Intro:
On Friday, July 29, 2005, Fox News ran the following story:
Some Seek Alternatives to 'Til Death Do Us Part'
Friday, July 29, 2005
By Jennifer D'Angelo
In some weddings, "'til death do us part" is going the way of "to honor and obey" — that is, out the window.
Vows like "For as long as we continue to love each other," "For as long as our love shall last" and "Until our time together is over" are increasingly replacing the traditional to-the-grave vow — a switch that some call realistic and others call a recipe for failure.
"We're hearing that a lot — 'as long as our love shall last.' I personally think it's quite a statement on today's times — people know the odds of divorce," said New Jersey wedding expert Sharon Naylor, author of "Your Special Wedding Vows," who adds that the rephrasing is also part of a more general trend toward personalizing vows…
(from http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,163251,00.html)
What do you think of that? “Realistic” or “recipe for failure”? When I meet with a couple to talk about an upcoming marriage, I let them know that I have three basic criteria for performing a Christian wedding: it must be between a man and a woman, they must each make a solemn vow that their relationship will be exclusive (ie. “to be faithful to you alone”), and they must each make a solemn vow that their relationship will be lifelong. I tell them that they can express those thoughts, and the others that make up their vows, in language of their choosing, and I help them with that, but at its very basic, fundamental level, it has to be exclusive and it has to be lifelong.
Context:
Last week we began a look at the question, “how should we love?”, which comes out of our desire to obey Jesus’ description of the greatest commandments: “Teacher, which is the most important commandment in the law of Moses?” 37 Jesus replied, “‘You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind.’ 38 This is the first and greatest commandment. 39 A second is equally important: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ 40 The entire law and all the demands of the prophets are based on these two commandments.” (Matt 22:36-40). It also comes out of our goal as a church community is to “love first”. The commands are simple enough, but putting them into action is worth a deeper exploration: what does it mean to love? how we have been shaped by our culture in terms of what it means to love? practically speaking, How should we love? How do we actually live a love for God and a love for others?
Last week we explored the idea of love as a powerful feeling, concluding that while there is a strong emotional component to love, and that is a really great thing, the emotion is not actually love. Today I want to explore a second way that I think our culture has shaped our understanding of love and compare that to the teachings of Scripture. Last week we talked about music as a medium for our cultural message, this week I thought we’d use TV. Again, it is a really broad topic so I have to just randomly pick a couple examples and generalize. So let’s pick one genre, the relationship sitcom – like Seinfeld, or Friends, and let’s think about what this particular genre of TV teaches us about love. Now, the “rules” of this type of TV show state that there is a set cast of characters, four in Seinfeld and six in Friends, and they appear week after week in various situations, interacting with various different characters and other relationships with people, but (and here is my point) – generally those are all temporary. Relationships come and go, they are often sexual in nature, but they aren’t really intimate outside of that physical realm. Often the general plot lines (in these and other TV shows like them) is one of the characters “falling in love”, a relationship existing for a time, and then it ends and the person moves on. Of course it is more complex than that, and there are other parts and messages, but this is the one I want to focus on today as an example of this critical skill we need to develop of listening to the messages our culture is sending, and then comparing those to Scripture to see what is truth and what is a lie.
So with this cultural message in mind, – that life is about meeting someone, growing to “love” them in some form or other, and then moving on to the next relationship, which many of us have watched hundreds of times on television - let me as this question: can love ever be temporary? What do you think? Now I know that in my introduction I used the example of marital love, but I want you to think now more broadly than that, to our conception of “love” in general, not just in romantic relationships, as you reflect on that question: can love ever be temporary?
Is that Jesus?
I think that one major message of our culture is that it is ok for love to be temporary, transitory, and to last as long as it seems to “work” in one way or another. I see this in friendships, in small groups where the goal is some sort of Biblical community, definitely in marriages, in our commitment to relationships with people in our church community, even sometimes in family relationships. We live in the middle of a culture that says, rather loudly in my view, that love is ok and good and desirable as long as everything is working out, which we then instinctively evaluate based on how this relationship or circumstance is meeting our needs. We become the center. Now, in reality this doesn’t happen right at the beginning – I know very few people who bail out of a relationship at the first sign of strain, or when it first becomes difficult or demanding. But I do know of a lot of cases where we have a certain threshold, after which we will not love anymore because we have “put up with enough”, or we “don’t have the energy to deal with it anymore”, or where “it’s too hard now”, or where “well I tried twice to phone that friend to fix the problem, but now it is up to them and I’m going to wait for them to come to me now”, and we can all justify those actions with words like self-preservation, or of a need to “love ourselves”, or of a resistance to being taken advantage of, or a perspective that we’ve given as much as we are willing, or even of a perspective that says “well that relationship (with a person or a church or even a family member) isn’t worth that level of sacrifice on my part, so I’m giving up and walking away”.
