Sermon Library
“Love Lessons”
Rev. Dr. Gregg R. Anderson
November 08, 2009
Service Theme: Pentecost XXIII – 2009
Source: 1st Corinthians 13
Pentecost XXIII – 2009 November 8, 2009
Love Lessons
1st Corinthians 13
I want to thank Lexie Potamkin and Bo Persiko for speaking the last two Sundays as well as the Chapel Choir, Susan Nicholson and Dave Dyer for the music. I had excellent reports while I was away in Virginia. One of my favorite things to do when I am away from the Aspen Chapel is to visit other churches. I attended a Unitarian-Universalist Church and a very traditional Presbyterian Church in Williamsburg two Sundays ago. Last Sunday I attended a United Methodist Church in Lynchburg. Before the worship service I also attended the adult Sunday school class.
All Saints Sunday
As it was “All Saints Sunday” the leader of the Sunday School class talked about the background to this remembrance along with the difference between a Roman Catholic and a Protestant perspective of saints. One of the questions he asked the class was what it was to be a saint. A few people responded with typical attributes of a saint. I wanted to respond with a different answer, but I was the visitor sitting in the back so I refrained. What I wanted to say is that a “real saint to me is someone who is not a saint and knows he or she is not a saint.” Martin Luther who initiated a much different concept of a saint stated that all people are equally a saint and a sinner. In a sense it is only when one knows that one is a sinner or a very human being can one even begin to be considered a saint.
A real saint is not a saint, but a real human being who is seeking in the deepest sense of their being a saint like – spiritual like - quality of their life which can only include the very human quality of their life. My intention is to show great respect and admiration for those people who seem to have that honest, humble, and down-to-earth demeanor about them. The type of person who expresses themselves in such a realistic way typically elicits and provokes the rest of us to say, “I can identify with that.”
I would dare say that we really want to identify with people who reveal their true self to others. It is hard to identify with a porcelain saint or the saint defined in the dictionary as “a very holy person; one who is pure in heart and upright in life.” This is what we should strive to be and do, but it needs to be in perspective with also being human.
Jesus
We identify with Jesus not only because he was indeed a very holy person who was pure in heart and upright in life, but also because he was human and he too suffered the trials of humanity and humiliation. He was the true suffering servant. It is because of his reality that we listen and take to heart his ideality. His life exemplifies his greatest teaching to love God and one’s neighbor as oneself.
The Love Chapter
We call the scripture this morning the “love chapter.” It clearly clarifies for us the supremacy of love. It depicts the qualities of love: “love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things and endures all things.” This is the first half of the love chapter. The second part, however, reminds us that we are also human. It reminds us that our “knowledge is imperfect and our prophecy is imperfect. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall understand fully, even as I have been fully understood. So faith, hope, love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.” Love is always our goal, but as long as we are on this earth, human love is not perfect. In a sense, love is bigger than perfection and imperfection. We fail at love all the time, but love still exists in spite of our selves. Love goes on. Love endures all things.
Performing Weddings
I have also spent a significant part of my life talking to people about love and marriage. Because of Aspen and the beauty of this Chapel, I have performed far more weddings than the average minister of a church. Most of the wedding ceremonies include words which express a certain ideal of love and marriage. When I talk with people before the wedding date and about the format of the ceremony, I often express that the words and sentiments of the service are an ideal in which we work toward, but to remember that we are also human beings and forgiveness is one of the foremost qualities of love. As much as the Bible talks about love, it also talks equally about forgiveness.
Lois Smith Brady
“Weddings are constant reminders that love does in fact exist.” “Love does not see each other’s weaknesses or problems and forgives all kinds of quirky habits, baggage and history.” The last two sentences are words from Lois Smith Brady. Lois is an award winning social columnist with the New York Times. She is mostly known for covering interesting weddings in the Sunday edition. She lives in New York and Aspen. She is a great writer. One might think that writing about weddings might be fairly pedantic or even boring, but Lois Smith Brady has an approach and creativity which makes every brief story a heart filled novel. She is also very down-to-earth and realistic in her reporting. She makes love real. She describes love in a way in which we can all identify.
Many years ago she called me a couple times to see if I knew of a unique couple and wedding in Aspen. Over the past few months I have been reminded of her creative writing as she has written a few articles in our local Aspen magazines. Ten years ago she wrote a book entitled Love Lessons. I recently purchased this book and read it on my vacation. It was as good as I expected it to be. The following are some of her thoughts and lessons.
Love Lessons
“You know it is love when you can’t stop talking to each other. Almost every couple I’ve ever interviewed said that on their first or second date, they talked for hours and hours. For some, falling in love is like walking into a soundproof confessional booth, a place where you can tell all. Finding love is like finding a pair of great old blue jeans that are exactly your size and seems as if you’ve worn them forever. I can’t tell you how many women have told me they knew they were in love because they forgot to wear makeup around their boyfriend or because they felt at ease hanging around him in flannel pajamas. There’s some modern truth to Cinderella’s tale – it’s love when you’re incredibly comfortable, when the shoe fits perfectly. I think you’re in love if you can make each other laugh at the very worst times – when the IRS is auditing you or when you’re driving a convertible in a rainstorm or when your hair is turning gray. As someone once told me, 90 percent of being in love is making each other’s lives funnier and easier, all the way to the deathbed.”
