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February 4, 2001 Sermon

Rev. Nancy D. Dean

February 4, 2001

The Church of Perpetual Responsibility vs. the Church of Occasional Catharsis

Some years I get a bumper crop of great sermon ideas from the members of this congregation, or at least terrific titles, and today’s sermon title came from Gail Dellapelle, who at one of our Membership Committee meetings was commenting about the aphoristic approach some people have toward their church or religious affiliation. I liked it so much when she said it that I told her to expect to see it heading up a sermon one day. Keep those thoughts, notions, quips coming, please!

I suppose it comes up more than I wish it would, but fairly regularly someone—almost always someone not a part of any UU congregation—will ask me why do people belong to a religion that does not in some way or another claim its special, one-on-one connection with the Almighty, thereby making it a requirement that one has to go to that religion’s services in order to be in good with the Creator. It is a kind of authority question. They are asking in effect: Where is your higher authority? Who requires you to abide by your Principles? What is the supreme mandate of your religion?

These are questions I do not find all that troublesome for my beliefs rest firmly in the idea that each person has the same supreme essence and can come to his or her understanding of what it means to be a spiritual or religious person just as easily as I or anyone else can. After all, consider that if any one of us grew up in some isolated setting where there was no church, synagogue, temple or clergy, would it mean that God would not have anything to do with us? Or to turn it at a different angle, what gives any one group or one person the authority to determine what yours or my religious understanding will be? A long time ago, I began to feel strongly that whatever I believed , I had to have the freedom to state that belief as my truth, understanding always that it has to be within the scope of basic human ethical and moral behavior to be good, for if I say that which I do not believe, how can that be missed in the great omniscience that is often called God.

If all the people who spend such a great deal of time worrying about which is the right religion and the right place and right set of rules and regulations would put just half that energy into the realm of good human relations, my guess is we would have a much better world. I really have no patience with all this rigmarole about what religion is right, and who knows the mind of God, and what God wants everyone to do. Nine out of ten times, you and I know if what we are doing is good and right if we get out of those power and control realms of who and what is right. For example, I know that left alone, a Jewish and a Palestinian group of five-year-olds will play happily and without reference one time to who is God’s favorite, and which piece of that rocky ground is holiest. Left alone, without a bigoted group of adults to teach them a set of beliefs and loyalties regarding church and state, a group of five-year-old Northern Ireland boys and girls of both Catholic and Protestant faiths will grow up without any great concern about what the boundaries of their home will be—their values will be placed on a higher plane.

We teach the values of hate and rancor just as much as we teach the values of love and acceptance. Why is it that human beings who spend so much of their lives talking abut religion, spend so little time acting like ethical, religious people? These have long been good questions for the millennia of human existence. Sadly, the answers are quite obvious and just as obviously ignored.

Most likely any given person will be part of the religious tradition of his or her family of origin, or he or she will chose a religion of which to be part. Part is the operative word, for there are far more people who just pop in and out for the bits and pieces they want, and skip the meal.

The reasons for the participation of either group, those who follow their family’s tradition or go their own way in a congregation, are not all that different. Naturally, if you belong to a religion that says you must attend services three times a week, partake communion on certain regular days, and so forth, you may do that as a matter of course. The modus operandi is: It is what I know, it is what I am comfortable doing. I don’t have to think about it, might just as well be the response. On the other hand, you may find that the ethics of the faith you are born into or chose are the highest motivators for you. You will seek to find ways to fulfill the options that signal your beliefs. In this manner, the believer or seeker, as we UUs usually like to think of ourselves, at least has a higher level motivation, has given some thought to what it is to be a good person, or what must be done to achieve one’s purpose or salvation.

The poet Walt Whitman in his epic Leaves of Grass, 1855, wrote this:

I have said that the soul is not more than the body,

And I have said that the body is not more than the soul,

And nothing, not God, is greater to one than one’s-self is,

And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral, dressed in his shroud . . .

The Great Forest Book of the Hindu holy texts the Upanishads says much the same thing from some ten centuries earlier:

This that the people say, "Worship this god! Worship that god! –one god after another! All this is his creation indeed! And he himself is all the gods . . . .

And:

One should worship with the thought that he is one’s self, for therein all these become one. This self is the footprint of that All, for by it one knows the All—just as, verily by following a footprint one finds cattle that have been lost. . . . One should reverence the self alone as dear.

