There are so many definitions of love! We use the word to describe food (I love BBQ) to styles (I love that dress on you) to patriotism (I love America). After time, it loses its meaning.
A few years ago I took Carol to my old elementary school in Cincinnati and had her sit on the stone bench in the playground where in the fourth grade Tina Lewis gave me my first kiss. I remembered that kiss for a week. We call that puppy love.
I also told her about my first experience in 7th grade with romantic love when Laura swept away everything else in my young life that mattered. That lasted until the 10th grade when she went to a dance with another boy who eventually became her husband. We never forget our first love.
Then there is married love. That is the love we sing along with Tevye in “Fiddler on the Roof” when he asks his wife Golde if she loves him.
“Do you love me?”
(Golde)
Do I love you?
For twenty-five years I’ve washed your clothes
Cooked your meals, cleaned your house
Given you children, milked the cow
After twenty-five years, why talk about love right now?
(Golde)
Do I love him?
For twenty-five years I’ve lived with him
Fought with him, starved with him
Twenty-five years my bed is his
If that’s not love, what is?
That’s the practice of love that endures a lifetime.
C.S.Lewis wrote “The Four Loves” in which he describes four very different kinds of love:
There is storge or “affection”: The affection for the people always around us, in the normal day-to-day of life, is the majority of the love we experience.
There is phileo or “friendship”: We develop a kinship over something in common. “Friendship must be about something even if it were only an enthusiasm for dominoes or white mice. Those who have nothing can share nothing; those who are going nowhere can have no fellow-travellers.” It is the surprising discovery that we have something in common.
There is Eros or romantic love: The danger in romantic love is to follow blindly after a feeling of passion. Then, we celebrate the passion and think its absence means such love has died. Certainly, true romance is not so fickle. “In one high bound it has overleaped the massive wall of our selfhood; it has made appetite itself altruistic, tossed personal happiness aside as a triviality and planted the interests of another in the centre of our being.
There is the highest form of love – agape or charity: This is our chief aim, the unconditional love of the Father given to us through his Son. Affection, friendship and romantic love are each the training ground for charity to grow. It’s also a rival to the three. It is unsafe love.
There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket—safe, dark, motionless, airless—it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and frustrations of love is Hell.
Just as there are different kinds of love there is an order to love – from the lowest to the highest. This is where I want us to focus this morning.
It was St. Augustine who wondered why so many people are unhappy. He quotes the Roman poet Cicero who said, “Every person sets out to be happy but the majority are thoroughly wretched.” Cicero concluded that the extreme scarcity of human contentment might be a judgement of divine providence for our sins. For Cicero, the solution was to set aside all pursuits of happiness and focus on philosophical contemplation since there is nothing in this world that can satisfy our desire for happiness.
For St. Augustine the pursuit of happiness became one of his lifelong projects to discover why most people are so discontent and lacking joy. He concluded that our discontent has a cause. He writes about our loves being out of order. I don’t know if he would put it this way but it fits. In the immortal words of Johnny Lee we are lookin’ for love in all the wrong places. Lookin’ for love in too many faces, searchin’ their eyes, lookin’ for traces of what I’m dreamin’ of.”
Augustine would say it is not just looking in the faces of other people but looking for love everywhere in the world. We find it here and it is not enough. We find it there and it evaporates. We find it and it is not what we thought it would be. We discover it is being thirsty and drinking salt water.
Imagine a bulls-eye with the red center surrounded by a series of circles each one further away from the center. For Augustine the center was the love of God and the love for God. That is the only place to start if we are to have our loves in order and not harmful. Our other loves find their rightful place around the perimeter of the center. On the outer ring – the furthest from the bulls-eye are what we might call interest. I have a hobby or I spend time on something I enjoy. However, the more time I spend on those things, the more I think about those things I begin to love and move them one ring at a time closer to the center. Instead of interests they become loves. The more important they become to my pursuit of happiness then the more I need them to satisfy me. What was once an interest has now become a necessity. It is not yet an idol but it is moving there. It is a love that has taken precedence over other and more legitimate loves.
He does not say we are not to love anything but God. We are born with an innate desire to love. To become uninterested in love is to become less human. In fact, he would say that it is often the pursuit of a legitimate love that causes us the most grief. No one in their heart – except the truly wicked – desire misery or hatefulness. Everyone has a longing for something that is good. It may be respect or peace or the enjoyment of life. We want those things but we use the wrong methods to achieve them. We produce unhappiness instead of what we desire. That is because our loves are disordered and it is disordered loves that are at the root of our sin and separation from the love of God.
