Love & Power
Song of Solomon 8:6-7; Ephesians 3:14-21
February 13, 2011
Tomorrow is Valentines Day, the feast of Saint Valentine, or the many saints whose name was Valentinus, patron saint of, well, probably a Chaucerian legend with no real grounding in history. Oh well. Happy Valentines Day, nonetheless. Oh, and the name Valentinus derives from the Latin valens, or powerful. Love and power – inseparable concerns even when it comes to Valentines Day.
Sometimes the Spirit moves me through a finished story or complete argument, but this morning I am more thinking out loud about love and power. Getting love and power is essential to understanding and practicing Christian faith. My thinking out loud was prompted a couple of weeks ago, when a group of 45 Presbyterian pastors sent an open letter to the church telling us that the denomination is “deathly ill” and needs to be “radically transformed.”
I don’t know if any of you have seen or read their letter, but I’d be willing to bet that you can guess what it’s about if I told you just one thing about the signers: all 45 of them are men.
Moreover, they come from churches that average more than 1,000 members, so they are men who sit atop large institutions with sizeable budgets.
It will not surprise you, I will hazard a guess, that their concerns are prompted by our divisions over ordination issues but there’s more at stake, as they acknowledge. They write,
“Homosexual ordination has been the flashpoint of controversy for the last 35 years. Yet, that issue — with endless, contentious “yes” and “no” votes — masks deeper, more important divisions within the PC(USA). Our divisions revolve around differing understandings of Scripture, authority, Christology, the extent of salvation amidst creeping universalism, and a broader set of moral issues.”
In truth, I don’t disagree with them, though I would name these concerns a bit differently. However, I think that they ignore the one huge issue that rarely gets named or confronted in the church, or in the broader society: the question of power – its sources and its proper uses. They ignore it, I’d guess, because they so clearly embody it that they cannot even see it.
In fact, when called on to explain why there were no women signers they pleaded innocent of practicing any exclusion. They just didn’t notice. They so clearly embody power that they cannot even see it.
Why bring this up today, in connection with the beautiful love song that is Song of Solomon?
To begin with, anyone who has ever been “in love,” in a deep relationship, knows that balancing power is the most challenging and essential work of such relationships. The best relationships are said to be marked by “mutuality” when power is shared in various ways. The worst are destroyed by abuse when power is in the hands of one party.
We know this because we see it in all kinds of relationships ranging from the personal and intimate to the broadly corporate. We see people – often we see ourselves – grasping for power because we are so fearful. We fear not having power. We fear not having control. We fear not being loved.
Yet the power that we find ourselves grasping for so often is such a pale imitation of real power.
Listen again for how the author of the great Biblical love song speaks of the power of love:
“Love is strong as death, passion fierce as the grave. Its flashes are flashes of fire, a raging flame. Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it.”
That is real power.
Real power resists all of our efforts to control it.
Take the list of concerns that our brothers in Christ want the Presbyterian Church to focus on:
Understanding of scripture? I’ve witnessed and participated in the contentious debates in our denomination for a long time now, and I’ll tell you what I’ve seen. I’ve seen an ever smaller contingent of fearful people who don’t grasp that love is not an orientation and who cannot see the new thing God is doing in the church because they are blinded by fear – of change, of the unknown, of the other. So they disregard the primary Presbyterian principle of interpreting scripture: the rule of love.
The rule of love holds that “any interpretation of Scripture is wrong that separates or sets in opposition love for God and love for fellow human beings.”
The question of authority gets completely muddled, then, when scripture is used as a bludgeon in argument rather than as an invitation to deeper relationship with God and the community of followers of Jesus – whose new commandment was simply this: love one another as I have loved you.
When the question of authority is muddled, power will be abused.
It is no accident, for example, that the letter in question was signed by 45 men. Further, it is no accident that the letter was signed by 45 clergy and not a single Presbyterian elder or other lay leader even though we claim to practice a priesthood of all believers. It is no accident that these men lead large churches whose high steeples project an image of power despite the fact that we worship a crucified God whose greatest power is exhibited in and through human weakness and frailty even unto the cross.
That would be the summary statement of my own Christology, to pick up from the list of concerns the letter names. In and through the weakness and frailty of the human being, Jesus, God exhibits the limitless power of divine love, offering a resounding “yes” to the world that offered the “no” of the cross.
