FaceValues - LOVE: How can I love again?
Sermon preached at Barclay Church, Edinburgh by Rev D. Graham Leitch
based on materials provided by FaceValues
22 September 2002

Over the past five years, or so there appears to me - and I don’t know whether I’m right or not but you can tell me - to have been a growth in the number of cookery programmes on TV, and so, I suppose, a growth of interest in cookery.

A CHILDHOOD MEMORY
I belong to a generation whose fathers went out to work and whose mothers stayed at home as housewives and homemakers. I noticed when I was renewing my car insurance yesterday, by the way, that in the name of political correctness the word “housewife” has been dropped in favour of “houseperson” which embraces the growing number of “house-husbands.”

When I was a child and my mother was trying to keep me amused during the long school holidays of the Summer, she occasionally allowed my brother and me to experiment in the kitchen.

About the only thing we successfully made, I think, was a mess!!

We sometimes tried to make a cake - how proud we would have been if it had worked - but usually we put the wrong ingredients in and the result was probably unrecognisable as a cake and certainly indigestible as an accompaniment to a cup of tea!!

GETTING THE PROPORTIONS RIGHT
When if comes to creating a healthy society - stable, safe and happy - we need the ingredients to be mixed in the right proportions. Let me give you two examples:

FREEDOM v LAW AND ORDER
In a healthy society FREEDOM matters. In autocracies and dictatorships people’s choices are limited and their personal freedom is restricted. Take religion for example. In some countries the freedom to choose your religion is denied - it’s a crime in some lands (punishable by impriosnment or even death) to convert to Christianity. FREEDOM matter - and in a healthy society personal rights and freedoms are respected and guarded.

But if freedom is the only ingredient anarchy will be the result. Just imagine what would happen if all of us were free to choose our own rules of the road!! That’s why, in a healthy society, personal rights and freedoms are respected, but LAW AND ORDER matter too.

MATERIAL v SPIRITUAL
Or again, in a healthy society PROSPERITY matters. On the one hand,because of its effects, poverty is undesirable and standards of living matter. But, on the other hand, money isn’t everything and life has other dimensions - aesthetic and spiritual - that are important too.

When it comes to creating a healthy society - stable, safe and happy - we need the ingredients to be mixed in the right proportions - that was often the trouble in the kitchen of my childhood - the flour was just lumped in and too much much of this was combined with too little of that!!

USING THE RIGHT INGREDIENTS!
When if comes to creating a healthy society - stable, safe and happy - we need the ingredients to be mixed in the right proportions - BUT you need the RIGHT INGREDIENTS too!! You can’t make a cake out of concrete!!

Facevalues - is about some of the INGREDIENTS that Christians believe are essential in the creation of a healthy, happy, safe and satisfied community. It’s about building the kind of world - the kind of communities and the kind of society we can be proud of, confident to be part of and happy to pass on to our children.


LOVE
Today the subject which claims our attention is LOVE. As part of the FACEVALUES campaign, a series of posters has been distributed and is being displayed by churches and in public places throughout the United Kingdom.... In each the image is accompanied by a question - and the poster featuring love displays the bruised face of a woman. It’s a powerful image of a kind not unfamiliar to us through the “zero tolerance campaign” which took place in the city a few years ago which was aimed at changing people’s perceptions concerning domestic violence.

It’s a shocking image and one that makes us feel sick and angry We’re looking, we think, at a woman who has been abused. We think of her abuser - was he drunk or inadequate? Is his pleasure in violence? Do the effects of his violence matter to him? Has he any remorse? Is it the first time, or part of a pattern. Was he himself the victim of abuse, a witness to the sufferings of his own mother? Does he want help?

But then we think of the abused woman. What affects - other than the obvious physical affects - will this abuse have upon her - upon her attitudes towards men; upon her relations with her children -upon her own self-esteem? Does she feel guilty - that it’s her fault? And, as the question on the poster asks,

“Will she ever be able to LOVE again?”

The answer GOD KNOWS may be seen as flippant - but it’s also credible and serious. Because ultimately the answer - her healing and the healing of society - can only be found in Him, for “God is love.”

Some may think it surprising that a campaign to “help bring values back to life” needs to focus on love at all. Isn’t love one of the most frequently used words in the English language? Yes it is - but the word “love” has so many meaning that the first question has to be “What do we mean by love?”