Most of us are a long way from being able to reverence ourselves as an aspect of the infinite ALL, to see God in ourselves; rather, we struggle just to figure out how it is we can be comfortable and content within our own skin. That drive has a lot to do with the concept of becoming a seeker, a believer, a worker in humanity’s vineyard, if you will.

What brings us UUs together is this struggle and the knowledge that we will always learn more in association with other seekers than we can alone. We want, as well, to have our children develop a sense of the worth and dignity of themselves as they learn to value the worth and dignity of others. But if we are to get the most out of life, we will be more likely to do so if we can find the holiness of the spirit of life that makes each one of us, you and me, do the things we do. I continue to believe that Socrates made the most pertinent and salient theological/spiritual statement ever made when he said that the highest work of a human being, of humanity, is "To know thyself." To know what and why and how it is that we think the things we think, do the things we do, want the things we want. To know what is going on inside this self of self that is all of the Infinite you can know in this lifetime, and perhaps ever.

That includes asking ourselves what it is we seek in our relationship to our community of faith and as a congregation? This is a question that traditional religions of the west have no truck with. Total acceptance is the mode; obedience, the means. Not so in our free faith. Unitarian Universalism begins and ends with questioning.

What we are striving to achieve here is a thoughtful religious gathering where caring and sharing are the glue of our fellowship, not some slavish working for heavenly rewards and expiating a constant list of sins, nor just getting a quick fix for the various rites and rituals of marriage, birth, crisis, and death. We want to find the Aristotelian Golden Mean between the Church of Perpetual Responsibility and the Church of the Occasional Catharsis.

And a lot of what makes that happen comes down to the root of all evil—no, not the love of money, though it figures squarely there. No, I believe that the root of all evil, and it has even been called Original Sin, is human ego. To expand that, it is the human ego that operates like a loose cannon in the human being, the ego that is not boundaried, or instructed, or sympathetic, as Whitman put it.

We are the parent of our own growing souls. Some of us had more or less help from our own parents, family, and friends in our young lives, but the very mark of a mature human being is that s/he takes over that role of parent to the self, and the constituent parts of the self, particularly the ego. The ego is the teenage, rebellious, often selfish, self-centered part of us, and we grow only as we parent the soul, the self, to learn to look outside of self to others.

If we come to this or any community of faith looking to chalk up imaginary points with God or our fellow human beings, then chances are we either do or will come to view our religious home like The Church of Perpetual Responsibility. The thinking is: If I do everything I possibly can, I will maybe earn my way to heaven, or will feel better about myself, or earn someone’s love. But this is haggard work, without joy and usually with little satisfaction. The sense of being burdened is the greatest feature of this approach to the spiritual life. While it is very characteristic of traditional Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, it has also filtered into our very culture, so that suffering as we work, raise our children, even play, is considered virtue.

We can carry this heavy load of life into everything we do. I know people who have turned to Eastern religions only to make them burdensome, too. Spending long weeks in retreats, working to achieve particularly difficult yoga positions, for instance, or going without food for long periods of time, or eating a regime of macrobiotic, or some similarly challenging foods, that all but put them on the outside of any regular sharing of food that happens in this country. Don’t mistake me, all of these have been, and can be, true roads to spiritual enlightenment, but if they are done to prove one’s spiritual worth as a test, then the whole point has been missed.

The process of spiritual growth is sometimes difficult, but it does not have to be burden or painful all the time to have merit. Chances are good that we are missing the boat if we do not recognize that joy and hope and openness must be part of the experiences as well.

My own childhood fundamental Christianity gave me a lot of models for how the suffering Christian sees his or her road to Heaven. If it is not rough and rocky with constant array of demonic forces working to foil one, then the path is not the right one. I often heard the New Testament metaphor that the road is hard and narrow and few can enter the kingdom of God. The religious road is one up the side of a spiritual Mount Everest. And, pleasure in anything except the worship of the Lord is most likely a sign that one is cozy with Satan.

Even UUs who do not believe in God’s evil twin, Satan, can approach our faith from the suffering model, too. The suffering UU can never enjoy one moment for thinking of all those who do not have his or her advantages; every decline and fall of our culture must be lifted up at any show of joy or satisfaction. I, like you, want to see the problems of our nation and the world addressed, but I do not think that preaching non-stop misery is the way to get things to change. I had an UU acquaintance at Harvard who could not allow anyone to express a moment of joy without leaping to point out that your joy came at someone else’s expense. Mention a birthday, and you got a lecture on over-population; mention a Thanksgiving gathering, and you got a list of the wrongs against the tribal peoples; mention the Principles and you heard the dangers of a creed creeping into the UUA. As you can imagine, I began to avoid her at all costs.

