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“Love is the Spirit of this Church”
February 19, 2006

It’s Valentine’s Day in the third grade. The night before, I wrote each of my classmate’s names on a store bought card carefully, selecting the very best ones for my best friend Ruth Ann and the two boys I sort of liked, Frank and Billy. A boy in the class, I think his name was Jimmy, brought in his cards and approached the box. They were all store bought, except for one – in my memory, it is a huge handmade red construction paper heart with extravagant decorations pasted on it, it was folded in half with someone’s name on it , and too big for the slit in box. He shyly handed it to the teacher.  When it was time to distribute the cards from the box, the teacher first passed out all the little white envelopes…we waited, wondering who would get Jimmy’s valentine…please please, don’t let it be me, I prayed…and then, following the distribution of all of the little white envelopes,  she brought Jimmy’s valentine over to my desk.  Jimmy followed me home from school that day; my mother invited him in for milk and cookies.

Thus, begins my lifelong ambivalence about Valentine’s Day…I think Valentine’s Day has a lot in common with New Year’s Eve. If you are in love, especially if you are newly in love, these holidays are magical nights of romance and passion. If you are in a longer term love relationship, and as I’ll talk about in a few minutes that means longer than 18 months, Valentine’s Day can be a wonderful reminder of that romantic love some years or other years, it is a discouraging reminder of how mundane or worse moribund your love life has become. And if you are without a romantic partner on these days, or worse ending an important relationship, these holidays can be excruciating just to get through, trying to ignore the ubiquitous romantic messages.    

As most of you know, I came to the ministry following a 25-year career as a sexologist. People are often surprised when I introduce myself as a minister and as a sexologist: I often say that people view “minister sexologist” as an oxymoron, like “jumbo shrimp”.  But I believe that our sexuality and our spirituality are intimately connected, and that at its foundation, my work as a sexologist and now my work as a minister share a common vision –to teach people how to love each other.

So, in some ways, Valentine’s Day is a perfect holiday for me. The legend of Valentine’s Day is unique among secular holidays in its connection of religion and sexuality. Its history is both pagan and early Christian.

The Roman festival “Lupercalia” was a pagan holiday in mid February to assure the fertility of both women and crops. Young men pulled slips of paper with the names of young women out of boxes to learn who would be their sexual companions for the next year, sort of an early match.com. 

In 496 c.e., Pope Gelasive turned the festival into a minor Christian holiday, naming it for St. Valentine. The names of saints replaced the names of young women on the slips of paper in the boxes, and men were supposed to emulate the saint on the slip they had chosen for the next year. (One can imagine this must have been a hard sell after the previous custom!)

St. Valentine was a priest in the third century (or maybe a composite of several priests.) The Emperor Claudius had outlawed marriage for young men so they could serve in his military without family obligations. The priest Valentine continued to marry young couples in secret. Discovered, he was sent to jail and sentenced to death for disobeying the Emperor. The legend continues that he fell in love with the jailor’s daughter, and wrote her a note, signed “From Your Valentine”, prior to his beheading on February 14, 270. This of course was when priests were still allowed to marry.   

A few weeks ago, some 1500 years later, Pope Benedict XVI released his first encyclical on love and charity.  He wrote, “We speak of love of country, love of one’s profession, love between friends, love of word, love between parents and children, love between family members, love of neighbor, and love of God.  Amid these multiplicity of means however one stands out, love between man and woman, where body and soul are inseparably joined and human beings glimpse an apparently irresistible promise of happiness…all other kinds of love immediately seem to fade in comparison.” He quotes the Greeks calling this love the “divine madness” and Virgil writing that such “love conquers all.”  I couldn’t help but smile thinking of the 79 year old presumably life long celibate Pope writing about romantic and sexual love as the “irresistible promise of happiness.” He is writing though in the tradition of a little spoken about history in the Christian church which affirms sexuality, at least in some relationships.

Indeed, the Bible extols this notion of romantic love. Jacob, we are told, worked for 7 years to marry Rebecca, and it “seemed to him but a few days because of the love he had for her” (Gen 29:20).  The Song of Songs is a passionate love poem; the lovers are beautiful, their passion for each other is mutual, their fulfillment mutual, and there is no mention of marriage or fertility. One says to the other, “let me be a seal upon your heart….for love is fierce as death, passion is might as Sheol, its darts are darts of fire, a blazing flame”…

Unfortunately, for those of us who believe that sexual difference is a blessed part of our endowment, Pope Benedict claims in his encyclical that such love must be heterosexual, monogamous, and married…he writes that “marriage based on exclusive and definitive love becomes the icon of the relationship between God and his people.”

