The Gospel According to the Beatles

Luke 3:7-20; I Corinthians 13:1-13
Third Sunday of Advent
December 17, 2006

You remember the Beatles? English band. 1960's. Over-rated. Won't go away. They got famous singing, "I wanna hold your hand" and "she loves you yeah, yeah, yeah." Among a whole lot of other highly intellectual things like St. Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band. Then they recorded a song called "All You Need is Love." The chorus of that song sported amazing lyrics, to wit

All you need is love (duh da da da duh),
All you need is love (duh da da da duh),
All you need is love, love.
Love is all you need.

That's right, they recorded a song called "All You Need is Love," and then broke up because they couldn't reconcile their differences. As Christians, we would probably agree that all you need is love, depending on how you define it, but being right about that and actually doing it are two different things. Seems like the Beatles sort of recapitulated humanity's history through our eons long hard day's night. All through our history we’ve known the importance of love, but we never quite get the hang of avoiding the break ups. Why is that? Well maybe it's because all of us, like the Beatles, can sing of love, but repeatedly fail to employ it. Help! We need somebody.

Now, we just lit the Love candle. The third Sunday of Advent traditionally calls attention to the Love candle, anticipating the Joy candle. I suppose there’s a certain logic in the traditional arrangement of those candles – with joy following on love. All kinds of jokes could emerge from that, especially if you have a twisted mind.

The problem I have centers on the traditional scripture passages associated with the Love Sunday, especially the gospel reading. It’s Luke 3:7-20, and at first glance the verses don’t sound loving at all. I mean, the scene Luke paints is of a fiery eyed preacher, wandering about the wilderness, being sought after by pilgrims from the city, and when people bother to hike out to see him among the boulders and the cactus, he doesn’t appreciate the trouble they’ve gone through to see him a bit. He doesn’t sound one bit loving. Now, you’d think that when he saw them struggling through the dust and rocks and finding a stone or a bleached-out log to sit on, he’d say something like, “Hey y’all! Thanks for coming out to worship here in the desert. You know, our experience of God out here today just wouldn’t be the same without your contribution! If you would, please fill out a visitors twig there so we can contact you next time I wander into Jerusalem.”

No, he doesn’t do that. What does he do? He calls them names! “You sons of snakes! What are you so scared of that you’d hike all this distance, and with no mass transit to ease the passage? Let me tell you what to do. If you have more clothing than you need, give something to someone whose wardrobe is a bit threadbare. If you have more to eat than you need, give something to the folks who’re going hungry. If you have economic and military power, don’t take advantage of the weak; instead, use your blessings and power to build others up.”

Now, that approach tells you right away that though history’s given him the name, he’s not a Baptist like most of us. On Love Sunday, the last thing we expect, or want, is to hear brash stuff like that. That might be because we live in a culture that understands love as a good feeling. If someone is “loving,” that person smiles a lot, doesn’t get mad when you use bad manners, and tells you how nice you are all the time. “Please, please me, oh yeah, like I please you.” John the Baptist’s tirade sounds so Unloving to us because we live in a culture saturated with the notion that Love is a warm fuzzy sort of thing. To tell you the truth, in our culture, John the Baptist just sounds like a fool on the hill.

But we have a problem. What happens when we hear Jesus say, “Love your enemies”? Right away, if we take Jesus seriously, we know we’ll never have warm, fuzzy feelings toward people like Osama. That’s the first problem, but there’s a second that immediately pops up. Not a week goes by that some married person doesn’t come to me and say, “I don’t know what’s happened, pastor. I just don’t feel the same toward her like I did when we first met. Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away. Now, I guess I don’t love her any more.”

In a situation like that, I always ask for folks to take a little pause before they take a ticket to ride. You see, love, in our world, is a word that gets tossed around like leaves in autumn. I don't know how many times young couples have come into my office to discuss their wedding plans and I, the old cynic, have asked them, "Why do you want to get married? and they've said, "Because we looove each other," and I've said, "How do you know you love each other?" and they've said something like, "I've never felt this way before," and I've said, "What are you going to think when you stop feeling that way?" And they've said, "Oh, that won't happen to us." And I smile and change the subject to bridesmaids knowing that before two or three years pass they'll have to learn that love isn't a feeling: love is a long and winding road, a commitment to a lifestyle.

"This is my command," Jesus said, "That you love one another." What did he mean by love? Well, the Greeks had three words for love. The first was the term “eros.” This is where we get the English word, “Erotic” and this word translated “love” refers to the easiest kind of love to start because it’s what gets the magical mystery tour of dating going. It’s also rarely used in the New Testament. It’s the chemical stuff, it’s the hormonal stuff. It’s what advertisers use to sell everything from shaving lotion to Hummers. It’s easy. Anyone can do it. It is the kind of love you fall into. But come one folks! Should we really idolize something so much that we describe in terms of a collapse?

