“All You Need is Love” Vance L. Toivonen
If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And 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. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing. 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. Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.
READING C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves
Creatures are made in their varying ways images of God without their own collaboration or even consent…The likeness they receive…is not that of images or portraits. It is in one way more than likeness, for it is union or unity with God in will…as a better writer* has said, our imitation of God in this life – that is, our willed imitation as distinct from any of the likenesses which (God) has impressed upon our natures or states – must be an imitation of God incarnate: our model is Jesus, not only of Calvary, but of the workshop, the roads, the crowds, the clamorous demands and surly oppositions, the lack of all peace and privacy, the interruptions. For this, so strangely unlike anything we can attribute to the Divine life in itself, is apparently not only like, but is, the Divine life operating under human conditions. (*Thomas À Kempis, The Imitation of Christ)
SERMON
One would reason that preaching about love would be any easy task. The title of the sermon is reference to a kind of light, fluffy song by the Beatles. There’s another song that came to mind when I was writing this sermon, the chorus goes, “Come on people now, smile on your brother, everybody get together, try to love one another right now.” I think that one’s called simply Get Together. Stephen Stills wrote and sang, “Love the one your with.” And so on.
There are probably more songs written about love than any other topic. Quite often the term love brings to mind marriage, and its associated celebrations of weddings and anniversaries. In fact, one of the most popular biblical readings at weddings is that middle section from 1 Corinthians 13, from “Love is patient”…through…”Love never ends.” Typically the surrounding material is left out.
I would imagine that this has something to do with the fact that many people who come to be married have no idea…just have no idea. And nothing I say or do can fix that. I get a couple of appointments and a wedding ceremony. Which is nothing compared with the inundation of cultural messages that marriage is about warm, gushy feelings; that it’s about being “in love.”
C.S. Lewis references four different kinds of love, based on four different Greek words for love: Storge, Philia, Eros, and Agape. The one those couples are feeling when they come for marriage is predominately Eros. C.S. Lewis also files love into two categories: Need-Love and Gift-Love. Eros falls into the category of Need-Love. But it is not a selfish form of Need-Love, for Eros focuses his attention on the Beloved. One has the inescapable impression when meeting with couples about to embark upon marriage that they have no choice; that they cannot possibly go on in life without one another. This is the work of Eros. Which is why Lewis writes:
Everyone knows it is useless to try to separate lovers by proving to them that their marriage will be an unhappy one. This is not only because they will disbelieve you. They usually will, no doubt. But even if they believed, they would not be dissuaded. For it is the very mark of Eros that when he is in us we had rather share unhappiness with the Beloved than be happy on any other terms…Even when it becomes clear beyond all evasion that marriage with the Beloved cannot possibly lead to happiness – when it cannot even profess to offer any other life than that of tending an incurable invalid, of hopeless poverty, of exile, or of disgrace – Eros never hesitates to say, “Better this than parting. Better to be miserable with her than happy without her. Let our hearts break provided they break together.”
Eros is the love between Romeo and Juliet; a love that leads to a suicide pact. Eros is a love that will be sustained only as long as the passion for the Beloved is in play. There is, therefore, an ebb and flow to Eros that will not alone sustain a marriage long term. It will get us into one, and then leave us stranded there to find some other mooring for sustenance. Lewis writes, “Eros is driven to promise what Eros of himself cannot perform.” No, we will need another love for this.
Storge translates as simply affection or attraction. This has to do mostly with fulfillment of desire. It is the any port in a storm kind of love. It is Need-Love in the most basic sense. And again, without another love to guide and direct it can lead not only to pleasure, but also to tremendous pain and agony. Lewis suggests that Storge must be married with “common sense.” He says, “If we try to live on Affection alone, Affection will “go bad on us.””
Philia is Friendship. I have a friend who is going through a rough patch in his life. We share, and verbalize, a love for one another. There is a faithfulness to Friendship, but also some space and boundaries that may not be present in the forms of love already referenced. Lewis says, “…in a good Friendship each member often feels humility towards the rest.” There is an equity to Friendship. This is the love that serves communities like churches so well. We function best here when we acknowledge our common need for acceptance and respect and dignity, and treat one another accordingly. Philia is brotherly or sisterly love.
