with anything that is important to us, anything we
cathect, without regard for the quality of that relationship, we
will continue to have difficulty discerning the difference between
the wise and the foolish, the good and the bad…”
You may notice a word there that you may never have heard of before: “cathect.” Peck and other psychologists, using the Greek language, have found a way to describe a love that is immature, a love that is short of real, committed love – real, committed love, we Christians would say, that is described by God in the Bible – God’s kind of love. We try to use other words to describe immature love – infatuation…sexual attraction…falling in and out of love…over-enthusiasm. Even words that point to being addicted, words like “chocoholic,” point to immature love, because the kind of love we have for things, like chocolate, or for people we don’t know too well, like celebrity sex symbols or our favorite sports teams, automatically has a limited quality to it. Realizing the limitations of certain kinds of attraction can help us, Peck says, identifying our “cathecks,” so to speak, will open us up to God’s priorities for our lives, and will enable us to put the time and the effort into loving more deeply the real people right around us.
There is an important process that the Spirit of God leads us through as we seek to plumb the depths of what real love really is. What Peck and others try to do is help us see what love is not, so that we know what true love really is all about. And that’s what the Apostle Paul does in our lesson today, from the 13th chapter of 1st Corinthians. You know, this passage of Scripture is famous. It is read at many a wedding, and for good reason. But, like the 23rd Psalm and the Lord’s Prayer, we can hear it so much we don’t LISTEN to it anymore. That is why I decided that today we would read it using the Message translation, in order to listen to Paul – and to God – again. I’m going to re-read the first part. Notice that Paul seeks to tell us, like Peck, what love is NOT, first.
“If I speak with human eloquence and angelic ecstasy but don’t love,
I’m nothing but the creaking of a rusty gate. If I speak God’s word
with power, revealing all His mysteries and making everything plain
as day, and if I have faith that says to a mountain, ‘Jump,’ and it
jumps, but I don’t love, I’m nothing. If I give everything I own to the
poor and even go to the stake to be burned as a martyr, but I don’t
love, I’ve gotten nowhere. So no matter what I say, what I believe,
and what I do, I’m bankrupt without love.”
Wow. You know, all the accomplishments Paul mentions here are “spiritual” accomplishments. But we could just as easily have rewritten that paragraph and inserted more secular ones. Like, if I’m the richest, most successful person in the world…or if I’m recognized as the most talented person in the world…or if I’m the most powerful person in the world…or if I’m considered a hero, or if I’ve been the best philanthropist in the world, or I’m the most beautiful or handsome in the world, but have not love, I am nothing. Or of I am considered to be ANY of these things in my own little world, but have not love, again, I am nothing.
There was a great film years ago called “All About Eve,” in which an actress named Eve receives the highest award Broadway can bestow. People give her a standing ovation. The narrator tells us, “Life goes where Eve goes. She’s profiled, covered, revealed, reported – what she eats and what she wears and whom she knows and where she was, and when and where she’s going. Eve. You know all about Eve. What can there be that you don’t know?” And then the rest of the film shows us that Eve, in order to get to that high eminence, had along the way trampled and backstabbed and manipulated and lied to everyone around her, all in the name of her great talent, and her love of the theater. To use Peck’s favorite word, her love of the theater, her love of her talent and ability – those limited loves – were “cathecks” that got out of hand, that kept her from loving the people around her. You see, Love is not just the doing. Love is not accomplishment.
And we have to remember what Paul originally said. He wasn’t talking to a wedding couple when he wrote these words; the apostle was talking to a divided church, full of fractured relationships. People in the church in Corinth were trying to prove that their kind of faith was superior to anyone else’s…that by my prayers I’m better than you, or by my preaching I’m better than you or because of what I believe in I’m better than you or by what I do I am better, more spiritual, than you. Prosperity preachers do this a lot today. They say, “Because you have faith, you will never be poor again. Because you have faith, this sickness will automatically leave you. Because you have faith, you will be happier than everyone else.” In many and various ways, we can make our “faith” into a “catheck,” into a thing we possess, a thing that treats God like an object who fulfills our needs. We may end up loving our “faith” more than we love God Himself. But real faith is not a catheck, a loved possession; Real faith is a relationship, a verb – “trusting”; it’s trusting in the God who wants you to have deep, committed, listening, loving relationships with other people around you – whether you “catheck,” or really like them, or not.