THE BEATLES - ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE

WHAT IS LOVE?
For some love is mainly to do with PERSONAL ENJOYMENT and defined by references to SELF. “I’d really love a cup of tea” means “I’d ENJOY a cup of tea” while “I love the Simpsons”means “That’s a great TV programme. It makes me laugh!”

For some love is mainly to do with PERSONAL ENJOYMENT. For others, love is mainly to do with SEX - “to make love” means to have sexual intercourse.

It is one thing to say that LOVE must be one of the foundational values of a healthy society but what do we mean by love - is it the somewhat ephemeral characteristic of life celebrated by the hippies and sung about by the Beatles in the late 60’s and early 70’s - or something else?

C.S. Lewis’s exploration of the subject of love in “The Four Loves” is now a classic. In it he distinguishes four kinds of love -

There is the love that’s really liking - its object can be an object or an animal - it’s as likely to be an object or an animal as a person - “Isn't that a wonderful sunset!” “Look at that sweet little lamb in the meadow!” “She’s got style!” But this isn’t really love at all.

THE FOUR LOVES
Basing his exposition on the different Greek words for love, Lewis explains FOUR kinds of love:

There’s a kind of love that exists amongst the members of families - familial love or affection. It’s a special kind of love - the kind of thing we mean when we speak about blood being thicker than water.
It might be called “family affection.” That’s one kind of love - strogh is the Greek word for it.

Then there’s the love that’s a close bond between individuals - what the Greeks called filia - and best described as “friendship” it isn't exclusive but it’s special.

Next there’s erox which is sexual love - (erotica is a word that comes from it) it seems to be the kind of love that dominates thinking today - we are living in an eroticised culture!!

AGAPE LOVE
But then there’s the most important love of all - agaph - this is love on a different level - love in a different league - it’s selfless - it’s sacrificial - it’s unending and other-regarding. This is the love that is capable of being a uniting and healing force in our broken world. It is the love which has as one of its most important attributes healing and peace. The love which , as Paul says in one of his letters:

“binds all things together in perfect harmony”

This is the love that matters most for the harmony of society and the healing of the nations. AGAPE is love on a different level.

This is the love that God has for us - that God has actively shown towards and demonstrated in the gift of His Son, Jesus Christ - and that God wants us to have in turn for one another.

THE LOVE THAT IS NEEDED MOST
But what does this have to do with the battered woman we see in our picture? It is simply this - that what the woman in our picture needs is precisely that healing love, expressed to her through others and which has its source in God.

And the same’s true of those her image represents - not just the victims of domestic violence but of abuse at the hands of paedophiles (too often members of their own family or friends); elderly folk who are the victims of mugging or terrorised by neighbourhood louts and scared to walk the streets;
those traumatised by the shock of marital infidelity or protracted and bitter divorce proceeding; the young rough sleepers on the run from abusive parents and violent homes - and the drug addict forced to steal because of the exploitation of the dealers.

Peoples needs are often complex - but the one thing they need most of all (perpetrator and victim) is the accepting, unending, generous and healing help of LOVE.

THE GOOD SAMARITAN
There are hundreds of references to love in the Bible and some of them connect with the theme of violence. One is the story of the good Samaritan which is about an act of violence towards a travelling Jew.

VIDEO - JESUS FILM - THE GOOD SAMARITAN

In this story, by choosing a Jew as the object of the Samaritan’s kindness, Jesus shows that agaph - the highest and truest love - is not shown just to those we like or to those like us. The Jews and Samaritans were were separated and suspicious of one another - an attitude which at its worst exhibited itself in mutual loathing.

But agaph -the love which is the reflection of the divine love and the principle by which every Christian is called to live - isn’t only shown where it is reciprocated:

“If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you?” (Luke 6:27-36)

No - the LOVE of which I am speaking this morning and the LOVE the world needs - the highest love, is shown to the undeserving as well as the deserving and irrespective of any return. It is like God’s love - shown not only to the lovely but to the unlovable, to the worst and the best like - this is the love we see most amazingly at Calvary:

“God so loved the world that He gave his one and only Son so that whoever believes in Him shall have eternal life.”

As, at the Cross, we see God’s love released in forgiving power, so in the world and through the church we need to see God’s love released in HEALING power. This is the LOVE the world needs!

