Love's Imposters

Love's Imposters

A sermon delivered by Rev. Peter T. Atkinson

September 3, 2017

at Bethany Presbyterian Church, Zuni, Virginia

Hosea 8: 1-10

1 Corinthians 13: 1-7

Click here for video of this sermon "Love's Imposters"

Let us pray,

Help us to see despite our eyes

Help us to think outside of our minds

Help us to be more than our lives   

For your eyes show the way

    Your mind knows the truth

    Your being is the life.

Amen.

So today we wrap up the Defining Love sermon series, but today we are looking at it again from a completely different angle because instead of looking at what love is, we will be looking at what love is not. But the funny thing about love is that there are many things that appear to be love, they look like love, they seem like love, the world thinks they are love, and the world sells them as love, but they just are not. They fall short, they lead astray, they are the wolves in sheep’s clothing, cheap imitations, they are, in short, the imposters of love. We’ve said in the last few weeks in describing what Love is, that Love always says “I will not walk away.” We also said that “Love leaves a trail of overflowing never running out life behind it. And last week we said that love is about sacrifice, and that Jesus Christ through his own sacrifice for us, his own love for us, makes his kind of love possible. Not only does he command us to love God and love our neighbor, but by loving us first, by providing for us first, by sacrificing for us first he sets us free from our doubt and fear to actually be able do the same. . . but sometimes it is hard for us, still. . .

Before we get too far into this I want to get to our scripture lessons. First the Old Testament lesson comes from the Prophet Hosea. . . and interestingly enough, Hosea is all about choosing to worship the other than Gods. The main metaphor that Hosea talks about is the idea that God and Israel are Husband and wife, but that Israel has forsaken God, and has not been faithful, choosing instead idols. Hear the word of the Lord from Hosea 8: 1-10:

Set the trumpet to your lips!
    One like a vulture is over the house of the Lord,
because they have broken my covenant,
    and transgressed my law.
² Israel cries to me,
    “My God, we—Israel—know you!”
³ Israel has spurned the good;
    the enemy shall pursue him.

⁴ They made kings, but not through me;
    they set up princes, but without my knowledge.
With their silver and gold they made idols
    for their own destruction.
⁵ Your calf is rejected, O Samaria.
    My anger burns against them.
How long will they be incapable of innocence?
⁶     For it is from Israel,
an artisan made it;
    it is not God.
The calf of Samaria
    shall be broken to pieces.

⁷ For they sow the wind,
    and they shall reap the whirlwind.
The standing grain has no heads,
    it shall yield no meal;
if it were to yield,
    foreigners would devour it.
⁸ Israel is swallowed up;
    now they are among the nations
    as a useless vessel.
⁹ For they have gone up to Assyria,
    a wild ass wandering alone;
    Ephraim has bargained for lovers.
¹⁰ Though they bargain with the nations,
    I will now gather them up.
They shall soon writhe
    under the burden of kings and princes.

It’s a simple story really, and a simple promise, because you have decided to worship that which is not God, choosing else to worship and serve, God will leave them up to those things, knowing that those things are merely stone representations of God, and rulers and kings who do not love, but instead mean to harm them. It is quite reminiscent of the judgement that Psalm 1 gives for the wicked, that they in fact actually will not stand in judgement but instead be blown by the wind, rather than rooted. They have here decided to worship gods who are not real gods, and seem to be given the right and freedom to do so, even though it means their destruction. If you want to live in the world the Assyrians have built, live in the world the Assyrians built. Realize though that is not a world of love, and sacrifice and justice, but instead a world where might makes right, and it is the Assyrians who have the might, and therefore they will determine the right, and you will be lost. . . We call this idea of creating other gods to worship, idolatry. . . but the parallels are there as well in Love, choosing a love that is not the actual fulfilling life giving love, the love that God ordained to be the structure of his ordered universe, results in less. . . and less than God just is not God. Less than love just is not love, it just does not render the same results, it does not bear the same life giving fruits by which we flourish. I hope you see the parallels and can remember the warning as we go forward. . .

