Love Is Not the Answer

A few months ago at the Royal wedding Bishop Curry preached a sermon. The world was in awe at the beauty and power of his sermon. I met Bishop Curry about 11 years ago in Raleigh at Church of the Nativity which I was attending at the time. We sang for him several times, and he was always grateful and made a point to thank the musicians. Whenever he was at church, he always brought with him a ray of sunshine that seemed to be bursting forth with Christ's love. It just naturally poured forth from his being. He has said "if there is not Love, there is not God." I loved Bishop Curry the first moment I met him. When the world responded to Bishop Curry's "charisma" (as one atheistic/agnostic friend remarked and named it) I thought to myself: that is not "charisma", that is Truth. 

When Truth speaks, people feel it, respond to it, react to it. I am often disappointed after church. Maybe my expectations are too high. I want to hear a preacher, not one who tells me his or her political view and then tries haphazardly to glue it to the scripture of the day. Not one who mockingly describes beliefs different than his or her own with an air of superior righteousness “None is righteous, no, not one” (Romans 3:10). Rather, I want to hear the Truth, plain and simple. Give me the scripture, perhaps illuminate the historical or scenario context and then get out of the way and let Truth speak. It will work its way into the depth of each being’s individual needs and illuminate and transform of its own accord. That is the power of the living, breathing word of God. 

The Bible tells us the heart is evil. “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?” (Jeremiah 17:9). I have to admit, I always find that pill a bit hard to swallow. It seems there is something pure and good in the heart. Something that informs, perhaps informs even that deepest innate knowing of God. “For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them” (Romans 1:19). There is though the heart’s deception, and maybe this is what that scripture points us to. We often hear “love is love”, “love is good”. In fact the scripture says "God is Love". Christ tells us the sum of the law and prophets is to first love God with all your soul, heart and mind, and the second is like unto it: love your neighbor as yourself. John 3:16 tells us God sent his only begotten son out of love to save the world. Such a powerful and touching scripture, not sent out of the will to judge and condemn but rather out of love. We feel Christ's pure love when he goes to the lost in mercy and even in his darkest moments pleads with his Father, in love: "forgive them, Father, for they know not". It seems in all this, love rules supreme. 

And yet, what is this about the evil heart? My aunt Suzanne once said, "I often pray to have made known my secret sins", and this is my light bulb moment. I think this illumines the difference, one kind of love is small, self-driven love, and the other is Agape love—the fountain that never stops flowing, the pure source that is the beginning and the end—The Alpha and Omega. The other is small love masked in all kinds of subtle self-serving needs. This love can feel like the real deal, and therein lies its own deceptive nature. Take Dante's Inferno and his infamous adulterous lovers Francesca and Paulo: the question remains for them, how can something that feels so ecstatic, so pure, so wonderful be bad? And yet...modern day psychology tells us that betrayal is one of the most difficult hardships a human being can bear, one from which many never recover.

I have a friend at church and I remember telling him about a story of a sister who was to be artificially inseminated, and he immediately in a very PC way said, "Yes I have no problem with that, good for her", but later I thought to myself: “but what about the child?” What about the child never knowing or having a father? We have our loves, our drives and ambitions....but what about the other? We are not islands. I believe we are connected perhaps more profoundly than we realize, our thoughts and actions affect others, often in ways we could not imagine.

Maybe this is the difference between a small self-driven love, albeit pleasurable and perhaps seemingly good, and the other enduring and constant, unchanging love of the Father. The difference of the sometimes love in our hearts, which can quickly turn to despising when our self-driven needs are not met. The classic love-hate relationship! Christ illuminates the core of the Agape love when he sacrifices his very being for the other, all the others. Even in his last breath, asking his Father for this cup to be taken from him and yet drinking it willingly, knowing fully the effect it would and could have for the other. 

Agape love, ever calling us and challenging us to find the subtle shades of small love and to expand its horizons beyond....beyond pleasure, beyond comfort, but eventually to rest in a peace much larger and more enduring than that which we can even conceive of if we continue to cling to the other. Love is not the answer, Agape love is!