PEOPLE'S CHURCH OF DOVER

Luke 2:1-7                                                                                        Love in a New Key
Sermon Dec. 20, 2009:  People’s United Church of Christ, Dover, DE:  The Rev. Dan Griggs

            He had been in the hospital for weeks.  We thought we were going to lose him.  He had been fighting the cancer for a decade, and now he seemed to be losing the battle.  I sat with him for awhile and we talked.  The disease had not robbed him of his interest in the world—who was playing golf, what was going on at church, his brother’s interesting life, his love for his wife and children and grandchildren.  We had a prayer, and I got up to leave.  That’s when he said it:  it caught me by complete surprise, and I didn’t know what on earth to say.  His words to me were:  “I love you, man.”  No man outside my family had ever said that to me before.  I thought about it for days before I could figure it out.  On the next visit to his hospital room I brought it up and said, “You really surprised me when you said that.  But I want you to know, my friend, that I love you, too.” 

            I think that the most misunderstood, most confusing word in the English language is “love.”  We use it for everything from religious experience to chocolate.  Since the Big Band Era with those wonderful singers like Ella Fitzgerald, Rosemary Clooney, Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby, the English word “love” has been used as a substitute for other language about sexual contact.  Blues and Rock music amplified that trend.  It’s in the movies with that meaning, too.  Now the ancient Greeks were more sophisticated in their use of words:  they had one word for friendship (philia, as in Philadelphia), a different word for the kindness of the gods (agape), a completely different word for physical desire (eros, as in erotic), and they had another word (storge) that meant affection.[1]  We just say “I love… (whatever it is).”  So our English word “love” is like a pair of garden shoes so caked with dirt and scrapes and pieces of leaf and MiracleGro and weed-killer that you can hardly tell the size of them anymore. 

            And this is tragic, because we Christians need the word “love.”  But we need it to have a crisp meaning, whereas it often feels like an emotion—and a sentimental one at that.  We call the Gospel of John “the Gospel of love,” and those words remind me of a picture in a Bible-story book I used to have, a print of a Renaissance painting of the Last Supper, not daVinci’s, where the Apostle John as a very young man is leaning in on Jesus’ shoulder; but when the real John used the word “love” he meant  something not at all maudlin:[2] 

There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear….

and

No one has greater love than this:  to lay down your life for your friends.

I think this meaning of the word is what my friend in the hospital with cancer meant when he said, “I love you, man.”  There’s a depth of meaning in Christian love that has gotten covered up with emotional MiracleGro—and it doesn’t need it. 

            When God stretched out his powerful arm and sent his Word[3] to be born of Mary, a baby boy, it was love in a new key.  Love in a new key. 

            What I’m about to say, I’ve never read in any Bible commentary, I’ve never seen this developed by any theologian.  This just comes from my reading of the New Testament, paying attention to the word “love.”  I believe the early church, during the time of the apostles, went looking for a way to talk about who Jesus was and what he had done, and there was no word that said what they knew in their own experience:  no way to say it; so they took a word the Greeks used to mean “the distant kindliness of the gods” and they filled that word with all the passion, all the power, all the wonder and mystery and healing of humanity that Jesus was; and that word came to have a whole new meaning for Christians, right down to our own time.  The word they used was “love”—in Greek, agape.  The Greeks didn’t use the word this way:  for them, their many gods were as jealous, spiteful, irascible, as kind and pitying as any human being; but they didn’t really care about anybody.  The “love” of the Greek gods was a cold, distant kindness, sort of like the IRS when they send you your tax refund.  Those first Christians took the word away from the Greeks and filled it to the brim with energy and caring.  So when the Gospel of John was written in the 90’s, the writer could have Jesus, on the night before he suffered,  tell his apostles in the upper room, “Love one another, as I have loved you.”[4]  Not sisterly love, not love like we’re rooting for the same team, not love like the Las Vegas performance of Tom Jones communicates on stage:  but rather love in a new key—love like God loves, and sent his Son to live out this love as one of us. 

            This love is content to dwell in a humble home where perspiration is a mark of joyful action.  This love is so electrified by the house of God that he may stay behind and talk for three days with the scholars.  This love leaves home behind in order to go follow a man of faith whose greatest desire is to see the nation righteous again.  This love knows the rules, but is willing to touch a woman, touch a leper, touch an alien worker and do for each one something they never expected.  This love will stand on a hillside and discourse all day about God’s desire for fellowship with us.  This love sees faith co-opted by institutionalism, so that the people seeking God are given laws instead of “living water,” and he braids a cat-o-nine-tails and interrupts the blindness of those who think they see.  This love welcomes anybody who is sincere.  This love steps out in front and takes the punishment of a rebel, even though what he really is   is human like “human” is intended to be.  This love lies waiting in a tomb, until the original power of God raises his life up to fill the whole world.  This is truly love in a new key. 

            Where might such love dwell?  American tanks and Humvees pass through a thousand dusty villages in Iraq and Afghanistan, but this love stops to see a child, speak to a widow, help a young husband repair his house.  Representatives of more than a hundred nations gather to discuss and debate climate change, but this love helps a poor neighbor insulate his windows and clean his furnace.  Another sports star’s life gets turned wrong and it goes public, but this love has a neighbor whose husband did the same thing, and becomes a welcoming listener. 

            “Love came down at Christmas,” but it need not be some grand demonstration.  You don’t have to solve the Israeli-Palestinian problem or balance the federal budget—love in a new key is the spirit of Jesus himself at work in your life, whatever your life is, whatever confronts you.  It isn’t a law, it’s your own, personal living out of the kind of love you yourself have received from God.  A hundred years ago Albert Schweitzer said it pretty well:[5]

This “they” that Dr. Schweitzer talks about   is us—you and me.  It is the people of Christ, the disciples of love incarnate.  This is how we ring the changes on this love in a new key.

            Christmas is Friday.  The trees are going up.  The decorations are appearing.  The gifts are hidden in secret places—or not so secret.  Our children are hearing again the popular stories, both religious and secular.  Our radios play the carols and the love songs of the season, as well as that growing number of humorous ditties.  All this is Christmas—all this and more.  But more than all these things, Christmas is what the fourteenth century Christian mystic Meister Eckhart said:  “the birth of the son of God in you,” for (he said) “God lies in wait for us with nothing so much as love.”[6]  Jesus, born in you, is love in a new key.

AMEN