Loving Our Neighbors As Our Selves

February 23, 2003

The Rev. Gretchen Woods

READINGS: Mark 12:28-31

And one of the scribes came up and heard them disputing with one another, and seeing that he answered them well, asked him, "Which commandment is the first of all? Jesus answered, "The first is, 'Hear O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one; and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.' The second is this, 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' There is no other commandment greater than these."

"The Steadfast Promise: Why love is not an emotion" by Karla McLaren in Emotional Genius: discovering the deepest language of the soul.

When an emotion is healthy, it arises only when it's needed, it shifts and changes in response to its environment, and it recedes willingly once it has addressed an issue. When love is healthy, it does none of these things. If emotions repeat themselves endlessly, or arise with the exact same intensity over and over again, then there's something wrong. But love, when it's healthy is a steadfast promise that repeats itself endlessly through life and beyond death. Love does not increase or decrease in response to its environment, and it does not change with the winds. Real love is not an emotion because it doesn't behave in the way emotions do. Real love is in a category of its own.

…real love doesn't depend upon what you can project onto your partner, or what you can get out of the relationship. Real love is a prayer and a deathless promise: an unwavering dedication to the soul of your loved one and to the soul of the world. Emotions and desires can come and go as they please, and circumstances can change in startling ways, but real love never wavers. Real love endures all emotions and all circumstances - it survives trauma, betrayal, divorce, and even death.

The truth about love is this: Love is constant; only the names change, Love doesn't restrict itself to romantic relationship: Love is everywhere - in the hug of a child, in the concern of a friend, in the center of your family, and even in the hearts of your pets. When you're lost and you can't seem to find love anywhere, you're actually listening to love in human language, instead of listening to the language of love.

I sense a visceral difference between love and emotion. I can be furious with people I love, or frightened of them, or completely disappointed in them, but the love never wavers. If my loved ones are too damaged or dissimilar for our relationship to work, I don't stay with them (and I don't let them keep my credit cards!), but I don’t stop loving them. For me, love lives in a realm far deeper than the emotions - and in that deep and rich place, words don't carry a lot of meaning. So I'll let words about love fall into the meaningful silence all around us. . . (pp. 369-370.)

SERMON: Loving Our Neighbors As Our Selves

In the first Gospel of Christian Scripture written (around 70 ACE, after the second fall of the Jewish Temple), a pseudonymous Mark tells a story of Jesus being tested by the Pharisees, Scribes and Sadduccees in the Temple in Jerusalem. They are trying to trip him up and discredit his preaching. A scribe approaches him and asks about the law of the Jews, the commandments. Jesus gives the answer Kent just read. Then the scribe responds:

"You are right, teacher; you have truly said that he (God) is one, and there is no other but he; and to love him with all the heart, and all the understanding, and with all the strength, and to love one's neighbor as oneself, is much more than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices." And when Jesus saw that he answered wisely, he said to him, "You are not far from the kingdom of God." And after that no one dared to ask him any question. (Mark 12:32-34.)

Jesus was able to answer powerfully the most important question asked in that situation and effectively silenced those who would discredit him. It is Jesus' words and their interpretation by the scribe that lie at the heart of the fifth source from which our living tradition draws: "Jewish and Christian teachings which call us to respond to God's love by loving our neighbors as ourselves." It is this source that draws our attention today.

It is this source that underpins the "great heart of Universalism," as Scott Alexander calls it. Some Unitarians view this Universalist grounding as "tissue-thin theology." I believe that the theology of love reflects Daniel Goleman's assurances from a perspective of brain chemistry that human beings are "not thinking creatures that feel, but feeling creatures that think." Love is at the heart of our understanding of our life process, and we know very little about it and have twisted the rest. From that perspective, let us look at the traditional theology of atonement from Christian teachings, at love from a scientific/theological perspective, and at actual practice, so that we may be more informed about our own lives.

In the book, Proverbs of Ashes:" Violence, Redemptive Suffering, and the Search for What Saves Us, Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Parker, President of Starr King School ( one of our UU theological schools), argue that using Jesus' suffering on the cross as a grounding for religious thought fosters violence in men and has led to years of oppression for minorities and to physical and sexual abuse of women and children. In one of her sermons, Parker quotes Leonardo Boff, in Passion of Christ, Passion of the World,

For Jesus Christ, to open oneself to God meant to abandon oneself to God as a child to a parent. Here is authentic, genuine sacrifice. Human life has an ontological structure of sacrifice. . . Human beings . . . can live and subsist in a human way only if they surrender to the Other." (Brock. p. 42.)

This theology demands resignation to one-up, one-down relationships and offers a god who shows no love. Most of us counter-dependent Unitarian Universalists reject this theology, which may be why we are UUs. Parker then provides this cogent counter- argument to a view of love and sacrifice:

This theology will leave an abused child or a battered spouse defenseless. Theology needs to teach us how to be for ourselves and be for others simultaneously, to hold both lives sacred. If either life is being exploited or injured by the relationship, there should be actions that will restore ethical relationship and redress the harm. Only then will our concern extend equally to victims and to victimizers. Otherwise, the victimizer is always the object of the victim's concern; but the victim is never the object of his or her own concern. (Ibid.)

