Sermon: February 14, 2010

My father was born on June 13, 1920. He always said, “The day after I was born the whole country hung out their flags (of course it was “Flag Day.” Dad died early this morning. He was 89 years old and the 5th generation of our Oregon Trail family to farm the land where I was raised. I think it is fitting he died on Oregon’s Birthday. And because this is also Valentine’s day I want to honor my father this morning for a moment. I loved my dad and I know he loved me. As a father, loving behaviors did not come easily to him. He did the best he was equipped to do. Our relationship was complicated. I had to work hard at my love with him. And that’s often the way it is with us, isn’t it?

Because it is February 14, I want to begin this morning, Debbie, by publicly embarassing you and thanking you for your love. I, of course, deserve it (for you readers, of course, this was a joke. Ha! Ha!). And ours has been, as you can see, a storybook kind of love, perfect in every way (joke). When we met in Ohio it was love at 10th sight (also a joke but true). Our first date in central Ohio fall was a romantic outing to dig a stump out of a seminary professor’s backyard! Our second date was catching frogs at night in the mud of the school pond. The entire time, we have been surrounded by the church. And look what it has gotten us. Don’t we make a cute couple? We’re happy all the time and we never fight (joke with sound of noisy gong). When we first started out our song was:

Our house, is a very, very, very fine house, with 2 cats in the yard, life used to be so hard. Now everything is easy ‘cause of you.
We’ve been married over 35 years. As a friend used to say, “Most of them have been good.” Much of our love has been easy. Much of it has been soul testing work. A work of art. A work in progress. Because February 14 doesn’t fall on a Sunday that often, I thought today we ought to celebrate true love, not the noisy-gong-clashing-cymbal-insist-on-your-own-way kind of love but something more. I have assembled several vignettes in reflection on love. The first one is called “Love at the basketball game.”

Love At the Basketball Game
So we’re at the Oregon-Arizona women’s game the other nite and the players are wearing all kinds of pink to support cancer research and I say, “Those pink uniforms look great.” Debbie says, “I don’t look good in pink.” I don’t say anything. Then she asks me, “Will you still love me if I never wear pink?” I say, “Well, sometimes!” Isn’t it a little scary to think how many people come to us for advice about love?”

My Loving Behaviors
Men and women, men and men, women and women, it doesn’t really matter. Everyone can use help to prepare for long-term commitments. Actually, the first love-counseling we ever did was for the 13-year-old boy from our Ohio youth group who fixed us a fancy lunch at his family’s home and sat us down with TV trays in the den, behind closed doors, to get our advice on how to ask his heartthrob to the Spring Dance.

Last summer we got to work with 9 couples preparing for 9 weddings. One of the things we like to do to enhance relationships is something you might want to try. In fact it would work equally well with spouses, good friends, co-workers. Kids, you could do this with your parents, parents with your children. You take a piece of paper and write “My Loving Behaviors” at the top. Then you fill the page with all the things you do that tell your partner that you love them, appreciate them, understand and respect them. When we do it, couples then sit face to face and, one at a time, share their lists. We hear things like: “I am saying I love you when I bring you flowers, for no reason.” Or “when I rub your feet at the end of a long day. I am saying I appreciate you when I fix you breakfast in bed, when I tell my father in your presence, what a great partner you are. I am saying I understand you, when I take the phones off the hook on your day off, when I listen to the frustrations of your day and don’t interrupt. I am saying I respect you when I support a decision you have made about parenting our children while I was gone, when I tell our colleagues what a thoughtful preacher you are.” You oughta try it. It will open your soul. Where you have clashing cymbals in your loving, it will quiet them.

