“WHAT’S LOVE GOT TO DO WITH IT?” A Sermon for Valentine’s Day

by the Rev. Melanie Morel-Ensminger
First Unitarian Universalist Church of New Orleans
Sunday, February 10, 2008

In her book, All About Love: New Visions, author and educator bell hooks lists the qualities that she says most people seek in a life partner: maturity and intelligence, loyalty and trust, sensitivity and openness, kindness, competency and responsibility, and of course, love. (For me, hooks omits something vitally important – and that’s a good sense of humor.) In reading the book, what struck me were not just her insights into what makes a committed intimate partnership strong and long-lasting, but how these observations could also be applied to life among the committed congregants in a religious community.

The parallel between bell hooks’ book on love and what is needful in a covenanted congregation is not the first time such congruence has happened. The passage from Paul’s letter to the little group of disciples in the Greek city of Corinth that we read as our Responsive Reading this morning is often requested by couples in wedding and union ceremonies. That reading is employed so often in such ceremonies that you’d be excused for assuming that St. Paul must have penned this particular epistle to a blushing pair of Greek young people preparing to be united in joyful nuptials – but you’d be wrong. The letter is actually a pastoral one, sent to a small religious community that was being torn apart by a nasty church conflict. Love is patient and kind, indeed!

I have given up trying to explain to couples where the passage comes from, and I’m resigned to intoning it in wedding and union services for the rest of my ministerial life. But it does make you think. What other qualities or expectations might the two relationships, covenanted couple and covenanted congregation, have in common? What else do the two share?

In addition to that aforementioned sense of humor, I can think of sever-al others, and they can all be summed up in a simple statement: Love is a decision, not a feeling. Certainly the decision is based, at least at first, on a feeling, but if love is only a feeling, then we do not have to act lovingly when the feeling is not particularly present – such as during times of stress or anger or disagreement or loss.

Intimate partnerships must be based on more than that initial rush of attraction; to sustain a partnership over time, the two people must come to know each other on a much deeper, mature level, and develop a knowledge of each other’s past experiences, for love in the present does not do away with history. This is also true of becoming committed to a religious congregation. The initial rush of happiness at finding a compatible church home must give way to a mature understanding of the history and development of that faith, which, although it exists in the present, rests on a foundation of what has gone before. Committed love is the decision to love the entire person, or the entire church, both because of and despite all that is found out after the first rosy glow wears off, and the going gets rough

Two people becoming life partners must have enough trust in and respect for each other to be open, honest, and authentic in their relationship. If you have an issue with your partner, if something they have said or done concerns you, you cannot resolve the situation by ignoring it or by discussing it with a third party. Why choose to be partners with a person, if you cannot bring yourself to speak directly to him or her about what concerns you? Partners have to take responsibility for what they are feeling, and what they need.

In the same way, people seeking to be part of a congregation must also have enough respect and trust for the community and its leaders to openly and honestly bring their concerns to those involved. Why choose to join a church if you cannot speak directly to the leaders about your important concerns? Like intimate partners, congregants must also take responsibility for what they are feeling, and what they need. Committed love is the decision to be open, to communicate, when things get tough.

Intimate partners must decide to be in it for the long haul. The traditional vows pledged faithfulness in good times and bad. For two people in covenant, “zero tolerance” (except of course for gross physical or emotional abuse) is a bad policy. There must be a willingness to forgive and move toward reconciliation.

The same is true in a covenanted religious community. To get the most benefit from being a church member, one must also commit for the long term – those who have “zero tolerance’ for disagreement and conflict in a church will sure not last long in a Unitarian Universalist congregation! With our openness and diversity, our historic freedom of the pulpit, plus the many theologies and spiritualities and philosophies and political stances that make up our congregations, UUs are pretty nearly guaranteed disagreement and conflict and thus, discomfort. Forgiveness and reconciliation among church members can become, with practice, a kind of spiritual discipline that is good for the individual and good for the whole church – especially given that all of us are human and fall short of perfection. Committed love is the decision to love even when imperfection is found.

Couples may spar and spat – and most do -- but those who let their petty disagreements escalate into nuclear name-calling and blame-casting will either not be together long, or won’t be very happy however long they manage to stay together. By the same token, UU churches where congregants throw verbal stones at one another, where those with differing opinions or beliefs are as much as told to leave, where communications descend to back-door gossip, where folks harbor grudges over periods of years, will hardly be able to retain long-time members, let alone attract new ones. Committed love is the decision to withhold the worst weapons, even when emotions are running high.

Two people in an intimate partnership must some-times be willing to sacrifice for one another, or for a greater good in the future. Neither individual can insist on always getting his or her own way. This is also true of those covenanted in religious community: sacrifices may sometimes be called for, no one person or group can count on always being completely satisfied. The relationship, or the community, must sometimes count for more than individual personal comfort.

Finally, I have come to see, both from painful personal experience and from serving other UU congregations, that it is often strangely ironic that the very quality that first drew us to a life partner or to a church, will turn out to be the exact same things that years later will get on our very last nerve. You fell in love with your sweetheart because of how outgoing he or she was, and later dislike them for being too talkative. You are drawn to a church by its openness and tolerance, and later get aggravated by all the opinions different from yours, and the lack of uniformity. (It is sometimes painful to discover that “like-minded” doesn’t necessarily mean “agrees with me.”) Committed love is the decision to stay in relationship even when our expectations are disappointed.

This morning, we celebrated and honored the love of the committed couples in our church community, and compared the covenant between them to the one shared within a religious community such as ours. The two are not as different and unconnected as we might first have thought. Both kinds of commitment require patience, endurance, kindness, mutual respect, generosity, and good manners. Both can benefit from a healthy sense of humor, and both can contribute to an individual’s sense of overall health and well-being. And let’s be honest – in intimate partnerships and in church congregations, conflict and disappointed expectations and even tragedy are all inevitable. It’s what we do about them that counts.

What does love have to do with it? Let us remember that love is much more than a feeling – it is a decision – a decision to act towards one another in a particular way even in those moments when the original feeling is not present. May we treat each other in our most intimate relationships and in our church as we ourselves wish to be treated. AMEN – ASHE – SHALOM – SALAAM – NAMASTE – BLESSED BE!