Easter 4C’22
15 May 2022
Matt. 5.38-48 “How Far Would You Go for Love?”
St. Luke’s Episcopal Church
North Little Rock, Arkansas
The Rev. Carey Stone
How Priceless is your love, O God! Your people take refuge under the shadow of your wings.
Psalm 36.7
Love, a word we hear and use every day, we use it to describe everything from Chocolate, to Ford pick-up trucks, to the person we want to spend the rest of our lives with. The entire internet can barely contain all the songs, and poems written and performed about the subject. In popular music the titles abound, there’s “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” “Radar Love” “I Can’t Help Falling in Love” “I Will Always Love You”, “All You Need Is Love.” Sometimes they’re about Love gone wrong, like Bon Jovi’s “You Give Love a Bad Name”, to Lady Gaga and Bradley Coopers duet, “I’ll Never Love again.” Love, it’s in such great demand, but seems to be in such short supply. People will go to almost any length to find Love, including me.
During my seminary days in Virginia a computer dating service was being utilized by millions of people, it was called Match.Com. As a single man at the time, I was on a search for just the right women in my life. So, I started scrolling up and down the pages of Match.Com. I was taken by a photo and bio of a woman who was living near Bethesda, Maryland. I sent her an email and we agreed to meet at a mall restaurant in Bethesda. Bethesda was the end of the line for the Washington DC Metro. So, it took a little while to get there from Alexandria, VA. The mall was about a mile beyond the station so I walked the rest of the way. I must say, I wasn’t prepared for the reception that I was in for, ‘cool’ doesn’t do it justice. No sooner that we had gotten a table, she started in with questions, that led to what felt like a corporate job interview, and from an interview to an interrogation. The only thing missing was a physical pencil in her hand to check boxes on the questionnaire. Periodically after asking a personal question that would make me feel uncomfortable, she would give this Cheshire cat type smile that she would quickly drop as she asked the next question. Toward the end, she had saved the best question for last, “Do you have any hang ups with sex? My last boyfriend did!” Now, if you are feeling a little uncomfortable right now with the candor of my sermon, just imagine how I must have felt! The lunch was short and the trip back to Virginia seemed long!
One of the theologians I studied while in seminary was St. Augustine, originally called Augustine Aurelius. He agreed with the Roman philosopher, Cicero who believed that every person sets out to be happy, but the majority are thoroughly wretched. Truly, no one dreams as a child of one day growing up to be miserable, and yet many people’s lives are characterized by conflict, frustration and unfulfilled longings. In fact, as young Augustine Aurelius would discover a bit later in life was that “the very essence of sin was actually a disordered love.” As the country music singer Freddy Fender put it many years later in his song, folks are “Looking for Love in all the Wrong Places.”
We each have within us a God-shaped whole, that only God can fill. We find many things in life to try and fill it with. I heard a colleague talking about this the other day, and he said that he had a” Mercedes-shaped hole in his soul” and two weeks after getting his Mercedes he discovered that the hole was still there! In our efforts the fill the god shaped hole we have become a society of addicts, did you know in our country there are over 200 different 12-step groups for various addictions? Disordered love is the driving force behind all addictions that tell us we unworthy of love and that we are not enough.
Spiritual writer Henri Nouwen, described the world as consisting of two different places we humans can live, one is the house of fear, that reinforces all the negative messages about ourselves, the other, is the House of Love where this perfect love of God casts out our fear. We might even go into a church or a house of worship in search of filling our god shaped holes, only to find there, yet another house of fear. But thanks be to God for churches that are truly Houses of Love.
As some of you know I grew up in a different Christian denomination that was very much a house of fear, where there was a sinner on every corner and a demon behind every bush. When I first entered an Episcopal Church, I found something very different – I was accepted for who I was, I didn’t have to have it all figured out, I didn’t have to have lengthy bible passages memorized, I could even, dance, play cards, and attend R rated movies and still be OK – I found that I wouldn’t find judgment.
Shortly after becoming an Episcopalian, I would periodically run into someone from one of my former churches and they would always ask the same question, “Carey, why did you become an Episcopalian? “Every time I would give my shortest and best answer, “Because I needed to find a kinder and gentler God!”
In the end the way home to the House of Love is not far, in fact, it is as close as the distance from our heads into our hearts. When we take the time to sit down in God’s presence, we find the true friend of our souls who calls us Beloved Sons, Beloved Daughters, and Beloved Child who are dearly and deeply loved. The more and more we can return, listen, and receive this unconditional love the more fear will lose its grip on us. This, my friends, is what we are about here at 4106 JFK Blvd. we are about joining together and building a House of Love, God’s Love, for all who are weary of the houses of fear are welcomed, and where they discover that God’s perfect love casts out fear.
How Priceless is your love, O God! Your people take refuge under the shadow of your wings.
Psalm 36.7