TEACHINGS ON LOVE

Unitarian Church, Davenport, February 11, 2007

Rev. Roger Butts 

 

This week, I want to ask you a simple question: what, for you, are the fruits of the spirit of love?

When you experience love, what happens?

 

LAUGHTER AND JOY…

 

I have to share with you my favorite story from this week. I was sitting on Wednesday night with some folks gathered for our Wednesday nights. The Committee on Ministry had met. The knitting group. There was a fun poker evening to raise money for our youth.

 

I went over to say hello to Melanie Landa and Jane Martin. They were sitting with someone I didn’t know. They introduced me to Shelley Klaus, a gentile, a protestant, married to a Catholic, and she told me this story. She said, “When my child was younger, we wanted to raise her in the Unitarian Church, and send her to Catholic school. So, we did that. And she said that one day her daughter came home, she must have been 6 or 7, and said, “Mommy, is Jesus God?” Well, Shelly the mom started, Some believe he is, and some don’t. She said some Unitarians believe that, but most don’t. But Catholics definitely believe that. And then the little girl looked at her and said, “Yes, but what do we believe as Jews?”

 

One of the fruit of the spirit of love is great laughter. One of the fruits of the spirit of life is great joy.  Laughter and joy.

 

What is the fruit of the spirit of love for you? How do you know when you are on that great road to wholeness and love?

 

ACCEPTANCE

 

Something similar happened to me. I was sitting with Norah, a couple of weeks ago. Norah is my four year old. And when you all were up here talking about prayer, the children’s religious education program decided to also take up a conversation about prayer. So what I did was I made a 7 page prayer packet. It included fun little prayers from every religious tradition, giving thanks mostly. I also included a weekly schedule of prayers. These were NOT prayers of intercession, asking for anything. They were prayers, such as helping your family set the table, and being mindful of and thankful for all of the hands and all of the people who had touched this food and helped prepare it. They were prayers such as taking a walk in nature and being thankful for the animals and birds you might see along the way.

 

So Sunday night, after the children had received this packet, I sat with Norah and we talked about this calendar. Before she went to bed, I was telling her what to expect in the next week. So I went over all of these things. On Monday, we’re going to write a thank you note to someone. On Thursday, we’re going to sit together silently. It was all designed to live a prayerful life, a life of intentionality and gratitude. So we sit there, and at the end of our tour of the weekly calendar, she indicates that she wants to hang it on the wall and mark an x through every day when it is done, an idea her mommy had given her. And then she looks at me and says, big brown eyes, the joy of my life, and says to me, “But who is God.”

 

Now I hadn’t mentioned God at all. So I thought, well, this is not what I expected. I hadn’t mentioned the first thing about God. So my first thought, of course, was “How in the world would I know such a thing. Time for bed.” Instead I said, “Well mommy and daddy believe that God is love.” Abstract, I realize.  “Ok,” she said, “but who is he?” Wait a minute, I thought. I haven’t mentioned God much. But I sure enough have never ever said anything about God in gendered terms.

 

I’m at this point realizing that without this RE prayer packet, I’d might not ever know that at this point she is having thoughts about this stuff.  So I remembered something that happened earlier in the evening. Earlier that evening, when Norah was taking her bath, Nicholas had come into the bathroom to entertain her. He brought in a little person chair and put it in front of the toilet seat (which was closed).  He put his hands on the toilet and his feet on chair, so he was not touching the ground. “Look Norah, I’m a bridge. I’m a bridge.” She laughed. So sitting there I remembered that episode and knew that she knew what a bridge was.

 

So I said to her, “Your mommy and daddy don’t believe that God is a boy or a girl, we believe that God is like a bridge, connecting all people to one another and all people to all of the earth.”

 

Now, I am so grateful that Norah is being raised in a Unitarian Universalist church, because the next thing she said was, “Yes, but sometimes God is a he, right?” I gave her a big hug.

 

One of the fruits of the spirit of love is letting the person in front of you have her questions, her opinions, her own life, and accepting her right in her own place just as she is, and walking with her as she becomes who she’ll become.

 

What is the fruit of the spirit of love for you? How do you know when you are on that great road to wholeness and love?

 

 

 

NEW EYES TO SEE

One of my favorite stories to tell in wedding services is one about Thomas Merton.

 

Thomas Merton was a great Catholic monk, a spiritual writer of enormous depth and clarity. He was a rebel—he hung out with the Beat poets and wrote against nuclear war at every turn. He was comfortable with truth where he found it—he died while in Asia with a group of Buddhists and Christians. He was a believer in humanity.

 

So one day, he left his monastery, Gethesmane in Kentucky and he went to Louisville. And he went to the corner of Vine and Ninth in Louisville and he had an epiphany.

 

And he saw all these people walking here and there and he began to feel something new as he looked at them. He said, I have lived this separate life, seeking God in all I do. I have been monastic. But I am not, he said, separate from this person. I am no better than they and they are no better than I. Rather I live in them and they live in me. I am connected to them at the deepest levels and I truly can say that I love each one of them.

 

He went home and documented this story in his journals. And he wrote, I wish I could stop each one of them and tell them that they shine bright as the sun.

 

One of the fruits of the spirit of love is gaining new eyes to see. That we are all of us one. That we are all of us connected. At the heart of all creation, I like to say, there is a goodness, that some call God that some call love, from which we come, in which we live our fullest, and to which we shall at last return.

 

What is the fruit of the spirit of love for you?

 

HOPE

More Thomas Merton "I had better get this said before rain becomes a utility that they can plan and distribute. By “they” I mean people who cannot understand that rain is a festival, who do not appreciate its gratuity, who think that what has no price has no value, that what cannot be sold is not real, so that the only way to make something actual is to place it on the market. The time will come when they will sell you even the rain. At the moment it is still free, and I am in it. I celebrate its gratuity and its meaninglessness.

…I came up here from the monastery last night, sloshing through the corn fields, said Vespers, and lit the Coleman. The night became very dark. The rain surrounded the whole cabin with its enormous virginal myth, a whole world of meaning, of secrecy, of silence, of rumor. Think of it, all that speech pouring down, selling nothing, judging nobody, drenching the thick mulch of dead leaves, soaking the trees, filling the gullies and crannies of the wood with water, washing out the places where men have stripped the hillside….

Nobody started it, nobody is going to stop it. It will talk as long as it wants. As long as it talks I am going to listen.

But I am also going to sleep. Because here in this wilderness I have learned how to sleep again. For here I am not alien. The trees I know, the night I know, the rain I know. I close my eyes and instantly sink into the whole rainy world of which I am a part, and the world goes on with me in it, for I am not alien to it."

 

For here I am not alien. Love, like rain, is free. It is not especially productive. It cannot be packaged. It cannot be sold.  Let your love, like the rain that Merton celebrates, be something that as long as it talks, you’re willing to listen to. Fall asleep in your love’s gentle embrace. Here, you are no longer alien. Here you are whole.

 

I pray that your life and your love unfold in beautiful and powerful ways, with solid roots and beautiful fruit.

 

 

To risk love is to risk loss. It is also to risk being truly alive. May the fruits of the spirit of love ever be with you. No matter who you are. No matter whom you love.

 

Now and ever more.

 

Amen.