Sermon — April 21, 2024
The Rev. Greg Johnston
There’s a beautiful piece in the New York Times Sunday Magazine this morning, with the title, “The Poems That Taught Me How to Love,” in which Nicholas Casey writes of the summer term he spent in Chile at the age of 19, a summer when he discovered the poetry of Pablo Neruda. Neruda’s immediately had him hooked: his imagery and emotion captured everything it was to be a freshman full of romantic longing, living in a foreign land. Also, it was the only Spanish poetry he could actually read. “Ah vastness of pines,” he read on the train down to Patagonia, “murmur of waves breaking, / Twilight falling in your eyes.” And yet there was no “you,” for him; no muse to whom to recite all these poems.
Until the last day, at least, when he met a girl. A German girl, visiting from Berlin. They spent the next day together, and the eleven-hour bus ride back into town. He read her Neruda’s poetry after dinner before they went back to their separate rooms.
The next day, as the bus left and they waved goodbye, his heart was breaking. He ran out to the curb—Stop the bus! Please! I forgot something. The driver stopped, and he stepped on, and gave his love a kiss. And in the perfect version of their lives, that would only be the beginning. But this is not the perfect version of life, and there was a boyfriend back in Germany named Jan, and it’s possible she wasn’t quite as into him as his Neruda-addled brain may have thought; in any case, that one day was the story’s beginning, middle, and end.
It’s a great little story—if you don’t get the magazine, you can find the piece online.
It’s a well-timed story, too, because this Sunday is, for us, is all about love. Not romantic love, of course. But it’s tempting to sentimentalize nonetheless, to sing lovely hymns and hear lovely words, to be as intoxicated by “The King of Love my shepherd is” as our young scholar was by the poetry of Neruda, and to think that feeling was love, and to think that expressing that feeling in beautiful poetry was love. But if we go a little deeper into what 1 John has to say about love this morning, it turns out that love cannot be captured in poetry or in hymns, because love is not a feeling or a word: it’s an action.
Of course, the kind of love that Pablo Neruda’s writing about is not the same as the Christian kind of love. You may have heard before, or maybe not, that ancient Greek, the language in which the New Testament is written, uses several different words for love. Eros is passion, romantic love; the yearning and pining that we might call a “crush.” in its most refined form, it’s an appreciation of the beauty within another person that leads us to appreciate Beauty itself. This is Pablo Neruda love. The second kind of love is filia, friendship, the kind of mutual affection and loyalty that binds together two good friends. When you like somebody, when you enjoy their company, when you want to hang out and chat after church: that’s filia. But the word for “love,” when the New Testament talks about love, is neither of these. It’s agape, and that means something else. Agape is a hard word to pin down, but it means something like “unconditional love.” It means, as Thomas Aquinas would say, “to will the good for someone else.” It’s a love that’s modeled in God’s own love for us, and in this kind of love there’s more duty than sentiment. As 1 John says, we should “love one another, just as he had commanded us.” (1 John 3:23) And that’s a sentence that makes no sense for the other kinds of love. Eros and filia can’t be commandments. You can’t be ordered to fall in love with someone. You can’t be obliged to like them. But you can be, and you are, commanded to love.
And that’s possible because if we’re talking about agape love, you can love someone without being in love with them. You can love someone without being related to them. You can love someone without even liking them, without having any feelings about them at all. And if that’s the case, then love cannot be about what you feel. Love is about what you do. And this is exactly what 1 John says.
“Little children, let us love,” the Elder writes, “not in word or speech, but in truth and action.” And he asks: “How does God’s love—How does the agape of God—abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a sibling in need and yet refuses help?” (3:17) When you see someone who needs your help, he says, what matters isn’t what you feel: it’s what you do. That’s what love is.
Most of us live in Boston, or Cambridge, or Somerville. I don’t need to tell you that this is a region of great inequality, a place where people with all the world’s goods and people in deep material need live side by side. And it’s also a place where people respond in love. Our only grocery store may be a Whole Foods, but Harvest on Vine distributes 12,000 pounds of food a month. The Clothes Closet was hopping here yesterday, with dozens of people shopping from clothes that dozens of other people had donated. We can always use more filia, more friendship and loyalty and solidarity across our communities, more connections and compassion between people from different backgrounds, but when it comes down to it, what matters from a Christian point of view is not word or speech or feelings of warmth, but action.
And there is more than one kind of need in the world. Every one of us, however wealthy or privileged or not, needs help, in one way or another. And every one of us, however little we may have in the eyes of the world, can love and care for and help someone else. We should yearn for and work for a more just world, in which there is no poverty or hunger, and yet on this side of the kingdom of God, we will always still need help. And when we see someone else who needs help, whether that’s material or emotional or spiritual, we should help, even if it means we have to make some sacrifice: because that is what Christian love is.
I loved the Times magazine piece because it’s the purest comparison I could possibly find. On one end of the spectrum, you have agape, Christian love, the self-giving, servant kind of love that’s not about words, but about action. And all the way over here on the other end, you have a shy college freshman’s Neruda-infused yearnings, hour after hour of poetry and speech, a depth and richness of feeling but no action at all—except that single, perfect kiss.
And yet as different as these two kinds of love are, the story points to something true, right there in the title: “The Poems that Taught Me How to Love.” We need to learn how to love. We need a poet to give voice to our inarticulate yearning. We need someone to model for us what it is to love.
And in the very different world of Christian love, that’s exactly what Jesus does. “We know love by this,” the Elder writes, “that he laid down his life for us.” (3:16) We know love by this. As Christians, we look at Jesus, and we listen to these stories about his teachings, his life, and his death, and we say: “This is what it means to love.”
And what we see, when we turn to these stories, wanting to know what it means to love, is a humble, patient, gentle, caring man, a good shepherd who lays down his own life for the sheep. To love is not to be like the hired hand, who hangs out with the sheep when times are easy, and then runs away and leaves them behind when the wolf comes and things get hard. To love is to be like the good shepherd, who lays down his life for the sheep, who’s willing to do anything to love and serve us when we are in need. And he doesn’t just do this to teach us how to love, but by doing all this, he does teach us to love.
And so we are invited—we are commanded—to love. Not to try to stir up inauthentic emotions for one another, not to try to warm our hearts with love, “for God is greater than our hearts,” and God knows already knows whether we like one another or not, and we don’t need to pretend. But to love one another, to give up some small part of our goods, to lay down some small part of our lives, to help one another when we are in need, so that just as we abide in God, God’s love abides in us.