2018-04-30
Brooke Strong
Scripture: I John 4:7-21
A psychology professor at Yale University started a new course this year. Called “Psychology and the Good Life,” it immediately became the most popular course in Yale’s history. 1200 undergraduates, fully one quarter of the student body, signed up for it.
This is intriguing to me. In one way, I suppose, it’s hardly surprising that such a course would be considerably more popular than organic chemistry or a senior seminar in the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. I’m guessing a number of students take it because they imagine it will be less demanding than those other courses, and maybe they think of it as an easy A. Nevertheless, it’s striking to me that a course on the meaning and heart of life would be so compelling to so many students.
At its best, of course, this, too, is what church is: it’s a seminar with Jesus on the soul, on the nature of what makes life truly good. Here we reflect on what makes life rich and worth living. Here we listen for a word from the source of all that is about what gives life its fullness.
I suspect most of us, if we were asked, would give as a snap answer that what makes a life good is being happy. Our Declaration of Independence declares that, by the beneficence of the Creator, we all have “unalienable rights,” among which are “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” In fact, the unofficial title for that Yale course is that it’s the course on how to be happy. The good life equals happiness.
And we get this. There’s nothing quite like being happy. A shimmering day, a walk in the Metroparks, a stroll on the beach, a great song, a really fulfilling hobby: you know how elated you feel when you’re doing something special. Who wouldn’t want that?
Happiness can be elusive, though. Laurie Santos, the teacher of the Yale course, reminds her students that “social science studies debunk the assumptions that good grades, big houses, high salaries, and nice stuff make us happy.” She says, “we forecast those things will make us happy, but they don’t make us as happy as we think [they will].”
A philosophy professor at Yale, Shelly Kagan, has offered a response of his own to Santos’ course. As a way to get us to think more deeply about this issue of what it is that makes for the good life, Kagan suggests that maybe feelings like happiness are not the heart of what makes for the good life. And he poses this thought experiment, which he calls “the deceived professor,” about a person who’s just died “happy.”
“Imagine,” says Kagan, “an art historian who has discovered certain overlooked paintings or the painter’s diaries that revolutionize our interpretation of that famous painter’s work and its place in history. The professor also seems to have a family who loves him, an adoring spouse, and kids who really admire, love, and respect him. He dies happy.”
Kagan continues, “But after his death, it is discovered that the paintings and diaries on which he based his discoveries were—unknown to him—forgeries, and it is revealed that his wife was cheating on him, his kids just wanted his money, and his academic peers really despised him.”
So Kagan asks, “Did this person die happy?” or, better yet, “What if this were your life—would that be okay with you?”
“By thinking about situations like this,” says Kagan, “we will discover that happiness isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. It’s not really the bottom line for us.” This person, says Kagan “the deceived professor, had really wanted accomplishment, love, and respect but [ended up with] none,” he added. And he concludes, “What thought experiments like this one teach us is that what’s genuinely, bottom-line, most valuable isn’t happiness. It’s these other things” (https://news.yale.edu/2018/04/05/yale-well-event-professors-serve-pursuit-happiness-three-ways).
This intriguing thought experiment reframes the matter of the good life. Happiness is great, we might well say, but it’s not everything. It’s not, after all is said and done, what’s most important. What matters most is something deeper, something more central. Kagan says the professor really wanted accomplishment, love, and respect. And maybe that’s it. At the very least, though, Kagan nudges us out of what might be our too-easy assumptions about a kind of simplistic happiness.
The heart of Christianity has its own answer to the question of what makes the good life, and it’s not unrelated to Kagan’s thought experiment. In the first letter of John, an elder of the church essentially reflects on life’s meaning. And in the passage we heard a few moments ago, this elder makes a ringing endorsement of love as what’s central to human life. As you heard the passage read, you may have been vaguely aware that love kept coming up over and over again. In fact some variation of the word “love” is mentioned twenty-nine times in those fifteen verses! That’s a lot of mentions! Love is at life’s heart.