Now the New Testament Lesson. . . if you’ve caught the last bunch of sermons I have given, trying to define love, you may have been thinking to yourself, “How can he be working at trying to define love, without ever once referring or using the greatest passage in the Bible about Love. . . the beautiful, the well-known, the oft repeated at weddings and other occasions where love is in the air. How can you go about defining love in a Biblical mode without using 1 Corinthians 13. . . Faith, Hope, Love, but the greatest of these is love. . . well truthfully you can’t do it, so here it is, at least the first part of those famous words. . . . 1 Corinthians 13: 1-7

13 If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. ² And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. ³ If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

⁴ Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant ⁵ or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; ⁶ it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. ⁷ It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

What does it mean to be patient and kind, not envious, nor boastful, not arrogant nor rude, not insisting on its own way, not irritable or resentful, not rejoicing in wrongdoing but instead in truth, bearing all things, hoping all things, enduring all things. . . It is actually a pretty impressive list, isn’t it. . . does it jibe well with the list of love’s attributes that we have made of Sacrifice, Steadfastness, and Leaving behind a trail of life. . . I think so actually, leaning heavily on the sacrifice, that is about the other and not the self. . . one who is focused on the other can be patient and kind because it’s not about them, and certainly envy, and boasting are out of the question, those are both about, hey look at me, look how great I am, or hey I deserve that too. . . how come they get that and I don’t. . . arrogant, rude, insisting in its own way. . .that is all about me. . . irritability is a reaction to an affront to yourself, resentment is about not getting your own way, and holding onto that feeling. . . then that whole bearing all things, believing all things, hoping all things, enduring all things, is the cost of saying to someone, I will not walk away, come what may. . . so we are not way off. . .

So if love is about the other and not me, then those imposters of love are deep down the love that is selfish. . . do you know of any? Can you name any right off hand? I’m going to start small I think, but there is one that use to get me every year. . . as a football coach. . . and that was the national trend of NFL players, and since the NFL players did it, it would trickle down, and that is the wearing pink during October for breast cancer awareness. Now I am certainly not against breast cancer awareness, and I’m certainly not against all the money that is raised and the awareness that may or may not come from the trend. I’m just truly skeptical that at heart it is really about that, because in my 16 years as a high school football coach, I know that for my players it had a lot more to do with saying look at me, than it had to do with fundraising and mammograms. . . and I know that some of the proceeds of those gloves and shoes and bandanas and socks and belts and mouthpieces and facemasks and jerseys and eye black. . . which is despite all odds a thing actually, pink eye black. . . thought it was supposed to be black to be effective. . . but maybe that is another example, its not about deflecting the light from the sun, but instead about doing something more to say, look at me. . .  but it’s one of those things. . . it raises money (it certainly boosts profits), it raises awareness. . . it’s a nice thing to do. . . but it isn’t love, and it isn’t enough. . . I know cold right.

We had many things like that at my former school as we were trying to supposedly teach the students to be more aware, conscious of what was going around them, and of course more loving towards their neighbor. . . . We would do fundraisers for charity, where the boys could pay $10 and have a dress down day. . .You see they had to wear coat and tie every day, but they could pay money and not have to, as long as the money was going to a good cause. . . we were helping, but at the heart of it all was laziness, not sacrifice, but the temporary bending of a rule, to incentivize the behavior we wanted to instill. . . Another one, was, following the breast cancer month of October, there was the men’s health month of No Shave November, where again, $10 donation, charity, temporary ban on the shaving rule. . . effective yes, but love? Is that what we were teaching them? And is it just the high school equivalency of tax breaks for charitable donations? Which is kinda ironic based on the political rhetoric that we see. . . if you don’t pay your taxes you are heartless and don’t care about people, but one way of getting around it is to help people yourself, on your own, but cynicism is at the bottom of it. . . people won’t “love” unless they are getting something out of it. . . one wonders if I would be possible just to love and help people, without the middle man of manipulation? Maybe. . . naah, cynicism right, but what then does the cynical version of love through taxation as a middle man result in. . . right. . . resentment. . . which is one of the things that 1 Corinthians suggests that love can never be. . .