But, the Bible presents other relationships as equally passionate…indeed, Jonathan and David seem to fall in love at first sight.  “When David had finished speaking, the soul of Jonathan was bound to the soul of David and Jonathan loved him as his own soul” (1 Sam 18:1), and David wrote, of Jonathan, “Greatly beloved were you to me, your love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women.” (2 Sam 1:26)  Ruth, says to her mother-in-law Naomi, in a passage often quoted at heterosexual weddings, “Wherever you go, I will go, wherever you lodge, I will lodge, your people shall be my people, and your God my God. Where you die, I will die, and there I will be buried.  Thus and more may the Lord do to me, if anything but death parts me from you.” (Ruth, 1: 16 – 17) 

This type of passion though is only one type of love, and indeed I believe it is harmful to hold up as a life long model. We now know through the pioneering work of my colleague Helen Fisher that love is experienced in three distinctive stages – lust, romantic love, and attachment.  By conducting sophisticated brain scans of people in love, she and her colleagues have found that each of these phases corresponds to a different part of our brain and different brain chemicals.  Lust is our inbuilt graving for sexual gratification – Fisher writes, “We weren’t built to be happy, we were built to reproduce.” From an infinite number of potential sexual partners, we fall in love with one individual: in romantic love, our brains are bathed in elevated levels of dopamine and norepinephrine and lower levels of serotonin; we have an abundance of energy, we focus obsessively on our new love, we need less sleep and less food, we are happier than we have believed possible. 

Such love scientists now know generally lasts no longer than seven to 18 months – and then we move on to the attachment phase, where we feel calmness, peace, and security with a long term mate.  Lust makes us want to create babies; romantic love allows us to pick one person to have those babies with; attachment I’ve heard Helen say, makes us able to stand the person we had them with - at least until they are grown up! 

We can do a better job of helping people from a very young age understand that it is expected that romantic love fades…You remember the fairy tale ending, “they fell in love, they got married, and – they lived happily ever after.” When I would read those stories to my children, I would change the ending, “they fell in love, they got married – and it was a lot of work.” 

Pope Benedict actually refers to the attachment phase although not directly; He writes, “Love is indeed “ecstasy”, not in the sense of a moment of intoxication, but rather as a journey, an ongoing exodus out of the closed inward-looking self towards its liberation through self-giving, and thus towards authentic self-discovery and indeed the discovery of God.” 

The Bible’s love ethic transcends the romantic love of one person for another. Leviticus commands us to “love your neighbor as yourself”, and a few verses later, to love the stranger as yourself, for “you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”  Matthew has Jesus go even further, commanding us to “love our enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” 

In a story repeated in three of the synoptic gospels, Jesus is asked, “Rabbi, which commandment in the law is the greatest?  He said to them, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”  (Matthew 2: 36 – 40) 

Love God, love the stranger, love your enemy, love your neighbor, love yourself.  Each week, we begin our affirmation by saying “Love is the spirit of this church” and we covenant with each other “to seek the truth in love.” And so to quote Cole Porter, “what is this thing called love?

The ancient Greeks used four terms for love:  eros "sexual love;" phileo "have affection for;" agapao "to have regard for, be contented with;" and stergo, used especially of the love of parents and children or a ruler and his subjects.  In Sanskrit, the word comes love from a root meaning “to desire”…all of these words are linked in my mind by our human need for connection, for intimacy, for regard.

We are all born, needing unconditional affection, unconditional attention, unconditional regard, and physical touch. Monkeys raised with surrogate wire parents are never able to form adult sexual relationships. Children in orphanages who aren’t touched enough often develop a syndrome called “failure to thrive.” 

I believe we are hard wired as infants to need unconditional love to fully become ourselves. Those of us lucky enough to have had that unconditional love from our mothers and fathers have a greater sense of trust and security in the world. Those of us, and there are many of us, who felt that paternal love as conditional, struggle. Psychologists say that we must believe that we are loveable and capable; the message I received growing up, although I now understand it wasn’t intentional, was that I had to be capable to be loved. I felt most rewarded with love when I got good grades or performed well at a recital or competition; I thought I needed to be a “good girl” and not cause trouble in order to hold on to that love. It wasn’t until my 40’s and a number of years of therapy, that I learned that I was loveable just for me, without any need to accomplish anything. Some of you have shared with me your own confusions about whether you are both loveable and capable. 