If God would say “yes” to the Roman imperial culture and society that got it all so wrong, why would God say anything but “yes” to the loving desire expressed in and through religious experiences other than our own? If you want to convict me of “creeping universalism,” so be it. Here’s my defense: God did it first.
The love of God does not recognize the limits that human beings always want to place on and around it. We build fences with our fear and thus surround our feeble frames to ward off that which we do not or cannot or will not grasp with our minds or welcome with our hearts. God’s love refuses to acknowledge those fences. God’s love is the raging flame that burns those fences to the ground.
Our own desire, at its highest and best, mirrors that raging flame.
Which is, of course, why it is also such a fearful and fearsome thing.
The fearsomeness is also probably why we don’t often read from the Song of Solomon in church. It is filled with the power of desire. It is a lengthy poem dedicated to that power. Down through the years the institution – whether of the church or the synagogue – has often tried to tamp down this power by trying to convince people that it’s really all just an allegory about love for God or God’s love for us.
But I’m not buying it. Any poem that begins with “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth! For your love is better than wine” is not talking about God.
I hope you have had the chance in the past couple of days, or will take the chance soon, of reading the whole thing. It doesn’t take long – a half hour if you read slowly and linger over the images. If you’re going to take your time, I recommend reading it with a friend! Hey – tomorrow is Valentine’s Day!
But seriously, this love poetry is all about real power – the power of desire, the power of love. Or, put better, the power of love trying to happen.
That lovely phrase comes from Sebastian Moore’s book, The Contagion of Jesus: Doing Theology as if it Mattered. “Desire,” Moore writes, “is love trying to happen,” and, as such, desire is the key to understanding our longing for God, our reaching out to God.
Because, as Moore puts it, “God is a god of desire, not of power and prestige, and Jesus knew God as the object of all our deepest desires – for joy, for laughter, and the love of friends, for sexual fulfillment.”
While I appreciate Moore’s focus on God’s desire for us and God as the authentic object of our own deep desire, I think he makes the common error of identifying power only negatively and aligning it with prestige. That understanding of power also easily equates it with money and might, which are surely forms of power, but understanding power only in those terms misses the deep power of love itself, and it has the paradoxical effect of leading us to embrace powerlessness.
That is to say, if we think that power is always a negative force we are reluctant to use power, and, in fact, often tend to deny that we have any power to begin with.
But such denial is dangerous self deception. We all have power. Consider your most intimate relationships – with lover, with child, with parent.
A good friend posted a Facebook “distress signal” last week bemoaning the fact that her three-year-old has given up her nap. Mom is not happy about this development. Talk about a primordial power struggle. All of our relationships, especially our most intimate ones, involve power struggles and negotiations.
This is true all the more so for our relationship with God, which is why theology matters so much. If we understand God as the great and powerful judge behind the distant curtain of clouds – the Wizard of gods, as it were – then our struggle of faith is marked either by trying to meet standards that are, by definition, unmeetable because they are not of this world, or by running away to hide from this vengeful and violent god. If, on the other hand, we understand God as the creator who longs desperately for relationship with the creature, and for a world in which all of creation lives in the shalom – the wholeness, the peace, the community – that was the animating desire behind the burst of creation itself, then the journey of faith is marked by desire itself.
As Moore puts it, “A theology that downgrades desire as such is going to make of the desire for God something rarefied and otherworldly, instead of being what it is, the hunger for the reign of God.”
In other words, the hunger for God is the desire for beloved community, the kingdom of God on earth. The hunger for God is the desire to know ourselves as beloved.
Diana Butler Bass writes, in the conclusion of her People’s History of Christianity, “Christianity [is] a story of accumulated human experience of God that reveals a certain kind of wisdom in the world: To love God and love one’s neighbor constitutes the good life. Love is, as the apostle Paul wrote, the greatest of all things. Without love we are, as the good apostle said flatly, “nothing” (1 Cor. 13). Without love, Christianity is either a pretty bad joke or a twisted political agenda.”
Without love, the church is destroyed by the love of power at precisely those points when God wants us to be drawn together by the power of love. For when we are drawn together in the circle of God’s love we truly become light for a world that dwells in darkness, water for a parched earth, balm for a broken world, voice for the voiceless, liberation for the captives, welcome for the outcast. That is the authentic power of love.
Thus my prayer for us all – including for the 45 brothers who believe we are part of the deathly illness of the church – is the same one that Paul offered:
that, according to the riches of God’s glory, God may grant that you may be strengthened in your inner being with power through the Spirit, and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, as you are being rooted and grounded in love. I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. Amen.