Adam and Eve
One time, we were working with some college students whose wedding was planned at the end of the summer. He was living at home for the summer. She on campus in her apartment, working 2 jobs and going to summer school. Midway through the summer his father kicked him out of the house and he moved in with her. 2 weeks before the wedding she called in tears. He had moved in to her place and while she was working and studying he was laying around the apartment, sleeping late, spitting tobacco on the floor and leaving his dirty underwear laying everywhere. She couldn’t live with him. We helped them call off the wedding.
I love the story from the Garden of Eden because it’s so true. The man and woman eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge so they think they know everything, smarter than God. Isn’t that the way loving relationships start? Marriages, domestic partnerships, committed long-term friendships, we start out thinking we know how love works, because we learned it from our parents or the TV, or movies or the web or we think we’re, somehow, naturals at love. Then we take hands, you know, we really begin to turn to embrace each other and start to bear and believe, hope and endure all things together and all of a sudden there we are naked...it feels like our whole lives are exposed for the other to see...dirty underwear and all...and it feels good because maybe we never had that before, but it scares us to death.
There’s another part of this story that rings true in my life in love. It’s where God asks Adam (and Adam in this tale represents all mankind and Eve all womankind), God asks Man if he has eaten of the tree God told them not to eat and what does he do? He says, “Woman gave it to me.” He blames the Woman. I was raised in a family where, whenever anything went wrong, it was Mom’s fault. Dad placed the blame, Mom accepted the blame and my sisters and I learned that this is what men and women do in love. (CYMBALS SOUND) Of course we know better, but when Debbie and I entered into our commitment to each other, there wasn’t a fig leaf large enough to hide me from the knowledge that my tendency was always to blame her. The words of First Corinthians begin by telling us what love is not. One partner blaming and the other acquiesing does not make love. I can truthfully say to you today that there has never been any violence in our marriage...not even close. But I have had to work hard on this tendency I learned to blame her for everything, especially when I’m the one who made a mistake. I know enough about it in my own life that I can see how this way of relating, especially for men and women who were raised witnessing their fathers abusing their mothers, can lead to domestic violence and how that violence can lead to injury and death. I will keep working on this for myself and we need to help each other model a better love so that we don’t rejoice in wrongdoing but find joy in healthy relating.

Men and boys, if you have a tendency to blame the girls and women in your life, get help. Women and girls, if you have the tendency to accept the blame, get help. Fathers and mothers, if you see these characteristics in your daughters and sons, get help. Blaming and insisting on your own way is not love and, if you’ve been raised in a home where this was acceptable behavior, you may have a tendency to ignore this behavior in others. And for God’s sake, for your children’s sake, if your daughters or girlfriends come to you saying they are being abused, please believe them, and get them help.

Honesty
In the Garden, God asks the man, “Where are you?” and the man says, “I was naked and I hid myself. I think those exact words are ones, if asked and answered in our relationships, could really help us establish important foundations for loving. These are a good opening for a real conversation. Ask the one for whom you care where they are. In vulnerable moment ask, “Where are you?” The best answer is to acknowledge your vulnerability and be honest. Say, “I was naked (embarassed, overwhelmed, sad, feeling guilty) and I hid myself.” And then tell your loved one why. I love the words on this poster I gave Debbie for Christmas:
For every girl who is tired of acting weak when she is strong, there is a boy tired of appearing strong when he feels vulnerable. For every boy burdened with the constant expectation of knowing everything, there is a girl tired of people not trusting her intelligence. For every girl who is tired of being called oversensitive, there is a boy who fears to be gentle, to weep. For every boy for whom competition is his only way to prove his masculinity, there is a girl called unfeminine when she competes. For every girl who throws out her e-z-bake oven there is a boy who wishes to find one. For every boy struggling not to let advertising dictate his desires, there is a girl facing the ad industry’s attacks on her self-esteem. For every girl who takes a step toward her liberation there is a boy who finds his way to freedom a little easier.
Text by J.T. Bunnell and Irit Reinheimer from a poem by Nancy R. Smith

