Loving and Letting Go
May 17, 2009
May 17, 2009
Rev. Susan Gilbert Zencka
Frame Memorial Presbyterian Church
Texts: Acts 1:15-17, 21-26; John 15:1-17
Two stories come to mind as I think about the church teachings on love. The first occurred at church camp, maybe 14 years ago. The camp director was talking with the children about Jesus teaching us to love one another, and at the end of her talk she said, brightly:: “So that's all we have to do! Love each other! That's not so hard, is it??” Yeah, right.
The second episode occurred a couple of years later, when I was on a PW retreat at the same church camp. One of the ladies said, with a kind of sly smile, “If anything ever happens to my husband and I fall in love again, I'm not getting married, we’ll just live together.” Another woman responded: “Not me, I'm going to get married and live separately – living together is the hard part.”
The nitty-gritty of living together is why loving is hard – it's easy to love in the abstract; it's the particulars that make it difficult. As Linus said to Charlie Brown once: “I love humanity; it's people I can't stand.” And yet, it's often the particulars that make the feeling of love vivid – we love someone's smile, the way she botches a punchline of a joke, his passion for a particular issue, the song she sings in the morning...and as time goes by, the laughlines by her eyes, the way his grey hairs are all so unruly. Love is incarnational – it’s how it is lived out in the flesh that makes it love.
When we think of “love” we usually think of the feelings: romantic love, family love, the love we have in our friendships. But when the Bible talks about love, it's more about actions than feelings. Jesus tells us to love our enemies, and he isn't trying to tell us to develop warm feelings for them. In fact, most of us can't control our feelings, but we can choose to control our actions. Jesus isn't giving us impossible commands – to have certain feelings. Jesus is telling us to behave in certain ways. And in today’s Gospel reading, Jesus says, “I give you a new commandment: love one another, as I have loved you.”
How has Jesus loved us? Let’s look at how love looks in Jesus.
Love is proactive – we love because God first loved us; God loves because of who God is, not because of who we are. When we decide to live out that love in our own lives, it comes from who we are, how we are deciding to be as followers, not because of the other person being lovable – remember, God loves us because of who God is. When we love, it is because we choose to act like God. So love is proactive.
Love is oriented toward the other (it is about their needs, their pleasures, or it is not love – it is taking care of ourselves). Jesus asks “what do you want me to do for you?” It is about showing love for them in the way they need, not necessarily in what we like to do.
Love is immediate (it lives in the moment and is present to reality of the moment) – Jesus was able to give his full attention to the person or situation right in front of him. I cannot recall a single instance of his saying to someone, “Not now, I’m running late.” He was able to give himself fully to the person he chose to be with in a given moment. It seemed, at times, to frustrate those around him. He’d be on his way to care for someone, and when someone else came to his attention, he gave that person his full attention for that moment, and then resumed the direction he had been headed. You can often almost see the disciples tapping their feet and looking at their watches as Jesus paused to give his full attention to someone.
This can be very hard for us, especially when our lives are overfull. When we have jampacked every minute of every day, we find it difficult to be open to the surprises of the moment. One of the wonderful disciplines of love is to let go of our own importance and the importance of our own lists, in order to be present to the person we are with in a given moment. If you want to see this in action, watch Donna Marx around children. She gives her entire attention to the child she is speaking to – no wonder our preschoolers love her so much! And this is why the folks at the Salvation Army so enjoyed the meal that Frame’s Mission Team prepared a few weeks ago – because you all took the time to sit down and eat with the folks. Love pays attention.
Love can be hard work – it is often not “romantic” at all, but simply concerned with the difficult details of life: think of Mother Teresa who was surely one of the great practitioners of love in our time. She said, “I have found the paradox that if I love until it hurts, then there is no more hurt, only more love.” Part of the reason that love is often hard is because it is about choosing loving actions when we may not have loving feelings. Another way of stating paradox of practicing love is that if we practice it enough, it creates the feelings from which we imagine that it springs. Loving actions may be very difficult, and in the moment, the feelings that result may be more like frustration. Over time, though, the fruit of loving actions is loving feelings.
