I.

Children aren’t and haven’t been valued in all cultures the way we generally cherish children in the modern United States. I say “generally” because even in our pro-children generations, there are still those kids who slip through the cracks and who are abused, terrorized, and forced to live in danger zones. Not every child born into an American household is guaranteed parental love, an adequate or nutritional food supply, a safe and climate-controlled home, adequate health care or any health care, or a future to anticipate with joy and confidence if their parents and grandparents keep electing yahoos as our lawmakers and public officials. And the number of at risk children escalates beyond our ability to take it in when we look at the problems of at risk children in a world context.

Some children in our world are sold into agricultural slavery; some children are sold into sex market slavery. Some children are forced to work in sweat shops, making some of the garments that several of us choose to wear. Some children are forced to take up arms and fight their parents’ wars or their tribe’s war or their nation’s wars. Some children are turned out on the streets to survive as best they can, if they can, when parents feel that they can no longer be burdened with the costs of caring for their kids. In ways, children are less at risk than in years gone by, but in other ways there are children who are more at risk than ever.

Some of you historians probably know that the total number of people murdered by Hitler and his minions in the Holocaust was about 11.5 million. You also know, by now, that not all of them were Jews; there were others whom Hitler hated and put to death as well--gypsies and homosexuals, for example. Also, not all the victims of the gas chambers and the firing squads were adults. At least 1.5 million of the people killed were children.

Hitler hated people of color, but a few Black soldiers from France had remained in Germany after some war activity. Some of those Black soldiers married German women, and these couples had children--mulattos, of course. Hitler called them “Rhineland Bastards.” Instead of putting them to death, at least wholesale, he would have them removed from playgrounds and classrooms--naturally not telling their parents where they were. They were in hospitals being sterilized so that no more dark blood could be infused into German veins. Better than a death camp assignment, these children were traumatized and remained so for the rest of their lives.

A few weeks ago I told you about the children being sold into slavery by their impoverished parents to work in the cocoa bean industry--planting, harvesting, shipping. This a pressing problem in the Ivory Coast where one of the very few ways to generate income is through the sale of cocoa beans--the Ivory Coast being the world’s number one producer of cocoa beans because of its location and climactic conditions. Almost none of those kids will ever taste even a bite of finished chocolate products to which the first world is addicted and for which the first world pays billions of dollars each year. I say again, unless we buy Fair Trade chocolate products, we are supporting those mega businesses that take advantage of the poor nation to further line their pockets with cash earned for them by little girls and boys sold by their parents into slavery in a desperate effort to support a family that might otherwise starve to death. When you buy a Hershey’s chocolate bar or a container of Nestle’s hot cocoa mix or a bag of M & M’s, you are supporting childhood slavery in the Ivory Coast.

Our country’s Department of Justice has a section or division called Child Exploitation and Obscenity. If you were to surf over to the Department of Justice’s website, you’d find some extraordinarily disturbing information. Not only are thousands of children “imported” to the US to be used in prostitution and pornography, but also we have what the site calls our own “homegrown problem of interstate sex trafficking of minors.” Our government’s estimate of how many children are lured or forced into this jail-hell of a life is in the 300,000 range at any given time. The majority of US American kids in the industry are those who ran away from home or who were thrown out of their homes and left to live on the streets and survive as best they can. They tend to come from family situations where they have been sexually and emotionally abused. Other kids are recruited, and some are doing what they’re doing because their parents got paid to let a pimp take charge of their child’s life.

Typically American kids in the sex trafficking business are taken great distances from their homes so they won’t be recognized by anyone who might be willing to pay for their services. Their lives are controlled by their pimps, and the only people they are allowed to relate to other than those paying them for sex are the other kids in the same boat essentially owned by the same pimp.

Much of the time, these children are required to have sex as many times a day as a paying customer is interested. They numb themselves by becoming addicted to drugs; if they don’t take up drugs on their own, they are often forced to use such drugs. The prime age for the most desirable girls in the biz is 12-14 and for boys 11-13. The justice department calls it a problem of epidemic proportions.

The wonderful organization, Bread for the World, estimates that today and every day these days 925 million people in the world are hungry. Right now, 16,000 children around the world die daily from hunger-related complications; a child is dying from starvation every five seconds. In 2008, there were about 9 million children of the world who died before their fifth birthdays, and a third of those deaths were related to hunger and/or malnutrition.

Let’s Americanize this so that we can bring it closer to home and get a better look. In our country right this minute, 13 percent of our citizens who are living in poverty. One in four households has trouble putting food on the table, and that comes out to 16.7 million children who are hungry to some degree.

The Rand Corporation reports that children with the most pressing health needs generally have the toughest time finding suitable health care for their problems, and if they have access even to primary care it tends to be haphazardly provided. The Corporation calls this “triple jeopardy for vulnerable children.”

World Vision International shocks us with another sickening statistic. A quarter of a million children around our world are forced to take up arms and fight the world’s wars; some of these child soldiers are as young as 7. Are you interested in knowing what these kids do militarily, kids who should be living with loving parents and getting up, going to school every day to learn and to enjoy recreation with their peers?

Well, the little girls are often, whatever else they may do, sex partners for the adult soldiers. Many of these kids are forced to be spies in especially dangerous places and circumstances. Many of them are sent to fight on the front lines of battle to minimize the chances of death to the more valuable adult and/or career soldier. Many of these kids become suicide bombers because they have been told that what they will do is a really fun and funny game. Kids, again to preserve the more experienced soldiers, are often required to walk through mine fields to see if a mine explodes.

