Sermon: Love Abides
Texts: Jeremiah 1:4-10; 1 Corinthians 13
Date: January 31, 2010
Rev. Dee Eisenhauer, Eagle Harbor Congregational Church
It was a swamp that called out to me. A picture of a swamp.
I was at the annual clergy retreat on earlier this week, and the leader had us quietly thinking about the deep yearnings of our hearts. After a period of reflection, she asked us to go to a table nearby that had a variety of pictures of trees laid on it. We were to select a picture that said something about our situation, our yearning, in this moment. So there’s this picture of a swamp—a grove of large trees whose tops are not visible in the shot and whose roots are completely covered with the water of the swamp.
The water in the swamp picture looked calm but I imagined water moccasins and alligators swimming there just below the surface—hazards lurking. I think the picture spoke to me because part of my mind was flooded with worries. I have been worried about the prospect of being “under water” financially as we begin a new church year. I have worried about reaching the point of exhaustion as a church just trying to stay afloat, never mind what we might actually want to accomplish in mission. I have worried about our gradual decline in membership and attendance. I have worried about whether our children will have faith. Sometimes I just feel swamped with worries.
But then there’s a much more profound reason that picture called out to me. It’s not really about the water in the swamp, or any dangers lurking there. It’s about how the roots of the trees are all intertwined and linked underneath the surface. It is to me a powerful picture of the church. It means so much to me that we are bound together in love in a local church, that our lives are tenderly interwoven. Once you commit to a faith community, you need never feel alone again. I am utterly grateful for the connections I have with this arm of the church. We may be swamped with problems from time to time, but we are strong standing together.
Although this picture didn’t show the top of the trees, I imagined them stretching up toward the sunlight, taking in nourishment from the light and air. We are nothing as a church if we are not reaching toward the wisdom of God who gives us life. Deep down in the swamp we might see only little patches of light that break through; we might never glimpse the sun in its entirety. Yet we know it is there, it entices us to feel its energy and keep growing toward the light.
It all worked for me as an image of the church, reminding me that love of God and neighbor is the important thing. Our retreat leader went on to teach us a conceptual model that backed up this idea of the emphasis being on love. She called it the “cycle of grace.” As an introduction, she read a passage from Mark that she called “a day in the life of Jesus.” In this text that covers a 24 hour period, Jesus teaches some people at the synagogue, heals some unclean spirits, heals some sick people, hangs out with his friends, eats dinner, heals some more people, silences some demons, sleeps, goes out alone to pray, and walks to the next town to pray and heal and cast out demons. The point is that he makes room in his life for both input and output—he is busy with doing his work, but he also rests and enjoys his friends and tends to his spiritual life. Input and output are balanced.
We know that Jesus was deeply rooted in the love of God, whom he often called “Abba,” the equivalent of “Papa” or “Daddy.” We heard the story a couple of weeks ago of his baptism when he heard God say “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” Healthy people of faith are similarly grounded in that acceptance and love of God. We understand ourselves to be loved by God with an indestructible, unconditional love. It’s our foundation, as it was Jesus’ foundation. Being loved is the ground of our being.
Rooted and grounded in divine love, we seek sustenance. We find various means to care for body and soul. Prayer, Sabbath time, worship, spending time with loved ones, enjoying food and exercise and music and all of that sustains the life that is grounded in God’s love and acceptance. We take care of ourselves because we know we are worth taking care of.
Loved and sustained, we feel our significance in the world. Each life is a part of God’s grand and beautiful design. We are each different, and we each matter. Every person is uniquely necessary as history unfolds, even if we are not famous or conventionally accomplished.
It is out of our understanding of being loved, being sustained, and being significant that we become fruitful in ministry. Love takes the form of service, and we offer our gifts to the world in myriad ways. We may not understand all the aspects of what we are giving back to the world, but we make our contribution, blessing others as we have been blessed. This is the cycle of grace.