Love takes care of itself. This is another paradox. We often think of love as being all about self-sacrifice, and after all, I just described love as often being about choosing actions that are not fun, or even pleasant, but that can be very hard. Nonetheless, if we look at how Jesus loved, it involved taking care of himself. And when he chose to give up his life, he was very clear about the fact that it was his choice. During the day-to-day of living his life, however, he chose to take care of himself on an ongoing basis. He would walk away from the crowds when he needed solitude, or prayer, or food or rest. He did not make himself infinitely available to people. Perhaps this is a big part of why he could be so available to a given moment – because he took care of his own needs so that he was healthy and rested and centered. Loving like Jesus loved us does not mean being a doormat. It involves self-care, loving ourselves is foundational to loving others. This is particularly important for long-term caregivers including parents of small children, because the day-in-day-out rhythm of caring for someone else can be very depleting. If we love others, we need to choose to love ourselves, too.
Love lets go – of results, of the ones we love, of our own desires, of being right. It accepts reality just as it is and people just as they are. The person who loves works on their own behavior instead of trying to fix others. When we love and let go of the results, we aren’t trying to manipulate people, we’re just loving them. This is one of the particular challenges of parental love as our children become adults. When our children are children, trying to shape them is indeed part of our responsibility. But as they become adults, they are responsible for their own choices. My mom told me once that one of the real delights of being a mother of adult children is that you can give advice and not worry about whether or not it is taken. Many of us worry too much about this, not only with adult children, but with our adult friends. When we are trying to fix people, we are not being loving. We are trying to ease our own anxieties. Love is a free gift, it is not conditional on other people accepting our advice or making the choices that we make. It’s yet another reason that Love can be difficult.
And Love goes to where the love is needed. This is one of the critical lessons for the church. Jesus did not hang around in the synagogue or the temple – and again, Mother Teresa is a great example to us here: Jesus and Mother Teresa both went to where the love was needed. This has been something that Frame has traditionally understood pretty well, and this is why you find Frame folks involved in all kinds of important ministry all over town: at Bootstrap, for example, or at St. Vinnie’s. Love goes.
Yesterday almost 40 people from Frame engaged in real love. As I’ve explained a couple of times, our new Christian Education curriculum is practice-based Christian education – we’re not just teaching Christian ideas, Christian stories, or Christian belief, we’re teaching a Christian way of life. So all year our kids have been learning, and practicing, discipleship. They are learning that Christianity is about what we do, not just about what we believe. So the kids have been doing creation care, doing stewardship, doing pastoral care, doing worship, doing fellowship, doing prayer and spirituality, and finally, doing mission. We thought it would be fun on a spring day to “Take It To the Town” – to take the love of God to various places in our area and live out the love by serving others. It turned out to be harder than we thought. Susan Barrett, with the support of the Mission Committee and a couple of members with good ideas, connected with several good projects. But at the last minute, lots of little things went wrong – loving involves real logistics. The weather was too cold to plant tender flowers in planters along Main Street downtown, and another place we had planned to volunteer is shutting its doors. But Susan and others came up with other projects. About half the people went down to the Boys and Girls Club in Plover, built a fence, and weeded and planted. It was a cold day for that kind of outside work, but their spirits were good – they experienced the joy of putting others first and the joy persisted despite the circumstances. Another group stayed here at Frame to bake cookies and take them to the Police Department, the Fire Department, the emergency room and the Sheriff’s Office. But that project had some challenges, too – the ovens decided not to cooperate. And our folks didn’t say, oh well, oven’s broken, we’ll love another day. They took the cookie dough home, baked it there and then delivered the cookies. It was not convenient to do it that way – love often isn’t convenient at all.
In our church, last week almost 200 people promised to nurture 3 of our church’s children in the Christian faith. We promised to love them and to teach them about love. We have 16 nursery families that live in our area (plus some grandchildren who visit from time to time). Of these families, 10 have joined the church in the last 3 years, and 10 have had babies baptized here – and each time, our congregation has promised to nurture these children. Jesus said we should love one another as he loves us – how did Jesus love the children? He invited them in, and cared for them. Right now, we have an opportunity to love one another as Jesus has loved. We have an opportunity to love in the nitty-gritty of life, to love by what we do. During the summer, one of our nursery staff leaves for the summer. So we need volunteers to help care for these youngest people in our congregation. Some people say, “The nursery parents should do this work.” But we don’t say that the elderly people should take care of all the shut-ins. Just as the sick people in our church are the responsibility of the whole church, so too are the children of the church the responsibility of the whole church. Likewise, the nursery parents are doing the work of the whole church – they teach Sunday School, they serve on the Building and Grounds Committee, the Christian Education Committee and its subcommittees, the Finance commitee, they are Deacons and they are on Session. The only promise we ever make in worship is to nurture the people that we baptize –it’s that important to the practice of our faith. Today, one of our elders, Marco Dotti, is volunteering to be the second person in the nursery. Marco’s sons will enter youth group in the fall. Marco knows that the people of this congregation have nurtured his sons, and so he is taking his turn nurturing others – as we all promised to do. There is a signup sheet outside the office – Jesus told us to love one another as he has loved us – this is one of the easier ways to live out the real love of Jesus, and it’s a real task that needs doing. As all of us in families know, love often involves doing the real tasks that need doing in a family.
