Love Your Neighbor - A Sermon for Valentine’s Day 2010
Written by Gary E. Smith Sunday, 14 February 2010 00:00
This is a sermon about love. This is a sermon for Valentine’s Day. This is a sermon about the kind of love that reaches beyond the self. Do you remember the passage in Paul’s Letter to the Corinthians Margie read earlier in which Paul writes, “If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal,” and then he goes on to give his own definition of love. “Love is patient and kind. Love is not jealous or boastful. It is not arrogant or rude.” And then he says, “Love does not insist on its own way.” That’s the piece of love I want to get at today. “Love seeketh not her own,” saith the poetry of King James’ day. “Love does not insist on its own way.” “Love seeketh not her own.”
That’s where this sermon begins. Well, it really begins with Kurt Vonnegut’s story of the shopping bag lady, but we’re not ready for that story yet. We’ll come back to her at the end. Let’s begin with ourselves and with this one brief life we have been given to lead. What do we want from this life? Last week, I talked about what saves us. What is saving your life today? I asked, and thanks to the many who wrote me with your own answer. Today, the question is what do we want? And the answer will be different for each of us: love, happiness, success, inner peace, all these things and more. For today, we’ll use happiness, but you can plug in your own wish. What do we want from this life? Happiness, defined as to be favored by chance or luck or fortune.
And so how is it we go about seeking happiness? The first stage – and this stage comes at different ages for different people, it comes over and over, and for some people it does not come at all - at the first stage, we are faced with the task of a full-scale self-assessment. Who are we? Which is to say, what do we have to work with? What cards have genetics and heredity dealt us? How damaged are we - by our background, our history, our parenting, the choices we’ve made? Who are we? What are our roots? Where did we come from? Has the sailing been rough? Has the sailing been smooth?
Who are we? Do any of us now see or have we ever seen a therapist? Are we trying to untangle the strands that have made up our lives? Do we wish we could? Who are we? Does coming to First Parish help to answer that question? Do insights come here, not just from words spoken, but from the place we go when we hear a particular piece of music or when we glance out the window just so? What about groups we might be in, or friends we have? Do they mirror back to us who we are? Do they see something in us that we do not or cannot see? Are these people willing to tell us who we are? Can we handle it?
Who are we? If we are brave enough, we may, from time to time, catch a glimpse of ourselves. This leads to stage two. Who do we want to become? Do we like what we see? The first question is “who are we?” The second question is “who do we want to become?” It is often in the answering of the second question that we get into trouble. If we do not like what we see, and I mean this both literally and figuratively, we may try to fix things. If we do not like how we look, and this is the literal part, we may tinker around with our body. This culture of ours gives us constant reminders of what the ideal person looks like: young, trim, healthy hair, confident but not brash, tall rather than short, good complexion, articulate, erudite, brave, clean and reverent, drive a pickup truck, wear a leather barn coat.
If we do not like what we see when we answer the question “who are we?” we may try to fix things. There are examples that fall under the category of “the privileged seek happiness.” This phenomenon in other generations has been called “the rat race.” Please notice the choice of creature. We want happiness and we equate happiness with things and the things cost money, so we work harder and longer to make more money to have more things. The problem is we don’t always end up with what we want.
“Who do we want to become?” is the second question. If only we had that job instead of this job, if only we were in relationship with that person instead of this person, if only my children had the same grades/ambition/skills as those children, if only we lived in that house instead of this house, if only our marriage were like that marriage, if only we were seen with that crowd instead of this crowd, if only… This is the way some of us answer the second question, “who do we want to become?” in response to the way we have answered the first question, “who are we?”
Two things must be said here. First, not all of us, by any means, respond to the “who are we?” by asking these questions. And secondly, those who do may know they are falling into a trap. They know that’s not who they want to become, but they can’t do anything about it. They think they’re expected to answer the question that way, and this pursuit of happiness is not all that easy.
The fact is, it is a trap. We’re given mixed messages. We need self-knowledge. We need self-esteem. It’s the way we hold it all together in the face of all the forces that would pull us apart. I would like to suggest though that the trap is when we consider the pursuit and the desire to make ourselves as perfect as we can an end in itself instead of a means to something even better. We are now circling around to Paul’s letter to the Corinthians and to something called the Golden Rule and to the story that Kurt Vonnegut tells so beautifully.
