I’d like to begin by reading from a familiar passage in Paul’s first letter to the church in Corinth:

"If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body to be burned, but do not have love, I gain nothing. Love is patient and kind, love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way in life; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends."

If ever there was one, we are a people into feelings, are we not? Watch the next time you see some disaster reported on the news channel. The reporter thrusts a microphone in the face of a woman in obvious agony and what will that reporter ask her? "Can you tell us how you feel?"

How do you feel? That’s the question on Oprah, in the tabloids, all over the talk shows. We want, above all else, to feel good. And we’ll go to almost any lengths to lift our spirits. We seem a people, a culture, caught up in the question of our feelings, absorbed in our moods, anxious about our state of mind. Advertisers appeal to it. Entertainers feed it. Therapists live off it.

I remember an interview by a Chicago talk show host some years ago, an interview with Dr. Karl Menninger from the famous Kansas clinic. Unfortunately, no longer with us. The host asked the famous psychiatrist, "What is your formula for happiness?" She was rather taken back when he responded, "What makes you think this world is designed to make us happy, that we have a right somehow to happiness?"

The wise down through the ages have always insisted that we will never know such a Kingdom in this world. But perhaps a needs oriented culture has seduced us into thinking that we can, along with all the conveniences and toys, somehow purchase such an untroubled state. And the result for many of us is an inability to settle for reality, accept life with all its moods and pains, embrace the inevitable ups and downs that are part of our days here.

If we turn to the Biblical story for a word about purpose, a sense of ourselves, we find very little interest in our feelings, as such. Oh, to be sure, there are the exhortations that we should be courageous, and not fear, not be troubled. The promise there is that peace, that peace that passes all understanding. But these are never viewed as the central quest of life, as an end in themselves. Such appeals are always in the service of that for which we are to give ourselves here in this world, that for which we are to live. And what is that? That, quite simply, the old story says, is love.

If you ask this old record about the purpose of your existence here in this world, what gives it meaning, one answer always comes back. You are here to love: love your God, love your neighbor. I think we often make the question of the meaning of life more complicated and obscure than we need. But it is important to add immediately that when this faith talks about love as the heart and center of our existence, it is not talking about the kind of love we celebrate, for example, on Valentine’s Day. It’s not talking about romance, not talking about a certain emotional moment that we hope for. Nothing, of course, against romance or Valentines, but look for a moment at this familiar picture by the Apostle Paul. I suspect it’s read at more weddings than any other, but one has to wonder, really, if anyone is listening.

First of all, Paul’s words are a criticism of his friends in Corinth for whom religion has become focused in the attainment of a kind of emotional high, an ecstasy that takes them out of themselves, a religious enthusiasm that carries them far out of the mundane and real world. His comrades in Corinth really major in the quest for religious experience. They speak in tongues, that’s a sort of utterance that takes them to heights of fervor. They revel in it, they are almost, one might say, addicted to it. Now, he doesn’t dismiss their religious fervor outright. He himself speaks in tongues. But he does begin by saying, "If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but have not love..."

And the love of which he speaks is not so much something you are swept up in emotionally, as it is something you decide and do. And it is certainly not a love that grants continual bliss or peace of mind. For example, it is patient he says, and God knows, being patient can be painful, can it not? It does not insist on its own way in life, and that is often hard to handle, to accept, is it not? And it is a love that bears and endures. That doesn’t sound like a Hallmark card, at all.

The reality is, we give ourselves to this business of love only by setting aside our absorption in our own feelings, our longings for eternal happiness, our desire for ongoing bliss. But let me read a piece that Mike Harden of the Columbus Dispatch wrote some years ago, which I think illustrates as beautifully as anything I’ve ever read the kind of love that Paul is speaking of.

"When Frank Steger pushed himself into an upright position in the hospital bed, the heart monitor's fluid cursive line disintegrated into an erratic scribble. 'I told the doctor,' he said, peeking at the edge of the curtain to make sure that his wife, Mary, was not within earshot, 'I told him that I felt like I was drowning. He said this is what happens when you have congestive heart disease. I told him I'd rather he throw me off the roof instead.' 

Mary returned to the room, drawing a chair to his bedside. 'Thirsty,' he complained. She lifted the straw to his lips as he pulled the oxygen mask aside. The medicine made him sick then. She fetched the basin, wrapped a firm arm around his spasm-racked shoulders, mopped the sweat from his forehead. In sickness and in health. They were supposed to be preparing for a Florida vacation, not holding on to each other in a cardiac care unit. 'Help me sit up,' he whispered hoarsely.

In the end, love comes down to this; not Clark Gable's devilish first appraisal of Vivien Leigh, not Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr rolling in the surf, but, 'Help me sit up.' A sharp-toothed rain spattered against the windowpane. In the room, a procession of medical courtiers came and went, trading pills for blood and tinkering, ever tinkering, with the buttons and dials controlling the tubes and wires to which their patient was trussed, like some latter-day Gulliver.