Ok, so now I return to the standard I taught last week in evaluating the messages our culture sends us about love: is that Jesus? Put specifically in terms of this week’s question: was Jesus’ love ever temporary? On the highest “plane”, I think we’d all say “no” – Jesus’ love for humanity has existed since the beginning of creation, when God molded us, when God breathed His Spirit of life into us, and it will continue into eternity. But how about in Jesus’ human relationships – in those, as a model for us – did Jesus ever love with a temporary love? And what then does that mean for us? For me, I’m really struggling with this idea of a permanent love in the context of a temporary world – how do we be Christlike, living in loving relationships, when the very fabric of our existence is interwoven with various different people at different times in life: I have very fine friendships with people I see very seldom, for whom I would drop everything in time of need and I know they would do the same for me, but our relationship isn’t active, so can I still call it a loving relationship?
So then I go to 1 Cor 13:7-8, and it doesn’t help much: “(love) always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.” Once again, are these little more than nice-sounding ideals, or does God intend us to somehow live by them? And do they only apply to people closest to us – those we love “most”, and not the other, less-important relationships? We all recognize that we live in a culture where people move in and out of each others lives constantly, so how can we possibly live a love that ALWAYS perseveres/trusts/hopes/protects?
Aha, maybe that there is an important clue… “we live in a culture that is transient and temporary”, and maybe that is what is wrong. Maybe God’s standard isn’t wrong, maybe the whole idea of love as something strong and permanent, with words like “ALWAYS”, is actually what love REALLY is, and maybe the message and “reality” of our culture is the thing in this discussion that is actually wrong.
An Important Sidebar:
As I wrestled this through, I had one of those little side-bar thoughts. Now I am going to come back to the main point in a moment, and we’ll talk about how urgent this makes our need to be healed and to be healers, but this side-bar was one of those times when I just really felt it was the Holy Spirit speaking to me. Here is what I felt God was saying: our experience of love being temporary is what makes it so hard for us to really accept the love of God for us. See, God’s love isn’t like the love we have known from other people, but on a deep level within us that is really hard to believe and accept because it is so different from what we have experienced. And I felt the smile of God as I heard these words, words that opened the window and let in the fresh air, that pulled back the blinds and let in the light. God’s love is different, God’s love is steadfast and faithful and “always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.” God’s love is not the same as the love of the parent that let you down or abused you, of the friend who betrayed you, of the spouse who abandoned you, or of the child who rejected you. God’s love is not the same as that! God’s love is perfect, beautiful, full of power, moving and strong, and there is NOTHING that can “separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? 36As it is written: "For your sake we face death all day long; we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered."37No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. 38For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, 39neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Rom 8). THAT’S how powerful God’s love is!
The Need to be Healed and to be Healers:
Ok, now listen very carefully: God’s love is so powerful, that it can actually heal us from all the wounds we’ve experienced from the transient, temporary, and harm done to us by those whom we trusted to love us but who actually hurt us deeply. That’s the great, amazing, hopeful, incredibly good news.
But now comes the hard part: in order to be healed by the love of God for us, we have to allow ourselves to be loved. We have to risk opening ourselves to be loved by God. And that is sometimes a tough thing to do, when we’ve had experience after experience of risking and getting hurt. This past summer, my son broke his elbow. We didn’t know it at first, but the X-Ray was pretty clear in the ER, and the Dr. was pretty adamant that he’d need surgery in 2-3 days. But then he put this temporary splint on Thomas’ arm, and it started to feel better. The pain wasn’t as strong. It was awkward and uncomfortable, but it was manageable. And that made the prospect of surgery a lot more difficult – it was going to hurt again, they were going to cut open his arm and put some wires and pins in, he’d have to be under general anaesthetic, all these unpleasant things, when at the moment it was manageable. He could cope. He didn’t want to have surgery, especially when he didn’t really feel all that bad. But until he faced the pain of the surgery, he couldn’t start to heal. See the parallel? I think a lot of people are walking through life with a bunch of emotional “broken elbows”, coping, but desperately needing to take the risk of letting God’s love really wash over and start to heal. It can be hard, risky, require help from people trained and skilled, but it is very much worth it.
Where do people find the motivation to take those steps, to get past the hurdles, to face hurts of the past? Sometimes the circumstances of life, sometimes an inner resolve, but often it comes from hearing the story of another person who has travelled a similar path. And this, my friends is where this whole message about God’s unfailing love, and God’s command for us to love “our neighbour”, and all the Scriptural messages about being a “witness” to God’s great love, this is where it all comes down to the second of Jesus’ commands described for us in 1 Cor 13. You and I need to love people enough that we share our story of God loving us perfectly, and how that has healed, restored, transformed, and set us free. It’s not about having all the answers to the theological questions, it is not about debating and convincing, it is not about confrontation or pressure or manipulation.
The story of the Kingdom of God just goes like this: God loves me perfectly. My life had some hurts and pains, some self-inflicted and some inflicted by others. But when I opened my messed up life to that perfect love of God, God did some amazing things for me. Now your story has different details than my story – the hurts are different and so are the amazing things God does – but the story is the same, and the story needs to be told. And in the telling, there is incredible joy, and in the telling is actually a powerful expression of love.
Conclusion:
My challenge is very straightforward today – let God’s perfect love impact you, and share that story, and don’t wait until it is all worked out or you’ll never tell it. Really practically, can you think of one person who needs to hear your ongoing story of the work of God in your life? Here’s a simple way to start that conversation: “Can I share something with you? It is kind of personal, but I’d like to and I hope it might be an encouragement to you…”
