God is Love: Banal, boring, or what?
This is an edited version of a sermon delivered by The Rev'd George Pitcher at St Bride's, Fleet Street, on Sunday 6th May 2007
My children have a shorthand for sermons they don't like - "God is Love". It sums up what they think is banal and predictable about the standard Anglican sermon: What was the sermon like? "Oh, y'know - God is Love". It's obvious, they say. And quite boring: "God is Love. Like Duh!"
Which presents me with a bit of a challenge. Because that's the theme of this piece. And it has to be said it is a very simple proposition in the Gospel of John: "I give you a new commandment, that you love one another," says the Christ, by way of a final message. "Just as I have loved you, you should love one another." It's a new commandment - one that fulfills the old Judaic laws with which the disciples grew up and a much simpler statement than Jesus's earlier edit of Mosaic law: "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and all thy soul and all thy mind [and] thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." (Well, that's an edit, but you get the drift).
Now, at the end of his ministry, he cuts it right down to its essential: "Love one another". It couldn't be simpler. It makes sense of the whole of Christ's ministry. As a friend of mine says: If there's a judgment, when we finally stand before God, it won't be about the work we've done, or the mistakes we've made, or the sins we've committed - the Big Question will be: How much did you manage to love in your life?
Yes, it's a simple proposition: But we make a meal of it. And we're always screwing it up. A number of events this past week show how this all too solid flesh makes a mess of our ham-fisted attempts at loving and its consequences when we try to control it, or deny it, or cover it up.
Lord Browne lost his job at BP, because he lied to a court about his love affair with a young man. Meanwhile, a young woman teacher was acquitted of abusing a teenage boy under her care, when their relationship had become too close. And, here at St Bride's, we were criticised for invoking the love of Allah in appealing to the captors of journalist Alan Johnston in the Middle East.
Sex, of course, is so often the complicating factor in matters of Love, made more so by the media obsession with all matters sexual. Lord Browne cut a tragic figure - a great businessman disgraced by a folie a deux. But the story also exposed our hypocrisy in such matters. "It's not about his sexuality," protests a sanctimonious newspaper, "It's about his lie to the Court." But we're entitled to ask why Lord Browne had been put into a position to lie to a court of law. And in these circumstances, anyway, "What is Truth?", a question Pontius Pilate asked in another court of law. What indeed, in matters of a lustful heart.
Then there was the woman teacher. "I loved him," she said, "but there was no sex." I must say this confuses me. Not the facts of the case, but the terms of the justification. Time was, in the permissive 60s and 70s, when the defence of an errant partner who had had a fling was "It meant nothing, darling." In other words, there was sex but no love. These days, apparently, the defence is the other way around - oh, it was just a bit of meaningless love; there was no sex involved. So nothing important happened. People seem to get jealous about the wrong bit.
What a mess we make of Love. Especially in the papers. And yet it should be so simple. "Love one another, as I have loved you". We should be able to do it. Children can. Children are good at loving, as they are loved, but when we grow up we lose the ability somehow. Let's pray that our children retain their childlike ability to love. Because some people can and I hope everyone who is reading this knows at least one. But it is hard when we've grown up. Perhaps we need to find what Paul Ricoeur calls the "second innocence", a fresh naivety. It's no accident that the Christ addresses his disciples as "Little children", in John's gospel, as he enjoins them to love one another.
So what are the characteristics of this child-like love? If we could identify them, perhaps we could obey the commandment. I offer three child-like characteristics of loving. They are the Three U's - Unconditional, Universal and Undying. A child loves unconditionally - she's not after anything, it's just a natural state of being - you hug, you smile, you give. It's just what you do if you're a child. It's Universal - there is no limit to it and there's no one outside it. To a child it's inconceivable that there could be limits to love, beyond which there are outsiders. And a child feels immortal - her sense of love, in every sense, is undying.
The Universal bit reminds me of the third event to which I referred. There was a Eucharist here at St Bride's especially dedicated to Alan Johnston, the BBC journalist kidnapped in Gaza, and it was recorded for BBC radio news. Our rector, David, invoked the name of Allah in praying for his captors to recognize our common divinity and the love that flows from it. An email arrived: "I beg your pardon?" it said, "surely I didn't hear on the radio a Church of England clergyman praying in the name of Allah?" Yes you did, madam, and it makes me rejoice wholeheartedly to be an Anglican and to know that the love of Christ knows no bounds between the God worshipped by Christians and Muslims and Jews.
That alone is cause for optimism. But there is more from the otherwise depressing events of the past week. The overwhelming support and affection, for instance, from the City and business establishment for Lord Browne suggest that the newspaper that invited his lie got it wrong when it suggested that it was in the public interest that he should go. The husband who stood beside his teacher wife suggests that, indeed, it is love that is the stronger force than infidelity. And it's the BBC journalist who says after last Thursday's simple Eucharist "I'm an atheist, but that really hit the mark" who shows that the love of Christ is available to all, even - especially - those who would put themselves outside it.
It's into this wonderful, universal, unconditional and undying body of Christ - the Church - that we welcome and celebrate the children and grown-ups we baptise, or simply welcome to Christ's communion rail. It's a church which, as the body of the risen Christ, can do infinitely more than politicians or powers or principalities to deny permission to death or darkness or despair to separate us from the love of God. And so we say, with all who join us from wherever they come, of other faiths or none at all, welcome to our Church, the body of the Christ, however you meet that Truth, we share a common injunction: "Love one another, as God has loved you."