One evening Frank was sitting asleep in the chair next to the bed. Mary paused in the waiting room to remove her street shoes and put on her slippers. She did not want to wake him now that sleep was such a rationed luxury. Soundlessly, she slipped into the chair next to his. In the end, love is not the smoldering glance across the dance floor, the clink of crystal, a leisurely picnic spread upon summer's clover. It is the squeeze of a hand. I'm here. I'll be here, no matter how long the fight, even when you want most to

'Help me into bed,' he said, he who had once been warrior triumphant in the business world. He was tough, demanding, but never as much on others as himself. If you gave him your best, no one could hurt you. If you gave him less, no one could hide you. She had been with him and beside him when the future was golden, beside him when health sent his career into eclipse. 'I'm thirsty,' he said. 'Here,' she said, 'let me get you something.'

Along the road they once traveled so often to visit family, the hearse wound its way past stubbled fields, shuttered roadside markets. The minister, clutching his Bible against his chest as though it was sufficient cloak against the winds whipping across the rural countryside, passed final benediction: 'Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.' He stooped to pick up his hat as the funeral director placed the folded flag in Mary's lap.

So when all is said and done, love is not rapture and fire. It’s a hand steadier than one's own, squeezing harder than a heartbeat. Wine changes back to water. Endearment is exhibited by what once might have been considered insignificant kindnesses, but which, in the end, become the tenderest of ministrations. On the day after the funeral, trying to busy herself with chores that could easily wait, she plopped the laundry basket down in front of her granddaughter. The child tugged out the end of the sheet her Frank had always held when they did the wash. When the child brought the folded end to meet the corners her grandmother held, she kissed her playfully, just as he had "

"Here, let me get you something."

A beautiful picture of what life is all about, is it not? But there are only two questions that we need to ask. Through all of this was she blissfully happy, untroubled, content? I very much doubt it. Through all of this was her life deeply meaningful, full of importance and purpose? I certainly think so.

A beautiful picture of what love is all about, but not just the love of a married couple. It reminds us that love is as near to each one of us as someone who needs us. And there is always someone who needs us. This is why we are here, for the love that does not insist on its own way in life, that not only hopes and believes, but that bears and endures the sufferings and the needs of those with whom we share life’s way.

But there’s more than commitment and deed here, as well. There’s also promise. Did you hear it? Love never ends. Why? Because love is the bedrock reality beneath all of the other realities of this world, love is the power that sustains the universe and each one of us. Love is God, and when we, under the impress of his love, stretch ourselves beyond ourselves to love as he did, even to the point of a cross, we participate in that which is forever, and from which nothing in this life ever separates us. Love never ends. That’s the promise, that in the end there will be peace and joy.

Interview with Gil Bowen
Interviewed by Floyd Brown

Floyd Brown: Gil, a marvelous message. It excites one’s thoughts about what is important in life. I used do a program around Valentine’s Day and we used to do definitions of love from different people. My favorite one was: love is an itch in the heart that can’t be scratched. And we all remember the motion picture, Love Story, where "love is never having to say you’re sorry." Has there ever been a phrase that really captured your imagination about love?

Gil Bowen: Well, I suppose there are a lot of them, but one that just occurred to me was from a grand gentleman in my congregation, unfortunately no longer with us, who used to say that life is love of life, labor, and neighbor. And that sort of stuck with me over the years because it seems to embrace pretty much what it’s all about.

Brown: Everybody wants people to love them.

Bowen: True.

Brown: And that’s not very easy to accomplish. You’re a professional counselor. How would you counsel someone who wants people to love them?

Bowen: Well, I’d certainly identify with their desire to be loved because I think it is important to be loved in life. The trick is, or the problem is, how do you get there? You simply cannot very effectively walk out and collar people, although some come very close to it, and say, "Please love me!" You know?

Brown: Right.

Bowen: There’s, I think, a paradox about love as there is about happiness. And that is that you really can’t get it by going after it. Dr. Menninger, whom I made reference of in my sermon, once said our problem is not that we have people who need love, he said our problem is we don’t have enough people who are able and willing to give love. To the degree that you can help people begin to think not of their own need and perhaps become involved in the needs of others, to that degree they discover this marvelous truth that as they give of themselves, they find it coming back to them.

I remember a young man who I took over to a home for the elderly. I pointed out a woman sitting in the corner and said, "You go talk to her." And of course he was paralyzed, but he finally went over and sat down. In a few minutes he finally opened up. Older people know how to talk and he became a friend of hers. Something happened to him because of the fact that he got outside of himself and really became interested in another human being.

Brown: Our daughter said she heard a sermon and it really impressed her and she had to share it with me. Someone gave the definition of a best friend, and they said a best friend is someone who makes you better.

Bowen: Certainly.

Brown: And, of course, you’re going to get love from a best friend. If you had a top ten of the traits that you would like to see most in people, like love, kindness, forgiveness, charity, what would be your top two?

Bowen: Well, I think one would have to say love at the top of the list.

Brown: Sure.

Bowen: Well, that’s why you gave me two. I think patience—patient endurance—maybe is a very important ingredient. I think we tend to emphasize too much the brighter side of loving, which is important. I didn’t mean, in either what I’ve said or what you’ve said, I wasn’t trying to suggest that I don’t believe in the romantic dimensions of love. In fact, the Bible has a couple of different words for what we have to collapse into the one word love. And, of course, romance and attraction are important parts of life, but really the kind of love that the New Testament is talking about is not that love. It’s the love that is willing to give and share and bear and be there in the dark and downside of life, as well as in the days when everything is going beautifully.

Brown: A marvelous, marvelous message! And thank you very much for those wonderful answers.