There is another dimension of loving like Jesus that I haven’t mentioned yet: Love leads to joy. Jesus said, “If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love. I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete.” Paul Tillich was one of the major theologians of the 20th century. In his book The New Being, published in 1955, Tillich distinguishes between pleasure and joy, explaining that pleasure is about our circumstances, and results from focusing on our own needs and desires so that we find ourselves pleased. Pleasure, he explains, is the opposite of pain, and does not co-exist with pain.
Tillich explains further: “If we desire something because of the pleasure we may get out of it, we may get the pleasure but we shall not get joy. If we try to find someone through whom we may get pleasure, we may get pleasure but we shall not have joy. If we search for something in order to avoid pain, we may avoid pain, but we shall not avoid sorrow. If we try to use someone to protect us from pain, he may protect us from pain but he will not protect us from sorrow.”
So where does joy come from? “Joy is possible only when we are driven towards things and persons because of what they are and not because of what we can get from them.” This is how love results in joy – when we are acting in love, we are acting in an other-centered, not a self-centered way. And this is fundamentally, what distinguishes joy from pleasure: pleasure results from our care for ourselves; joy results from our care for others.
Our culture is so very oriented to pleasure that many people are missing joy – the advertising industry wants us to be driven by pleasure: by identifying our needs and desires and satisfying them. God has designed us, however, so that our deepest satisfaction and our truest joy spring from a different way of life. The early Christians were known as People of the Way – they realized that following Jesus meant taking up a different way of life then, too. Jesus said, “I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete. This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.” Jesus asks us to give our lives in the living of them, and to give them to love. So as we let go of ourselves, we find ourselves and we find joy. Amen.
Rev. Susan Gilbert Zencka
Frame Memorial Presbyterian Church
Texts: Acts 1:15-17, 21-26; John 15:1-17
Two stories come to mind as I think about the church teachings on love. The first occurred at church camp, maybe 14 years ago. The camp director was talking with the children about Jesus teaching us to love one another, and at the end of her talk she said, brightly:: “So that's all we have to do! Love each other! That's not so hard, is it??” Yeah, right.
The second episode occurred a couple of years later, when I was on a PW retreat at the same church camp. One of the ladies said, with a kind of sly smile, “If anything ever happens to my husband and I fall in love again, I'm not getting married, we’ll just live together.” Another woman responded: “Not me, I'm going to get married and live separately – living together is the hard part.”
The nitty-gritty of living together is why loving is hard – it's easy to love in the abstract; it's the particulars that make it difficult. As Linus said to Charlie Brown once: “I love humanity; it's people I can't stand.” And yet, it's often the particulars that make the feeling of love vivid – we love someone's smile, the way she botches a punchline of a joke, his passion for a particular issue, the song she sings in the morning...and as time goes by, the laughlines by her eyes, the way his grey hairs are all so unruly. Love is incarnational – it’s how it is lived out in the flesh that makes it love.
When we think of “love” we usually think of the feelings: romantic love, family love, the love we have in our friendships. But when the Bible talks about love, it's more about actions than feelings. Jesus tells us to love our enemies, and he isn't trying to tell us to develop warm feelings for them. In fact, most of us can't control our feelings, but we can choose to control our actions. Jesus isn't giving us impossible commands – to have certain feelings. Jesus is telling us to behave in certain ways. And in today’s Gospel reading, Jesus says, “I give you a new commandment: love one another, as I have loved you.”
How has Jesus loved us? Let’s look at how love looks in Jesus.
Love is proactive – we love because God first loved us; God loves because of who God is, not because of who we are. When we decide to live out that love in our own lives, it comes from who we are, how we are deciding to be as followers, not because of the other person being lovable – remember, God loves us because of who God is. When we love, it is because we choose to act like God. So love is proactive.
