All you need is love, All you need is love, All you need is love, love, love is all you need.
What’s your all time favorite love song? Or, if not your favorite, the one that immediately popped into your head?
One of my favorites, or at least the one that I think I’ve known the longest was taught to me by my kindergarten teacher Mrs. Holbrook at Le Jardin Academy in Hawai’i, where I was born and raised.
It goes like this.
Love is something if you give it away, you give it away, you give it away, Love is something if you give it away, you end up having more.
A very simple, but theologically powerful song.
In our world, Love can often seem like a very complicated thing.
This abstract concept is so complex that even the ancient Greeks and Romans separated love into different categories;
Philos (like Philadelphia, Philosophy, Xenophilia), which is the equivalent of Amicus (like an Amicus brief in court, or Amigo in Spanish)
Agape, which is unconditional love, like God’s love for humanity.
In Latin, Agape is so complicated that it is separated into two additional words; Caritas (where we get our term Charity) and Dilectio (where we get our word delight).
And of course there is Eros (where we get our words Erotic and Erogenous)
In Latin, the closest term is Amor.
It’s that “Love is a burning thing” type of love, but also at a more basic level it is the love that is connective like magnets that pull toward one another, or the gravity that keeps us planted to the earth and keeps the moon circling around the earth.
But, even these don’t really get at all of the different ways that we love in this world, do they?
That’s because as an abstract concept, Love is mystery.
Anthropologist and Cultural Theorist, Dan Sperber, calls it a Meta-Representation.
That is, we all have some idea about love in our minds, but its so complex that we have to hold its definition in limbo over a lifetime.
He equates this mental state of limbo with our concept of mystery, or the mysterious.
Abstract concepts like love are not a physical thing like a cup, or a table, or water, where we can point to it.
Like when Mel and I are having a serious conversation in the car and all of a sudden I point out the window and yell, “squirrel!” or “hey look, Amish people!”
Those are concrete objects; we can point to them, we can define them fairly easily within certain typicality conditions.
Things like love, though, they’re more like an unfillable bucket; we add things to them throughout our lives that help us define what it is, but we never hold the whole of the definition.
Often, we can point to things that resemble abstract concepts.
I heard a sermon once from a retiring priest, who said that he had seen the Holy Spirit.
He talked about going to Canterbury Cathedral, the famous destination for pilgrims that launched Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.
He told us in vivid detail about how the stones of the cathedral’s floor had ruts worn into them from centuries of pilgrims kneeling and crawling the last part of their journeys to the altar where Thomas a Becket was killed while he was celebrating the Eucharist on the orders of King Henry the Second;
Hundreds of years of devotion captured in the simplicity of an uneven floor.
But even more astounding, he picked up his Book of Common Prayer, and he opened it to the Baptism and showed the wrinkles on the pages, where drips of water had left their indelible mark from all of the baptisms;
And he flipped to the service for the burial of the dead, where dust had gathered in the seams from the funerals of so many beloveds; ashes to ashes and dust to dust.
He convinced me that we can sometimes see abstract things come to life, or at least the traces of them.
We can see love and point to it sometimes,
But even that - as beautiful and moving as it is – does not encompass the totality of things like love, which at their core are mysterious.
Love is complicated.
It is not surprising that in the past couple of weeks, there has been a debate in our country about the meaning of love; who we should love and in what order.
The discussion came to a focal point about 12 days ago, when the Vice President suggested that the medieval Roman Catholic concept of Ordo Amoris (Proper ordering of love), means that Christians should prioritize love in concentric circles beginning with family, then neighbors, then community, fellow citizens, then the rest of the world.
Besides the fact that he didn’t mention how God fits into the order, or that people who are being deported might just fit into the category of neighbor, or that the Pope took time off from fighting Bronchitis to remind him about the Good Samaritan;
His analysis of the Ordo Amoris wasn’t completely off.
The concept is based on the writings of St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas.
Both of these theologians wrestled with the fact that the Bible has many different ways of defining love.
Both thelogians insist that we are “to love all equally.”
This is the ideal.
But, since we don’t live in a perfect world, how to do good for each other based on this ideal love means we have to prioritize, or order our charity.
And so, we actually move from a conversation about Ordo Amoris, the unlimited “love is something if you give it away” type of love, to the Ordo Caritatis, the love that moves us to give from our limited resources to others.
Now, the Vice President wasn’t totally off, when he said that Christian theology and the thought of Aquinas and Augustine talk about prioritizing connections that are familial, or having to do with “fellow-citizens,”
But he left out the teaching that comes immediately after this on prioritizing based on need, in which one might “help a stranger, in extreme necessity, rather than one’s own father, if his father’s need is less urgent.”
Many people have pointed this out online.
The point is that he leaves out as much as he puts in.
It’s a one dimensional reading of a three dimensional theology.
Our biblical lesson from Genesis gives us a good example of the difference between a one dimensional and three dimensional reading based on these ideas of love and charity.
Joseph, who was sold into slavery in Egypt by his brothers, is in position to help his family with limited resources during a seven year drought.
On the surface, this story could well be used as an example to say, “see, he prioritized his family.”
But the context tells us that actually - through his prudence and foresight - Joseph was able to provide for everyone, including his family.
Furthermore, Joseph's family were strangers in a foreign land that provided for them despite the fact that they were not “fellow-citizens.”
And, this episode then becomes a central focus of Hebrew theology toward the stranger in Deuteronomy, where it says over and over, “remember that you were once strangers in the land of Egypt,” as a moral ethic.
Ultimately, though, if I were to bring my whole sermon down to one point about how the national conversation about Ordo Amoris has missed the mark, it would be our Gospel lesson for today.
The Vice president opined that people who don’t see eye to eye with him have inverted the natural and rational order of love.
But actually it was Jesus who did that, when he said, “if you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? for even sinners love those who love them. and if you do good for those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? for even sinners do the same.”
Jesus continually inverts our expectations.
It’s why he was crucified.
He defied easy answers that would simplify love,
He deified a human body so that we could begin to believe that we all belong to each other.
One of the problems that we run into is that we do live in a world of limited resources.
We can’t do everything for everybody.
But we live in the richest country in the history of the world.
And you’re saying that we don’t have enough to do good?
That we limit our goodness and our charity only to people who look like us?
To people who belong to us?
Neglecting the fact that Jesus made everyone belong to us?
The fact that we were all strangers at one point.
If we only loved those who loved us, the Quakers wouldn’t have been abolitionists.
They would have just done their own thing for their own people and said, “that’s not my problem.”
We have so many resources at our disposal and yet we think that we’re limited.
Our refrain from the Psalm today says, “Trust in the Lord, and Do Good.”
The last several weeks I’ve been talking to you, and last week I did as well when I talked about being a tree planted by water, about not witholding your fruit even in a time of drought.
Do good even when it doesn’t feel like you can.
“Put your trust in the Lord, and Do Good.”
Not just for those in your smallest circle.
See if you can expand your circle.
See if you can incluce more people.
Jesus’ message to us is that the order of love is not a one dimensional thing.
It’s three dimensional.
Love is something that if you give it away, what you find is that you end up having more.
So, remember your favorite love song.
Just like I remember the one that was taught to me in kindergarten.
Remember that Love is boundless.
Love cannot be exhausted, unless you put a limit on it.
“Love is something if you give it away, if you give it away, you end up having more.”
Amen
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