ns’ Johny M. Buchanan

: atl? Broad Street Presbyterian U1...
. Pia an Columbus
er 7, LEP Ohio

™ 2:¢ is a conspiracy of silence in cur culture, the Par mnose of which is to

: eorle from discovering that love is hard work. On e basis of the date
wile, it is apparent that popular culture regarcs leve as a mystical,ethereal
“a which strikes without warning leaving its victim stunned, speechiess and
aded, Other data sugcest that love is nncontrel} ably glandular ,"hermones

. Sermones" someane recently described it. Nowhere is love celebrated as

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But it is. Parents try to tell that to young people who aré besinning to look
starry-eyed at each other, ‘You know the rhetoric: you 've probably recited it, 2s
- the middle eses you hear

feelings aren't enough.

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variation on the theme, several times. and s¢
it. It goes ii I know just bow you

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ike this...

Somadaey your feelings will change and then what L you do?" What you do, of course,
is go to work at it, Peovle who have been married creatively and vitully unow it,
and want desperately to tell newlyweds that happiness and life-long relationships are
a culmination of a number of factors, some of which may be out of our control, But

one factor is eerri 2, and that is hard work: the will, the determination, to leve -

articularly when the feeling hes disapyeered for mo.ent. pete

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At a norvet.y on Substance Abuse recently I heard a psychologist supgest eri-+
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teria fer o.t.,*s «3c went to deal with drug and alcohol use. The first crite ja, fe

Rede. Ag Tle wihiNeg ess ro De disliked by your own children. There were a few
nervous ch: es acd then che room became vary quiet as he said: "The trouble with
all vou nes fegatena al people is that you feel guilty about your chiléren. You worry

about not spending enough time with your children, you analyze your own parenting
perforrance and you feel guilty. And you have a very hard time making decisions

thar will cause your children to be urhaspy and jsrhacs even 6 ciglike you."

Love is heautiful, Loewe makes the w. ric # is a nany splendorec

thing. It is also very hard work.

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The lawyer who came te sea Jesus wanted to embaress Him, to discredit Him, in

fact, in the eyes of the -ecple who were following Him, From the very moment He
enterec Jerusalem the celigisus and legal authorities had degeed His steps, harassing
Him, intesrupting Him, uSiLnE éifficult, leaded questions. "Which is the great

Cttumnueé ent in the law?" tic Pharisee asked, There
"¥ou shall love the Lord your God
new that. But then He pulled an
the process, cpened the door te z
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it..,You shail

ve your nel grhuor

Abstractions inspire: the specifies give us t: «ble. Who could argue with the
acsenition to love God with heart, “ind ané soul, o:¢ theological equivalent of
mothertiood and apple pie? Jesus, bovever, wved the focus frem safe abstractisn fo

Clver ChTA worrers. The general uucaploynent rate in Franklin County

cf 3 fi is
ever U%. That means that there are no jobs for those 3,060 people, Ac the same time
there are fewer dollars to feed and house them and the prospects of tighter welfare
eligibility regulations, Worst of all, there is a new social respectability to igner-

gn
ing the problem, assuming that the poor should and can take care of themselves. James
Reston caustically observed last week that we are guilty af asking people to pull
themselves up by their own bootstraps who have no straps and no boots.

Ti the Old Testament were being written today the plight of those 3,0UC; the
Gilemma of the men standing around on the corners up and down Main Street, Long
Street, Livingston Avenue, Mt. Vernon Avenue, would be the subject matter, If Jesus
were composing parables the cruel dilemma of people not very far from here would be
the focus.

Love is hard work. Love defined by Jesus is practical, down to earth, help for
people who need help,

There is another dimension to the matter. On a personal level love has to do
with the way you and I feel about ourselves. "Love your neighbor as yourseif," He
said. Over the long pull we have almost as much trouble with that self-love business
#s we do loving the neighbor in need,

Christianity, historically, has been very suspicious of the self. Sin, we have
been taught, is pride, thinking more highly of oneself than we ought to think; mak-
ing ourselves the center of the universe. Sin, we were taught, is unbridled selfish-

SS, egotism, Liturgicelly we have confessed sin as a prerequisite to the rest of
worship. Psychologically we have acted as if the only pood Christian is a guilty
Christian.

One of the great theolosical developments in our era is the recovery of a little
sanity about the self. Sin may be egotism, but we are finally learning that there is
also a form of sin which results from low self-esteem. People, we are learning, often
-Go bad things precisely because their self-image is bad. twas a struggle, but many
of us who were weaned on the "sin is ;ride”™ doctrine, finally heard a new version: of
the Gospel when we read “I'm OK, You're OK". It wasn't casy, but we learned, finally,
that low self-esteem doesn't look very pretty when it gets expressed teheviorally,

We jearned that vicicus racism is often a partn€® of self-hatred. We finally saw
rnat forcing people to lever the self-imege is to invite their behavior to fellov.
Even Taérenting was graced by something called "positive reinforcement" which taushe
the covious; namely, that no child ever acted better because parents made him feel
bad about himself.

The only real danger in loving your neighbor as yourself, I conclude, is in not
roving yourself nearly enoush, You can't give something you dan't have. In marriage,
you can’t give a self you don't value. Love, on all levels, depends entirely on the
‘ard work of coming to terme with the self.Sonewhere along the line we concluded that
if homility is a virtue, self-abesement rust be marvelous, Som-where we concluded
that the appropriate approach to iost of the problems we -nceunter is that someone
@lse is bettar prepared to reselve them, and that the épypropriate response to all
invitation to fill a positicn, serve as an officer, make a speech, is to decline on
the basis of inadequacy. Somewhere along the line we got the idea that God is worried
that we will think too highly cof ourselves.

