GIFT OF LOVE John M. Buchanan
I Corinthians 13:1-7, Matthew 2:7-11 Broad Street Presbyterian Church
Decenber 21, 1980 Columbus, Ohio

Something peculiar and disturbing hippens on the way to becoming a parent. First
time fathers are convinced that it is their problem alone, but I am assured that the same
phenomenon happens to new mothers. In fact, it happens equally with people who are about
to adopt a child. Sometime after the original shock of one's immanent parenthood wears
off, but before the awesome event actually happens, the terrible realization sets in that
there simply are no feelings of love toward this unborn child everybody is awaiting. Ex-
pectant fathers worry about that a lot, I lear. They contemplate what has happened, what
is happening and what is about to happen and for the object of all this contemplation and
commotion they feel absolutely nothing. Swme take their deep, dark secret to minister or
psychiatrist..."Dr...you're going to think I'm awful, some kind of cold-hearted barbarian...
but Dr., I don't love the baby my wife is about to have. in fact, I can’t feel anything
about him or her. What am I going to do?...'"

And then the child is born: a pink, squinty, wrinkled, unresponsive, not terribly
pretty infant, to all but immediate family, and for most parents the issue is resolved at
the very sight, and for others it may take a few days, but for the vast, vast majority of
people love is created by the child.

~ There are several miracles, it seems to me, which happen in the process of human
ipo regeneration, The miracle of conception; two microscopic cells joining to produce, ulti-
V mately, @ person: the incredible process 01 gestation, and, the birth itself, the becoming

of a human being. But of all the wonders in the event, nothing is more miraculous than the
x f~ creation of lové. Love is truly created, «x nihilo - out of nothing. Once there is

Rs nothing and then, 4 iew short months later, there is a feeling so strong you would gladly
a die on its behalf.

A remarkable dynamic when you think about it - all that fierce affection and
loyalty and dedication and intense feeling created out of nothing by an infant who doesn't
make an inspiring speech, er sing a beautilul song, or even look very pretty, but simply
shows up. That insight was brought into focus for me by Langdon Gilkey, University of
Chicago scholar who writes learnedly about theology and science and philosophy, but who
also knows about people. The paragraph, tor some reason, jumped off the page..."To be
enabled te love is the greatest gift that can be given to us, even more enhancing of the
strengths of the self, of the depth of its joys, than being loved. Thus it is the parent
who is really blessed by the presence of the child, not the reverse, because of the in-
credible gift of another being whom we can hardly help but love.' (Message and Existence,
p.203).

The dynamic is not confined to parent-child relationships, obviously. In fact, too
much can be made of parenthood as a paradipm of God's leve, and family as the only metaphor
for divine/human encounter. The truth stands in all relationships. The most precious
gift of all is a person who enables us to love; who calls love out of us. As first time
parents discover, it is not a matter of will. Love cannot be willed. We can behave with
justice and fairness and compassion toward others as an act of the highest moral intent,
But we cannot will ourselves to feel love. That comes, always, as a gift, from somewhere
outside ourselves, from another person whose very existence creates love in us and calis
it out of us.

St. Paul understood that dynamic as the basis for the relationship between God and
people. Paul could be tedious in his discussions of righteousness and the law, but no one
ever accused him of being opaque about God and men and women in relationship. That, Paul

saw, is a miracle which depends on God, n= anything in men and wonen. He chose the

Greek word ‘Agape’! to express it. "Eros" is romantic love; "Filia" is family and friendly
affection: "Agape" is divine love, which ‘as its source, not in the desirability or

merit of the object, but in the basic post-re of the subject, "Grace" he called it: the
unmerited, undeserved, unearned love of Gei for people, It was not an abstraction for
Paul, It took shape in the birth, life, ceath and resurrection of Jesus Christ. "That",

Paul said, “is love."

In human relations this love becomes possible for those who allow it to be generated
by and called out of them by Jesus Christ. In human relationships its essential character
is defined by the fact that ordinary human virtues are meaningless gestures without it...
“IF I give away all I have...but have not love, I have nothing."

This leve, Paul went on to argue, is the one permanent reality in the universe, the
one thing we can count on always. Elsewhere he asked, "Who can separate us from the love
of God?" And then listed all the catastropnes and disasters and threats to life, coneluding
that "nothing in all creation will separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ."
(Romans 8).

On the subject of love, J.B.Phillips has translated beautifully, in a way that is
part of the new Presbyterian Marriage Ceresony...'Love knows no limit to its endurance,
no end to its trust, no fading of its hope; it can outlast anything. It is, in fact, the
one thing that still stands when all else has fallen."

That love is God's gift to us. It is eternal. Nothing shail ever overcome it.
Nothing shall ever separate us from it. But it is not simply’a theological concept, an
abstraction. It is God giving himself to us. Et is the gift of life, Jesus of Nazareth,
the Christ, God incarnate. God's love is not, however, an end in itself. It is not even
the greatest gift. That may sound strange on this Sunday - perhaps even heretical - but
I am proposing that the greatest gift of all is the enablement, the calling of love out of
you and me, The best thing of all is what happens when that love goes to work with the raw
material of a human life.

We are constructed, apparently, with a need to love, We know, by now, about our
need to be loved. We have learned that the love of parents and significant others is
vital to the building of healthy personhood, Our need to love others is just as important.
Psychologically, we have our identity in community, in a whole complex of relationships.
with other people. Our age has shown us how to celebrate our individuality. Our era has
lifted up the self, the individual and given permission for the person, alone, whole. But
the process sometimes goes beyond the point of helpfulness and healthiness. The human self
has an alarming propensity to curve in upon itself, Martin Luther taught. "I gotta be me."
"Y did it my way": "Do your own thing." "If it feels good do it." Sometimes seif-
awareness looks suspiciously like selfishness, and self-realization like old fashioned
self-indulgence.

