IT’S NOT EASY TO LOVE
Rev. Dr. Joyce Antila Phipps
Old First Church December 19, 2021
Texts: Psalm 43: 1-21: Luke 1: 57-79
The woman in the supermarket stood next to me as I was trying to decide which package of cheese to buy. “I just don’t know how much I can buy just for myself,” she said in a halting, stumbling voice. I turned around and faced an older African-American woman who looked as If she was going to break down at any minute. I knew exactly what she was talking about, as would some of us in this room. “I’m so sorry,” I said, “When did your husband die?”
You know, there are times that I think my face says, “Yes, tell me about your life. I’ll listen.” She looked at me and began to talk. Her husband had been a policeman in Newark for many years; he retired and they built their home in Plainfield; she had 59 years of marriage when he died after a short illness that the doctors just couldn’t figure out. So, as I’m listening, I’m tallying years. Ok, 59 years, unless she was a child bride, she had to be in her early 80s at least.
She kept on talking as if no one had never listened to her before. I took her hand in mine and said that as someone who had also lost a husband in April -- why is it always April, I thought, I knew that the first Christmas would be really hard for her. And I promised to call her and listen some more. Well, maybe Allred Tennyson thought it was better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all, but there are times, that I’m not so sure. It’s not easy to love.
When we hear the word “love,” we usually think of romantic love, the love of spouses or partners have for each other. But there is more than the love of spouses or even of friends. Love takes so many forms. The love we call passionate can apply to the love for nature and nature’s wild creatures. There is a different kind of love -- deep and strong -- of parent and child, for instance, but there are times when there is no love because grinding poverty flattens t such emotion. There is the love of a people, an ideal, and a hope that the world as we know it will actually get better. That’s also a form of love. And none of them are easy.
In our Gospel reading this morning, Zechariah’s mouth is opened and he names the child John. The text tells us that fear came over all his neighbors for no one in his family had ever had that name. The custom was, of course, to choose the name of someone in the family, either a deceased relative, a grandparent or uncle or aunt. However, the text reflects the story of Hannah and Elkanah, who named their son Samuel, which in Hebrew means “God has heard.” The name John in Hebrew means “God is gracious.”
In this story one finds a particular kind of love that’s not easy, much like the love of Samuel’s parents. In their dedication Zechariah makes clear, with Elizabeth’s presumed consent, that the child will be dedicated to the service of God. There is no buy-back as was permitted in the Torah; more than anything, this is what the neighbors feared.
Artists of the Renaissance usually portrayed John even as a child with the younger Jesus clothed in camel’s hair and with uncut curly brown hair as a precursor of what was to come. No matter how we look at the story of Zechariah and Elizabeth, their love could not have been easy for they knew in their hearts what happened to prophets, especially in a land under Roman rule.
It’s not easy to love a child so much that you are willing to separate yourself from that child for the child’s better future. I’ve had to help parents about to be deported relinquish custody of their children to a relative or a friend because, as one woman from Guatemala told me, “I don’t want my daughter to suffer in poverty as I did.”
We tend to think of love as fixed on people we know, whether through deep and caring relationships whether they be in family, church, or even our communities. Love and loving becomes more abstract as the circle of people broadens into those we do not know. Love is different from mere pity or sympathy, an emotion we usually feel when we see pictures of victims of conflict or war. It’s not easy to love those we do not know.
Advent and Christmas in some way serve as permissions to act out our basic human instinct, which is, I believe, to care for one another. By nature, people are not hermits; we need each other and we need to show that we care for each other. When we care for others, however, we know we make ourselves vulnerable to disappointment or loss. How we deal with those hurts and losses say a great deal about us. Perhaps even more than what we normally call “loving.”
Loving, whether it is a spouse, a friend, a church, or even what we think of as our Nation, inevitably involves disappointment or grief. We are raised with high ideals for our community, our church, our Nation, and sometimes events disappoint us, even make us angry and tempted to be bitter. We become angry that things aren’t done, promises are not kept, and images of a past are merely nostalgia. The people to whom Muslim baiters and subtle racism -- well, perhaps not so subtle -- speak are people who have felt left behind in our national transformation to a multi-ethnic and multicultural society.
Love may be unconditional but loving is not. Learning to love is more difficult than we first imagine. We struggle with the world around us and with the people we know and with the images of those we don’t know. Loving is just not easy, not easy at all.
Let us pray: Gracious and loving God, help us to become more loving towards others, not just in this season of Advent and the Christmas season that follows, but throughout the whole year. In the name of the One who is our model of love, even Christ Jesus our Lord, Amen.