Christmas 1996 (#2)

Redefined what love is about

It’s been suggested that one of the unique elements of Christianity is that it has redefined what love is about, and I think that is a fair statement. And it is very easy to move from there directly to that famous passage which shows up in the Letters of Paul, Matthew, and Luke’s Gospel about loving your enemies. I mean, surely, that does not fall into the normal way we understand what love is about: "to love one’s enemies, pray for those who persecute you, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera..." I think that works as long as you keep it on a fairly abstract level, but what really goes into being able to do that? How do you do it in a way that is not sick or compulsive in some way? I mean there’s a lot of that..., that kind of teeth gritting nonsense that is not love, but a sign of neurosis, I think.

Well I’d like to make a suggestion which, the older I get, seems to be more and more true. That is that everybody feels to one extent or another that they should not be loved, that they do not deserve to be loved, and that plays out in this fashion for most of us, with individual variations of course: most of us make extraordinary efforts to convince somebody, our dad, or our mother, or Sister Petrona..., or somebody, that they really ought to love us because we really are nice people, we really work hard, we really do good things, and, therefore, we are loveable. It seems to me that if one were to examine one’s own behaviour along these lines enormous light is shed on all kinds of phenomenon: our insistence on being right all the time... Where does that come from? --the fact that we much more readily talk about humility than feel comfortable with the idea of it, or that humility takes, again, so many sick forms: "Oh..., me? Surely not me..." This kind of door-mat of the universe sense of one’s self..., self-righteousness, plagues not just nations, God knows we see that writ large all over the place, but individuals as well. What are we doing?--We could easily put it down to egocentrism. Why are people egocentric, if that’s in fact the case? Because we figure, I think, at some pre-conscious level, that if I don’t push myself nobody else is going to push me. And it’s egocentricity, and over-achieving in one form or another: "I’m going to be badder than everybody, and I’m going to be gooder than everybody, I’m going to be smarter, or jump higher, or run faster, or sing louder..., or something more than any body else so that I can be seen and cared for.

Well, what Christmas has to say to us is that all that stuff is not necessary... We did not deserve the figure of Jesus to walk around on this planet; we did nothing to merit the transmission of the memory of the freedom and the generosity of this man--nothing..., pure gift... And for those of us Christians it is clear it is clear that we did nothing to see in Jesus the revelations of God’s absolutely free love, despite ourselves... And so I think this is where the business of this compulsion to be special, and all of the terrible distortions that flow from that, can be righted, can be rectified...

I’ve been thinking about this for the past couple of weeks, for years for that matter, and probably the most insightful statements about the human condition are found in advertisements, I think. I mean they spend millions of dollars on very high-classed psychologists to find out what will really grab them..., and what occurred to me is the big Toyota line: "I love what you do for me..." I don’t think it’s far-fetched to say that has power simply because it reaches so deep into this sense that I have to do something for somebody... and that love becomes simply a matter of performing the right operation so then I can prove to somebody that I am loved. No..., what Christmas is is that you don’t have to do anything; just be... Accept your existence as a gift... It doesn’t just stop there because, to the extent that people do begin to understand themselves, there is an enormous freedom, and an enormous energy, perhaps the only energy that we ever experience; it is not some kind of neurosis. It does get us to some kind of freedom that is released by the sense that I don’t have to prove myself, I don’t have to be especially good, or more worthy, or all the rest of it. "I love what you do for me...:" sure, that makes so much sense. But in the light of the gospel it is totally wrong-footed..., and it distorts..., and above all, and this is the crucial thing, if to be loved means that I have to earn it, then it is not surprising that there is a sense of competition about love. If love, whether of God, or my mother, is a kind of finite resource and everyone around me is struggling after the same good, then of course the only possible status is that of being in competition with everybody else... And, here too, what Christmas says is, especially this passage from Luke--what does the Gospel of Luke say throughout its pages? That above all, right here in the beginning, that God takes above all the absolute nothings of a society and speaks to them... Because that’s what shepherds were sociologically; they were not these cute little guys running around in bath-robes with towels wrapped around their heads with their fathers’ canes in their hands--they were the dregs... You were a shepherd because nobody would trust you to do anything else... And it is to those people that Luke wants to say that this is what God has to say, and these are the ones to whom God says it... The point being, of course, is that if the shepherds are somehow brought into the human family there is for the first time a human family. It is all-encompassing. And the law of competition, the law of survival, of struggling after this finite resource, is no law at all, but a form of sickness and a playing out of sin rather than virtue...

So that’s why we’re here tonight: to think again, to be confronted with this man who said, "this is my life for you..., and you didn’t have to do anything to warrant my affection, my attention, my concern, my self-expenditure..." And that’s why we can talk about Joy to the World.

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