Foam prepesing the opposite. Jesus said, “Love your neighbor as yourself,”
And that assures a self in there worthy of iocving, Self-love doesn't mean fauning

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the svecific - He said, "Love your neighbor." He said, "Love your neighbor as your-
self.'' And we have trouble with both, because both are "hard work",

The "love your neighbor” mandate is grounded in the theology and history of the
Jewish people, In the Old Testament Lesson this morning religious responsibility is
described in clearly social terms, The section of the Book Exodus is called the
Book of the Covenant. It contains the rituals, rules, customs and responsibilities
to one another which constitute Israel's part of the bargain. The treatment of the
poor, the weak, the disinherited, occupies a special place in the list. To obey God
is to treat them with special consideration. To take advantage of them, to exploit
them, was to offend God, No abstractions here. God is honored, obeyed and worshipped
rightly when poor people receive justice, .

In the New Testament the same connection is made. God is not loved in the ab-
stract, but as the neighbor - defined by Jesus as the person who needs you + is
helped, healed, served, and if there is any misunderstanding of the issue the first
Epistle of John, written around the turn of the First Century, ought to clear it up.
“if aman says he loves God and hates his brether, he is a liar."

Love in the Biblical idiom is not an emotion, but an activity, a verb not a noun.
Love, by Jesus’ definition is something you do, not something you feel. God doesn't —
care how you feel about your neighbor. God, by Biblical definition, is a behaviorigt,
He cares about how you deal with your neighbor. A whole school of psychology is con-
vineed that feelings follow behavior anyway and that the feeling of love follows
loving behavior. The late Paul Tillich was helpful when he equated Biblical Love
with Justice, "Justice is nothing more, " he said, "than love at work in the world."

Our propensity to keep it abstract, te define love as feeling rather than activ-
ity, however, remains one of the critical issues for the institutional church. Swiss
Roman Catholic theologian Hans Kung, in his recent book Does God Exist?, deals with
the major objections to belief in Ged: Darwinism, Freudism, the philosopher Nietzche
and a very helpful section on Marx. Karl Marx simply didn't know very much about
relision: his views were unsophisiticated, childish. It was Lenin whose brother was
executed in connection with the murder of Czar Alexander Ii, who passionately hated
anything remotely connected with religion thereafter. Marx simply regarded the re-
ligicn he saw as superfluous and assumed that it would disappear as its uselessness
bacume evident. Kung suggests that "Marx never seriously came to terms with,..the
message of Jesus Christ and consequently was not at all familiar with the ‘social
principles of Christianity'.” (p.254-5}. Marx never even knew about Christian
concern for poor people and justice, Kung isn’t the only scholar toe suggest that
had institutional Christianity been vigorous about the social dimension of love,
Marxism would never have had a prayer. Kung, and most scholars, are inclined to
think that Marx's analysis of the religion he saw was accurate, "God," in Kung's
words, "is often discredited by His followers."

The proper role for government in dealing with poor people, protecting rights
and guaranteeing adequate food, shelter and medical care, is now under vigorous
debate. People of good will, peaple who are committed to justice, disagree regard-
ing the aporopriate role for gevernment to play. My concern is that we not stop
working for it as the debate continues. My euncern is that the Christians in our
society not forget that justice for the poor is their baoy, and that the political
position that "Washington shouldn't do it",..does not relieve the society from deal-
ing with its own problems, I don;t think we intend that, but it will take alert,
sensitive, mature leadership to assure that it doesn't happen. Example: I under-
stand that cut-backs in Federal Anti-poverty funds have resulted in the unemployment

85.04

(1)

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Board of Review: dearings

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over oneself, Jt means acknowledging one's uniqueness: simply coming to honest

terms with the fact that God made you totally unique. There is nobody like you. The
pattern on your finger tip is different from everyone else who ever lived. You and I
are absolutely unique, Self-love beging when we acknowledpe that, appreciate it, may-
be even begin to enjoy it. It proceeds, then to an appreciation that along with unique
finger prints and eye color, each of us has been given special gifts, skills, sensi- —
tivities, abilities that are unique to us, Self-esteem continues as we begin to

enjoy who we are, Mature self-love doesn't overdo it, nor - by tha same reasoning,
under-do it. Mature self-love accepts limitations, failures, mistakes, perhaps even
intentional meanness ~ but also sees goodness, kindness, potential for courage and
grace,

What the Pharisee who esked the question missed, however, was the key to the
whole transaction. The Christian word is not an ethical admonition. It is not even
a sophisticated psychological analysis of the human condition, Rather it is the Cood
News, the Amazing Grace, that in Jesus Christ we are loved. The Pharisee didn't see
that apparently. The essence of religion for him was keeping the rules. What he
missed entirely was the very thing that attracted Fis disciples to Him; namely, the
sense that in this man God's love for them was being lived out, That's why they
followed Him and were willing to die for Him. That's what transformed people, made
them over - the sense that they were loved strongly, creatively, by God himself.

Love is hard work. The command to love neighbor as self is terribly difficult,
In fact, it is impossible, until we begin the process of learning haw to Tove our-'
selves. And that, clearly, can happen only as we know curselves to be loved,

To love neighbor as self is what it means to be a Christian. To know oneself
loved of God is what we mean by salvation,

it is to be saved from the hell of a lifetime trying to prove self-worth, to earn
self-esteem, It is to be gractously and marvelously free - free to be who we are:
free to spend ourselves doing what our creator put us here to do - free to love our

neighbors as ourselves,
Amen,

Eternal God, help us to see and know and accept Your love for us. Cive us
the grace to receive what You offer: and the strength to love our neighbors. In

Jesus Christ our Lord,
Amen,