From a Sermon given at the Winter Solstice Worship Service on December 14, 2023.

I confess that when it was first suggested that we devote this worship service to the idea of Love, I found myself in quite a bit of resistance. It was not that the topic itself is a problem. It is a wonderful concept to explore. It’s just hard to have a conversation about something that is so profoundly important; and at the same time something that so thoroughly evades understanding by the human brain. There may not be as important of a word in human languages than “Love.”

The temptation here when the energy of a meta concept, a gargantuan idea that cannot be reduced to a word presents itself, is to try to contain it by talking about what it is not. You all recognize some of this backward approach to the idea of Love. . .but to start us off, I offer a few reminders.

Love is not seasonal. Hallmark movies to the contrary, love is not something that occurs more at Christmas time, although the number of words that cross our lips supposedly about love during the end-of-the-year celebrations typically do increase dramatically.

Love is also not what you crave. The programming that is coming through the media and other cultural sources right now attempts to convince us that we must “prove” our love for children and others through gifts and monetary contributions. This is pervasive and destructive, and completely untrue. These messages of rampant consumerism are the result of an economic imperialism of sorts. They have nothing to do with real Love. 

Love is not connected to desire in any form. Quite the opposite. If you desire something or someone, if you are therefore attached to an outcome or a particular form of a relationship, as opposed to operating from the neutrality that exists in the center of your head, you have already lost (or rather, temporarily misplaced) your connection to Love. Love can only be present when one lets go of the need for the outside world to be or behave in a certain way. True Love only exists within the context of Freedom. When you cannot walk away from whomever or whatever you think you love, what you are experiencing is attachment, otherwise known as dependency and/or desire, not Love.

In fact, Love has nothing to do with feelings whatsoever. It does not originate in our emotional space. Love is perhaps best described as a state of being. If you are still talking about feeling love for some other person, please consider clearing your space of enough programming that you at least update your use of language. That will go a way towards helping set your intention to experiencing the real thing.  

You might be feeling a great deal of connection with another person or animal. That can be a wonderful interim experience, but it is not, in Truth, what Love is about.  

Love is also not really an idea. I started this sermon speaking of the inherent difficulty in discussing the idea of Love. But that is just the dilemma with which we naturally are confronted when our human brains try to process something that cannot be fully understood solely using the physical systems.

Love is a spiritual concept and therefore the most truthful experience of it necessarily involves both the physical and the spiritual aspects of being an embodied human.   

I’d like to switch gears now a bit. . .and talk about the “wars and rumors of wars” part of our time together. I was asked to address the topic of Love within the content of today’s reality where what one sees overwhelmingly in the world around us is hatred.

How do we dwell in Love when the collective energy does not?  Everywhere one looks there appears to be an endless ocean of hatred and strife. We have so many wars going on right now that it’s hard to keep track of them all. There are, of course, the major military and political struggles that are steadily growing in size, sucking in almost the entire global population. There is the intensifying war between human beings and Mother Nature herself that is affecting every living organism on the Planet. There is even the intense for now-somewhat invisible battle going on above our heads in regards to which group of humans will be in control of the space above us. And on the ground there are the life-sucking ever-present culture wars, over the hearts and minds of the people themselves. How does one love in a world full of such participants?

As I was contemplating this question, I found myself drawn to certain words attributed to Jesus of Nazareth. He talked a bit about Love, including what it is not. He reminded us constantly that Love is not a product of the physical world, but rather that it originates from our relationship to the divine.

The Christ who referred to himself both as the Son of God and the Son of Man, thereby validating both physical and spiritual aspects of being human, talked about Love carefully and sparingly. In lieu of trying to reduce our understanding of Love to words he told his disciples to follow his example. He admonished his disciples to “Love one another, just as I have loved you.” So major hint there: Love requires expressed action (or inaction as a form of movement.) And he also talked about the end times, the times we are experiencing in 2023.