All of these loves are human, earthly, and quite naturally occurring. Yet, in some way, they are all bereft of a crucial ingredient; they are unfulfilled loves, incomplete loves, inadequate loves. They are all variations on what Lewis calls Need-Love. The love described by Paul in 1 Corinthian 13 is Agape, which is divine love – God’s love. Now, there is, according to Lewis, a tinge of Gift-Love mixed in with those other, more human loves. But our Gift-Loving is usually tainted with a little something for the giver. Lewis writes,
These never quite seek simply the good of the loved object for the object’s own sake. They are biased in favor of those goods they can themselves bestow, or those which they would like best themselves, or those which fit in with a pre-conceived picture of the life they want the object to lead.
In other words, our Gift-Love as human beings is always mixed with just a hint of self-interest. We give, but we also get something in return, even if it should be simply a better sense of self worth, or a suspension of guilt, or a warm fuzzy feeling in the pits of our stomachs. Again Lewis writes,
…natural Gift-Love is always directed to objects which the lover finds in some way intrinsically lovable – objects to which Affection or Eros or a shared point of view attracts him, or failing that, to the grateful and the deserving, or perhaps to those whose helplessness is of a winning and appealing kind.
I do not receive gifts from enemies. I receive only gifts from those with whom I find favor. And quite often, even those gifts are more like something that the giver takes interest in, rather than something that would bring me any kind of pleasure. This is the realm of the regifter.
We are challenged financially here at Hope because people will not always give simply out of love. We tend to give only if there is some sort of resonance with how we think things ought to be. Special interest feeds our religious and political systems. Love of God and neighbor? Love of God and country? Not always so much, I think. I’m sure there are exceptions, those of us who give out of pure gratitude to God, those of us who give to Hope even when Hope does not live up to expectations. But for most of us our giving comes with strings and conditions attached.
Lewis tells us that Agape, or Divine Gift-Love runs counter to much of our human experience with loving and giving. He writes that this Divine Gift-Love enables us “to love what is not naturally lovable; lepers, criminals, enemies, morons, the sulky, the superior and the sneering.” You see, this is what I need to hear, and where I need to begin. For I do not start my days with a deep sense of oblivion to this Divine Gift-Love of God. On the contrary, I find myself needing every day to remind myself that I am the object of God’s Agape, and to wonder and marvel at this fact. How could God, who is beyond all knowing and understanding, choose to love me of all people? And such love is a choice, pure and simple, for it makes no sense otherwise.
Perhaps there are those who find no need for this daily reminder. I cannot understand this. In all of my nearly fifty years of life I have never been without such a need. There have been days that I have avoided the reminding, some of which I have spent here at Hope; my less noble days as one who serves among you. But it is from the genesis of that need that I am given the grace, mercy, and loving-kindness to extend to others a faint imitation of this love. This is what Paul means by seeing dimly in the mirror. Any attempt I make at Divine Gift-Love is a pale imitation to the real thing. But it is the real thing that captures and energizes me, empowering me to love even the unlovable, to love my enemies and those who would seek to do me harm, to love you even when you do not love me.
I will leave the last words to Lewis who admits how rare this love truly is in one’s experience. He writes,
God knows, not I, whether I have ever tasted this love. Perhaps I have only imagined the tasting…If we describe what we have imagined we may make others, and make ourselves, believe that we have really been there. And if I have only imagined it, is it a further delusion that even the imagining has at some moments made all other objects of desire – yes, even peace, even to have no more fears – look like broken toys and faded flowers? Perhaps. Perhaps, for many of us, all experience merely defines, so to speak, the shape of that gap where our love of God ought to be. It is not enough. It is something. If we cannot “practice the presence of God,” (reference to a famous book by Brother Lawrence), it is something to practice the absence of God, to become increasingly aware of our unawareness till we feel like (those) who should stand beside a great (waterfall) and hear no noise, or like a man in a story who looks in a mirror and finds no face there, or a man in a dream who stretches out his hand to visible objects and gets no sensation of touch. To know one is dreaming is to be no longer perfectly asleep.
All quoted material is from The Four Loves by C.S. Lewis.