Proper
6 2015 (Year B)
Father Adam Trambley
June 14, 2015 St.John’s Sharon
This morning’s reading from Second Corinthians has the
following line: “For if we are beside ourselves, it is for God; if we are in
our right mind, it is for you.” Paul is
in the midst of writing about life above and beyond the mortal life we have
now, and he is throwing all sorts of metaphors together with the good news of
what Christ has done in dying and rising from the dead. One of the points that comes out in this very
rich passage is a sense that he is mostly living in some sort of glorious,
ecstatic spiritual place filled with love, joy and the nearer presence of God,
but that he remains tethered to regular life by his great love for other people
and his desire to help them however he can.
Paul says in Philippians “my desire is to depart and be with Christ, for
that is far better; but to remain in the flesh is more necessary for you.” Paul is already focused on entering the
eternal life that he is just skirting the edges of as he completes his earthly
ministry. Sometimes he must seem odd,
maybe crazy, “beside himself”, as he says, as he fasts and prays and sings and
speaks in tongues and maybe even dances around like King David did to the glory
and praise of God. But then for the sake
of the new Christians he has brought to Jesus, he decides to focus on the pragmatic
aspects of writing encouraging letters and making travel arrangements and
sewing tents together and any number of other day-to-day concerns belonging to
a first century church planter.
I want to unpack Paul’s sense of his desires by looking at
four degrees of love developed by the eleventh-century monk and theologian
Bernard of Clairvaux. Paul’s words can
be a discussion on the third to the fourth degree, but all four are helpful for
us to think about. The four degrees are:
- 1. Loving oneself for self’s sake
- 2. Loving God for self’s sake
- 3. Love God for God’s sake
- 4. Loving self for God’s sake
The first degree of love is Loving oneself for self’s sake.
This basic form of love might seem self-evident and maybe even a little
bit un-Christian. Many parents and
Sunday school teachers have probably told us not to be selfish, and we really
shouldn’t be. But we do have to love
ourselves and value ourselves for the sake of ourselves, in what could be
considered a selfish way, or we will have a hard time growing into the love of
God and others.
So what exactly does loving oneself for self’s sake
mean? This first stage of love means
that we do what is in our own self-interest because it is good for us. We take care of ourselves because we value
our own well-being. We brush our teeth,
we eat our veggies, we limit our recreational use of crystal meth. We make choices about desserts and exercise
to stay as healthy and pain free as possible.
We learn skills and save money and do the kinds of things that allow us
to have a better life. As Bernard
writes, “This is the curb of temperance imposed on you by the law of life and
conscience, to stop you following your own desires to destruction or becoming
enslaved by passions which are the enemies of your true welfare.”[1]
Not everyone has been able to get to even this first degree
of love. Too many people don’t love
themselves. They have never received
adequate love from parents or others to believe they are really loved and
lovable. They get involved in any number
of self-destructive behaviors because of a huge deficit of love in their lives. One of the basic works of evangelism is to
find people who cannot currently love themselves and are stuck in enormous
amounts of pain and to share the good news of God’s unconditional love with
them. This sharing takes place in word,
so that they understand, in deed, so that they feel God’s love through us, and
in prayer, so that God will allow them to feel his love directly. Just to get to this first degree of love, we
need to know that God loves us so that we are able to value our own self and
our own needs.
The second degree of love is that we love God for self’s
sake. In this stage we value God because
of what he has done and will do for us.
As Bernard says, “It is good for us to know how little we can do by
ourselves, and how much we can do with God’s help, and therefore to live
rightly before God, our trusty support.”[2] If we want what is truly good for us, we can
discover pretty quickly that we can live much better lives if we are in a
relationship with God. All Christians
start their prayer lives here, and many also stop here. When we need something, we ask God for
it. We are obedient to God and what he
asks of us because we find things work out better for us when we do so. At this degree of love we are like the little
kid who cleans his room so that mom will give him dessert. We tithe because we see how God blesses us
when we do or we come to church because it really does help us get through the
week feeling better. When we need God,
we turn to him and he answers.
Now I am not saying that this kind of relationship with God
is bad. When we love God for self’s sake,
our heavenly Father is pleased to be asked for help and to shower his blessing
on us. We hope, however, that once we
develop this kind of relationship with God, that our relationship moves
deeper. As Bernard says, “realizing how
good he is, we find ourselves drawn to love him unselfishly, even more
powerfully than we are drawn by our needs to love him selfishly.”[3]
This third degree to love God for God’s sake has to do with
deepening our intimacy with God beyond any ways that he helps us. We want to be with God and spend time in
prayer and adoration with God the way lovers want to lose themselves gazing into
each other’s eyes. This degree of love
is when we join our voices with Angels and Archangels and with all the company
of heaven as they proclaim the glory of the Lord before his heavenly throne. This degree of love is the desire to sit
before an icon or a candle and repeat the name of Jesus until the room feels
infused with the presence of the Holy Spirit.
This degree of love is the confidence Saint Paul had that nothing was
better than to be as close to God as possible because God is so good, so holy,
so beautiful, so majestic, so glorious, so altogether lovely, altogether
worthy, altogether wonderful that to be home in the presence of God is more to
be desired than anything else. People
loving God with their whole heart and soul and mind and strength tend to seem
beside themselves and a bit disconnected from day-to-day life because they really
are focused somewhere else.
Of course, not many people can stay here for very long. Sooner or later, most of us move from “Holy,
Holy, Holy” to “How about a hand with this Lord God Almighty?” Such petition is to be expected as we learn
how to develop a deeper relationship with God, and, as always, God is patient
with us.
Even beyond this degree of love, however, Paul talks about
Bernard’s fourth degree of love, loving self for God’s sake. Here we give our whole selves to God. Bernard doesn’t think such love is possible
until we have achieved our immortal bodies on the other side of the
resurrection, but Saint Paul certainly comes close. He talks about no longer regarding people
from a human point of view, but seeing everyone, including himself, as a new
creation.
More than that, however, Paul has entirely given himself
over to be used by God for God’s purposes.
He loves himself because of the ways God can use him, even being willing
to deal with all the parts of his ministry that force him to be in his “right
mind” for the details of daily living instead of in the rapture of prayerful
union with God. He hasn’t stopped loving
himself, but he no longer loves himself merely for self’s sake, but he loves
himself even more deeply as a vessel for the work that God has given him to
do. Paul follows Jesus, who left the
glories of being with his Father in heaven to live and die among us. The greatest saints are those who have had
the surpassing privilege of raptures of delight in the worship and praise of
God, but who then do the often dull, practical work of loving their neighbors
joyfully and even sacrificially. This
degree of loving is when we die to self, take up our cross, and follow Jesus,
not because we think so little of ourselves that we are willing to throw our
lives away, but because we think so much of ourselves that we can imagine no
higher purpose for ourselves than to lose our life for Jesus’s sake. As Paul says, “whether we are at home or
away, we make it our aim to please [our Lord].”
So let us grow deeply in the love of ourselves and of our
God, moving from one degree of love to another.
Let us share the depth and riches of God’s love with those who do not
know it, and let us immerse ourselves in the love of God through prayer,
reading of scriptures, and meeting together to encourage one another.
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