A second word the Greeks used for love was “Philos,” or brotherly love. This is the kind of love that characterizes respect and integrity in keeping agreements. This is the kind of love that lets you know that you can get by with a little help from your friends. After eros gets a couple to a wedding and then they discover that they have to occupy and find a living in a vast and unexplored land called marriage, it’s philos that keeps them true to their vows. If you fall into eros-love, philos is what gets you back on your feet.

But what happens when someone messes up on keeping the contract? I’m not necessarily talking about cheating on the other spouse. I’m talking about all those hidden agendas, the unconscious and unexplored expectations we carry into our relationships with our spouses cause more conflict than anything else. A guy might have grown up with a mother who cooked a special meal a special way every Sunday and when his wife doesn’t do it, he feels disappointed. They never talked about it while they were dating and learning anatomy by braile, but he’s got the expectation none the less – a hidden contract.

Or maybe he isn’t much of a handyman. He doesn’t keep up with the yard like her dad did. He isn’t quite the man he ought to be, and she feels disappointed. Or a guy is supposed to buy presents or real woman is supposed to pay attention to the curtains. These are the things that bruise and instill callouses on our souls in our marriages. And when those things happen, all we can think about is a way to get back. We think we just have to hide our love away.

That’s when we need to listen to Paul's definition of love in I Corinthians 13. The word he uses there is “agape,” or God love. This is the most frequently used Greek word translated love in the New Testament. According to agape, being patient is love; being kind is love; being content with your own state rather than envying the situation of another is love; refusing to gloat over your own success or insights (i.e. not boasting) is love; being polite to other people rather than rude is love; paying attention to other's well being rather than always putting yourself first is love; not letting your anger seethe into a poisonous grudge which infects everything is love; throwing away your list of grievances is love; rejoicing when truth is illuminated is love; protecting what is fragile in others, trusting what is best in others, hoping for the best to come about, and experiencing no limit to your endurance -- these things are loving. There’s no way to fall into that kind of love. When you fall into eros-love, and philos-love gets you back on your feet, it’s agape-love that keeps you going.

When you say that you don't love your spouse any more, you're only saying that you've decided not to practice this lifestyle on your spouse's behalf any more. Paul never said that we need to have warm, fuzzy attraction to everyone. He told us that if we want to follow Christ, the most excellent way, then we would dedicate ourselves to the discipline of this kind of lifestyle, and when we do, we’ll find ourselves singing “Here Comes the Sun.”

Now, if that's what the Beatles meant when they sang "All You Need is Love," then they were right. You see, the goal of our faith is not an institution that protects our feelings. All our religious institutions, all our Sunday School lessons, all our worship services, all our offerings, everything, is designed to produce persons who are unflagging experts at love. Paul said it: all institutions will fail. Every single empire has crumbled into dust and every personal fortune has fallen into other hands. Sooner or later we have to admit that nothing of our ambitions, nothing of our fortunes, nothing of what we might consider to be our successes will last. It'll all fade into nothingness and sooner or later we have to acknowledge what James Taylor called "the dust and the rust and the ruin that names us and shames us and claims us all."

If I’m able to do that, then I know that someone will care for me when I’m sixty-four.

Now, this brings us back to John the Baptist. You see, John really was talking about love. John knew that we don't love unless our lives are shaped by intentional acts of compassion. He knew that all of the law and the prophets were summed up in the commandment, "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, AND YOUR NEIGHBOR AS YOURSELF." And two, he knew that when the real Messiah did come, he would insist upon the same thing with an even greater urgency. John knew he was just the opening act. If those people thought John had some tough requirements, wait until they heard Jesus!
You see, Jesus aggressively turned upside down every power and status arrangement of the day. He preferred the poor over the rich, children over adults, the non-religious over the religious, sinners over righteous, sick over the healthy. He lampooned governmental power and told the disciples that the way things were ordered as far as dominating people and forcing them to do what you wanted them to do was not the way they were supposed to conduct their lives, not with their spouses, not with their friends, not even with neighboring communities and countries. And then Jesus said to his disciples, "You do as I have done."
Do as Jesus did? How in the world can we love like that? Well, imagine this –

While studying for my Ph. D. and serving as a chaplain in the department of psychiatry at the University of Louisville, I had the opportunity to meet a score of other fine chaplains. We regularly met in continuing education/support groups to hear what each other was dealing with and discuss practical theological issues pertinent to the needs of the patients for whom we tried to care. Once, we were discussing how recent research had shown that children get their first concept of what God is like from their parents. If they have bad parenting, say, a domineering and distant father, then they tend to think of God as distant and domineering, which is why some feminist theologians began advocating for more feminine images of God. Mothers tend to care and nurture more than fathers. A woman chaplain responded to the discussion by saying that she didn’t have a problem with a male image of God. This surprised us since we’d all heard the same woman advocate for including more frequently the feminine images of God from the Bible. She saw the surprise in our faces and in an effort to explain why she didn’t have problems with a “Father God” she told us this story.