Love is oriented toward the other (it is about their needs, their pleasures, or it is not love – it is taking care of ourselves). Jesus asks “what do you want me to do for you?” It is about showing love for them in the way they need, not necessarily in what we like to do.
Love is immediate (it lives in the moment and is present to reality of the moment) – Jesus was able to give his full attention to the person or situation right in front of him. I cannot recall a single instance of his saying to someone, “Not now, I’m running late.” He was able to give himself fully to the person he chose to be with in a given moment. It seemed, at times, to frustrate those around him. He’d be on his way to care for someone, and when someone else came to his attention, he gave that person his full attention for that moment, and then resumed the direction he had been headed. You can often almost see the disciples tapping their feet and looking at their watches as Jesus paused to give his full attention to someone.
This can be very hard for us, especially when our lives are overfull. When we have jampacked every minute of every day, we find it difficult to be open to the surprises of the moment. One of the wonderful disciplines of love is to let go of our own importance and the importance of our own lists, in order to be present to the person we are with in a given moment. If you want to see this in action, watch Donna Marx around children. She gives her entire attention to the child she is speaking to – no wonder our preschoolers love her so much! And this is why the folks at the Salvation Army so enjoyed the meal that Frame’s Mission Team prepared a few weeks ago – because you all took the time to sit down and eat with the folks. Love pays attention.
Love can be hard work – it is often not “romantic” at all, but simply concerned with the difficult details of life: think of Mother Teresa who was surely one of the great practitioners of love in our time. She said, “I have found the paradox that if I love until it hurts, then there is no more hurt, only more love.” Part of the reason that love is often hard is because it is about choosing loving actions when we may not have loving feelings. Another way of stating paradox of practicing love is that if we practice it enough, it creates the feelings from which we imagine that it springs. Loving actions may be very difficult, and in the moment, the feelings that result may be more like frustration. Over time, though, the fruit of loving actions is loving feelings.
Love takes care of itself. This is another paradox. We often think of love as being all about self-sacrifice, and after all, I just described love as often being about choosing actions that are not fun, or even pleasant, but that can be very hard. Nonetheless, if we look at how Jesus loved, it involved taking care of himself. And when he chose to give up his life, he was very clear about the fact that it was his choice. During the day-to-day of living his life, however, he chose to take care of himself on an ongoing basis. He would walk away from the crowds when he needed solitude, or prayer, or food or rest. He did not make himself infinitely available to people. Perhaps this is a big part of why he could be so available to a given moment – because he took care of his own needs so that he was healthy and rested and centered. Loving like Jesus loved us does not mean being a doormat. It involves self-care, loving ourselves is foundational to loving others. This is particularly important for long-term caregivers including parents of small children, because the day-in-day-out rhythm of caring for someone else can be very depleting. If we love others, we need to choose to love ourselves, too.
Love lets go – of results, of the ones we love, of our own desires, of being right. It accepts reality just as it is and people just as they are. The person who loves works on their own behavior instead of trying to fix others. When we love and let go of the results, we aren’t trying to manipulate people, we’re just loving them. This is one of the particular challenges of parental love as our children become adults. When our children are children, trying to shape them is indeed part of our responsibility. But as they become adults, they are responsible for their own choices. My mom told me once that one of the real delights of being a mother of adult children is that you can give advice and not worry about whether or not it is taken. Many of us worry too much about this, not only with adult children, but with our adult friends. When we are trying to fix people, we are not being loving. We are trying to ease our own anxieties. Love is a free gift, it is not conditional on other people accepting our advice or making the choices that we make. It’s yet another reason that Love can be difficult.
And Love goes to where the love is needed. This is one of the critical lessons for the church. Jesus did not hang around in the synagogue or the temple – and again, Mother Teresa is a great example to us here: Jesus and Mother Teresa both went to where the love was needed. This has been something that Frame has traditionally understood pretty well, and this is why you find Frame folks involved in all kinds of important ministry all over town: at Bootstrap, for example, or at St. Vinnie’s. Love goes.
