Tuesday, February 14, 2006
“JACOB LOVED RACHEL”
Key Scripture—Genesis 29: 10-27
“What think you of falling in love?” Shakespeare asked.
“Fall from the treetops
Fall from above
Fall from anywhere
But don’t fall in love”
the little rhyme I learned somewhere along the line advised. Love. Butterflies in the stomach, and stars in your eyes.
“They say that falling in love is wonderful.”
“It’s cherry pink and apple blossom white
When you’re in love.”
“Love is a many splendored thing.
It’s the April rose that slowly grows
In the early spring.
Love is nature’s way of giving
A reason to be living.”
“Do you ask what the birds say? The sparrow, the dove,
The linnet, the thrush say, “I love, and I love.”
In the winter they’re silent, the wind is strong;
What it says I don’t know, but it sings a loud song.
But green leaves, and blossoms, and sunny warm weather,
And singing and loving—all come back together.
But the lark is so brimful of gladness and love,
The green fields below him, the blue sky above,
Then he sings, and he sings, and forever sings he,
“I love my Love, and my Love loves me.”
Love. Our literature and lore are full of it. There are love stories and songs, there are sonnets and rhymes, there are movies and plays, there are legends and clichés that enshrine and immortalize love. There were Samson and Delilah, Isaac and Rebecca, David and Jonathan, Romeo and Juliet, Anthony and Cleopatra, Daphne and Chloe, Tristan and Isolde, Hamlet and Ophelia, Burton and Taylor, and many famous as well as many lesser known couples who have inspired song and sonnet from time immemorial.
Before I go any further I should admit that this is the first time I am preaching a Valentine’s Day sermon. It may be that I am getting sentimental in my old age. So I changed the lectionary for today, since February 14 falls on a Sunday. I shall try to avoid the temptation to use the traditional device of preachers when they talk of love to talk about the three different Greek words eros, philos and agape that are all translated love in English. I shall use expressions of love that have come from many sources Biblical and non-Biblical to define and describe this human experience that borders on the define.
I woke up two days ago with the thought in my mind, “Sigmund Freud was wrong! Love is much more than sex.” I don’t know what I must have been dreaming, or whether I had been dreaming at all. But all of a sudden it seemed to me that to confine the human experience of love to a biological function was to limit our understanding severely. Certainly our human sexuality is closely intertwined with much we call love. There are some who would argue that it is at the base of our experience of love. There are others who argue that it enhances and enriches love, but love has deeper roots in our souls.
Friendship and companionship are even more basic to love than sexual attraction.
“All love that has not friendship for its base,
Is like a mansion built upon sand.
Though brave its walls as any in the land,
And its tall turrets lift their heads in grace;
Though skillful and accomplished artists trace
Most beautiful designs on every hand,
And gleaming statues in dim niches stand,
And fountains play in some flow’r-hidden place:
Yet, when from the frowning east a sudden gust
Of adverse fate is blown, or sad rains fall
Day in, day out, against its yielding wall,
Lo! the fair structure crumbles to the dust.
Love, to endure life’s sorrow and earth’s woe,
Needs friendship’s solid masonwork below.
For many years I have given presents of music boxes to my wife for birthdays, anniversaries, Christmas, and so on, until a couple years ago she told me she had enough. We have a curio cabinet full of them. Every now and then I would wind them up in turn. “Close to you,” “Love Me Tender,” “Memories,” and a host of other melodies that could occupy her for a long while.
And while our tradition has immortalized the love of man and woman, and our tradition and culture has frowned upon and denied that deep and genuine relationships are possible between persons of the same gender, the door has been opened slightly, and many of us are beginning to learn that the depth and intensity, the beauty and the purity of love is not confined to heterosexual relationships. For if the basis for love is not sexual but human, if friendship and companionship are the ”solid mason-work below,” then surely those deeply human qualities are possible for all our human relationships, and homosexuality as truly as heterosexuality can enhance and enrich those relationships that give so much joy, and fulfillment, so much meaning and purpose to human life.
The magic and the mystery of love is that it helps us to discover parts of who we are that we never would have known we were to stay safely within ourselves. The poem I share with you now is titled simply, “Love,” by Roy Croft.
I love you,
Not for what you are
But for what I am
When I am with you.
I love you,
Not only for what
You have made of yourself,
But for what
You are making of me.
I love you
For the part of me
That you bring out;
I love you
for putting your hand
Into my heaped-up heart
And passing over
All foolish, weak things
That you can’t help
Dimly seeing there,
And for drawing out
Into the light
All the beautiful belongings
That no one else had looked
Quite far enough to find.
I love you because you
Are helping me to make
Of the lumber of my life
Not a tavern
But a temple;
Out of the works
Of my every day
Not a reproach
But a song.
I love you
Because you have done
More than any creed
Could have done
To make me good,
And more than any fate
Could have done
To make me happy.
You have done it
Without a touch,
Without a word,
Without a sign.
You have done it
By being yourself.
Perhaps that is what
Being a friend means,
After all.
It is at this very deepest level of our being that we find within ourselves the capability to know and experience God in a fullness and a depth we would not otherwise have known. In the rock musical Jesus Christ Superstar, of a generation ago, Mary Magdalene encounters a depth of her being that confuses and confounds her as she enters into a relationship with Jesus.
“I don’t know how to love him,
What to do, why he moves me.
He’s a man, he’s just a man;
And I’ve known so many men before
In very many ways, he’s just one more.”
Yet it is very obvious that he’s not “just one more.”
“I’ve been changed, yes, really changed.
In the past few days, when I’ve seen myself,
I seem like someone else.”
It was in the human relationship of love that Mary finds a part of herself that could only be expressed in relationship to God.
In the Gospel according to John in the New Testament, the writer continually makes reference to John as the disciple whom Jesus loved. I don’t want to make too much of this, but it seems to me that Jesus must have loved all his disciples. The disciple whom Jesus loved, refers, to a special relationship John experienced with Jesus.
In a slightly different vein, those of you who have seen the movie, Sister Act saw how the leading lady played by Whoopie Goldberg takes two popular songs written and sung to express romantic love and uses it to express a relationship with God. So when she takes the song, Nothing in the world could make me untrue to my guy, and transposes it to say, “my God” it seems to be even more appropriate than in the secular version. In the same way the song,
“I will follow him;
Follow him wherever he may go,
There isn’t a mountain too high...
to keep me away,
Away from my love.
I love him, I love him, I love him;
and where he goes I’ll follow...”
That whole song becomes more expressive of the human relationship of God in Jesus Christ than it is of our normal human loves.
Saints and mystics often describe the inner relationship as a mystical romance with God. Sometimes the language they use to describe that deeply spiritual experience is much like the sexual experience. That is not sacrilegious. It shows us how close to God we are when we deeply and truly love.
Jacob loved Rachel. He loved her to work seven years for her; and when after seven years he was tricked, he worked another seven years. It is at the level when our souls reach beyond ourselves to find a fulfillment and satisfaction that is so deep that our lives will always be impoverished without it that we experience love; and it is there that we experience God.
We could go on talking and quoting for a long time. One more bit of verse that expresses love for the woman who kissed this frog and even though I may have not turned into a handsome prince, at least I am a frog who has been kissed by a princess. The poem is also to God who not only created me with potential but has helped to discover some of that potential and shows how I can become all I’m meant to be.
How do I love the? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of every day’s
Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints,—I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life!—and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.
It is when we learn to love like that that we are closest to the heart of God. It is when we experience that depth of love that we share in the divine nature which is love. For “love is from God, and whoever loves is born of God and knows God... God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.”
Happy Valentine’s Day!