Oregon’s Birthday
Truth be told, on this day I think of Oregon’s Birthday. When our kids were at home, I always made sure to bake a chocolate cake for dinner on February 14. Even when we lived in Idaho, I carved the cake in the shape of Oregon. I thought it would be the most soothing dessert to end a Valentine day when it’s almost guaranteed that, along with the fun and the celebration of romantic love, they might come home with broken hearts. They might not have received, at school, a Valentine from the ones they were secretly hoping would acknowledge them or one of those heart-shaped candies inscribed with the sacred words “Cutie Pie” or “Be mine.”
God’s love is so much bigger so maybe it’s a good thing Oregonians combine a day of reveling in personal love with one that draws the circle wider to encompass love of place and our hopes for what loving behavior could look like in the public realm. Gordon Hall of our congregation lived in California several years ago when that state approved Proposition 8, amending the California Constitution to restrict the definition of marriage to opposite sex couples. Today Gordon is President of the Asian American Psychological Association.
Recently, when members of the AAPA learned that the owner of the Hotel where their August Convention was to be held, had helped finance the campaign to approve Proposition 8, there was quite a range of reactions. In a communique to the membership announcing that the executive committee had voted to boycott the Hotel, Gordon shared a love story and I share it with you this morning with his permission:

In 1942, my mother and 120,000 other Japanese Americans were incarcerated in internment camps solely because of their Japanese ancestry. After World War II, in 1949, my mother and my father who was a European American, were married in the state of Washington. This wedding could not have taken place in my mother’s native California nor in Oregon, where I live now, because interracial marriage was illegal at that time in all but a handful of U.S. states. Over time, most of the public has come to recognize these civil rights violations as wrong and that expanding the scope of civil rights benefits everyone. I believe someday, restrictions of civil rights for same sex relationships will be viewed in the same manner.

To Be Transformed In Their Presence
Kathleen Moore, a nature writer, teaches at Oregon State. She often asks students to list in 2 columns on a sheet of paper. What it means to love a person and what it means to love a place. They always conclude that the lists are the same. Listen to her list. To love a person or a place is:
1. To want to be near it, physically.
2. To want to know everything about it---its stories and moods, what it looks like by moonlight
3. To rejoice in the fact of it.
4. To fear its loss and grieve for its injuries

1. To protect it---fiercely, mindlessly, futilely and maybe tragically, but to be helpless to do otherwise
2. To be transformed in its presence---lifted, lighter on your feet, transparent, open to everything beautiful and new,
7. To want to be joined with it, taken in by it, lost in it.
8. To want the best for it.
9. Desperately
1. To love a person as to love a place is to accept moral responsibility for its well-being.

I Love Our Children
A few years back, we drove to Portland to share Valentine’s dinner with our daughter Erin. Now, Erin and I have always had a special bond in loving behaviors that, to others, might seem a little strange like swimming in the ocean in December or making Oregon-shaped cakes on Valentine’s Day. Since we hadn’t been able to do this for awhile, this was an opportunity to go all-out to celebrate the quirky relationship we share. So I went all out. As we come to the end of this sermon, I don’t want to leave you with the impression that I think Valentine’s Day is all noisy gongs and clashing symbols. It certainly can be. And it can be manipulative and dangerous and we need to watch out for that. But, having said all that, it is a great occasion to go all out. So I hope you get a chance to do that for someone important in your life today.

I baked the cake with Erin in mind and I carved it in the shape of our State. Then I mixed frosting in all the colors I would need to make it look like a topographical map with the Cascades and the Coast Range and the valleys and rivers and mountain peaks that make us fall in love with this place. Some of the mountains looked pretty much just like blobs of chocolate frosting, but, by the time I was done, I had given that one relationship in my life the attention it deserves and I fell in love again with our daughter and my whole family and that was enough.

That’s what I want for all of us. Let’s be done with noisy gongs and artificial love that insists on its own way. Today, for love, men will buy the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit edition and that’s not love. Women’s shelters and protection programs tells us that today and in the days leading up to this day, domestic violence will increase and we know that’s not about love. We know better. We know these have nothing to do with love. For God so loved the world that we can cherish and honor God’s places and each of God’s loveable people. And we know that wherever love is, God is. And wherever God is, there is love.

I close with a final quote from Kathleen Moore. She says, “I think the most loving thing you can say to another person is, “Look!” And the most loving stance is not a close embrace but 2 people standing side by side. Looking out together on the world.” (The Pine Island Paradox, page 49) Today I hope you get to stand by one you love and look out together on our world. It is a wonderous place. We are a wondrous people, and wonderfully made. Go out in love.