To take the alternate view, Heinrich Heine, a great German poet of the 18th century who was a supporter of revolutionary social ideals was famous for his dry humor. He wrote about religion: "I love to sin. God loves to forgive sin. Really, this world is most admirably arranged."

Heine was clearly not a Calvinist or Puritan or a suffering Unitarian.

Heine does bring us to the alternative approach that is widely practiced in this country and abroad, and fits nicely under the rubric of the Church of Occasional Catharsis.

Partly, maybe even mostly, culturally driven, are those folk who see the church as a way to act out the traditions of our culture without being troubled with the religious duties that can certainly get in the way of sleeping late or playing golf and tennis on Sunday mornings. There are also the various crises of life when we simply do not know what else to do but turn to religion. Practically every month I receive a telephone call from someone whom I have never met, and never likely will meet, who just has to have someone to talk to. They want me to solve a lifetime of problems, or at least a couple years’ worth, in a fifteen-minute phone call. Who provides them this service—and certainly not who pays my salary--rarely enters into the conversation. They may have the notion that we are a liberal religious tradition, which often gives the man or woman the mistaken idea that I am likely to sanction whatever they are wanting to do or have done. I have to educate them about our Seven Principles, the first particularly. There is also that old idea, which is true, that confession is good for the soul, and any minister will do for some people. My hope in these encounters, which I take very seriously, is that one day they will go to a Unitarian church or congregation, or follow any kind of thoughtful spiritual path.

Additionally, all religions have that group of people who show up and commit themselves for a short while with the hope that, as if by magic, perhaps really by magic, that all their sadness will disappear, all their fears and worries will vanish, and that, metaphorically speaking, the sun will come up every day and no dark clouds will mar what they have come to believe is supposed to be an always bright, good life. They never last long, nor do the ones who only come for what they want in the moment. Fix my marriage, teach my children, take care of my problems. Once we do, they leave.

Again, all of these things are involved in what it means to be a committed member of a religious community, but the process is more complex. When I’m down you lift me up, when you’re down I lift you up. Further, there is a complete understanding of sharing. We help to educate each other’s children, we share the responsibilities of making this gathering of UUSMC work, and through it all are the ups and downs, the rewards and the headaches, for a commitment is not running in getting immediate needs met and then leaving. This UU Society of Mill Creek was not founded to be a convenience store quick-stop for those who are not committed to a larger vision. If everyone approached religion in that way, there would be nothing but state run religions.

Of course, all of us can find ourselves in a position that might put us quickly in and out of a congregation for reasons that have nothing to do with our larger commitment, but the ease with which many people approach religion, especially our more liberal free faith, cannot be sanctioned as a way for anyone to live a full life that leads to the seeker’s path where the parenting of the soul/the self can best happen.

Neither suffering nor self-serving creates the fully actualized human spirit that we all want. The Church of Perpetual Responsibility, is one where joy cannot be allowed, therefore it cannot be found. And, to live with the sword of Damocles always hanging over one’s head is not the route to a contented life. Yes, we do want to be responsible people, but we deserve to feel a sense of accomplishment for all our hard work, too. There is meant to be joy even in the struggle. I learned a long time ago, from a lot of different people, that all the good things in life entail responsibility of some sort, and that play is really just work you like to do, and that rewards are rarely just about receiving things. In the service, the love and care, of our brothers and sisters in the world, we find the rewards of responsibility, which are faith, hope and joy.

Whitman’s words about sympathy continue to be the factor of the Golden Mean that comes to mind.

There are all kinds of ways to show that sympathy, I might add. For instance, as in this story of the early 19th century: It has long been well known that many of the mineral waters at Saratoga Springs, New York, are highly and quickly cathartic. They tell at the famous Springs about a frequent visitor who stopped outside his hotel one day to greet a group of women acquaintances who had just arrived. They told him they had just had several glasses of Hawthorne water-one of the more potent, then followed it with a glass of Coesa water, and topped all that off with some Geyser water.

The experienced and thoughtful gentleman graciously tipped his hat, bowed, and said, "Ladies, please, do not let me detain you."