The person who developed this model (I’m sorry I didn’t write down his name) conceptualized it because of a problem. The problem was that missionaries were going off to work in India and other such far- away places, seemingly well-equipped and inspired, but coming back completely burned out after two or three years. They were simply too exhausted to continue. The person trying to understand their problem concluded that they were, in fact, doing this cycle backwards. They were going to the mission field determined to be productive and fruitful in their ministry. Out of their accomplishments, they were seeking a sense of significance, and hoping to be sustained by feeling significant in their setting. They were hungry for acceptance, both among their neighbors and inside themselves, and hopeful that their good work would win their acceptance. They turned the cycle of grace into a cycle of works by going at it backwards. And that’s why they burned out, unable to continue what they had set out so eagerly to do. “If I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.” Right? A noisy gong. A clanging cymbal, without love.
The clergy listening to this lesson at the retreat made this “oooooohhh” sound of recognition when our leader got to this point. I think all of us have at times turned the cycle of grace up on its ear and worked it backwards, thinking we would get to acceptance if we were productive and professional and impressive and successful and things like that. We’ve tried to earn our significance in the world, and hoped that being good and looking good would sustain us. In other words, we’ve tried to earn what God wants to freely give us, love and acceptance, security about our significant value on this planet. We’ve lost sight of the durability, universality, and longevity of God’s love. If we could remain rooted in God’s love and work it the other way, we would actually be more fruitful in ministry, especially over the long haul.
This in an interesting model for thinking about individual spiritual life, and I think it works as a model for the life of a church as well. The reason the model is a little lopsided is that the side of the circle devoted to acceptance and sustenance is to be emphasized—it needs more space because it needs more attention. As in, “the greatest of these is love.” Churches need to prioritize the message of love, the gospel of love, because if our members are not rooted and grounded in love and acceptance, there is little hope that we will (eventually) be fruitful in ministry. It’s important. The moment I decided we should hire Zach and Elise as our youth ministers was the moment Zach said something about the goal of youth ministry was making sure young people know they are loved—no matter what kind of programming and time spent together one uses to get to that goal. Adolescence may be a time when that message is particularly needed, but people of all ages need to know they are loved. So we need to teach about the indestructible, unfathomable love of God, and we need to reveal it to each other—patiently, kindly, even-handedly, humbly, as grace-fully as we possibly can. That’s Job One.
Job Two for a church: providing the means of sustaining spiritual life. We do this primarily through worship and all that goes into it (music, prayer, quietness, attentiveness to scripture, reflecting on faith, connecting with the community, acts of generosity, sacraments, celebration, beauty, art…). In addition, as a church we provide education, discussion, table fellowship, opportunities for service, space for conversation, time for developing friendships, counseling and consolation when needed, hospitality, and so forth. We join with God in helping each other sustain our souls.
Only then do we call out each other’s significance, seeking to celebrate our various gifts and employ them in service. We gently argue with anyone who feels inadequate as Jeremiah did when he was called to service (“I am only a boy!”). We can’t sit still for any sentence beginning “I am only…” Taking God’s part, we remind each other that it is God who is empowering us to bold speech and action, giving us a ministry and the ability to carry it out. We remind each other that we are each needed in God’s great work of healing the world.
Once we are entwined in love, sustained in spirit, secure in our significance, we will be fruitful in ministry. We could have the shiniest, snappiest, most organized programs in the world as a church but if we haven’t started with love we won’t get very far in advancing God’s kin-dom on earth. If we have started with love, it will naturally lead to fruitful ministry.
Even though this cycle has been presented sequentially, I don’t think we should think of it chronologically—as if we will never offer any service to the world until each and every member of the community is secure in love and acceptance. It’s a cycle of grace, which implies going around again and again. Different people in the community will find themselves in different places on this wheel, maybe needing to be reminded of their acceptability, maybe fully ready to bear the fruit of love. It’s all happening at once. But we can’t neglect the love part, ever.