Yesterday almost 40 people from Frame engaged in real love. As I’ve explained a couple of times, our new Christian Education curriculum is practice-based Christian education – we’re not just teaching Christian ideas, Christian stories, or Christian belief, we’re teaching a Christian way of life. So all year our kids have been learning, and practicing, discipleship. They are learning that Christianity is about what we do, not just about what we believe. So the kids have been doing creation care, doing stewardship, doing pastoral care, doing worship, doing fellowship, doing prayer and spirituality, and finally, doing mission. We thought it would be fun on a spring day to “Take It To the Town” – to take the love of God to various places in our area and live out the love by serving others. It turned out to be harder than we thought. Susan Barrett, with the support of the Mission Committee and a couple of members with good ideas, connected with several good projects. But at the last minute, lots of little things went wrong – loving involves real logistics. The weather was too cold to plant tender flowers in planters along Main Street downtown, and another place we had planned to volunteer is shutting its doors. But Susan and others came up with other projects. About half the people went down to the Boys and Girls Club in Plover, built a fence, and weeded and planted. It was a cold day for that kind of outside work, but their spirits were good – they experienced the joy of putting others first and the joy persisted despite the circumstances. Another group stayed here at Frame to bake cookies and take them to the Police Department, the Fire Department, the emergency room and the Sheriff’s Office. But that project had some challenges, too – the ovens decided not to cooperate. And our folks didn’t say, oh well, oven’s broken, we’ll love another day. They took the cookie dough home, baked it there and then delivered the cookies. It was not convenient to do it that way – love often isn’t convenient at all.
In our church, last week almost 200 people promised to nurture 3 of our church’s children in the Christian faith. We promised to love them and to teach them about love. We have 16 nursery families that live in our area (plus some grandchildren who visit from time to time). Of these families, 10 have joined the church in the last 3 years, and 10 have had babies baptized here – and each time, our congregation has promised to nurture these children. Jesus said we should love one another as he loves us – how did Jesus love the children? He invited them in, and cared for them. Right now, we have an opportunity to love one another as Jesus has loved. We have an opportunity to love in the nitty-gritty of life, to love by what we do. During the summer, one of our nursery staff leaves for the summer. So we need volunteers to help care for these youngest people in our congregation. Some people say, “The nursery parents should do this work.” But we don’t say that the elderly people should take care of all the shut-ins. Just as the sick people in our church are the responsibility of the whole church, so too are the children of the church the responsibility of the whole church. Likewise, the nursery parents are doing the work of the whole church – they teach Sunday School, they serve on the Building and Grounds Committee, the Christian Education Committee and its subcommittees, the Finance commitee, they are Deacons and they are on Session. The only promise we ever make in worship is to nurture the people that we baptize –it’s that important to the practice of our faith. Today, one of our elders, Marco Dotti, is volunteering to be the second person in the nursery. Marco’s sons will enter youth group in the fall. Marco knows that the people of this congregation have nurtured his sons, and so he is taking his turn nurturing others – as we all promised to do. There is a signup sheet outside the office – Jesus told us to love one another as he has loved us – this is one of the easier ways to live out the real love of Jesus, and it’s a real task that needs doing. As all of us in families know, love often involves doing the real tasks that need doing in a family.
There is another dimension of loving like Jesus that I haven’t mentioned yet: Love leads to joy. Jesus said, “If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love. I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete.” Paul Tillich was one of the major theologians of the 20th century. In his book The New Being, published in 1955, Tillich distinguishes between pleasure and joy, explaining that pleasure is about our circumstances, and results from focusing on our own needs and desires so that we find ourselves pleased. Pleasure, he explains, is the opposite of pain, and does not co-exist with pain.
Tillich explains further: “If we desire something because of the pleasure we may get out of it, we may get the pleasure but we shall not get joy. If we try to find someone through whom we may get pleasure, we may get pleasure but we shall not have joy. If we search for something in order to avoid pain, we may avoid pain, but we shall not avoid sorrow. If we try to use someone to protect us from pain, he may protect us from pain but he will not protect us from sorrow.”
So where does joy come from? “Joy is possible only when we are driven towards things and persons because of what they are and not because of what we can get from them.” This is how love results in joy – when we are acting in love, we are acting in an other-centered, not a self-centered way. And this is fundamentally, what distinguishes joy from pleasure: pleasure results from our care for ourselves; joy results from our care for others.
Our culture is so very oriented to pleasure that many people are missing joy – the advertising industry wants us to be driven by pleasure: by identifying our needs and desires and satisfying them. God has designed us, however, so that our deepest satisfaction and our truest joy spring from a different way of life. The early Christians were known as People of the Way – they realized that following Jesus meant taking up a different way of life then, too. Jesus said, “I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete. This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.” Jesus asks us to give our lives in the living of them, and to give them to love. So as we let go of ourselves, we find ourselves and we find joy. Amen.