Beyond Sentimental--January 27, 2022

Beyond Sentimental--January 27, 2022

"You do well if you really fulfill the royal law according to the scripture, 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' But if you show partiality, you commit sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors." [James 2:8-9]

Love isn't really about whether we feel like it or not.  Seriously.

Somewhere along the way most of us learned (wrongly, James would argue) that love is basically an emotion--in particular a feeling of liking someone, but with the dial turned up to eleven.

You could hear it in our thinking already when we were kids in elementary school, when the local gossip around the bike rack at recess was all about who "likes" whom (friendship), who "LIKE likes" whom (a crush), and who "LOOOOOVES" whom (whatever children think romance looks like).  We learn to treat "love" as just the high end of a continuum of liking someone, and we treat it as something just about as dependable as a fifth-grade courtship as well.  If love is a feeling, after all, you can only be expected to do kind things for the ones you love while you "feel" like it, which may not last for very long at all.

And maybe, in some way, some part of us still struggles with letting that childish thinking go as we enter into adulthood.  I know plenty of adults who are still stuck in that mindset that love is a feeling for people you like, and of course that makes it terribly easy to bail out on romances, friendships, and other commitments as soon as they don't "feel" like sticking around or working things out.  I know even more adults, including folks who have been going to church all their lives, who find Jesus' command to "love your enemies" completely baffling and nonsensical, because they can only hear "love" as a stronger form of "liking," and by definition they can't "like" their enemies.

That much is a fair point, of course--it's meaningless to command someone to feel a certain way about someone else, and even more ridiculous to insist you have pleasant feelings for someone you really find detestable.  But what if we were wrong back at the bike rack in fifth grade when we thought that love was merely a feeling?  What if we're still wrong when we equate "love" with the flurry of chemical reactions from endorphins firing in our brains that we call emotion?  And what if, beyond the shallow sentimentality that we usually settle for when talking about love, there is something with substance that doesn't depend on our flighty feelings?

I want to suggest that this is where the Scriptures are pointing us.  James is certainly pointing us in that direction, but he's hardly alone. He, along with the commandments in the Torah and Jesus himself, sees love as something more than a feeling that must come first before action.  For all of the biblical writers, love is the commitment to do good to another--and that doesn't have to depend on whether you "like" that person or not.  And because it's not first and foremost about getting your own emotional needs met, it is something that the Torah can instruct us to do for everyone--all who are our "neighbors" (which, again, is everyone, to hear Jesus tell it).  If the commandment, "Love your neighbor," is about my feelings, it loses any meaning when a new family moves in next door who shout all the time, set a hateful sign laced with profanity in their front yard, play loud, terrible music into the wee hours of the morning, and whose dog eats my prize petunias.  But if loving my neighbors includes even the bad neighbors whom I do not like, then it's got to be about more than my emotional response to them.  It's about my willingness to do good for others, to seek their well-being, even before my own.

And really, this is it.  This is what makes the way of life marked out by the Scriptures so beautiful, so compelling, and frankly so countercultural.  When love is defined by who or what I already like, it will by definition be about partiality--only those I already like, or who are alike enough to me, will be eligible for love.  And those who don't make the cut won't be worthy of love.  But when love is about seeking and doing good for others regardless of how I feel about them at the moment, I can love everyone who crosses my path, because their likability is bracketed out.  It's not about whether I "like" someone, or whether they can do favors for me, or whether we are enough alike that we belong to some social grouping.  I can show love even to people I deeply dislike because love is no longer seen as a reward for being sufficiently likable, but simply a reflection of God's choice to love them and me both.

So in our verses for today, the situation that seems to have come to James' attention is about discrimination between rich and poor.  And James' point here is that the people of God are called to show love regardless of whether someone can do favors for you or looks more expensively dressed or has a bigger house than you.  We are called to seek the welfare of all people, which means especially caring for those whose well-being is at risk.  That's why James sees showing partiality as such a violation of the commandment to love--it's one more way of reducing love just to "who is likable enough to warrant my care and attention."

Of course, we still struggle with exactly that same kind of partiality and sifting of people based on their wealth--you know exactly the ways people talk about "good neighborhoods" and "bad neighborhoods," or the ways we build little gated communities (to keep out undesirables, of course), or the ways the needs of poorer communities never seem to get the attention that the up-and-coming suburbs do.  We live in a culture that teaches us it's in our own self-interest (for future resale value!) to make sure that no low-income housing developments get built near "us" and "our kind of people." And we just shrug it off as inevitable when the schools in the neighborhoods and communities with lower property values are falling apart because they bring in less income from property taxes compared with the communities where the millionaires live.  We're still doing exactly what James warned against, but we just act like there's nothing to be done about it--as though we can't be expected to seek the well-being of others, who we don't even know, and who live in those "other" parts of town. 

None of this is even to begin to look at the ways we are still doing the same along racial and ethnic lines, even in our own day.  Or the ways we still often use gender, language, and physical ability or disability, to decide whose needs matter more than someone else's.  James shines a spotlight on all of this and says, "This isn't what love for your neighbor looks like!  You are supposed to be looking out for each other's interests, even when you don't know the other person, or even when you know them and don't like them!"  When we settle for the childish definition of love as just "liking people a lot," then by definition we'll only ever seek the interests of people we know, have something in common with, and like.  James, however, along with the rest of the Scriptural writers to be honest, sees love as more expansive--something not dependent on me knowing, liking, or agreeing with someone else. Love means we still seek good things for others, regardless of whether we are alike or different, whether we look, talk, and think the same or not, and whether we like each other or not.  And every time we divide our communities, our country, and our world into "Me and My Group" over here, and "Those People" over there, however the lines are drawn, James says we are running counter to the call of love, because love isn't merely liking or sameness.

James calls all of that a failure to love, because it is showing partiality.  James calls us to more than that.  He calls us to "fulfill the royal law"--to love genuinely, which means actions more than feelings or empty talk.  And it means leaving behind the childish notion that love is reducible to "liking" what is familiar, rather than love as seeking the good of the other, regardless of how you feel about them in the moment.

Today is a day for us to grow up, then, to move beyond immaturity, and to step deeper into the love we've been called into from ancient times, as old as the Torah's instruction, "Love your neighbor as yourself" and Jesus' direction, "Go and do likewise." If it feels difficult at time, or we are awkward in our learning how to love beyond sentimentality, that's ok.  Growing up is like that. And growing up is exactly what this moment needs of us.  It's what we need most for this moment, as well.

Lord God, help us to grow in love beyond flighty feelings or self-interest--help us to love like you.