This love isn’t sentimental, it’s sacrificial. Society needs to rediscover the healing power of a life lived for others. Today people think more about “What I can get!” than “What I can give!”
The others who passed the victim in Jesus’ story were too busy. If the Priest and the Levite weren’t rushing to meetings at work they were probably rushing to meetings at church - some of us have just got too busy to love. Others of us are just too lazy to love.

And all the time this is what the bruised and broken need - not meetings, programmes, projects, plans, policies - but more than all of these, LOVE!!

Are we too busy to LOVE? Or are we too proud to LOVE?

A SCRUFFY MINISTER
There’s a story about a minister who wanted to discover how his congregation would respond to need. During an extended holiday he let his hair grow and didn’t shave - he came back scruffy, dressed up as a smelly tramp and turned up smelling of booze. His Elders didn’t recognise him and they threw him out!!

The story’s probably apocryphal but there’s an element of being too proud to love in most churches - we may not say it but we think it - we don’t want “people like that” here!

TIME FOR AGAPE LOVE TO FIGHT BACK!
Today the eroticisation of society - which cheapens sex and degrades women - erox - has overthrown agaph. It’s time for the highest LOVE - the love that is “other-centred” and has its source in God -to fight back!!

AGAPE LOVE - the love of which the Bible speaks - needs to be reinstated at the heart of life as its first principle. It is the key to a healthy and happy society and a better world. But what IS it!!

I know of no better explanation and description of it than Professor Willie Barclay’s:

“The supreme passage for the interpretation of the meaning of agape,” he says “is Matthew 5:43-48. We are told there to love our enemies. Why? In order that we should be like God! And what is the typical action of God that is cited? God sends his rain ‘on the just and the unjust, on the evil and the good.’ That is to say - no matter what a man is like, God seeks nothing but his highest good.

“Let a person be a saint or let a person be a sinner, God’s only desire is for that person’s highest good ......Agape is the spirit which say ‘ No matter what any man does to me, I will never seek to do harm to him, I will never set out for revenge, I will always seek nothing but his highest good. That is to say, agape is unconquerable benevolence, invincible good will.

It is not simply a wave of emotion, it is a deliberate conviction of the mind issuing in a deliberate policy of the life..”

If, today and every day, every one of us was to resolve in our hearts and covenant with God to seek only the highest good of every individual we met and dealt with and the highest good of all, then don't you think we’d be better people and the world would be a better place!!

Of course peoples’ needs are complex, and so this LOVE will be expressed practically in many ways. It isn’t always possible for us to help ourselves.

The woman in our picture is probably a victim of domestic abuse - others are victims of alcohol abuse, drug dependency, homelessness, marital stress, emotional trauma, child abuse - yet others may be in prison - or through no fault of their own suffer from dementia or other mental illnesses or severe physical disabilities - yet others may be hooked on pornography or paedophilia.

We can’t always help people ourselves - we may not have the experience or professional skills. But that we should desire their highest good and do what we can is what agape is all about.

I have in my hand the Millennium edition of the UK Christian Directory. As you can see it’s more than a pocketbook.- it’s a comprehensive list of not just hundreds but thousands of specialist Christian agencies expressing agape love to the needy in practical professional ways.
The nation and the world today needs an “army of lovers” filled with God;s Spirit and expressing, incarnating as Jesus did, God’s will.

LUKE 23:33
I agree with everything that Professor Barclay says about agape, but on one point we differ - and that is on the supreme passage for the interpretation of the meaning of the word AGAPE.

I would nominate Luke 23:33:
“When they came to Golgotha, there they crucified Him, along with the criminals, one on his right and one on his left.”

It is supremely at Calvary and in Christ’s laying down his life for us in a self-denying and sacrificial way that we see AGAPE - divine love, His love for us - in action.

It is as the objects of his love - who known and experienced and benefited from and daily ENJOY His love in Jesus Christ, that he call us to LOVE!!

If we are to build a society that is health and happy, that is healing - that is strong and stable - then it must be built on the love that “seeks not its own” but the highest good of others and of all.

NOT AS AN OCCASIONAL HOBBY OR SUNDAY DUTY BUT AS THE FIRST PRINCIPLE AND FOUNDATION OF OUR LIVES.

Amen