Barbara Wright Henrietta UCC

Sermon Text: 1 Corinthians 13 February 12, 2006

Part of a series on “The Love of our Lives”

“What Happens After ‘Happy’?”

I Corinthians 13:1-8a (adapted from The Message and NRSV)

[The Message] “If I speak with human eloquence and angelic ecstasy but don’t love, I’m nothing but the creaking of a rusty gate. If I speak God’s Word with power, revealing heavenly mysteries and making everything plain as day, and if I have faith that says to a mountain, “Jump,” and it jumps, but I don’t love, I’m nothing.

If I give everything I own to the poor and even go to the stake to be burned as a martyr, but I don’t love, I’ve gotten nowhere. So, no matter what I say, what I believe, and what I do, I’m bankrupt without love.

[NRSV] Love is patient; love is kind;

Love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude.

It does not insist on its own way; love 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.

This text, from First Corinthians, chapter 13, shows up in one form or another in many wedding ceremonies. Often when we hear it, our minds go back to our own weddings, or weddings we’ve attended, and conjure up romantic images of “true love.” Last week Pastor Dave spoke about filial love – love that seeks the welfare of humankind in general and our neighbor in particular; next week he’ll be addressing God’s agape love. Our sermon series will ignore the tennis variety of love, because that love that means “nothing” anyway.

This morning, we’re going to talk about romantic love, the type of love that drives us to leave our birth families behind and start a brand-new life, a new family, with that one special person who we hope will fulfill us, complete us. (Yikes!) Love with a capital “L”…the magical emotion that leads our favorite storybook or cinematic characters to risk it all for a chance at “happily ever after” …remember the scene from “West Side Story” when Tony and Maria first see each other across a crowded dance floor? The rest of the world fades out of focus and into slow motion; the music softens as the young lovers see only each other? What makes the fairy tale prince risk his life to rescue and wed the beautiful princess, or the mermaid give up life as she knows it to win the prince? What is this thing called Love?

This month’s issue of National Geographic offers one answer. The cover story is an article by Lauren Slater about the bio-chemistry of love. Slater tells how researchers at Rutgers University recruited volunteers who had been “madly in love” for a number of months. They put the subjects in MRI machines, showed them pictures of their lovers, and watched the changes that took place in the brain. It turns out that, bio-chemically, love and mental illness look a lot alike! A flood of dopamine in the lover’s brain causes this intoxicating energy and sense of well-being that make lovers take risks, pursue one another despite logic, and stay up all night to…um…be together to watch the sunrise.

In addition to the high dopamine levels, these lovers had serotonin levels that were 40% lower than the norm – that’s the same level that occurs in people with obsessive-compulsive disorder! The brain can’t tell the difference between Love and OCD! Hmmm…

As some of us may know from experience, the passionate euphoria that characterizes the initial stage of love is transitory. Maybe that’s a good thing – the infatuation stage of love is exhilarating, but it can also be exhausting! So, maybe after a few years, a few bills, a child or two, you wake up one morning and discover that the roaring flame of desire has become more of a low grade fever. There’s still some heat, but it’s different now. The dopamine thrill is gone. Can we really live “happily ever after?” As a classmate at school asked this week, “What happens after happy?”

Slater’s scientific answer is that most of the dopamine flood is replaced by oxytocin, a mellower hormone that is released when we hug our partner or our child, or when a mother nurses her infant. According to Slater, oxytocin is the commitment hormone – what our brains need to transform the “happily” into the “ever after.”

This physiological side of love is interesting – we are, as the psalmist says, “fearfully and wonderfully made,” but as persons created in the image of God, we are far more than a pattern of chemical reactions. And in today’s scripture reading (despite its frequent presence at weddings), Paul wasn’t talking about romantic, erotic love at all…he was talking about love with real staying power -- the Love that never ends. That’s committed, unconditional love. The kind of love God gives us, and the kind God wants us to have toward one another. But letting go of our own agenda and loving people as they are isn’t always easy.

One of my husband Peter’s favorite stories tells of a nervous bride who decides the best way to cope with being in the spotlight at her large wedding is to mentally break the ceremony down into small sections -- first the processional down the aisle, then meeting her groom at the altar, followed by a congregational hymn. One piece at a time… As she walked toward her groom at the beginning of the ceremony, he was taken aback to hear her repeating, “Aisle, Altar, Hymn, aisle altar, hymn, I’ll alter him…” (I can’t for the life of me figure out why he thinks this story bears repeating quite so often…) Maybe he’s thinking of all those early Christmases when he gave me camping equipment and I gave him dress shirts and nice sweaters.

I’ll alter him. Or I’ll alter her. It’s an appealing thought, and maybe some of us have even tried it. But it doesn’t really work, does it? It didn’t work for us – I still don’t camp and he still doesn’t care much about clothes. Instead, we’ve grown to appreciate our differences – most of the time. Dr. Phil, in his new book, Love Smart, says that false expectations create the biggest problems in marriages. If we think all of life will be roses and champagne, we’ll be disappointed. He will leave hair in the drain; she will keep you waiting. One or both of you may get sick, or become unemployed and unable to afford the lavish lifestyle you expected.

And even if it were possible (which it isn’t) to alter him or her, we have no authority to change our partners, to mold them to meet our expectations. Our partner is not necessarily “wrong” if he or she is different from what we expected… the good news is, with God’s help, we just might be able to change our expectations, to give up the illusion and choose to love the real person. I heard a country music song on the way in this morning that said, “I don’t feel like loving you today…” and went on to say, “But you know I will anyway…”

The challenge is that while we’re looking at reality, we may find some things about ourselves that need to change. It’s a good thing God’s love for us is committed and unconditional, isn’t it? A wise woman said, “It’s true that God loves us exactly as we are, but God loves us too much to want us to stay this way.” Our unconditional love of our partners can follow that model. We strive to love them as they are, while wanting them to become (by their own decision and with the help of God) the very best that they can be.

Last week, Pastor Dave talked about the conflict between love and fear. According to Dr. Gary Chapman, a marriage and relationship expert, another feeling that stands in opposition to love is self-centeredness. Love with staying power, he says, the kind of love we see in First Corinthians 13, is love that concentrates on the well-being of the other. God has designed marriage to be the most intimate of human relationships, and Chapman lists five areas of intimacy:

Intellectual intimacy:

This isn’t necessarily discussing great literature or scientific theory – what’s important is that you share your thoughts. They may be thoughts about food, finances, politics, but they reflect what’s on your mind.

Social intimacy:

has to do with events we experience together or things that we do separately and then tell each other apart. It’s open communication.

Emotional intimacy:

sharing our feelings and emotional responses

Spiritual intimacy:

This may be the toughest, but the most important. We don’t have to agree on every detail of belief, but we discuss our thoughts about spiritual realities, and hope to understand and respect one another.

Physical intimacy:

seeing, touching, appreciating one another. Real sexual intimacy requires understanding one another’s different needs and finding mutual joy in pleasing each other.

The more we seek to support and understand our partner, the closer we come to modeling God’s unconditional love. We can even use First Corinthians 13 as a sort of check-in or litmus test to see how we are doing by substituting our own name in place of the world “love” and see whether it fits: Barb is patient; Joe is kind; Sandy is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. Mel does not insist on his own way; Dave not irritable or resentful; Sue does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. Dorothy bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. If we aren’t there yet, (I know I’m not) we can keep working on it. After all, God’s Love never ends.