I John wrenches us out of the way we usually think of love, though. When we hear the word love, our associations so often go to romance or physical attraction. The culture would have us think of love as a kind of fluttery magnetism, a chemistry that draws couples together.
And love, of course, certainly includes that kind of attraction. When the Bible uses the word love, though, it’s talking about something much deeper than that. It’s talking not primarily about feeling but about action, not about romance but about commitment, not about butterflies in the stomach but about feet on the ground and hands in active service.
“God is love,” says the letter of I John (4:8,16). Everything begins there, with divine love. It is only because God loves us that we are able to love each other. My sense is that we’re not born knowing how to love. We learn it by receiving it. Think about it from a human point of view. If you have been loved dearly by a parent or a spouse or a child, you have some sense of the wonder of such a love. When I have known myself to be wrapped in love by my parents or Mary or our children, I am lifted into a rarefied space. I know myself to be treasured, and that’s what lets me love in return. I wouldn’t know how to do it otherwise. It’s the experience of being loved that gives us the capacity to love. And being loved is essentially to be adored as we are.
Several years after I met Mary, my mother said to me one day, “I knew early on how right Mary was for you, because she let you be just who you are.” She remembered that the day she met Mary, we were sitting in a food court at a mall in Maine. As we ate, a song came on the mall’s sound system, and I spontaneously stood up and started dancing to it. When I did, Mary said, “I knew you were going to do that.” And my mother said, “I didn’t.” It’s not that my mother didn’t know me. It’s that she could see that day that Mary loved me in a full way. What my mother observed was that with Mary I was able to be myself.
To really take in the love of God is to know yourself to be loved like that, only more. You’re one who cries easily when no one else in your family does? God adores you for that. You’re an engineer when everybody else in your family was an English major? God thrills to that ability in you. You’re a J on the Myers Briggs Type Indicator, when everybody around you is a P (or vice versa)? God made you just that way, and delights in your unique and gifted identity.
We are only able to love because God first loved us with a bottomless love, a love that will not let us go. It’s that very love that lets us love the people who have been given to us to love. If we take in the love we have received, we may just be able to extend that love even to people who may, in truth, be difficult to love. Early in my ministry, I heard someone say that God gave us eleven-foot poles so we could love people we wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole. Exactly!
Samuel Wells, the rector of London’s St. Martin-in-the-Fields, talks about something he learned early in his ministry. He learned, he says, not to give people false hope, but to be willing to walk with them through their doubts and their shadows and their pain. And he says, “if they find you, their companion, are still there, they’ll know a love that Song of Songs says ‘is strong as death.’” And Wells says “this is the most important line in the entire Bible. It’s the whole question the Bible is trying to answer: Is love as strong as death?” This question, he says, is why people come to church. It’s the truth they’re most looking for. They want to know whether it’s really true that love is as strong as death (Christian Century, April 25, 2018, p. 35).
God knows, it’s not always obvious that love is as strong as death. You look around and you see mass shootings and terrorism and war and betrayal and character assassination. And when we look at ourselves honestly, we can see the worst sides of human life. If you’re like me, your capacity for love gets tested in all sorts of ways. When our older son Alex was a toddler, I took him one spring Tuesday to a Vermont town meeting. He wouldn’t stop fussing, and I got increasingly aggravated with him, finally squeezing him more and more tightly in my arms, trying to get him to stop. Not my finest parenting moment! When our sons were in high school, each one’s senior year passed with maybe 46 words spoken to Mary and me the entire year. I felt as though our sons had left us, and there was frankly little there that I could connect with. In fact, a cousin of Mary’s said to her one day, “Yes, when they’re teenagers, they’re abducted by aliens. But eventually they come back.” Or as somebody else recently put it, it was as though they were in the witness protection program and were prohibited from telling you anything about their life. It was during those abducted years, those witness-protected years, that love came a tad harder.
