What is Love? (Love is the Way)

​What is Love?

Today I would like to begin a new preaching series based on a Book by the Episcopal Bishop Michael Curry called “Love is the Way”.  The book is a really thought provoking exploration on the meaning of love and the potential for love to truly transform the world.  The first chapter begins in an obvious place as it asks the question “What is Love?”, “What is this thing called Love?”

In answering that question, Bishop Curry introduces us to a woman who made an enormous impact on his life, a women by the name of Josie Robbins. At the time of writing the book, Josie Robbins was still alive and in her 85th year.  The moment that precipitated Josie Robbins coming into his life was in fact the death of his own mother when he and his sister were still children.  She wasn’t a member of their church. She wasn’t even a family friend at the time.  She was just a lady who stopped by at his own church to drop off her neighbours child before going on to her own Baptist Church.  

But when she heard about their family situation and asked: ‘How can I help?’ soon thereafter, his father invited her into their home, leading her to the spare bedroom where a pile of clothes needed to be ironed.  A little later the same day he rang to say that he was running late at work and could she give his kids lunch?  And from that day, as she responded to further requests from his dad for help, Josie Robbins would eventually become a surrogate mother to him and his sister. 

He writes that “Moved by love, Josie  jumped in with both arms and never let go.”  She became the one who made the hurt go away as she did many of the things that their mother used to do for them. And over the years she was present at all their family events and big days – from high school, to university and to his seminary graduations, to weddings, ordinations, births and baptisms and on and on and on. 

For Michael Curry Josie Robbins became a living example of what love looks like, the kind of love that is the only way we can save the planet. 

Many languages have several words to encompass different kinds and dimensions of love.  Three of the most frequently used words in New Testament Greek are eros, philia and agape. Eros refers to romantic and sexual love and is what Valentines Day is about.  Philia is fraternal, brotherly or sisterly love. Also the bonds of love and affection experienced between friends.  

Finally, Agape is love for the other – a sacrificial love that seeks the good and well-being of others, of society and of the world.  Michael Curry writes that Agape is the kind of love that looks outward.  It is the kind of love that he experienced through Josie Robbins.  It is the kind of love that Jesus seemed to be most interested in. Love in this sense is the firm commitment to act for the well-being of someone other than yourself opening up the goodness and sweetness of life to them. And Michael Curry writes that it can be personal, or political, individual or communal, intimate or public. Love can never be segregated to the private or personal dimensions of life, but extends to and affects all aspects of life. 

What Michael Curry didn’t know as a child was that Josie Robbin’s love shared so generously with his own family had changed many other lives also. She was the principal of St Augustine’s school, a high school for pregnant and parenting teens.  In the 1960’s, while most of the rest of society were ready to disown and abandon pregnant teens, she poured her life energy into giving them a chance at a better future for themselves and their children, helping thousands of them to complete their high schooling with the opportunity to go on to study further or get a decent paying job.  

Michael Curry writes that an oft quoted passage in the New testament says, “God so loved the world that he gave his only son”. The Greek word for love used in the passage is agape, while the Greek word for ‘world’ is kosmos. But what it really means he says is “everything” – “everything that is”. Isn’t that wonderful…For God so loved the kosmos, God so loved everything that is, everything that God had created, that God gave… God did not take. God gave. As Michael Curry says: “That’s agape. That’s love. It is the way to a new world that looks something more like God’s dream for us and for all creation, what Dante spoke of as “the love that moves the sun and the stars”. 

Today’s reading is from 1 Cor 13, the apostle Paul’s inspiring ‘ode to love’. It is a passage that tragically is seldom read in churches except at weddings.  But as Michael Curry says, when the apostle Paul wrote those words he wasn’t at a wedding. He wasn’t giving advice to young couples on how to make their marriage work.  Paul’s words were in fact written for  a dysfunctional church community in Corinth in which its members had forgotten all of the values of Jesus of Nazareth that had first brought them together and they were in fact ripping themselves apart.  

