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Sixth Sunday after Epiphany

Deuteronomy 30
15 See, I set before you today life and prosperity, death and destruction. 16 For I command you today to love the Lord your God, to walk in obedience to him, and to keep his commands, decrees and laws; then you will live and increase, and the Lord your God will bless you in the land you are entering to possess.
17 But if your heart turns away and you are not obedient, and if you are drawn away to bow down to other gods and worship them, 18 I declare to you this day that you will certainly be destroyed. You will not live long in the land you are crossing the Jordan to enter and possess.
19 This day I call the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live 20 and that you may love the Lord your God, listen to his voice, and hold fast to him. For the Lord is your life, and he will give you many years in the land he swore to give to your fathers, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.


Take one measure of Russian Olympics, add a dash of St. Valentine’s Day, and spend too much time sitting in darkened theaters and what do you get? Doctor Zhivago.

Doctor Zhivago, for those who haven’t seen it, is an older film (released the year of my birth) set it in the turmoil of the Russian Revolution and it’s aftermath. It’s a love story (of a sort) that is largely fueled by an insidious earworm called “Lara’s Theme.” The film is an eye-popping 197 minutes long and—I would argue—will teach you nothing about love.

Yes, Julie Christie is lovely, and Omar Sharif impossibly handsome, and David Lean does a fine job recreating the vast Russian backdrop, but the love story is weak and morally ambiguous. You can watch it if you want, but you’ve never get those three hours and 17 minutes back.

So now that I’ve convinced you to skip the film and stick with Ron Maclean and 24-hour coverage of our Olympic heroes, I need to convince you that St. Valentine’s Day is a legitimate theme for worship. And maybe the best place to start is the saint himself.

But before I say more about our saint de jour, I want to recount a conversation I had with my mother the time she bought a used car:

Me: What’s that on the dash?
Mother: That’s Saint Christopher, the patron saint of travelers.
Me: When did you become Roman Catholic?
Mother: I’m not, but I couldn’t very well take it off.
Me: Why not?
Mother: Well, that would be bad luck, wouldn’t it?
Me: You know he’s been delisted?
Mother: What do you mean?
Me: Delisted, taken off the list of actual saints. So since he’s not real, you can take him off the dash.
Mother: No way, that would still be bad luck.

Now, St. Valentine was never delisted, like poor old St. Christopher, but he is on the list of saints for whom virtually nothing is known. Yes, there was a Valentine martyred in Rome on February 14th sometime in the third century. But beyond that, everything else is legend. And there is the small problem of multiple Valentines on the Roman list, as many as fourteen, half of whom seem to have been martyred on the 14th.

So by the time the High Middle Ages arrive, a number of legends develop around St. Valentine: restoring sight to the blind, secretly marrying Christians to save young men from being conscripted, and so on. Chaucer and others go a step further and suggest he is the saint of romantic love, and the whole thing takes in a life of it’s own. Looking at all the panicked faces in the Hallmark store on Thursday night, I wonder if some secretly hope Chaucer had kept the whole idea to himself.

“But Michael,” you are no doubt saying to yourself, “we should celebrate romantic love: it is one of the four basic types of love that help us understand the love between us and God.” It seems you have a lot to say on the topic. And what you say is true. C.S. Lewis describes the ‘four loves’ in a book of the same name, and romantic love is firmly on the list.

But first the others: Lewis begins with affection, the type of love we most commonly feel in our families, where affection is extended based on a lasting bond, and adept at ignoring faults in favour this, the first type of love that most of us experience.

The second is friendship, the deep bond between those who are not related or romantically involved. Lewis argues that friendship was appreciated by the ancients to a greater degree, perhaps because friendship happens beyond the ties of clan or tribe. It isn’t natural in the sense that it happens outside self-interest, and as a result has a unique purity.

Romantic love (eros) is next, the deep love we can feel for another, and the pleasure this can bring. Of course Lewis makes this the most qualified type of love, citing all the dangers from lust to obsession to idolatry, but it remains, for us, an key experience of love.

The last is charity (agape) often called unconditional love, or loving kindness, the kind of love that God extends to us, and we are called to extend to others. This is the love of John 3.16 (“For God so loved the world...”) and Jesus‘ command to love our enemies. It is the love Paul labels the ‘greatest’ in his tribute to love (1 Cor 13) and is even the name of God according to the author of 1 John, who said “God is love” (1 John 4.8).

And this, of course, takes us to the passage that Taye read this morning, the invitation to choose a life of love:

Now choose life, so that you and your children may live and that you may love the Lord your God, listen to his voice, and hold fast to him. For the Lord is your life, and he will give you many years in the land he swore to give to your fathers, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

All the loves are distilled to the love of God, the love that heard the suffering of the Israelites, the love that liberated the people from bondage, the love that maintained the wanderers in the desert, the love that forgave nearly continuous disobedience, and the love that took God’s people to the very edge of the promised land and invited them to enter in.

But, and it’s a big one, the people would need to choose life. They would need to listen for God and obey God’s command, they would need to care for the widow, the orphan and the alien, they would need to keep God at the centre of their life together and they would need to instruct their children about God and God’s ways. All of these things together meant they had chosen life—the same ‘abundant life’ (John 10) that Jesus would commend to his friends.

So what about a life without love, what happens then? Well, God is pretty specific about that too:

But if your heart turns away and you are not obedient, and if you are drawn away to bow down to other gods and worship them, 18 I declare to you this day that you will certainly be destroyed. You will not live long in the land you are crossing the Jordan to enter and possess.

The implication, and it’s borne out by all the smoting that seems to follow the Israelites wherever they go at this point in the story, is that God will punish the people for their disobedience. But even if you can’t accept this—and you don’t have to—then at the very least we can conclude that the logical outcome of seeking idols, failing to help the vulnerable, and serving yourself alone is a life without God, a life without agape, charity, loving kindness. And it wouldn’t be much of a life. Think self-destruction rather than divine retribution.

Now, I feel I was a little hard on David Lean a few minutes ago, one of the greatest directors of the last century, who also gave us The Bridge on the River Kwai and perhaps the greatest film of all time, Lawrence of Arabia. It’s the other Omar Sharif film, the one that made him famous, and also the film that confirmed Peter O’Toole as the finest actor of his generation.

It’s a film about love: love for a people and a way of life not understood by colonial masters, love for the unlikely people we meet along life’s path, love that risks death in seeking the lost, and the anguished love expressed in loss as the sand claims a friend. It is the love between Lawrence and Sherif Ali, played by O’Toole and Omar Sharif, that provides perhaps most moving portrayal of friendship every captured on film.

I feel like we have come full circle, but I can go one better: The 1960 Olympics, hosted by the City of Rome, happened in a simpler time when the organizers knew that the athletes not only needed their own village to gather and enjoy new friends, but also a chapel for contemplation and prayer. And so they build a new church, in the centre of the athletes village, and dedicated it to St. Valentine.

May God bless our love, and may the words ‘faster—higher—stronger’ define our love, now and always, Amen.

posted by michael jacob kooiman @ 6:16 AM