Whether we go to mineral springs like those at Saratoga, or to magical waters or miraculous waters at Lourdes, or to any church, temple, or synagogue in the hope of finding a quick cure for the whole of life’s challenges, then we will be bound to find that we will have only a quick drink, perhaps a moment of ecstasy—though extremely few judging by the records of the modern Church, or a moment of bliss in a wedding ritual. What we miss, though, is too large to encompass in any sermon, but at the same time just as simple as the lines from Whitman or the Upanishads.

If you and I who clearly value what this congregation is trying to accomplish for each and every one of us here and for the larger community had not found our way between the extremes then I doubt any UU Society of Mill Creek would exist. Yes, we do have responsibilities: there are sermons to write, meetings to attend, committees to chair, RE classes to teach, and all that we want to have here and are willing to make happen. Yes, there are moments of catharsis, when we find that we have to seek counsel, or share a joy or sorrow, or grumble about the coffee hour. We have that need as well. The difference is in seeing the larger goals, the bigger picture.

I now never drive by our new Polly Drummond building site without thinking of a child in this congregation who told her mother one day as they were driving by that that was were she was going to get married. Can you imagine if everyone had that kind of vision. Good grief! She was maybe seven at the time, yet she had more vision than a good many four-five-six times her age. Believe me, if I am so lucky as to be there to do that wedding, I will feel I have served every goal, the entire purpose of my call to this congregation, indeed my call to the ministry. This is what we are all about.

We are seekers, creative beings who can have a vision of how to be religious that lives up to the most basic and the most important ethical human principles, without creating a dictatorship of it—now, that is something special. We offer here a place that challenges and guides, but asks you to be part of that process, too. We are here to help and heal, to love and cherish one another. We are gifted with the ability to see that God is not a thing, but a verb, a way of being and doing, a verb that states love in all our actions. We have the privilege and the rewards and the responsibility of freedom, which is not to be handled carelessly.

Our faith is neither a coal-mine of burden, nor the caffeine quickening of coffee to get us going in the morning. We are meant to be neither the Church of Perpetual Responsibility nor the Church of the Occasional Catharsis; we are meant to be the Church of Faith, Hope and Charity Where People Laugh and Cry Together. So be it, and Amen.

February 11, 2001 Sermon

Rev. Nancy D. Dean

February 11, 2001

What’s Love Got to do With It?

Hearts and flowers, chocolates and diamonds, boxer shorts with I Love You written all over them, lacey red lingerie, sporty colognes and seductive perfumes in fancy boxes tied up with red satin ribbon, restaurants long booked solid for February 14th dinner reservations, cards of all sorts for children, men and women of all religious persuasions to give to others proclaiming the day of the Catholic saint Valentine. What I want to know is, in the words of Tina Turner: What’s love got to do with it? In fact, that is what I want to know about everything that comes under the headings "Human Existence" or "Social Concerns" or "Spirituality" or "Religion" and any other typology we have created to label and try to understand what it is we human beings are doing on the planet. It is the question I want you to ask yourself whenever you are challenged by any difficult problem or person or situation: What’s love got to do with it?

I told Frank MacArtor one time, maybe when I was meeting with the search committee that led to my call to this congregation, that every sermon I give is about love, otherwise there is no point in my standing up and talking. A talk that is not about love is simply a lecture. So you could say that my definition of a sermon is that it is a talk about love.

So, as I am sure the children would challenge immediately, Reverend Nancy, what is love? Generations of people have been saying that you cannot define love, but I disagree. Love is what makes you feel good, love is what makes another person feel good, and respects all people in the process. Love is a waving when you drive past your neighbor, it’s a smile to anyone at any time, it is a piece of chocolate layer cake with fudge frosting, or a cold beer or a drink of water, love is a kiss or a hug, or making coffee for our coffee hour, or sharing your money to build our new Mill Creek home, or sitting at a sick child’s bedside, love is digging in the rubble of an earthquake hoping to find people alive or their bodies, love is not expecting people of other races, colors, genders, or ethnicities to be just like you. Love is every good thought, word or deed that shows you care about yourself and the whole human race.

This morning I want us to think about what love has to do with anything that comes before us as individuals, and as a larger community. Unlike in the situation where the love-struck young man asked his girl: "Do you really love me, or do you just think so?" "Yes, honey, I really do love you," she replied. "I haven’t done any thinking at all about it, yet."

During the past couple of weeks I just randomly picked up items from the newspaper or magazines around my house, or things I heard about on the news or witnessed, and asked the question I posed for you: What’s love have to do with it? Here are some of those things and responses I wrote out for myself to share with you at the time.

