Self-Love and Sermonwriting
Over at seratoninrain, Jim is hard at work on his sermon for the week. The passage he’ll be addressing is the beginning of Philippians 2. This passage is so chock full of heady goodness that we could probably discuss it for weeks on end. Unfortunately, he doesn’t have that kind of time, so he decided to bounce a question or two off of his readers to see what we thought. More to the point, he asked the following:
I invite you to share your reaction to the following statement, as well as your thoughts regarding the juxtaposition of this statement with the quote from Philippians above (if any). Ready? Here goes:
To love others you must first love yourself.
Now I don’t know the first thing about sermonwriting, but I can get as preachy as the next guy, so I thought I’d give it a shot.
I started to leave a comment on Jim’s site, but as often happens when I’m typing without giving a whole lot of thought to what I want to write, it ended up getting crazy long. So I thought I’d post it over here to see if anyone else had any thoughts. Besides, this continues some of the thoughts I started to write about here. Anyhow, here goes....
A few nights ago, I had a conversation with a few friends from church. We were talking largely about the idea of peace as a fruit of the spirit. I said that it seemed to me that peace is inherently relational — that we can be at peace, but only inasmuch as we are at peace with others, or God, or even ourselves.
One of my friends said that she didn’t understand what I meant by being at peace with ourselves. I had to admit that I was thinking out loud and that, while it seemed a natural extension of where I was going with my thought, I wasn’t quite sure what I meant. We talked about it a little more, and then another friend said something that I’ve been pondering since. He said that when Jesus summarized the law as “Love your neighbor as yourself,” that command might require that we love ourselves to begin with.
So while I would ordinarily tend to dismiss a saying like “To love others you must first love yourself” as so much Chicken Flavored Aphorisms for the Soul, my conversation earlier this week actually has me in a frame of mind to consider this a little more seriously.
I suppose that you could certainly define “loving ourselves” in different ways. Paul seems to have a good feeling for the negative forms of self-love in the passage Jim is using from Philippians: selfish ambition and vain conceit. And Lord knows I’m plenty selfish and proud.
But what is a healthy, dare I say Godly, notion of self-love?
I’m sure psychologists might have a much different answer, but since we’re talking about Paul’s writings and the Church, I wonder if it has to do with having a grounded sense of our identity and being at peace with that. Paul’s identity was profoundly rooted in the idea of being fully loved by God, in spite of his many failings. It allowed him to make audacious claims like “God is for us.” And it gave him a confidence to love others with a similar audacity.
Maybe we can love others to some extent without having this settled confidence in who we are. But I’m not sure how deep that love can be. I’m not sure that we’d ever be able to risk the self-sacrificial love that God asks of us without first feeling secure that God loves us deeply.
It is interesting, though, that Paul takes a step beyond Jesus’ command. Instead of loving our neighbors as ourselves, Paul exhorts us to regard others as better than ourselves and to look to their interests before ours. Is this a substantive difference? I don’t know. Maybe it’s moot. It seems like Jesus’ command is hard enough. Maybe Paul is just giving us some pointers as to how the Man Himself got it done.
For what they’re worth, those are my initial thoughts. Y’all are welcome to chime in, either here or over at Jim’s pad.
Update: For those of you who don’t venture into the Ripples, I wanted to point out that Nicole has posted a personal, passionate and thoughtprovoking response.
7 Ripples from “Self-Love and Sermonwriting”
Nicole says:
September 23, 2005 at 1:09 am
I’m heading over to my own site now to post about this...you’ll see why when you get there!
Nicole says:
September 23, 2005 at 2:09 am
http://goingape.blogspot.com/2005/09/love-your-neighbor-as-yourself.html
Now, it’s really up!
Jim says:
September 23, 2005 at 7:09 am
Thanks for pointing to Nicole, she did the same over at my place. I respond deeply to what she said.
You said at Nicole’s that you danced around the issue. I think you actually danced right on it:
I’m not sure that we’d ever be able to risk the self-sacrificial love that God asks of us without first feeling secure that God loves us deeply.