Let’s call the chaplain “Cindy.”

Cindy’s dad was a farmer. The farm he worked and where Cindy grew up was located in the county just north of Durham, North Carolina. As Durham grew and the developers went looking for cheap land for cheap, but expensive looking houses, farmers surrounding Cindy’s dad sold out and cashed in. Cindy’s dad loved farming and wouldn’t sell out. As a result, expensive homes sprang up all around the farm and soon filled up with the families of bank executives, scientist working in Research Triangle industry, and faculty from Duke University. This dramatically changed the composition of the student body at Cindy’s high school.
Of course, Cindy noticed the change in ways more painful than mom or dad. While her dad continued to plow the same fields that lay across the backs of the spreading suburban developments, Cindy moved about the halls of the high school with kids who could afford much more expensive and stylish clothing and drive to school in the latest vehicles. She, on the other hand, had to suffer the embarrassment of riding to school in her father’s pick-up truck with “Farm Use Only” license plates and the evidence of the cattle he’d carried still caking the sides.

As Christmas approached her senior year, Cindy developed a longing for a coat that many of her friends were wearing. It was a new style, looked great, and since all the kids were wearing it, all the kids had to have it. Cindy asked her parents if she could have such a coat for Christmas, since she needed a coat. She knew it was expensive, but, after all, it was Christmas.

Christmas arrived and there was the coat-sized package under the tree. But when Cindy opened the package, instead of the stylish coat, there lay – what shall we say? – a sensible coat. Whatever, the fact that her parents had NOT given her the coat which would have helped her blend in, but had given her something that would make her stand out as weird even more became for Cindy more than a small symbol of how they didn’t understand her. It became the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back.

She arranged to leave home to live on her own. She got a job, got an apartment, and soon dropped out of school. She met a boy who was a sophomore at Duke University and soon moved in with him to help with expenses. That relationship lasted about four months at which point they broke up, leaving Cindy without a place to live. In order to make ends meet and too proud to go back to her parents (not to mention that she was feeling rather ashamed) she got a job performing in one of the exotic “gentlemen’s clubs” one could find in profusion around Durham.

She hated it from the beginning but felt trapped. She hated being ogled by men with their own problems and hated the one or two times that she had to fight off near assaults. She felt cheap, but felt even more reluctant to return home since she knew her parents knew what she’d resorted to to survive.

Then one evening she was sitting in her dressing room taking a break, feeling as low as she’d ever felt. She propped her head in her hands at her dressing table and breathed a deep sigh. Then the hair stood up on the back of her neck as she sensed that someone had appeared in the door. She rose and whirled around – and there stood her father.

She stared at him in wonder. “Hello, Cindy.”

“Dad, how did you find me?”

“It took a while, but I knew if I searched enough of these joints, I’d find you.”

And she realized that her dad, a deacon at their small country church, had been in a number of strip clubs looking for her. Evidently, he didn’t care what the ladies of the WMU thought. She burst into tears and walked to him – to be embraced by those old farmers arms that felt like fence posts closing around her.

“Let’s go home.”

“That’s why I don’t have problems with a father God,” concluded Cindy. “Because that’s exactly what God does – seek us out in the seediest of circumstances, right at those points when we have failed the most, and throws loving arms around us to restore us to our proper place.”

Obviously, things turned out very well, because there she was, in graduate school in theology, planning to be a chaplain, and looking downright great. We men chaplains were weeping as she finished the story and our supervisor, Dr. Wayne Oates, commented that the support group hour was up and that we needed to return to the floor to see our patients. As Cindy rose to leave, Dr. Oates commented, “You look mighty sharp, today, Cindy.”

“Oh, thank you,” she said, running fingers along the lapel of an elegant coat. “This is the coat my parents gave me. It’s still in style.”

Indeed, that love is still in style that God sent at Christmas. It was that eternal love that infused this planet with life and called you and me into being. It was love that woke us up, gave us consciousness and soul, and set eternity within us. Our bodies, indeed, are made of the stuff of stars: and our souls are made of the stuff of God's love. When we love, love as Jesus loved, we set ourselves on that path to eternity. Here in this place, we proclaim that central reality, that the most excellent way is love. It really is true: all you need is love. May we love as God loved us. Amen, Lord, amen.

You know, I think I’ll take the Hebrew term “amen” out and restate that in English: “Let it be, Lord, let it be.”