I wonder at heart what the true trouble is. . . is it that love in these ways has become much too big, global, and large, and love was never about that kind of thing? That it has become about “all” but should instead be about loving “each.” Does Jesus use neighbor because it suggests a certain proximity, as if love needs be personal, immediate and face to face. . . not loving of a faceless mob, nor of a faceless idea of a person somewhere across the world? Is there something missing when we love by proxy, rather than in person, when we outsource our love, through our money or our views, so that others might love in our place? We see it so much in the recent division, is it all media driven, or is something else behind it. . . the absence of love, that you can love humanity, globally somehow, but hate people. . . stand in the streets saying that you are all about love, but vilifying a total stranger as someone filled with hate. . . it reminds me of a great quote from Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov. The character Ivan says, “The more I detest men individually the more ardent becomes my love for humanity.” And that is the case for many, love has become such a large and distant thing that people end up loving all of humanity, they think, but hating the individual human, and that is just the absolute flipside of the commandment to love our neighbor, and as we see too much in our world it does not result in a trail of life, but instead a great chasm of the discordant opposition to life.

So that is one of the imposters to love, the love by proxy. . . it is born out it seems from a much too small version of love that is at heart if we were to be honest more about our selves than the other, the giver rather than the recipient, all possibly stemming from social pressures and other incentives rather than the selflessness that love demands. It’s love on the sidelines, and beyond what we have mentioned often manifests itself in love through hashtags on twitter, the right bumper stickers, the right political views, and has nothing to do with love in reality.

Another one of love’s imposters is much more personal, and we all I think have experienced it in some way in our life. . . Have you ever heard the phrase the old ball and chain? The notion that love is a burden, an obligation, a prison. . . I think about an old Seinfeld episode where Jerry was thinking about getting married. . . and Kramer comes rushing in, as Kramer does, and says, “What are you thinking about, marriage, they’re prisons man, you’re doing time. . . its like you wake up in the morning, she’s there, all day long, she’s there, it’s like you have to ask permission to use the bathroom”. . . then he says, “and you can forget about watching tv while you’re eating, you know why, because it’s dinner time. . . and do you know what you do at dinner time, you talk about your day. . . did you have a good day, well what kind of day was it, was it a good day or a bad day. . . you have no idea!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!.” Is love truly a burden like that, we have said that it is about sacrifice and saying, I will not walk away, and that is commitment. . . but love is supposed to not be about you any more but about them, about the other, but at the same time an amazing paradox about the more you give, the more that you get, and the cup is always full, and the tomb cannot contain it. . . why is it then that we have such a hard time giving of love in that selfless way? Why do we see something that is supposed to be life giving, life overflowing, life fulfilling as chains? Because there is this chasm right, the chasm of vulnerability, the putting yourself out there, and not having it come back. . . what is that?

What is the true opposite of love? It is not hate, hate is not even in the same league as love. . . hate is simply loudmouthed ignorance, bumping around in the dark, it is something different entirely. . . the true opposite of love is fear. Love builds people up, Fear breaks them apart, Love sets free, and fear places people in chains. . . because fear causes people to seek to control their situation, control. . . we try to hold on because of a fear of abandonment, a fear of love not being reciprocated, a fear of it all being in vain, a fear that love does not exist, fear of the unknown. . . remember how we said that some of the system of globalized love is built on cynicism. . . we must do it this way, manipulate, else it won’t get done, and we of course know that it must get done. . . right. . . fear. . . doubt. . . cynicism. . . ends justify the means, love doesn’t exist, they could never love me, love isn’t really that powerful anyway, there is no such thing as the trail of life, they are merely prisons, I will walk away, and hold onto and take care of myself instead. . . . and the problem is that fear breeds more fear, and doubt breeds more doubt, and all that is left is people controlling others and using fear to do so. . . remember the Assyrians, and idol worship, and the Israelites forsaking God and the law of love for the law instead of Might makes Right. . . yeah fear eventually dissolves into control. . . the real chains, people place on each other. . . how truly ironic huh. . . but that is what is described by the Prophets in the Old Testament, we need to be more like the Assyrians and the Babylonians lest we are over taken by them, we need to protect ourselves, in the way they do, with power and might and kings and gods of stone. . . self fulfilling prophecy I would say. . . the same is true about abandoning the world of love for the world of fear, it because merely a cynical world of manipulation and control real quick. . . and in many ways we are there folks. . . and the only way to break out of those chains is not more of the same, not half measures, not partial love pieces, but instead the whole deal. . . knowing the power and redemptive characteristics of love and living wholesale into it truth.