In the News Journal of this week: "The death rate for HIV/AIDS is more than twice as high in Wilmington as in the rest of the state, according to a state report released this week." The same 1999 report covering the years between 1994-1998, showed also that the state’s cancer mortality rate dropped, but respiratory, digestive organ, and breast cancers were all up. All this gathering of data about disease, disorders, or negative situations that contribute to them both such as teen pregnancy, prompts me to ask, What’s love got to do with it? Love may be seen in the desire we have to be well ourselves and see others well, too. Love may be seen in the support and activism of those who have been afflicted or seen others afflicted by any of the hundreds of kinds of problems that come not only in the form of the illness or crisis, but in the treatment or lack of treatment.

And we can ask what love, especially agape, that love for one’s brothers and sisters in the world, has to do with the New York Times report of January 28, that stated: " Someday, we may look back on the year 2001 with nostalgia for a time when AIDS was merely a health catastrophe. Soon, AIDS in Africa will be doing more than killing millions every year. It will destroy what there is of Africa’s economy and cause further instability and, perhaps, war." And later in the same lengthy article: "From the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, the major drug makers clung to the idea of one planet, one price. Or worse—some drugs cost more in Kenya that in Norway. The strategy has earned them a public image almost as malignant as that of tobacco companies. By last year, they were also facing the growing threat of generics and the loss Washington’s automatic trade support."

What does the threat of AIDS, or the growing cancer rates and health problems of all sorts have to do with love? What does love have to do with drug company profits, shareholder returns, and children whose parents are all ready dead from AIDS and who are infected, too?

We know that we do not want anyone we love to have to deal with any of these illnesses. We know that we do not want to have them personally. Love for ourselves and others is always protective, concerned with nurturing the total health and well-being of the ones we love the most. Do we love others less? Yes, we do, but do we care that others suffer? If we are to truly love ourselves, we will.

The same 1999 report covering the years between 1994-1998, showed also that the teen birth rate dropped a from around 39 to 36 per thousand births. What does it matter? What’s love got to do with it?

I want to tell you about an experience I had on Monday, when I went to the Dupont Children’s Hospital to visit Emily Ferro, the oldest daughter of members Tony and Cathy Ferro. Emily had pneumonia and was in the hospital for three days getting her lungs clear and generally being watched to make sure she got the proper level of antibiotics and fluids. During that entire time, her parents were with her, watching her, cuddling her, giving her their encouragement and support. While I was visiting with Emily I could not help notice this darling little boy, maybe around 12-14 months, maybe older, but he was clearly undernourished which the nurse confirmed that came in later. He was the most engaging little guy with a shock of red hair and big blue eyes. His name, I found out later, is Joshua. Emily and I began playing peek-a-boo with him, and he would laugh, his blue eyes would light up as he would get as close to the corner of his cage-like crib nearest to us as he could. At one point I walked over and began to tickle his arm, and watch him laugh and try to climb up the side of the crib. He had a feeding tube inserted into his nose, tapped along the side of his face, so his grins had a lopsided quality that made them only more precious. Then I walked away, back to Emily. He immediately let out this wrenching cry, and clambered back over to get close, I went back and he stopped crying and laughed, but when I walked away again . . . . I found out from the Ferros and the nurse that he was mostly by himself. The mother with her boyfriend came in late one night for a few minutes, the father came in with his wife for a few minutes another day, but for the most part, little Joshua was left alone with the nurses coming in periodically to check on him. The Ferros were clearly touched deeply by this, and so was I, so much so that I found myself the next day at my monthly UU minister’s chapter meeting crying about how much the contrast of these two children had torn at my soul. Here was one child, so clearly and obviously loved and nurtured, who’s birth was anticipated by mature adults who had created an environment that is the most desirable for a child, and while in five feet away was another who was so clearly and obviously neglected, and whose birth very likely was one of those unplanned accidents of youthful passion. So what’s love got to do with declining birth rates, Joshua and Emily? I think it is pretty clear and obvious.

Ashley Montagu the anthropologist wrote (as quoted in the Humanist Jan/Feb’01): "the prolonged period of infant dependency produces interactive behavior of a kid which in the first two years or so of the child’s life determines the primary pattern of his subsequent social development." In the same magazine, Selma Fraiberg, a noted child psychologist is quoted: "A baby without solid nurturing ‘is in deadly peril, robbed of his humanity.’" And Richard Restak, a neurologist reported: " Scientist at several pediatric research centers across the country are now convinced that failure of some children to grow normally is related to disturbed patterns of parenting."