February 13, 2011
Tomorrow is Valentines Day, the feast of Saint Valentine, or the many saints whose name was Valentinus, patron saint of, well, probably a Chaucerian legend with no real grounding in history. Oh well. Happy Valentines Day, nonetheless. Oh, and the name Valentinus derives from the Latin valens, or powerful. Love and power – inseparable concerns even when it comes to Valentines Day.
Sometimes the Spirit moves me through a finished story or complete argument, but this morning I am more thinking out loud about love and power. Getting love and power is essential to understanding and practicing Christian faith. My thinking out loud was prompted a couple of weeks ago, when a group of 45 Presbyterian pastors sent an open letter to the church telling us that the denomination is “deathly ill” and needs to be “radically transformed.”
I don’t know if any of you have seen or read their letter, but I’d be willing to bet that you can guess what it’s about if I told you just one thing about the signers: all 45 of them are men.
Moreover, they come from churches that average more than 1,000 members, so they are men who sit atop large institutions with sizeable budgets.
It will not surprise you, I will hazard a guess, that their concerns are prompted by our divisions over ordination issues but there’s more at stake, as they acknowledge. They write,
“Homosexual ordination has been the flashpoint of controversy for the last 35 years. Yet, that issue — with endless, contentious “yes” and “no” votes — masks deeper, more important divisions within the PC(USA). Our divisions revolve around differing understandings of Scripture, authority, Christology, the extent of salvation amidst creeping universalism, and a broader set of moral issues.”
In truth, I don’t disagree with them, though I would name these concerns a bit differently. However, I think that they ignore the one huge issue that rarely gets named or confronted in the church, or in the broader society: the question of power – its sources and its proper uses. They ignore it, I’d guess, because they so clearly embody it that they cannot even see it.
In fact, when called on to explain why there were no women signers they pleaded innocent of practicing any exclusion. They just didn’t notice. They so clearly embody power that they cannot even see it.
Why bring this up today, in connection with the beautiful love song that is Song of Solomon?
To begin with, anyone who has ever been “in love,” in a deep relationship, knows that balancing power is the most challenging and essential work of such relationships. The best relationships are said to be marked by “mutuality” when power is shared in various ways. The worst are destroyed by abuse when power is in the hands of one party.
We know this because we see it in all kinds of relationships ranging from the personal and intimate to the broadly corporate. We see people – often we see ourselves – grasping for power because we are so fearful. We fear not having power. We fear not having control. We fear not being loved.
Yet the power that we find ourselves grasping for so often is such a pale imitation of real power.
Listen again for how the author of the great Biblical love song speaks of the power of love:
“Love is strong as death, passion fierce as the grave. Its flashes are flashes of fire, a raging flame. Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it.”
That is real power.
Real power resists all of our efforts to control it.
Take the list of concerns that our brothers in Christ want the Presbyterian Church to focus on:
Understanding of scripture? I’ve witnessed and participated in the contentious debates in our denomination for a long time now, and I’ll tell you what I’ve seen. I’ve seen an ever smaller contingent of fearful people who don’t grasp that love is not an orientation and who cannot see the new thing God is doing in the church because they are blinded by fear – of change, of the unknown, of the other. So they disregard the primary Presbyterian principle of interpreting scripture: the rule of love.
The rule of love holds that “any interpretation of Scripture is wrong that separates or sets in opposition love for God and love for fellow human beings.”
The question of authority gets completely muddled, then, when scripture is used as a bludgeon in argument rather than as an invitation to deeper relationship with God and the community of followers of Jesus – whose new commandment was simply this: love one another as I have loved you.
When the question of authority is muddled, power will be abused.
It is no accident, for example, that the letter in question was signed by 45 men. Further, it is no accident that the letter was signed by 45 clergy and not a single Presbyterian elder or other lay leader even though we claim to practice a priesthood of all believers. It is no accident that these men lead large churches whose high steeples project an image of power despite the fact that we worship a crucified God whose greatest power is exhibited in and through human weakness and frailty even unto the cross.
That would be the summary statement of my own Christology, to pick up from the list of concerns the letter names. In and through the weakness and frailty of the human being, Jesus, God exhibits the limitless power of divine love, offering a resounding “yes” to the world that offered the “no” of the cross.
If God would say “yes” to the Roman imperial culture and society that got it all so wrong, why would God say anything but “yes” to the loving desire expressed in and through religious experiences other than our own? If you want to convict me of “creeping universalism,” so be it. Here’s my defense: God did it first.
