Dear Family: The One Sermon
Dear Family,
There’s a common wisdom in church circles about the fact that most excellent preachers have a very limited number of sermons. Three, some would say, but ultimately, I would say that it’s often just one. One sermon … preached again and again, reiterated, and re-mined, with the preacher looking at that one topic from slightly different angles depending on what’s going on in the world and in the scripture passage on which it’s based. The basic message is hopefully kept fresh with new insights, new anecdotes, different poetic metaphors, but always the core message is rooted in one truth, or Truth.
For me, that one sermon, that Truth, has always been about the supremacy and salvific nature of Love. Even though I’m no longer preaching on a regular basis, I find I can’t help myself: I still walk through the world dragging what my friend and colleague Rev. Andy Nagy-Benson calls “the homiletical net,” capturing stories and images and lyrics that speak to me about love. It doesn’t matter if I’m working on writing something completely unrelated to the topic; I seem to live my life in a heart-shaped world, and have always done so.
Yesterday, I went on a great walk starting at the Green River bridge, with my octogenarian friend Karen Hein, who can walk miles around me. We climbed hills, scrambled over roots, let our dogs explore both muck and clear water, and talked about the state of our hearts, more or less, and I returned home tired (nearly 6 miles! Did I mention that Karen is amazing?) but also very heart-filled. And through it all, though I was certainly listening deeply to her, I was also thinking about love ~ love lost, love found, love that heals, love that shines, love in nature, and the nature of love. As we walked, we stopped to appreciate streams and flowers, and in my case, a mailbox.
A black mailbox with the letters L-O-V-I-N-G-E-R attached without benefit of ruler or level.
LOVINGER, it says, and though I suspect it’s pronounced with a soft-G, I couldn’t help but read it as Loving-er. As in … more loving. My goodness, isn’t that the goal? To be more loving-er?
What would it be like, this world, if all of us were more loving-er? And I don’t know if we even need to be transformed into saintly levels of loving. I think about Dan Harris’s book and podcast, “10% Happier,” and wonder if that might be enough. What would it look and feel like to be 10% more loving? Of course, that would require us each to have some way of accurately assessing how loving we are now, and look at how we would measure the growth in lovingness.
Perhaps here’s where it’s important to define our terms a little bit, because the word “love” has been so watered down. I would argue that if we were to dive into a 10% Loving-er experiment, we’d need to agree on one central point: that LOVE is not just a soft-and-squishy feeling. Love, my dears, is an action word, and if we’re measuring how loving we are, it has to be about how our behavior impacts others, not just the feeling in our hearts. If I love you, but you aren’t seeing my love in action ~ if you aren’t feeling it and feeling lifted by it ~ what difference does it make? As scripture puts it (and I’m paraphrasing here), we shall know it by its fruits.
I’m writing this on August 17, which happens to be our wedding anniversary ~ our 29th this year. That’s not a milestone number in any standard way, but I’ve always had a fondness for prime numbers, so it feels significant all the same. And to celebrate, Tristan and I drove to Putney for an early morning session of blueberry picking at Green Mountain Orchard, which was just the right thing for my spirit. As we exited the interstate, I noticed that someone had adorned the stop sign with two words … NEVER and LOVING, above and below the word STOP. And below the stop sign, one more sign: ONE WAY.
Image: Stop sign with “never” and “loving” added on… and below, a One Way sign.
Never stop loving. It’s the one way. The only way.
That, dear family, is my one sermon.
May it be so, for you and for me.
love,
Susie