I’m going to use one more example of the depths of the love imposter that is fear and its need to control, and the way it actually uses fear to achieve its ends. . . Now you are all familiar with the old children’s story Rapunzel, but you may not be familiar with the latest Disney retelling of that story, in the cartoon Tangled. Anyone? Grandparents, come on? Now in that movie there is the character Mother Gothel, and she is bad, she uses the magical property of Rapunzel’s hair to stay young, you see it, as long as it isn’t cut has the power to heal and keep an old witch young. . . now I put that quote from Machievelli in the bulletin and this Mother Gothel is up on that cynical manifesto, she decides she is going to use fear and false love to keep Rapunzel locked away in the tower. In fine Disney fashion it is all captured in song, this one called “Mother Knows Best”

You want to go outside
Oh
Why, Rapunzel?

Look at you, as fragile as a flower
Still a little sapling, just a sprout
You know why we stay up in this tower
(I know but)
That's right, to keep you safe and sound, dear

Mother knows best
Listen to your mother
It's a scary world out there

Mother knows best
One way or another
Something will go wrong, I swear

Ruffians, thugs
Poison ivy, quicksand
Cannibals and snakes, the plague
(No)
Yes
(But )

Also large bugs
Men with pointy teeth and
Stop, no more, you'll just upset me

Mother's right here
Mother will protect you
Darling, here's what I suggest

Skip the drama
Stay with mama
Mother knows best

Mother knows best
Take it from your mumsy
On your own, you won't survive

Sloppy, under-dressed
Immature, clumsy
Please, they'll eat you up alive

Gullible, naive
Positively grubby
Ditzy and a bit, well, hmm, vague

Plus, I believe
Gettin' kinda chubby
I'm just saying 'cause I love you

Mother understands
Mother's here to help you
All I have is one request

Rapunzel?
(Yes?)
Don't ever ask to leave this tower again
(Yes, mother)

Oh, I love you very much, dear
(I love you more)
I love you most, hmm

Don't forget it
You'll regret it
Mother knows best

You can hear it right. . . fear, using fear, and false notions of love. . . to keep and enslave, and it all makes her think she is not good enough, that she is not capable. . . but of course she is, the world is not the cynical evil place of fear, but instead something very different, and she is not just the vulnerable weak and defenseless little girl she is made out to be, instead she is much much more than that. I said that the only way to break out of this cycle of fear and false love is to actually love, fully, not in half measures by proxy, but by full measures, and to do that you have to know the worth of yourself, because if you do not know your full worth, how could you ever give of it? Look at how Rapunzel breaks the spell Mother Gothel has over her. . . she realizes the truth about the wonder of who she is. . . and says to her

"I am the lost princess, it was you, it was all you, I spent my entire life, hiding from people who would use me for my power, but I should have been hiding from you, You were wrong about the world, and you were wrong about me, and I will never let you use my hair again.

We could and probably should say this very thing to ourselves. . . we are wrong about the world and the way it works every time we allow it to convince us to hold on and not to give of ourselves completely and freely, without fear, with complete knowledge that we have already been loved, and loved abundantly, by the very one who created us and this world we live in, having the faith in us that love requires to set us free. . . may we in everything we do remember in everything we do what real love means. . . I said last week that Jesus makes it possible for us to love. . . one of the amazing ways he does so is at heart stripping us from our fear, so in the moment, every moment, Be Still our Souls, we can choose love, the giving of ourselves, rather than holding back or accepting less. . . to God be the Glory. . . amen.