Wanna come to PA and preach my sermon for me?
Muser says:
September 23, 2005 at 2:09 pm
Wow. Lots of good thoughts floating around in these circles- I love how Nicole brought it back to the knowledge and security that we are loved by God.
However, and I’m just spitballing here, I wonder if we read a command like that from Christ and instantly go to the Feelings-Emotion part of our brains, when we could go at it from a very different angle. We could look at “love” more as a verb in this case. The idea that indifference is the opposite of love still holds true- No matter how we feel about our neighbor- we can still “love” them by taking care of their needs, much the way the Good Samaritan did. The GS didn’t have a personal relationship with the man he helped (as far as we know), so I doubt that he could feel “love” for the man as we think of it. Perhaps pity. But he showed love in what he did.
Similarly, we have “neighbors” in Darfur that we can show love to, regardless of our feelings for them on a personal level, by taking action for them. We are hungry, so we generally feed ourselves. They are hungry and unable to eat, so we help feed them. We are sick, so we get medical attention. They are sick, and unable to get medical help, so we do what we can to provide that for them. It doesn’t as much matter what we “feel”, but what we do. Our actions show our love.
What about our enemies? Well, here it becomes tricky to separate actions from emotion. Can you forgive someone without “feeling” it? I’m not sure. But I do know that we can in our words and actions extend the opportunity for reconciliation and forgiveness. We can offer to the people we argue with the same things we want for ourselves: attention, respect, thoughtfulness, freedom from attack.
Much for me to think about. Thanks again for the direction to other peoples’ excellent thoughts as well.
zalm says:
September 24, 2005 at 2:09 pm
I understand what you’re getting at, Kri - er, Muser. Love is something we feel; love is something we do. (Ooooh! Semicolon!) And sometimes we need to do love even if we don’t feel love. Maybe another way of expressing it is that love is bigger than affection.
But I actually like to think of it a slightly different way. I’ve always been moved by the way John phrases it: God is love. I like this because love is no longer something we only feel or do, but it’s something we are called to be.
I know that’s a little abstract. But I think it’s more holistic than setting up a feeling/doing dichotomy. It’s one of those “both/and” things all the kids are talking about.
Jim says:
September 24, 2005 at 6:09 pm
I’m going to post a pretty good portion of my sermon tomorrow, if I can nail it down tonight. It’s turning into one of those wild beasts that won’t ever go the way you want. I’m not going to fight it all night, I need sleep.
Here’s what I’ll say now… I think Philippians 2:3-4 is the key to Paul’s conception of the gospel, at least in terms of its application. The language he uses in verses 5-11 is flowery but it is really the justification for what he’s already said in 3-4. I don’t believe he was taking Jesus’ command further, I think he was trying to give it some practical clarity. In essence, the gospel according to Paul is “consider others above yourselves because this is how Christ lived his life and died his death. And God exalted him.”
We actually see this same theme a number of times in Paul’s writing: to live is Christ, to die is gain. Nothing counts except faith working itself out in love. Let no unwholesome talk come out of your mouths… that it may benefit those who listen, and of course 1 Corinthians 13.
Paul’s conception of love is exactly as you put it in your comment above: it is something we are called to be. We need not give thought to loving ourselves, it doesn’t need to be on our minds at all. Loving Christ by giving ourselves away to others as Christ did is the ethic of Christianity, according to Paul.
More on whether I agree with this or not at my place sometime tomorrow.
zalm says:
September 24, 2005 at 8:09 pm
This seems like one of those passages that would be easy to write a sermon about if you were able to keep your sights set really small, but really, really hard to write a sermon about if you wanted to do the full passage justice. It’s just too full, too foundational, too beautiful.
But, as I said before, I know diddly about sermonwriting, so maybe I’m mistaken.
All that is to say, I don’t envy you your task. But it sounds like you’re on to some good stuff. And I’ve enjoyed trading thoughts with everybody.
I hope it goes well tomorrow. I look forward to reading what you post.
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