You all know that in the Church of the Harvest we honor all paths to God, all spiritual seekers after the Truth, all religious organizations and cultural traditions, including those who shun references to the divine in any form. I typically use words from various spiritual traditions in these sermons, so please do not be put off if you are one of the many who squirm a little when someone references the Christian Bible out loud. If you so desire, you can read for yourself the words spoken by Jesus and quoted in Matthew of that book about the current time of famines, plagues, and earthquakes. Those words echo in the nightly news. His teaching about the many who will hate, and the many whose love will grow cold during these times, resonated deeply within in as I went through the process of creating this sermon today.   

What I primarily want to draw your attention to this morning though, is the use of the phrasing “wars and rumors of wars.” Why are rumors being mentioned here? Initially this looks to be a redundancy, two words or phrases expressing the same thing. They are not. Perhaps some of you will know what I mean when I tell you this phrasing is more an illumination of a key dichotomy.

I remind you all that Jesus was a master of energy, and fully capable of infusing into any of his words a meaning that can only be understood by those who bring more to bear to the passage than just a flat analysis. “Rumors of wars” is not just a watered-down version of the concept of wars. It is at the heart of what creates the violence of wars.

Human beings “go to war,” that is to say, we act out in a violent way towards each other and other forms of life, when we are in fear. When we have no fear, we have no motivation to behave horribly. If you are a science fiction fan what I would say to you is “fear is the mind-killer.” Except that unfortunately, fear kills more than just the mind. For those of you more comfortable with dialogue about spirituality, what I would remind you is that Hatred is not the opposite of Love. Hatred is only a byproduct of the lack of it. The true opposite of Love is Fear.

When Jesus puts “wars” and “rumors of wars” on equal status, what he is teaching us is that our path to salvation is to address our fears, individually and collectively. I think of this every day as I watch the nightly news media personalities, bless their hearts, struggle with their own fears and their convoluted versions of bringing to their viewers a mixed bag of facts, interpretations and illusions, as they try to report what they understand to be the truth of our physical world. Too often their version is distorted by their own individual fear(s) and the fear(s) that their listeners want to hear. 

 When we truly embrace our Creator in all its manifestations, there is no fear. There is only the complete understanding of the soul that it is loved and is Love. However, this often requires more “surrendering” than many are wont to do. It takes a lot of pure intention and a great deal of healing/release of the pockets of pain and fear we each have stored within before most individuals are willing and able to experience the completeness of what some might call God the father. 

To have the lived experience of Love, the active version that The Christ modeled for us all, you have to face your fears. Only then does one reflect the state of being that is talked about when, as the Persian mystic Khalil Gibran puts it: “When you love you should not say ‘God is in my heart,’ but rather ‘I am in the heart of God.’”

I want to end by reading the truest words about Love in the face of Hatred, aka Fear that I have run across. These words, a selection from the poem entitled “On Love” by Gibran, speak eloquently about the fact that if you want to reside in the vibration of Love, you must find the courage to let yourself fall into the hands of the Divine. (p.s. Feel free to change the gender of these pronouns if it will help you hear the message).

When Love beckons to you, follow him, though his ways are hard and steep.

And when his wings enfold you yield to him, though the sword hidden among his pinions may wound you.

And when he speaks to you, believe in him, though his ways are hard and steep.

For even as Love crowns you, so shall he crucify you.

Even as he is for your growth so is he for your pruning.

Like sheaves of corn, he gathers you unto himself. He threshes you to make you naked.

He sifts you to free you from your husks. He grinds you to whiteness.

He kneads you until you are pliant;

And then he assigns you to his sacred fire,

that you may become sacred bread for God’s sacred feast.

But if in your fear you would seek only Love’s peace and love’s pleasure

Then it is better for you to cover your nakedness and pass out of Love’s threshing-floor into the seasonless world where you shall laugh, but all of your laughter; and weep, but not all of your tears.

And think not you can direct the course of Love, for Love if it finds you worthy, directs your course.

Allahu Akbar. Copyright by the Rev. Dr. Resa Eileen Raven, 2023.