"The subject, as you may have guessed, is love: one word, four letters, and a thousand meanings.
We are wiser than to think that the word always means the same whenever it is used. There are kinds of love that mean a feeling and other kinds that do not refer to feelings at all. There are kinds that bear responsibility and others that settle for kicks. A recent cartoon reveals a certain insight when it shows a thoroughly rumpled young man and an equally rumpled you woman in a passionate embrace as the boy says, "Why speak of love at a time like this?"
Love is a complicated thing, often a very confusing thing, both to the giver and to the recipient. Not only that, but love is always a very risky thing. The first risk of any love extended is that it may not be returned, or that love once given may now be withheld. That is painful, and more severe perhaps because often it must be borne in silence, without even the loved one knowing. A broken heart is at least as painful as a broken leg, and usually slower in healing. One who speaks of puppy love or merely infatuation is flippant and does not understand - that love on any level can turn sour and even cause one to wish that love were not a fact of life. C.S. Lewis said, "To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken."
Can we begin to think that our love for another person could have anything at all to do with our love for God? We have been taught that love of God and love of neighbor were inseparable. But somehow, we surmise that the love for another person was different and somehow separate. One of our goals in life, I think, is to learn that just because love may be romantic or even sensual, does not mean that love is somehow the opposite of our love for God. It can be one means by which we can express our love for God.
By the same token, when our "valentines get broken," and our hearts broken, that is not unrelated to our relationship with God either. Any experience we can have, that somehow provides a window through which we can understand God more clearly, and understand our relationship with God more carefully, is an experience we would do well to have, no matter how painful. The experience of a broken heart is one such experience. For one thing, it awakens us to the fact that we have more in common with Jesus than we thought we had; for Jesus, too had a heart, and we are told that for all the physical torture and loss of blood he suffered at his crucifixion, he died of a broken heart.
His ministry, it seemed, had been characterized by a broken heart - the broken heart of a lover suffering the slings and arrows of unrequited love. Oh, not the love of a man rejected by a woman, thought I do not for a moment doubt the possibility that Jesus knew what it was to fall in love and knew that it was not for him, which may have been a deep and secret pain in his life. But I am speaking of the love of this Jesus the Christ for humanity, in which we see the love of God for the world. After many months of self-giving ministry and careful explanation, Jesus hears one of his closest disciples say, “Lord, show us the one who is God.” Broken hearted, Jesus could only respond, “Have I been with you so long, and yet you do not know me, Phillip?”
This was a lover who sat on a hillside overlooking a city saying… “O Jerusalem,
How thin and pale our love appears next to that of God: how full of talk, but short on action; all smoke but no fire. It reminds me of the lad who sent his beloved a valentine telegram: “I love you, I love you, I love you.” “That is only nine words,” said the agent. “You get ten for the same price.” So the lad thought some more, taxing his creativity to the limit, and decided on a final message, which read, “I love you, I love you, I love you. Regards.”
To be sure, the Eros of valentine is not to be confused with the agape of the cross. But while the two are different, they are not unrelated. Just possible the “broken valentine” could open the way to an insight concerning the meaning of the cross – not only in the way of understanding God’s pain, but of knowing what to do with your own.
For what do you do when your love is rejected and you are left helpless and alone, when behind your façade of cheerfulness is a heart broken in a dozen pieces? What do you say when occasionally a tear slips out? What do you do?
First of all, I suppose you do that Jesus did and express the forsakenness you feel – to someone and to God. And having been thus honest with life, you may then proceed to do that Jesus also did, and yield up the whole affair to God and ask God to make of it what God will.
George Bernard Shaw wrote that Jesus was executed upon a thick stick of wood, but he always had a way of getting a hole of the right end of it. How do you get hold of the right end of a broken love? How do you put a cross or see a cross in the midst of a broken heart? I think there are ways, and again it is Jesus who gives us the clues. Jesus could have just wallowed in his misery and felt sorry for himself Instead, he cooperated with God in making the very experience of pain itself a further vehicle for demonstrating God’s love.
So it is with the crucifixion. I cannot describe the power for me in Jesus’ prayer for my forgiveness at the moment when he had every reason to curse me. You see, the response a person makes to a rejecting lover is really a measure of the depth of one’s love. If you will allow a moment of autobiography as I share with you this morning. For I have learned from my personal experience that if the response is anger and a desire to hurt back, it means that love was no more than a means to get something. “I love me, therefore, I want you … and if I cannot have you, then I despise you and want to hurt you.” And that is exactly where I found myself with my former wife when our marriage was ending. It was a horrendously horrible place to be and words were shared that never should have been shared. I do not know where you are in terms of your valentines, or relationships, or marriages…but if they are not working and broken…find a way to get out of them…without destroying each other…otherwise the brokenness of that could haunt you all the rest of your days.
If on the other hand, one can, by means of the Holy Spirit…say, “I want the life of my beloved to be as full and as happy and as guilt-free as possible, because I love that person so” it is tantamount to picking up a cross. I still remember vividly…the way my former wife and I were able to come to our senses and realize what we were doing to each other. In that realization, I penned her these words two years after our marriage ended. I wrote then to her on the second anniversary of her marriage to her beloved…and in writing them…found solace and healing. I share them with you…
If I love you best by giving you distance and space,
I shall give you distance and space.
If I love you best by rejoicing for you for your other affections and new life,
I shall rejoice for you.
If I love you best by directing that love to other needs that surround me, then
That is what I shall do…
Because I love you best… Because I love you best.
In writing these words I was finally able to do something with the brokenness in my life and make it an instrument of love. It makes my love a verb and thus rescues me from the feeling of helplessness, the feeling that there is nothing I can do. It is, so to speak, a way of sowing the grief, of investing the sorrow, of doing something positive with it; and in so doing, it becomes an action in which God also has a hand.
I do not pretend to understand how God always acts in our lives. I cannot believe that God guides and governs every accident and incident that occurs and then, therefore, we can simply turn to God to earn our living, or solve our problems, or protect us from harm on the highway. Neither do I believe that God is removed, disinterested, and uninvolved in the world’s history or in our personal lives. I have faith, and I have some evidence, that God can take the thread of any event and weave it into a pattern for our good in God’s own time, but that requires our faithful and patient co-operation. I believe this, even with respect to the torturous agonies of broken loves. We have experienced them and we will experience them again, but C.S. Lewis was right that “to love at all is to be vulnerable.”
The whole of what Lewis said is this:
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…safe, dark, motionless, airless…and it will not be broken…it will become unbreakable…impenetrable…irredeemable.
That, to me, and I suspect to all of us, would be a slow death. No one is safer than a dead person and no one is deader than a person who always has to be safe. I would rather be vulnerable and take my chances. Real love is only for those who are willing to take the risks of love, in the confidence that all of our lives are kept and finally redeemed in the love of God.
And that my friends…as sincerely as I can put it…is a prayer for my life and mine for yours.
Amen and Amen.”
This was the sermon at the church I attend while here at school, obviously on Feb 13th. I must say it was one of the most moving sermons I have heard in quite some time. Perhaps a little too personal (there were some anecdotes not included here), but I still believe it is essential that our pastors allow congregations to understand the humanity, and mortality of their leaders. Anyways, what got to me about this sermon had less to do with the message of God’s love (although that is certainly a strong one as well). But just the connectedness of us all through the simple experience of a broken heart. No matter how great or small the love, the hurt can seem irreparable. I feel like there is more to say, but I can’t find it currently….
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