The scriptures, though, tell us that God is love, and that love is as strong as death. Is it? Deep down, I’m convinced we know the answer. We know that a father who patiently rocks his infant while colic totally ruins his night’s sleep is witnessing to a love that’s stronger than death. We know that a woman who sits with her friend while the friend weeps in utter despair at the death of her spouse is witnessing to a love that is stronger than death. We know that a couple who takes in a challenging foster child is witnessing to a love that is stronger than death.
A love that sacrifices itself for the sake of someone else, for the sake of something larger, is testimony to the holy love that will not, that cannot, let us go. It all begins with that love, the that comes from God. If pressed, I would say that the very heart of prayer is the process of absorbing, again and again, the phenomenal love God has for you and me. Whenever we turn toward God, the Holy One is leaping for joy. When, as prodigals, we trudge over the horizon on our weary way back to what we hope is still home, the proverbial father is running down the path toward us, just to welcome us home. God is love, and that love delights in us and embraces us with fierce and relentless affection.
At the same time, I John makes it clear that there is no God love that does not include love for others. It is not possible to say we love God while at the same time ignoring our sisters and brothers, or, worse, causing them harm. All God-given love finds its expression in our love for each other. That means loving our children when they deeply disappoint us or are abducted by aliens. That means loving our spouses when they fail miserably. That means loving our fellow church people even when they irritate the heck out of us. We’re to love not just those we find attractive and amusing and appealing. We’re to love the people who test us the most.
We see love demonstrated here at Federated in countless ways. Just today we are reminded of the love exhibited by Stephen Ministers for those in the congregation who have been through various trials. These lay ministers take abundant time to be trained and prepared, and then they give of themselves to be present to people in need. In a totally different vein, the countless hours given by so many Federated people to the set-up and running of our Trinkets and Treasures sale this week is testimony to love lived out in this communal way. Think of the various ways that sale benefits the community. It enables many of us to simplify our closets and basements; it supplies trinkets and treasures at extremely reasonable prices; it provides a venue for so many items to be reused rather than put in a dump; it builds community as people connect in a way they hadn’t before; and its proceeds benefit the great mission of this fantastic church! It’s all good. And it’s God’s love being poured out into the wider Chagrin Valley. What a blessing of a love stronger than death!
In so many ways, we are invited to a rich and grace-filled love. Some of you have heard of Clarence Jordan. The founder of Georgia’s Koinonia Farms, Jordan was a visionary. In the 1950s, he modeled a different way of doing things racially, joining people across racial lines to work together on the farm he founded.
When Jordan was growing up, he lived about 200 yards down the road from an “‘old-time Georgian chain gang’ camp and [a] jail of ‘terrible brutality.’ Young Clarence walked near the camp on his way to school. He once said that the camp gave him his ‘first awareness of the injustices [that come] to people because of race.’
“At church, he met the warden of the chain gang, a Mr. MacDonald. One [formative] Sunday evening, 12-year-old Jordan observed MacDonald exulting in singing the hymn ‘Love Lifted Me.’ In bed later that night, Jordan was awakened by the sounds of a prisoner being beaten at the camp. He later called it a ‘devastating experience.’ The sounds ‘nearly tore [him] to pieces.’ How he wondered, could a [person] sing about God’s love and then become a monster toward a man because he was black?’”
That experience, and his recognition that true love of God had to show itself in love for others, shaped him. A few years later, Jordan developed a ministry at an outdoor farmer’s market in Louisville. One day, after a white man had raped a black woman, “a black man announced at [the farmer’s market] that he was going to kill a white man to exact justice. Clarence walked forward, put his head on a table, and told the man that if someone had to die for the act, he’d be the one to die. That vulnerable act of surrender calmed the situation and started a conversation about what could be done without resorting to violence” (Christian Century, April 25, 2018, p. 30).
What’s at the heart of the good life? It’s love, isn’t it—love that bears fruit in an infinite variety of ways. Invariably, though, that love takes its shape from the God who loves us with a boundless love. And at its richest, it entails giving of ourselves beyond what we thought possible. All because God has indeed made it possible. Ahh, the good life.