Augustine was convinced that what defines a person more than anything is what they love. He said that when we ask if someone is a “good” person, what we are asking is not what they believe or what they hope for, but rather what they love. He stated that what we consider human virtues like courage, fidelity or honesty are essentially forms of love. Courage is loving your neighbor’s well-being more than your own safety. Honesty is loving someone enough to tell them the truth even if it may put you at a disadvantage. Fidelity is staying true with no benefit.
Jamie Smith writes in “You Are What You Love” that love is a reflection of our habits and our disciplines. ““We learn to love, then, not primarily by acquiring information about what we should love but rather through practices that form the habits of how we love.” We spend more time on those things that reinforce virtue – courage, kindness, seeking peace, love of neighbor – than we do on what we imagine will bring us happiness.
Tim Keller writes that we can know our loves are disordered when we make good things all important things and those things determine our happiness and our despair. What thing, if you were to lose it would cause you to despair? What thing, if gone from your life, would mean that almost all value and significance – identity and worth – would be drained out of your life?” That is when you know a legitimate love or interest has gradually moved to the center.
We have a good example right now. It is appropriate to have an interest in politics because we should have a love for legitimate government and order in our country. However, when that interest in politics and legitimate love of order moves toward the center and begins to displace other loves and eventually becomes the foundation of our happiness or our despair then it has become a sin. For instance, if Trump winning or Biden losing causes me to despair or if the reverse is true then a genuine interest and legitimate love has become disordered. It is then that life begins to fall apart and instead of contentment we have replaced the love and trust of God with the love and trust of political power that God never intended to be anywhere near the center.
Of course, we all know the phrase “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” While all of those have been distorted and misused there is still truth in them. I do believe the pursuit of happiness is a good thing and I would agree with Cicero that it is only a few people who ever discover it. For many, the pursuit takes them in all the wrong places. I believe Paul’s understanding of happiness as the contentment he writes about in the letter to the Philippians.
“I rejoice greatly in the Lord that at last you have renewed your concern for me. Indeed, you have been concerned, but you had no opportunity to show it. I am not saying this because I am in need, for I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances. I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want. I can do everything through him who gives me strength.”
This is what would have answered Cicero’s question had he known it.
There is the contentment of plenty when nothing more could add to our happiness. It is what Solomon called the ability to enjoy what we have in Ecclesiastes. We are not constantly eyeing what else we might want.
There is the contentment with little that is not resignation or fatalism. It is the contentment of gratitude for what we do have. It is not a comparison with others. It is not a longing for more.
In the end, there are two ways to live: push or pull.
Push is living and achieving out of a basic discontent. It is a constant sense of “yet one thing you lack” that so perplexed the rich young ruler. There is always one thing more we want when we live out of something pushing us. It is up to us. It is always a little beyond our reach, isn’t it?
Living by being pulled is living out of a basic sense of contentment. How does a needle make sewing easier? It pulls the thread instead of our having to push it. It is the same in life. The easier life is that of being drawn. To be pulled is to be attracted. “If I be lifted up I will draw all men to myself.” We are drawn to Christ – not pushed toward him. We are not drawn to a teaching or a doctrine but to a person. We cannot be pulled except by a relationship and that is the secret Paul is describing. Contentment is not stoic self-sufficiency. It is trust in a relationship with Christ. It is not “how much is enough?” but who is enough? “I know whom I have believed” is what Paul says and it is the same for us. We are not driven. We are drawn.
So, what is the love that is as strong or stronger than death? The love that is priceless and can never be extinguished? It is the love of God for us. I love that hymn “The Love of God” and I want to close by reading it. It’s important to remember that part of it was discovered scrawled on the wall of a patient in an insane asylum before it was turned into a hymn. In so many ways, in the insanity in which we find ourselves we would do well to remember these words:
The love of God is greater far
Than tongue or pen can ever tell.
It goes beyond the highest star
And reaches to the lowest hell.
The guilty pair, bowed down with care,
God gave His Son to win;
His erring child He reconciled
And pardoned from his sin.
O love of God, how rich and pure!
How measureless and strong!
It shall forevermore endure—
The saints’ and angels’ song.
When hoary time shall pass away,
And earthly thrones and kingdoms fall;
When men who here refuse to pray,
On rocks and hills and mountains call;
God’s love, so sure, shall still endure,
All measureless and strong;
Redeeming grace to Adam’s race—
The saints’ and angels’ song.
Could we with ink the ocean fill,
And were the skies of parchment made;
Were every stalk on earth a quill,
And every man a scribe by trade;
To write the love of God above
Would drain the ocean dry;
Nor could the scroll contain the whole,
Though stretched from sky to sky.
That is the great Song of Solomon and ours as well. The love of God.