What an amazing grace it is to be involved in a community that is rooted and grounded in love. It’s not that we love each other perfectly, intertwined as we are in this covenant community. Our human love is incomplete and rather fallible. It can be appalling fragile and shallow. We are too often all those things Paul says love is not: envious, arrogant, rude, irritable, resentful, insisting on our own way. How fortunate that a bigger love can take hold of us and form us in a different way.
Theologian Soren Kierkegaard wrote a profound book called Works of Love in 1847. One chapter title is taken from the last verse of today’s epistle reading: “Love abides.” I can’t do justice to the whole chapter in a few moments, but want to share one of his ideas with you. He is speaking of the bond between two people, whom he calls the lover and the beloved. A bond is formed between them: lover-beloved. The two are joined together in the larger love of God, which is represented by the hyphen between lover and beloved. Suppose the beloved becomes disenchanted and leaves the relationship. Is the love destroyed when the beloved turns his back? No, says Kierkegaard, the lover keeps the hyphen: lover-. If you saw a word with a hyphen after it, or half a sentence that ended with a hyphen, what would you think? You would think, “this word, this sentence, is not complete.” It’s not over; there is more to come. The lover can keep faith; the lover can hold on to the hyphen indefinitely, because its source, if it is genuine love, is God, whose ability and will to love never falters. Love abides, even when human relationships break down. Even if one person in a relationship is unwilling to stay in it, the lover can abide; she or he can hold the door open. Even if the beloved stops speaking to the lover, the lover can say to herself, “I abide; therefore we shall still speak with one another, because silence also belongs to a conversation at times.” Since the love (the hyphen) between lover and beloved was the eternal, indestructible love of God in the first place, the patience of love can outlast a disruption in the relationship.
Shifting the metaphor, Kierkegaard says "Does the dance cease because one dancer has gone away? In a certain sense. But if the other still remains standing in the posture which expresses a turning towards the one who is not seen, and if [because you abide] you know nothing about the past, then you will say, `Now the dance will begin just as soon as the other comes, the one who is expected.'" I find that a very appealing image. Picture the dancer standing there, holding the posture of the dance, even if the partner is not in view. It is a stance of faith and expectancy, openness, anticipation of joy.
As I understand it, Kierkegaard was trying to say that our ability to abide in love is not dependent on how successfully those with whom we are in relationship are able to abide. Because we are rooted in the love and acceptance of God, which is indestructible and eternal, we can keep on loving others regardless of how well they love us back. We can take hold of that love and offer it as an open invitation to be in relationship: me – whoever. I’m not inventing or generating the love, just clasping it and remaining open to one of God’s beloved on the other side of the hyphen.
Returning to the swamp where I launched this address, I picture the roots of the trees intertwined with each other as the loving relationships in our church. Some of our relationships are well established, long lasting; our roots are all tangled up together. But we can never be a closed system if we are to be a church of Jesus Christ. Always there must be roots reaching out, stretching and straining toward the others we wait for. A mess of roots like so many hyphens between lover and beloved, expecting the community to grow, welcoming the newcomer, trusting that the love of God will be sufficient to bind us together even when human affection falters. And when someone leaves our corner of the swamp for any reason, we can abide in love for them, keeping the way open for reconciliation.
Love never ends. Isn’t that one of the most exquisite expressions of truth ever written? Love never ends. Say it out loud. Love never ends. As for the problems and troubles we get bogged down in, they will cease. Love never ends. As for budgets and strategic plans and committees, they will come to an end. Love never ends. As for books and ideas and theologies, they will eventually fall into disuse. Love never ends. As for this hymn and that order of worship, they will be forgotten. Love never ends. As for members who covenant with us, they will come and they will go. Love never ends. As for leaders who rise up and offer their gifts with inevitably mixed results, they will finish their work and move on. Love never ends. As for our precious children, they will grow up; and as for our beloved elders, they will die. Love never ends.
Love never ends. Root yourselves in it. Grow toward the light that is love. Abide in love. Be sustained by love. Bear the fruit of love. Offer the invitation of love. Remember the eternal truth of love: Love never ends.