I Want To Know What Love Is
Sermon preached July 6, 2014
Texts: Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30
So here is the 1984 Foreigner song from which I took this morning’s sermon title, “I Want To Know What Love Is” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=loWXMtjUZWM&feature=kp
But now I have a bit of a problem, because I am not sure just how to get from this song to the next word in the sermon: gonorrhea. This is not a good transition. “I want to know what love is, gonorrhea.”
So let’s see if we can redeem this situation. Many of you know that my daughter is an ob-gyn resident. This week she was going to be making a presentation on gonorrhea and chlamydia to other residents and physicians, and I asked if she remembered the Seinfeld episode where Kramer was acting out disease symptoms for medical students, giving a stellar performance for gonorrhea.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLRlbsBJhio
How is it that I can remember a Seinfeld episode? I love Trivial Pursuit kinds of games. I have sometimes thought I might be good on Jeopardy, along with thousands of other people, though I have imagined finally getting on the show and having all kinds of categories about which I know nothing – “Alex, I’ll take fabrics for $100.”
Knowledge. There is so much that can be known, and so much that we do know. Our minds are pretty amazing. While knowledge matters, there is something vastly more important, wisdom. Joan Chittister writes: It’s not difficult to become smart. It is difficult to become enlightened enough to be able to distinguish what is smart from what is wise. (Becoming Fully Human, 97).
Wisdom. Let me suggest to you that wisdom has not only to do with our minds, our heads as it were. Wisdom has to do with head, heart and hands – with knowing, feeling, and doing. We get hints of this in various places in the Bible. Be wise in what is good. (Romans 16:19) Who is wise and understanding among you? Show by your good life that your works are done with gentleness born of wisdom. (James 3:13)
In today’s gospel reading, we get more than a hint that wisdom has to do with head, heart, and hands, we get the message straight up. Today’s reading can be divided into two sections, the first centered on the saying, “yet wisdom is vindicated by her deeds,” and the second focusing on the invitation – “come to me.” Wisdom in the religious tradition of Jesus was a feminine figure – Sophia. The emphasis of Jesus in this passage is that wisdom may not be what the purportedly “wise and intelligent” think it is. People missed the wisdom of John the Baptist, and they are missing the wisdom of Jesus. Want to know where wisdom is, look for deeds. Sophia/Wisdom makes herself known by her effects. Even more significantly, Matthew’s words locate the wisdom of God in Jesus. Marcus Borg: On the one hand, Jesus was a teacher of wisdom…. On the other hand, the New Testament also presents Jesus as the embodiment or incarnation of divine wisdom (Meeting Jesus Again For the First Time, 69). Elizabeth Schussler-Fiorenza: Matthew characterizes Jesus as Sophia herself…. Jesus does what what Wisdom does. (Jesus: Miriam’s Child, Sophia’s Prophet, 151). Jesus embodies wisdom and Jesus embodies love, and wisdom is known in love.
To be wise, then, is to align our thinking, feeling and doing and to align it in the direction of love. To be wise is to love. To grow in wisdom is to grow in love. To talk about the relationship between wisdom and love is important, for we are called to love in a very complicated and complex world. To be wise is to love and to love well is to be discerning. In writing about the wisdom tradition of the Old Testament, scholar Walter Brueggemann says: Wisdom teachers stay close to the enigmatic quality of experience… [and] the richness of concrete experience…. In an embrace of the traditions of wisdom, know the dailiness of life in all its contested, buoyant density. (Walter Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament, 681, 745) Jesus embodied wisdom. Jesus embodies love, and wisdom is known in love, a love that operates with discernment in the midst of our rich, complex, dense world. And Jesus, in his life touched very particular lives with his love, especially those who were on the social margins.
Into this enigmatic, rich world, this world of buoyant density, we hear the call of wisdom. We hear the call to love. The call of love is gift and demand. But just what, materially speaking, are God’s gift and demand as they are decisively re-presented through Jesus himself? They are, in a word, the gift and demand of love, of a boundless love that authorizes – i.e., both entitles and empowers – a human existence of obedient faith working through love and love incarnating itself as justice…. Jesus himself, through everything he says and does, means love – both God’s prevenient love for all of us and, on this basis, through our obedient faith in God’s love, our own returning love for God and for all whom God loves. (Schubert Ogden, The Understanding of Christian Faith, 73)
Love is a demand. Love implores us to live differently. The wisdom of love is always seeking to discern the loving course of action in a complex world, or sometimes we need to say the “more loving” course of action when the alternatives are less than ideal. Love demands our best thinking, and wisdom demands our deepest loving.
Yet love is not ceaseless demand, it is also a gift. If we see love as only demand we risk harming ourselves and others. The Biblical scholar Walter Wink shares the response of a person discussing in one of his workshops the famous passage from Matthew 25 about the least of these. I tried that for seven years and ignored my wife and family trying to get European and U.S. money to the starving of India and Africa. I totally ignored the ‘least’ within myself and my family, till I lost them through divorce. (Walter Wink, The Human Being, 185 ) Love is not only demand. Love is beauty, joy, musement. It is finding our way to dance to the unforced rhythms of grace. I bet you may have been wondering if ever I was going to get to the second section of today’s gospel reading, a favorite among many. Jesus: Come to me, all you that are weary and carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light. Sophia/Wisdom speaking. Jesus (The Message): Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me and you’ll recover your life. I’ll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me – watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won’t lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with me and you’ll learn to live freely and lightly.
The question of wisdom is the question, “I want to know what love is.” To be wise is to know, in the words of the poet W. H. Auden The choice to love is open till we die. The voice of wisdom is also the voice of Forrest Gump: I may not be a smart man, Jenny, but I know what love is. Wisdom is as wisdom does, and what wisdom does is love. May we be so wise. Amen.
Faith Forum After Hours – Seven Summer Sermons
July 6, 2014
Scripture Reading: Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30
Sermon Title: I Want to Know What Love Is
Quotes and Questions for Reflection
It is not difficult to become smart. It is difficult to become enlightened enough to be able to distinguish what is smart from what is wise.
Joan Chittister, Becoming Fully Human
How would you distinguish knowledge from wisdom?
Be wise in what is good. Paul, Romans 16:19
Who is wise and understanding among you? Show by your good life that your works are done with gentleness born of wisdom.
James 3:13
What do you think about the idea that true wisdom is wisdom about love, that genuine wisdom leads to loving action?
But just what, materially speaking, are God’s gift and demand as they are decisively re-presented through Jesus himself? They are, in a word, the gift and demand of love, of a boundless love that authorizes – i.e., both entitles and empowers – a human existence of obedient faith working through love and love incarnating itself as justice…. Jesus himself, through everything he says and does, means love – both God’s prevenient love for all of us and, on this basis, through our obedient faith in God’s love, our own returning love for God and for all whom God loves.
Schubert Ogden, The Understanding of Christian Faith
How would you reflect on love as both gift and demand?
Wisdom teachers stay close to the enigmatic quality of experience… [and] the richness of concrete experience…. In an embrace of the traditions of wisdom, know the dailiness of life in all its contested, buoyant density.
Walter Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament
The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.
William James, The Principles of Psychology
On the one hand, Jesus was a teacher of wisdom…. On the other hand, the New Testament also presents Jesus as the embodiment or incarnation of divine wisdom.
Marcus Borg, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time
The choice to love is open till we die.
W. H. Auden
I may not be a smart man, Jenny, but I know what love is.
Forrest Gump