Now another thing love is not; it’s not a feeling. There was a hit song years ago called “You Were Always on My Mind.” There are many things the singer confesses he didn’t do enough of: “I didn’t treat you quite as good as I should have….made you feel second best…didn’t hold you all those lonely times.” He sums it up, “Little things I should have said and done…I just never took the time.” But the singer will not own up. He justifies himself with this statement: “But you were always on my mind…you were always on my mind.” Now, we all fall short of loving other people more completely. But we should never justify our sins with “Well, you were always on my mind,” or “I’ve always felt I loved you.” That feeling can become a “catheck,” a crutch, a fantasy…an idealized image of ourselves we hold onto in our minds to justify not wanting to really serve and sacrifice for someone else in the real world. Romanticizing a “me-first” attitude doesn’t make it any better! For love is not a feeling. Love is not things we DO. Love is not things we FEEL. Love includes both, and goes beyond both, because Love makes us reach out much further than either feeling or doing can do alone. Love is a real, deep, committed, available CONNECTION with someone else.
Jesus shows us how to get beyond our cathecks, our limited loves, our idols, in order to reach out and love someone more completely. Look at our Gospel for today. He had just read from the scroll during Sabbath, and sat down. The people around Him – people who knew Him from as a young boy, who had seen Him grow into an adult carpenter – were astonished. They complimented Him as a speaker, yet in their hearts, their love for Him had a catch – a catheck: they wanted Him for themselves. And Jesus knew it, knew that they thought He had shortchanged them thus far, doing His miracles in other cities instead of His hometown. “I suppose,” He replied, unexpectedly challenging them, “you’re going to quote the proverb, ‘Doctor, go heal yourself. Do here in your hometown what we heard you did in Capernaum.’” [see Luke 4] Then Jesus revealed to them how narrow and selfish their attitude was. He gave them examples of where God had not limited His love, but had gone beyond and done good things for Gentiles, for the outsiders, and not just for Jews. The people of Nazareth caught His drift, and they didn’t like it. They were not going to stretch themselves; they were not going to go out and serve those people in Capernaum, nor anyone else, especially people like you and me, those Gentiles out there. Jesus had called them on their “cathecks,” on the prideful limits of their love, and they didn’t like it. So they nabbed Jesus and tried to hurl Him off a nearby cliff. But Jesus not only got away; He refused to give up on them – or on any of us.
“Love never gives up,” Paul tells us today. “Love cares more for others than for self. Love doesn’t want what it doesn’t have. Love doesn’t strut, doesn’t have a swelled head, doesn’t force itself on others, isn’t always ‘me first,’ doesn’t fly off the handle, doesn’t keep score of the sins of others, doesn’t revel when others grovel, takes pleasure in the flowering of truth, puts up with anything, trusts God always, always looks for the best, never looks back, but keeps going to the end.”
You see, when we are “in Christ,” when we relax and surrender and trust God to take care of us now and always, He places His Spirit in our hearts, and we are inspired to reach out and be there for others through thick and thin – “for better, for worse; for richer, for poorer; in sickness and in health.” Then we realize what it means to be a God-created human being; we realize what it means to be created in the image of a loving God; and we place ourselves in that blessed position of inspiring others – both the people we help and the people who watch us help – and inspiring them to do the same.
In the paper this weekend I read, as perhaps you did, of an event that occurred at the Colts game last week. It’s the story of two brothers who had been close, but then years ago a great dispute occurred, and the two refused to speak to each other ever again. Secretly, it was killing them both inside. Then one day the older brother, Bill, found out he had brain cancer, and, through these recent months, gradually got weaker and weaker. The other brother, Greg, seeking a way to reach out beyond his pride, beyond his catheck, his love of self, knew he had to return home and see his brother before he died, and try to reconcile with him. His trip happened to occur on the same weekend as the championship game last week. I will quote from the paper: “3 days before the game Greg felt compelled [by Whom, I wonder?] to e-mail the Colts about his brother. He was stunned when the team responded with 4 tickets,” also making Bill the “12th Man Fan” of the game. Bill was so delighted, he couldn’t thank his brother enough during the game. More importantly, this unexpected gesture broke the ice; they were reconciled; the larger love between them had triumphed.
As a crying Greg later told the paper – his hands shaking with emotion as he held the phone – “When my brother hugged me during the game and repeated to me how much it meant to him, I just lost it. It’s something I’ll never forget. To be able to make up on those terms, I can’t describe it.” You see, sometimes Jesus describes it as turning the other cheek…as giving the shirt off our back…of going the extra mile. How is God calling you and me to put aside those confining “cathecks,” those limited loves in our lives that we protect with pride and selfish desire, making apologies that we have no energy, no ability, or no time to be there for others? How, in connecting to God, can we listen better to our Lord, who is pointing out to us as he did to Greg, where to stretch, how to bend, and when to reach out to others? God is filling us up to be poured out for many. This is the time, Jesus tells us today: “This is God’s year to act!” As disciples of our Lord Jesus, let us be ever-ready to be poured out by Him. Amen!