Lois has a way of making the message of 1st Corinthians real and applicable today. Love is about being your real self and totally at home self with another person. It is about feeling safe. Lois writes creatively about other people’s love lives while simultaneously interjecting her own love life. She writes that she “moved to New York City where love was as hard to find as a legal parking spot and you need to wait for love with the patience of a Buddhist fly fisherman. Love is not a fantasy experience, not the stuff of romance novels or fairy tells. It is as gritty and real as the subway; it comes around just as regularly, and, as long as you can just stick it out on the platform, you won’t miss it.”
Lois reminds us that we cannot force love nor can we really explain love.. She writes, “Live your life well, take care of yourself and don’t mope, complain, or shop too much. Love will find you. Love is still mostly a mystery. They say that many things are impossible to explain – God, musical ability, the disappearance of dinosaurs, clear-air turbulence – and love is among them.”
“The best love stories usually contain the element of the totally unexpected. In many ways, falling in love can be like getting on the wrong airplane and landing in Paris when you thought you were headed for Newark, New Jersey – or the other way around. Don’t look for a certain kind of person . . . instead just look for a feeling. When it comes to love, as with kissing, it’s best to close your eyes. I’ve come to believe what’s most exciting about getting married is not the certainty but the incredible uncertainty of love.”
Lois talks about the foundation of love and the fragility of love. She writes, “Love, like tomatoes and buds, is much more delicate than you think. From my parents, I learned that love is one part passion and nine parts hanging on for dear life, that hardship can safe keep love and maybe even give it more spark in the end. The feeling of roaring down a mountain on a toboggan and holding on for dear life is what in my new small family is about. That’s how my marriage has lasted, leap-frogging from perfect moment to perfect moment, with fear of falling in between.”
“A pilot said that falling in love is similar to putting the nose down on an airplane. When a plane is about to stall, putting the nose down can add enough forward power to get it going again. But it can also backfire and cause a crash. Still, it’s wiser to put yourself in danger than to play it safe. It’s hazardous not to take the risk. In love and flying, you sometimes need to do the opposite of what’s easy. Sometimes love has the endurance of the black box on an airplane, something that is built to survive plane crashes and keeps emitting signals so it can be found anywhere, in snowdrifts, deep forests and swamps.”
Lois is a firm believer in love. She is not a cynic. She believes that love cannot only exist but last, especially when we get past any hallmark notion of love and approach it honestly, realistically and humanly. This is my point this morning. To be a realist about love is the only way to allow love to exist and to survive. To be a romantic about love may in the end not be romantic, but only a fantasy. There are many fantasies about love which is unfortunate. The Apostle Paul said that “love endures all things, believes all things and hopes all things.” Love is not about fantasy, but about reality. Lois Smith Brady helps us realize this in a very gutsy way. In fact she states that guts and humor are most important in sustaining enduring love.
As I mentioned I have performed thousands of weddings. I like the weddings which project the meaning of love versus the fantasy of love. Lois concurs when she observes that brides who cry if their wedding dress is not perfect bear a red flag, but brides who laugh at any faux pas with their dress or anything else during the wedding will survive. Love is one thing at the beginning and something else entirely years later, but it is still love, perhaps even a deeper love later including all the faults and faux pas.
Lois continues, “Most important thing is that disasters during weddings and in life are never as disastrous as you think. And perfection is never entirely perfect. Death is serious. Everything else isn’t.” “In a one minute sermon, the minster said we are all pilgrims and sometimes as pilgrims in the course of our journey we find ourselves in a wilderness.” Another minister Lois quoted is one who said during the wedding that “the person we marry is a person about whom we have a magnificent hunch.”
Love is indeed foundational and fragile all at the same time. Love is an ideality and reality all at the same time. Love is the theme of the Bible, but the Bible also includes stories of failed love and even evil. Love is always the goal, but can only be really realized within the framework of humanity, at least for now as Paul reminded us.
Love like God is a mystery. Lois says, “Love, I’m convinced, is not something you can see on the surface. You can walk down the street holding hands without actually holding hands. What is between people is actually more invisible than visible. People tell me over and over that love for them was like a ghost in the room, something ephemeral but unmistakable.”
Here is the real question about love which Lois Smith Brady poses toward the end of her book on Love Lessons. “Love is wondering, ‘Do I want this person by my bedside when I am dying and taking my last breath?” This question is one big question. Keep in mind however that death is part of our humanity and mortality and so too is love. The person with you at this most poignant moment also does not need to be perfect, but merely someone who has longed for love like yourself or anyone else. It is that person whom you can “feel as comfortable with as a great pair of jeans,”
“People want love because they want their taped-together eye-glasses, unstylish clothes, or lack of athletic ability to be forgiven. They want someone to look right past the surface stuff and just see them as they are, for better or for worse. Lois’ last line in her book on Love Lessons affirms, “Love can happen anytime, anyplace, anywhere. My advice is: Don’t get cynical, don’t get jaded. Just believe.”
God is Love
I perform weddings because I firmly believe that this is God’s intention for two people to come together in a commitment of love. Marriage is not an institution; rather it is a natural and innate progression of being human. God is love and is manifested in our love for one another. God is perfect, but our love is but a mere reflection of perfect love. Love is bigger than any petty imperfection. Love exists. We exist in love even when we fail in love. “Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends. So faith, hope, love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.”
Amen.
Rev. Dr. Gregg R. Anderson
Aspen Chapel
0077 Meadowood Dr.
Aspen, Colorado 81611
http://www.aspenchapel.org