All this business of the pursuit of our perfect selves, this way we sometimes fall into when we think of what we want to become: have you heard the expression “House of Cards”? It all comes to naught. It is doomed. And we know that. And we pursue all of it anyway, most of us. But there is a Plan B. Plan A was my self and your self as an end in itself. Plan A was imagining the perfect self for our selves, and going after it, at all costs. [Please notice the phrase “at all costs.”] Plan A was an outcome that, at the end, comes up empty, as in “my life is empty.”
Plan B suggests that we can accept ourselves, with all of our shortcomings, all of our pretensions, all of our blemishes. Plan B suggests that we can always keep working on coming to the place we want to be, and in the meantime, we can try love. “Love does not insist on its own way,” says Paul. “Love your neighbor as yourself,” says Jesus. “’Hug her’, said a woman in the crowd.” “The living tradition we share draws from many sources,” say the words of our Unitarian Universalist Purposes and Principles. From the Christian source comes this word from our sponsor: “love your neighbor as yourself.” The Church has called it the Golden Rule, as in “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your mind, and with all your soul, and love your neighbor as yourself.”
Here’s my take on all this: if we wish to be favored by happiness, try loving others “as yourself”, which is to say, love your neighbor without thought of yourself, without thought of any “thank you”, any reward, any stars in your crown. Don’t wait to be perfect to do this. There’s no time. Don’t make an action plan. Just try some simple thing today that involves loving your neighbor. Do it without guile. Do it without thinking about it too much.
I must have told you the time I went down to the coffee hour at 10 o’clock after the first service, I had not eaten breakfast, I was hungry, there were bagels left. But there is one container of cream cheese and one knife and a child is laboring over the spreading of this cheese, slowly and carefully covering every bit of the surface of the bagel half, and did I mention I was very hungry and impatient and self-important, and I wanted the knife! As I am ready to reach out and grab it, the child turns to me and says, “I made this for you, Gary.”
Thank you. A child teaches me again. Love your neighbor as yourself. Do these things happen to you or do you make these things happen for others? When we are eating out, Eliz and I have sometimes picked up the check for someone else. We watched a young couple as they read the menu and could hear them trying to figure out what they could afford. Their waitress was our waitress and I told her to give us their bill but not tell them who paid. Try it sometime. Guerilla love, and I don’t mean the animal.
Here’s my take on all this: synergy will take over. You may like it, this love of neighbor stuff. And you will want to become a better person so that you can love more. The two forces will work on each other: becoming the person you want to be and loving your neighbor. They will become one. And you will find happiness. This is not some pop culture, “feel good” piece of advice. This is ancient wisdom. This is the core teaching of our Christian brothers and sisters for centuries. What if love is some divine force that pulls us toward our neighbor? What if we find ourselves living into the paradox that the more we love our neighbor the more we come to love our own selves, accept our own imperfect selves? What if we find ourselves living into the paradox that the more happiness we bring to our neighbor the more happiness we find for ourselves, and that it just happens, and we can’t plan on it, and we can’t force it.
Kurt Vonnegut tells the story of a shopping bag lady named Mary Kathleen who surrounds the story teller and will not let him go, surrounds him with all her shopping bags and takes hold of his wrist and will not let him go. In fact, she will not lower her voice. “Now that I’ve found you, Walter [she calls him Walter], I’ll never let you go.” Vonnegut says this kind of melodrama will always draw a crowd.
“You used to tell me all the time how much you loved me, Walter,” Mary Kathleen cries out even louder. “But then you went away, and I never heard from you again. Were you just lying to me?” Vonnegut says the man cannot make a sound. “Look me in the eye, Walter,” she says. And then Vonnegut says that this unlikely tableau must have represented “a miracle that our [street-side] audience must have prayed for again and again: the rescue of at least one shopping-bag lady by a man who knew her well.”
“Some people were crying,” so the story goes. “I myself was about to cry.” ‘Hug her,’ said a woman in the crowd. I did so. I found myself embracing a bundle of dry twigs that was wrapped in rags. That was when I myself began to cry.” It is story enough for a Valentine’s Day. “Love does not insist on its own way,” says Paul. “Love your neighbor as yourself,” says Jesus. “’Hug her’, said a woman in the crowd.”