The love of God does not recognize the limits that human beings always want to place on and around it. We build fences with our fear and thus surround our feeble frames to ward off that which we do not or cannot or will not grasp with our minds or welcome with our hearts. God’s love refuses to acknowledge those fences. God’s love is the raging flame that burns those fences to the ground.
Our own desire, at its highest and best, mirrors that raging flame.
Which is, of course, why it is also such a fearful and fearsome thing.
The fearsomeness is also probably why we don’t often read from the Song of Solomon in church. It is filled with the power of desire. It is a lengthy poem dedicated to that power. Down through the years the institution – whether of the church or the synagogue – has often tried to tamp down this power by trying to convince people that it’s really all just an allegory about love for God or God’s love for us.
But I’m not buying it. Any poem that begins with “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth! For your love is better than wine” is not talking about God.
I hope you have had the chance in the past couple of days, or will take the chance soon, of reading the whole thing. It doesn’t take long – a half hour if you read slowly and linger over the images. If you’re going to take your time, I recommend reading it with a friend! Hey – tomorrow is Valentine’s Day!
But seriously, this love poetry is all about real power – the power of desire, the power of love. Or, put better, the power of love trying to happen.
That lovely phrase comes from Sebastian Moore’s book, The Contagion of Jesus: Doing Theology as if it Mattered. “Desire,” Moore writes, “is love trying to happen,” and, as such, desire is the key to understanding our longing for God, our reaching out to God.
Because, as Moore puts it, “God is a god of desire, not of power and prestige, and Jesus knew God as the object of all our deepest desires – for joy, for laughter, and the love of friends, for sexual fulfillment.”
While I appreciate Moore’s focus on God’s desire for us and God as the authentic object of our own deep desire, I think he makes the common error of identifying power only negatively and aligning it with prestige. That understanding of power also easily equates it with money and might, which are surely forms of power, but understanding power only in those terms misses the deep power of love itself, and it has the paradoxical effect of leading us to embrace powerlessness.
That is to say, if we think that power is always a negative force we are reluctant to use power, and, in fact, often tend to deny that we have any power to begin with.
But such denial is dangerous self deception. We all have power. Consider your most intimate relationships – with lover, with child, with parent.
A good friend posted a Facebook “distress signal” last week bemoaning the fact that her three-year-old has given up her nap. Mom is not happy about this development. Talk about a primordial power struggle. All of our relationships, especially our most intimate ones, involve power struggles and negotiations.
This is true all the more so for our relationship with God, which is why theology matters so much. If we understand God as the great and powerful judge behind the distant curtain of clouds – the Wizard of gods, as it were – then our struggle of faith is marked either by trying to meet standards that are, by definition, unmeetable because they are not of this world, or by running away to hide from this vengeful and violent god. If, on the other hand, we understand God as the creator who longs desperately for relationship with the creature, and for a world in which all of creation lives in the shalom – the wholeness, the peace, the community – that was the animating desire behind the burst of creation itself, then the journey of faith is marked by desire itself.
As Moore puts it, “A theology that downgrades desire as such is going to make of the desire for God something rarefied and otherworldly, instead of being what it is, the hunger for the reign of God.”
In other words, the hunger for God is the desire for beloved community, the kingdom of God on earth. The hunger for God is the desire to know ourselves as beloved.
Diana Butler Bass writes, in the conclusion of her People’s History of Christianity, “Christianity [is] a story of accumulated human experience of God that reveals a certain kind of wisdom in the world: To love God and love one’s neighbor constitutes the good life. Love is, as the apostle Paul wrote, the greatest of all things. Without love we are, as the good apostle said flatly, “nothing” (1 Cor. 13). Without love, Christianity is either a pretty bad joke or a twisted political agenda.”
Without love, the church is destroyed by the love of power at precisely those points when God wants us to be drawn together by the power of love. For when we are drawn together in the circle of God’s love we truly become light for a world that dwells in darkness, water for a parched earth, balm for a broken world, voice for the voiceless, liberation for the captives, welcome for the outcast. That is the authentic power of love.
Thus my prayer for us all – including for the 45 brothers who believe we are part of the deathly illness of the church – is the same one that Paul offered:
that, according to the riches of God’s glory, God may grant that you may be strengthened in your inner being with power through the Spirit, and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, as you are being rooted and grounded in love. I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. Amen.
posted by David Ensign at
6:42 AM
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