Sermon – February 14, 2010: The Same Image
Sermon for Sunday, February 14, 2010 The First Baptist Church of Lewisburg
The Same Image
Psalm 99; 2 Corinthians 3: 12- 4: 2; Luke 9: 28-36
There’s a scene in a “Three Musketeers” movie in which someone opens a door into
a private space, to reveal a shrine. There are votive candles, the little ones you light in a
Roman Catholic church in exchange for a small donation, to help carry the prayers of your
heart into a luminous and ethereal realm. There aren’t just a few such candles, nested in little
glass holders, but row upon row, all lit, so that there is a golden glow. The centerpiece of
this devotional space is an altar, and resting on the altar is a painting.
So far everything looks like an elaborate church of the period, the carving, the
candles, the ornamentation and the image on the altar. But it is not the Madonna or Jesus in
the frame. The person who goes to kneel at the altar in rapturous transport has there a
picture of the woman of his dreams, the fine lady to whom, in an act of chivalrous devotion,
he has pledged his heart. At least that’s how I remember it–it’s possible that it’s a woman
gazing at a picture of the man of whom she’s enamored. The thing that stuck with me was
the shock of recognizing a traditional Christian worship environment converted to a place for
romantic reverie.
It’s Valentine’s Day. I always preach on some topic related to human love and
human intimacy around Valentine’s Day. The story of Jesus’ transfiguration, which is the
theme of the scriptures, gets us to that part of religion which experiences visions. The
disciples who are at the transfiguration see things and don’t, they get impressions and form
notions but it’s not clear that their reactions are appropriate or particularly meaningful. The
point of the whole thing seems an additional affirmation of the special quality of Jesus as
God’s chosen one, but it’s not just the voice from the cloud or even the appearance of
Moses and Elijah which seem to support the holiness of Christ. The otherworldly aspect of
the event, the dislocation of ordinary perceptions, the luminous face of Christ, the disciples’
confused response and the impenetrable fog all point to the disciples’ having, in some
sense, entered another realm.
That realm, the place of purity and holiness and mysterious light, is something we
humans associate with God. It’s also associated, at times, with objects of romantic longing.
Something about us, about our nature, makes it possible for us to make an idol out of
someone to whom we give our heart. That’s what was so striking about the scene from the
movie. The “Three Musketeers”, like a lot of French fiction, is a bit deliberately excessive in
its evocation of the depths of feeling harbored by its main characters. However, the
convention of courtly or chivalric love, as we know from the story of Don Quixote, which also
wasn’t unreservedly sincere about it–the story wasn’t, but of course Don Quixote was–
anyway, that heritage of knights pledging themselves chastely to the perpetual worship of
some woman they’ve made into a goddess for themselves–that’s familiar enough that we
accept it in the context of “The Three Musketeers.” There, in seventeenth-century costume,
we believe it as motivation for one of the main characters.
We think we no longer do that with love, no longer worship the object of our
affections, no longer feel the depths of our souls stirred by a type of religious reverence for
someone who makes our hearts skip a beat. It may be that no one now deliberately
copies a shrine from a church and puts his or her loved one’s image at the center, and lights
rows of votive candles as an act of devotion. People still, however, find ways to ritualize
their deep emotions into some significant deed, to channel the bounding goodwill of their
hearts toward the object of their affection. It’s not only adolescence which invites over-thetop
convictions of undying devotion, but it’s common enough at that point of life for
someone to have a secret place to which to go, to gaze at a photo or some other reminder.
Young men may no longer strap on swords to do battle with the world for the sake of some
fair lady, but they’ll climb up a cut along the roadway or onto the side of an overpass and
spray paint pledges of love for all the world to see.
What’s going on? There’s some connection between what is recognized as a
religious sensibility and erotic love, and there’s even research to support it. In a survey of
people who reported various kinds of visionary and out-of-the-body experiences apart
from trauma, the single largest connection was with lovemaking. Either the depth of human
devotion or transports of sensual delight or both sometimes have been enough to unmoor
persons from their ordinary consciousness and give them the impression of having been on
another plane.
There’s two ways to simplify understanding this mixing of sacred and secular love.
One is to suggest that human beings have a powerful instinct to mate and that this inner
drive has more energy and potential than can be realized and so is transferred into other
realms, including the religious sphere. Women swooning at a Pentecostal revival are seen
as the equivalent of girls fainting at a Beatles concert, and in both instances what happens is
explained as the displacement of erotic energy. Freud, who tried to reconceive existing
insights about human nature by referring everything to basic drives, is the most familiar of
such theorists. Essentially, however, everyone whose brand of philosophy rejects the idea
of a human soul accounts for ecstatic religious behavior as redirected mating impulses.
The other way to try to untangle reverence for the holy from awe at human intimacy is
to reverse the equation. God’s greatness calls forth wholehearted devotion from the
creature’s soul, and the depth of love and adoration properly given to God can take people
onto a different level of experience. That potential rarely being fully realized, it gets
transferred to other objects of admiration and the urge to give oneself away. De
Rougemont made it his thesis in Love in the Western World that courtly love entered the
Middle Ages from suppressed religious movements. Kierkegaard’s reflections on his own
exalted feelings for his fiancée led to his analysis that what he had been doing was to
bestow ultimate value on something of less than ultimate meaning. What he meant was
that he realized he had been given life in order to submit himself to God but had found
himself offering his soul to a fellow mortal.
I believe that the soul is immortal and that it does exist in relationship to God, so I
think that this second way of seeing things is more true than the first. However, I think that
both approaches are false simplifications. I don’t think these great fundamental human
responses to the imperative to be in relationship can be neatly distinguished. Certainly
sometimes a person is mistakenly behaving religiously in a relationship between mortals,
but at what level of devotion and adoration do we decide that’s true? And is there
something inherently unacceptable about earthier human energies contributing to a person’s
depth of religious feeling?
We read the passage from Second Corinthians to link to the illumination visible on
Jesus’ face in the company of Moses and Elijah, but the whole topic of having a glow by
virtue of being close to someone else also applies to human relationships. We use the
word “glow”, not entirely as a metaphor, for the look of people whose depth of feeling
makes them radiant.
To argue about the spiritual power and potential of human physical intimacy from the
dark side of the equation is perhaps most persuasive. We know people are “playing with
fire” when they indulge passionate urges. Desire and frustration and headlong
abandonment to feeling can and does, in the wrong circumstances, unleash forces which
overwhelm sense and sympathy. People get hurt. People get killed. There is something
really there in real intimacy–in what the Hebrew Bible refers to as “knowing the other”–
comprehending, taking into oneself the other–that takes people out of themselves, that
removes them from fully being in the everyday world. That’s what makes it so good when
it’s good and so bad when it’s bad. In the same way that a religious enthusiast can be more
wholeheartedly evil than a doubter ever could be–God, after all, overrules all objections–a
human lover can declare that “all’s fair in love and war.” All bets are off, because a person is
answering to powers which seem beyond the ordinary.
That’s why the Bible has its perspective on the business of Valentine’s Day. God
understands the spirituality of everything about us in a way which we don’t very well grasp,
and wants the whole persons we are to know good. The Bible isn’t concerned about bad
relationships around intimacy just because of concerns about property or progeny. It has a
concern about purity, about the purity of heart of humans who can wholeheartedly love and
in their love know spiritual fulfillment. It is a confusing and complicated part of who we are,
with great possibilities for delight and for disaster. As with everything in life, it is something
which works right when God is first. That prevents us from making an idol of a lover; but it
does not prevent us from experiencing the wonder and wealth of human love, for God has
assigned that love its place in our lives.
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