Thus Parker sets true and healthy boundaries for a definition of love: love does not condone violence nor offer cheap grace to those who practice it. Love asks that we act as if we can be better in the world. It says there is an alternative to violence and suffering after one has grieved to the full.

In contrast to theology that accepts violence as part of God's plan is theology from a scientific perspective, especially that of physics and biology. Charles Darwin, the great Unitarian mind of the 19^th century, in his later years was not only examining survival through strength and "fitness," but also survival of animal societies through co-operation, an acknowledgement of connections that aid groups. This approach to understanding human behavior was pushed aside by those who favored "social Darwinism," which justified exploitation of one another - hardly love.

Still, recent research into altruism and love indicates that human beings are as drawn to caring for one another and helping one another as they are to exploitation. In an article entitled "Genuine Love Is More Than an Altruist's Daydream," Stephen G. Post notes results of research by C. Daniel Batson ". . . that there is such a thing as a genuinely other-regarding emotional-psychological motivational state that leads to helping behaviors." He also writes, "The researchers found that devotionalism, church attendance and level of religious commitment were positively correlated with levels of helping behavior, both in routine and emergency situations." It is clear that there is link between love and religious behavior.

For me, love is not only the steadfast promise of Karla McLaren. It is the experience of connections that energize and provide a sense of depth and breadth to life. It is at the heart of religion, for it is that feeling that "ties my life back together," the meaning of "religare," the linguistic root of "religion." Love is give and take that begins within one's self. It is a recognition that within my being is a source that has power and creativity and feels the pull of Whitehead's "divine lure toward greater intensity and harmony." This love feels connections, not only within myself, but also in and through all of life as I know it. It also is able to make distinctions between me and all the rest of life. While we are one spiritually, as McLaren and our anthem today assert, we are Not one physically, mentally, and emotionally. And Hooray for that! It is massed co-creativity of distinct entities that brings love into our lives.

Here I would like to raise another conviction that I believe has been somewhat overlooked in our society: In point of fact, we DO love our neighbors as ourselves. The theology of atonement that is the ground for western society leads us to love ourselves very little, if at all. We are led to believe that the best we can do in life is sacrifice ourselves, to deny our own wants, needs, hopes, and creativity, which is far too unmanageable for schools, churches, and other institutions. As Anne Wilson Schaef has noted, society asks us to choose "not to live and not to die." If we chose to live, we live in opposition to the institutions that ask us to deny our creativity and march lock step into acts of violence.

When we choose to live, to acknowledge our own power and desire, we feel connected to our highest self, even if disconnected from the "rules of society." We also feel connected to all of life. We rail against the problems in the environment and the body politic. We are not "well adjusted," but we are in love with ourselves, others, and with life. James W. Fowler, III has written that the highest stage of faith development is that in which one "loves life and holds it loosely." We are fully alive when we love the give and take, the co-creativity, without demanding that it follow our wishes to the exclusion of those of others.

Too many of us don't love our selves nearly enough to be able to love others truly, in that loosely held manner. We don't feel the connections to our own highest self, and we don't experience connections to all of life which remind us that we must live in a way that reveres our selves and all of life.

I have become convinced that love is not only a steadfast promise, it comes from deep within us as human beings. The object is important to us, but most deeply it is Our love, our creative expression of the best that we have to bring to our life and the life of another. When our loved one dies or disappears from our life, our love does not stop. It is vividly seen in our grief. It comes from deep within and is uniquely ours. This insight came when I was chatting with a person in deep grief. I suddenly realized that love had not gone with the loss of the loved one. It was still there within the grieving person. It was part and parcel of her being, not lost, but having lost its object. It could be sparked again, perhaps even more deeply for having been experienced already and being know as an expression of life for that person.

Our Unitarian Universalist call from this sixth Source is to move beyond the limited understanding of love that calls for self- sacrifice and self-abnegation. Love places us, not above or below any other, but as a truly co-creative and active force for the greater good of all. To feel this is to know love of one's self and love for all of life. Rebecca Parker writes it so vividly:

Love encompasses life. Like an arc of fire across the night sky, Presence blesses those who await it. In sensing Presence, we embrace a passion for life. Love is a seal upon the heart, a hunger to create, to honor life, to protect it, and to see it flourish.

This passion for life burns fiercely and cannot be quenched by many waters, It is as strong as violence and death. As we see more deeply into the luminous depths, we draw closer to that astonishing fire at the heart of things.

This is God with us:

quiet moments of mutual discovery by friends

sharing coffee on a sunlit afternoon,

tears appearing on a frozen face,

a community meeting that resists violence,

an embrace that holds the other through the terrors of the night,

a sheltering moon watching over an unblessed child,

an old woman keeping faded photographs on a mirror,

a dark ocean shimmering with diamonds.

Let us say that life shows us the face of God only in fleeting glimpses, by the light of night fires, in dancing shadows, in departing ghosts, and in recollections of steady love. Let us say this is enough, enough for us to run with perseverance the race that is set before us, enough for us to stand against violence, enough for us to hold each other in benediction and blessing.

So Be it! Blessed Be!