No one of us can be a person alone. None of us is an island, [ft is perhaps the
most subtle and fashionable of our original sins to think and act as if we are. We don't
exist very long in a vacuum. We are human only in relationship. Dr. Lewis Thomas has @
delightful little essay on "Cloning" in his best seller, The Medussa and the Snail, in
which he pokes gentle fun at the science fiction fears generated by the laboratory ability
to "clone" or recreate an individual from a single cell, a Thomas Jefferson, or Henry
Kissinger, or Albert Schweitzer. Thomas points out that to clone the individual it would
be necessary to duplicate the environment in which the individual matured...He writes,

~3-

"When you examine what we mean by ‘environment’ it comes down to other human beings. We
use euphemisms and jargon for this like 'social forces’, cuitural influences,...but what
is meant is the dense crowd of nearby people who talk to, listen to, smile or frown at,
give to, withhold from, nudge, push, caress, or flail out at the individual,” Thomas
argues that to clone an individual you would also have to clone "parents, grandparents,
family members, schoolmates, lovers, enemies, car pool partners..." The Dr. believes that
we are not ready for an experiment of this size. (See On Cloning a Human Being, p. 41-45).
The point he is making is a very important one.

We are human in relationship with other human beings. We are related. We need to
love as badly as we need to be loved. Ebenezer Scrooge, Charles Dickens understood, could
live human life - only when he allowed the people around him to epen the window of his
heart and call out the love he had been hoarding there for years.

We need others - wives, husbands, children, parents, friends, acquaintances, not
simply for the love they give to us, but for our love which they create and cail out of us.
We need one another in order to live. Nothing is more clear than that. Yet, nothing is
more elusive and evasive than open-ended creatively mutual love,

God's grace is given in freedom with the result that the gift is not always, not
often, received. We don't have to accept it, The superb motion picture Ordinary People
explores the dynamics of a suburban, well-to-do family that has forgotten how to love, if
it ever knew how, and trying desperately to Live on some other basis: social expectation,
responsibility, propriety, control. An accidental death has created guilt and self-
recrimination, attempted suicide, and the disintegration of the structures which hold the
family together. It's an amazing movie: to see it is to be moved deeply by the beauty
of the gift of love - which is always the calling of love out of us by someone who is
willing to be vulnerable for us.

The focus of the problem in Ordinary People is a mother who cannot give anything of
herself to her son. Love is always the gife of oneself. Sometimes we forget that. Some-
times we cave into the philosophy behind the TV commercials which, without apology or even
discretion, equate love with the amount of money you are willing to borrow in order to
purchase gifts. Sometimes we even reenforce that sad misunderstanding by Literally taking
our children by the hand, giving them our money, and forcing them to purchase gifts for
others, ignoring those useless and clumsy little items which bear the investment of the
person. I don't know what's in your treasure chest; there's nothing in mine that even
resembles the gift suggestion list from a slick magazine, but you might Find in there the
picture of a gorilla someone drew for me for Christmas, or a photo of a toothless seven-
year old framed with popsicle sticks.

Frederick Buechner, with his characteristic irreverence, speculated in print
recently about the gifts of the Magi.'It gives you pause," he wrote, "to consider how,
for all their wisdom, they overlooked the one gift the child would have been genuinely
pleased to have someday, and that was the gift of themselves and their love." (Peculiar
Treasures, p.172).

A D Magazine contained the touching story of a young woman who was hurriedly da-
livering a glass of jelly to a shut-in on behalf of her church circle a few days before
Christmas. She discovered a very lonely old woman who brightened immediately at the simple
presence of another person. In fact, she prevailed on her harried caller to stay for
coffee and a snack, When the old woman opened the cupboard door, the younger woman saw
there, lined up, still with ribbons brightly wrapped, the untouched jelly jars from the
past decade of well meaning but unloving deliveries. The old woman needed a little love -
not jelly; a little humanity, not a holiday gesture. St. Paul observed; "If I give away
all I have...and have not love, I gain nothing."

~&e

There ig a lot going on emotionally at Christmas: affection, family reunions,
genuine wishes of peace and good will, generosity. There is some sentimentality, a good
dose of nostalgia, a little greed and a bit of silliness. There is also basic truth
about the human condition, What God gives at Christmas, in the birth of Jesus Christ, is
himself, It is not simply an infant to fawn over for a few weeks a year. What God gives
is love - which means the very selfhood of God made vulnerable, offered to us in the human
and humble process of birth.

There is no way to repay God for that. There really is no way to say “thank you"
adequately, The only way to respond to love, is to love.

That is where we rest our case. Ultimately, the grace of God - the mysterious
wonder of God's love for us is the source of our faith, We believe, finally, not because
we have been convinced by logic, certainly not because we have been coerced: we believe,
finally, because we sense that we are loved. Sometimes we find the courage to fight
battles and take stands, because we sense we are loved. And sometimes we find strength
to live another day, to face unknown futures, to walk. confidently into the valley of the
shadow of death because we have sensed that nothing will ever separate us from God's
love, And sometimes, quietly, privately, we simply rejoice in the miracle of love that
keeps happening deep within us ~ because in Jesus Christ we have been graced by God.

So let us keep the feast. "A child is born...a son is given...His name is
Immanuel...God with us."
Amen.

God our Father, for all the customs and tradition, for carols and wreaths and
family rituals, we give thanks. For memories of Christmases past, and dear ones who
made the occasions of joy and laughter, we give thanks. But above all, our Father,
we give thanks for love - Your love in Jesus Christ, and our love, created in us and
called out of us by others. God eternal, we are grateful: through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Amen.