What does the fact that so many children are growing up in ghettos in abject poverty around the world have to do with love? What does the fact that we have more money going into the construction and maintenance of prison than into child welfare and education have to do with love?

Betty McCollister who wrote that Humanist article gave this response: "For all the technology that has allowed humans to visit outer space and jammed our lives wit cars and computers and television, we still haven’t invented a machine that bathes a baby in constant, joyous, ego-strengthening affection. We haven’t invented one that can cope with the unfortunate products of negligent rearing and the havoc they wreak o themselves and society."

Another newspaper article reminded me of an incident I had long forgotten, reported first some thirty years ago, when, in South Carolina, three men were killed by state-police during a civil rights protest. The article quoted that Gov. Jim Hodges said "the sate still is healing." The tragic incident occurred at the mostly black South Carolina State University during a protest over the banning of blacks from the Orangeburg, S.C., only bowling alley. "A platoon of white highway patrolmen opened fire on the protestors" killing three young college students and injuring twenty-seven others. Gov. Hodges, speaking to students at that school, said: "If these three young men were alive today, their sons and daughters would be college students just like you."

This is Black History Month, and in the years since the late 1950s when the first civil rights protests began that eventually led to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, we have seen a lot of racial hatred, heard a lot about racial bigotry, bias, cultural and institutional racism, and when we consider all the sadness that has accrued from slavery in this country, and are reminded of the on-going struggles for many in the African-American community, we have to ask ourselves: What’s love got to do with it?

Gov. Hodges, again: "They were here because their parents believed in the power of education. And you are here because of the sacrifices they made. These sacrifices must never be forgotten, and these opportunities must never betaken for granted." That is one response. My response is that no young people should fear for their lives because they object to the unfair conditions they find and lift up for the world to see. Even if they are angry when they do their protesting. Parents and members of a community should not be worried that armed police personnel will turn the bullets we have given them to insure our children’s safety on the children themselves. There are other, better ways to handle unruly groups. There is more of thoughtfulness, caring, and compassion that can be exercised before bullets, or dogs, or pressure-hoses are turned on people for protesting the unfair, hypocritical system that would have people denied access to any and all public resources.

These past two weeks were also filled with numerous reports about the climbing numbers of victims from the dreadful earthquake in India, and the desperate attempts to rescue potential survivors, then the efforts to remove bodies and the fear of disease from decaying corpses, and we hear these tragic accounts, and remember all the others we have heard about, and each time we must ask ourselves: What’s love got to do with it?

Alongside the Valentine’s Day advertising are reports that Ariel Sharon, "the iron-fisted warrior-turned-politician whose name is associated with some of the bloodiest chapters of Israeli history, was elected prime minister in a landslide Tuesday with a promise to change the way Israel pursues peace." And I ask, What’s love got to do with it? Can love be only for one’s people and exclude all others? Is love something that has any hope of being a whole and wonderful thing if it is limited to only some people, some of the time?

The same paper give us the story from Las Angeles Times reported Brian Lowry that says a study finds there is an increase in sexual content on TV. It seems the Henry Kaiser Family Foundation, of Menlo Park, CA, compared recent results with those from just two years ago and find that "the percentage of programs containing ‘sexual content’ rose from just over two-thirds (from 56 percent in 1998) and three-quarters [of a percent] within prime-time shows –up from two-thirds during the prior analysis. . . ."

Actually, even no more than I watch television, I think I could have told them that there had been an increase in sexual content on TV—without the expense of a survey! And what does love have to do with all this sexual explicitness that is rampant in this most religious of the western world countries? Perhaps the love of money.

As you go about your days, reading, listening, observing with the eyes of a principled member of this community of faith, I ask you to keep this question before you: What’s love got to do with it? As you work, and play, and drive, and watch TV, and buy your groceries, ask yourself: What’s love got to do with it?

And, whatever you decide to do or to give to show your love for you sweetheart, children, or friends on Wednesday, Valentine’s Day, make sure that the recipients know without question, what your love has to do with your actions.

Someone who loves someone in this congregation asked me to help them surprise that special person for Valentine’s Day, and I asked myself: What’s love got to do with it? The answer is that we will make that person know by actions that speak louder than words, that love is the motivating force in his/her (I cannot give the gender away!) life. That is what gives our lives any meaning that they can have, it is the caring that motivates us to all actions of kindness and respect we call love. And it is the greatest power in the world. Which means the greatest question in the world is: What’s love got to do with it?

 
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