They were a community splitting into factions according to who had baptised them. Members suing each other in the secular courts. Some were sleeping with other members spouses. The rich and well-to-do were demanding that they receive communion first and others getting drunk at communion. And in the midst of all of this a community arguing about who was more spiritual than who. 

Bishop Curry says it is behaviour that has a decidedly contemporary ring about it reflecting much of the of behaviour and attitudes expressed so often on social media platforms today: Arrogant, rude, insisting on its own way, irritable, resentful, rejoicing in wrong doing.  And so Paul reminds the Church in Corinth of the kind of love that they should be nurturing as a church community built around the values of Jesus – the only kind of love that can save a divided community. 

Bishop Curry writes that you might think that the opposite of love is hate. But if Love looks outward, to the good of the other, then it’s opposite is not hate. Rather it’s opposite is in fact selfishness. A life completely centred on the self. 

He goes on to say that intuitively, we all understand that nothing good ever came from selfishness and greed. In contrast to love, selfishness is the most destructive force in the cosmos and hate is only a symptom. Selfishness destroys families. It destroys communities. It destroys societies, nations and global communities, and he says, it will destroy the human race by laying waste to our planet it we let it. 

By contrast, he says that Love is the only thing that has ever changed the world for the better, seen in people who have dedicated themselves to the growth and flourishing of others, their communities and of the world.  This includes, parents and teachers dedicated to the flourishing of the children under their care. In fact it includes anyone and everyone who in their neighbourhoods, and places of work dedicate themselves to living not just for themselves, but for the greater good. People like Josie Robbins,  Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi, William Wilberforce, the great abolitionist, Malala Yousafzai the activist for girls' education and the youngest Nobel Prize laureate, who survived an assassination attempt by the Taliban and continues to advocate for education and equality. 

As Michael Curry writes: Love is a firefighter running into a burning building, risking his or her life for someone he doesn’t even know. Love is that first responder hurtling toward an emergency, a catastrophe, a disaster. Love is also someone protesting anything that hurts or harms the children of God.  As Jesus says hours before his crucifixion in John’s Gospel: “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s own life for one’s friends.”

Where selfishness excludes, love makes room and includes. Where selfishness puts down, love lifts up. Where selfishness hurts and harms, love helps and heals. Where selfishness enslaves, love sets free and liberates. 

And finally, Michael Curry says that Love is God’s GPS for living.  Getting back to Paul and the dysfunctional Christian community in Corinth, he concludes his exhortation to them to love with these words: “And now faith hope and love abide… and the greatest of these is love.”

Michael Curry writes that Faith is another word for trust. Without trust society falls apart. Every society depends on trust. Without trust, government is useless and relationships are impossible. Without trust it’s every human for him or herself – and that is just a mess he says. And so faith is a radical act of trust in reality. It is to dare to live and act as though the moral arc of the universe is long but bent towards justice, even if you can’t see its end.  Nothing short of faith can stay the course. It dares us to believe that in the end, even if we can’t see it, love will win. 

Then comes hope, which Michael Curry says puts wind in our sails of faith, for it is the energy that keeps us going when life gets tough. It was Dante who imagined the gates of hell with a signpost above it: “Abandon hope, all who enter here”.  Without hope Bishop Curry says that life becomes mere survival, but with hope he says you can march through hell for a heavenly cause. 

But while faith and hope are necessary for a full life, Bishop Curry says that they are not a guide for life. They don’t tell you what to do. That he says is the purpose of love. It is love that tells you how to direct the energy of faith and hope. He says that if faith and hope are the wind and the sails, then love is life’s rudder. It is God’s GPS or SatNav for the way of love will show us the right thing to do every single time.  He writes: “It is a moral and spiritual grounding – and a place of rest – amid the chaos that is often part of life. It’s how we stay decent in indecent times.” And although the way of love is not easy, he reminds us that it is the only thing that has ever made a positive difference in this world. 

What is love to you?  What are the places in your life where you are needing love’s care?  What are the places in your life where love is calling you to reach out beyond yourself to make a difference in the world?