I think I finally understood unconditional love when I had my own children. A friend of mine, who had a baby before I did, called me from the hospital, cradling her new daughter, and said, “Men have never had anything on this.”  I didn’t get it, until I met my children. I fell wildly, unconditionally in love with my children – truth be told, I still am.  I am just back from visiting Alyssa in Vietnam for a week; when someone asked me why I was traveling 60 hours for only a week, I said “because I’m in love.”  My children and I played a game when they were little, “I love you more than…”  One of us would start, “I love you more than…all the stars in the sky…” They’d answer, “I love you more than all the sands on the beach…” and so on.  I still remember my son at age three taking a deep breath and saying, “I love you more than all the ketchup at all the McDonald’s in the world…”

Ministry has taught me a lot about unconditional love. Early on in my path to ministry, I told Frank that I didn’t think I was nice enough to be a minister. I asked how he could be nice to so many people. He told me, “You don’t have to like everyone. You just have to love them.”  And he does love you – each of you. At first, that didn’t make much sense to me – but I have learned that it means bringing my full presence and attention to each interaction, to opening my heart to the person standing in front of me, to being willing to risk my own vulnerabilities and ask you to risk yours, to bring the best of in me to my interactions with you.  

The mystic Hafiz wrote this about unconditional love,  “even after all this time the sun never says to the earth, “you owe me”…Look what happens with a love like that – it lights the whole world.” 

I often define my theology as incarnational…I may waver in my beliefs about God and what is larger than we are, or even how to describe the sacred,  but I do know that when we are at our very best, how we treat each other is the expression of the divine on earth. If there is a God, then surely the route to knowing that God is through our own relationships.  And that is what I think we mean when we begin each week, “love is the spirit of this church.”

There is a wonderful passage in the New Testament about the love of people in the church for each other and for the community.  It is the first letter of John, who may or may not have been the same John of the Gospels. This is part of a passage that was meant to be read aloud to groups of people, and I invite you to substitute another word for God to make it more meaningful to some of you…the letter says:   

Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God.  Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love…since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another.  No one has ever seen God, if we love one another, God lives in us, and God’s love is perfected in us…God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them…We love because God first loved us.  Those who say, I Love God, and hate their brothers and sisters are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen.”  Martin Buber, centuries later, said similarly, “to love God truly you must freely love your fellow man; if any one tells you that he loves God but does not love his neighbor, you will know that he is lying.”

The irony of course is those who use Scripture yet call them religious who encourage divisions among people and work to separate some people from full participation in their church communities. They did it to maintain slavery; they did it to keep women from full participation and in some cases still do; they use 4 verses in the Bible, two in Leviticus and two in Romans, to deny gays and lesbians full inclusion in congregational life, including ordination and same sex unions.  If they do not love and welcome everyone, it seems to me that they violate Jesus’ very message of love and inclusion.

Of course, the hardest part of “Love your Neighbor as Yourself” is the part about loving yourself…fully accepting ourselves…offering yourself the unconditional acceptance and radical love that we try to offer others.  But, I do know it is easier to do when others love us…that we raise children and grandchildren who love themselves by offering them our unconditional love…that we must take the time to do the hard work of forgiveness and understanding of those who have hurt us or let us down…that we can learn to open our own hearts to love ourselves as we hoped our parents loved us, as we wish our friends and lovers love us, as some of us believe, God loves us. To live as Rumi wrote, “With Passion.  With passion, pray.  With passion, work.  With passion, make love.  With passion eat and drink and dance and play.”

Living with a loving, gracious heart helps us bring that love into our lives. There are research studies that show that keeping a gratitude journal improves people’s sense of well being. In a gratitude journal, people write down three things each evening before they go to bed that they were grateful for during the day…it could be something big – a new job, a raise, a visit from a grandchild – but it could also be something small – a really good cup of coffee, the first sign of spring, a parking space near the front of the mall. Taking the time to be grateful opens our hearts.  I also try to practice living with a gracious heart in those everyday moments of stress and unhappiness – in a long line at the grocery store, I try to remind myself to be grateful that I have the money and resources to buy food and then remind myself of all the people from the farmer to the packer to the trucker to the cashier who make buying that food possible…after watching men and women planting rice last week in fields outside of Hanoi, I will never look at a bowl of rice in the same way again…but we can practice a grateful heart on other, harder, things as well…after a  fight with a friend or a lover, we can remind ourselves to be grateful for all the good that person has brought to our lives and commit ourselves to doing the work that is needed to forgive and love again…life…and so on.  Each day, take the time to say thank you to the good around us – and within us.    

The ultimate challenge for each of is to love generously, courageously, and with integrity – our neighbors but also ourselves, remembering that each of us wants to be loved… just the way we are.  “Love your neighbor as yourself.”  “Love with all your soul, your heart, and your might.”  May we leave this sacred place here each week ready to love each other, fully, ecstatically, from the place of knowing that we are loved?  Love is the spirit of this church…and so may it be.

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