II.

In November of 1959, the United Nations adopted its “Declaration on the Rights of the Child.” To my knowledge, this strong declaration still stands as an important part of the United Nations’ identity and has been amended little if at all in these last fifty years.

• Whereas the peoples of the United Nations have, in the Charter, reaffirmed their faith in fundamental human rights and in the dignity and worth of the human person, and have determined to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom,
• Whereas the United Nations has, in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, proclaimed that everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth therein, without distinction of any kind, such as race, color, gender, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status,
• Whereas the child, by reason of her or his physical and mental immaturity, needs special safeguards and care, including appropriate legal protection, before as well as after birth,
• Whereas the need for such special safeguards has been stated in the Geneva Declaration of the Rights of the Child of 1924, and recognized in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and in the statutes of specialized agencies and international organizations concerned with the welfare of children,
• Whereas humankind owes to the child the best it has to give,

Now therefore, the General Assembly proclaims this Declaration of the Rights of the Child to the end that every child may have a happy childhood and enjoy for her or his own good and for the good of society the rights and freedoms herein set forth, and calls upon parents, upon men and women as individuals, and upon voluntary organizations, local authorities and national Governments to recognize these rights and strive for their observance by legislative and other measures progressively taken in accordance with the following principles:

Principle 1

The child shall enjoy all the rights set forth in this Declaration. Every child, without any exception whatsoever....

Principle 2

The child shall enjoy special protection and shall be given opportunities and facilities, by law and by other means, to enable the child to develop physically, mentally, morally, spiritually and socially in a healthy and normal manner and in conditions of freedom and dignity.

Principle 3

The child shall be entitled from birth to a name and a nationality.

Principle 4

The child shall enjoy the benefits of social security. He or she shall be entitled to grow and develop in health; to this end, special care and protection shall be provided both to the child and to her or his mother, including adequate prenatal and postnatal care. The child shall have the right to adequate nutrition, housing, recreation and medical services.

Principle 5

The child who is physically, mentally or socially handicapped shall be given the special treatment, education and care required by the particular condition.

Principle 6

The child, for the full and harmonious development of personality, needs love and understanding. She or he shall, wherever possible, grow up in the care and under the responsibility of her or his parents, and, in any case, in an atmosphere of affection and of moral and material security; a child of tender years shall not, save in exceptional circumstances, be separated from the child’s mother. Society and the public authorities shall have the duty to extend particular care to children without a family and to those without adequate means of support.

Principle 7

The child is entitled to receive education, which shall be free and compulsory, at least in the elementary stages. This education will promote her or his general culture and enable the child, on a basis of equal opportunity, to develop abilities, individual judgement, and a sense of moral and social responsibility, and to become a useful member of society. The best interests of the child shall be the guiding principle of those responsible for childhood education and guidance; that responsibility lies in the first place with the child’s parents. The child shall have full opportunity for play and recreation, which should be directed to the same purposes as education; society and the public authorities shall endeavor to promote the enjoyment of this right.

Principle 8

The child shall in all circumstances be among the first to receive protection and relief.

Principle 9

The child shall be protected against all forms of neglect, cruelty and exploitation. He or she shall not be the subject of traffic, in any form. The child shall not be admitted to employment before an appropriate minimum age and shall in no case be caused or permitted to engage in any occupation or employment that would prejudice health or education, or interfere with physical, mental or moral development.

Principle 10

The child shall be protected from practices that may foster racial, religious and any other form of discrimination. He or she shall be brought up in a spirit of understanding, tolerance, friendship among peoples, peace and universal brotherhood, and in full consciousness that her or his energy and talents should be devoted to the service of fellow human beings.

This glowingly optimistic document has probably helped some children in the world, but plenty of countries and individuals completely ignore it--to the detriment of children past and future. Right in our own country are parents and neighbors and teachers and priests and devoted child predators on the loose. Children still are at risk.

The Church longs for ways to protect all the unprotected in our world--our precious children included. Children have to trust adults, and that makes them unavoidably vulnerable.

III.

The biblical story on which we focus today is out of place, as we use it. It should come after Christmas rather than before or during Christmas. Furthermore, the story of the Magi makes a theological statement that not all devotees of Jesus were ready to affirm the instant Jesus was born. Finally, there’s a geographical problem in how the story has been conventionally conceived.

The story from Matthew’s Gospel has already been read for us. Let me remind you of how it began, Matthew chapter 2:

In the time of King Herod, after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, Magi from the East came to Jerusalem, asking, "Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews? For we observed his star at its rising, and have come to pay him homage.”

There is so much to take note of in these two brief verses. First, the calendar we currently use is off; some scribe made an error in calculations somewhere along the way and lost about six years. So, if the calendar for Christians begins at Jesus’ birth, then the current year is 2004 and not 2010. If you want to, you can think of yourself as six younger than you are, although a year is still a year regardless of whether it transpired before or after Jesus’ birth. But you could still make the argument that the year on your birth certificate is six years off.

According to the calendar many of us use today, Herod the Great died in 4 BC or BCE. These Magi show up when Jesus is about two years old. Mary and Joseph and Jesus had long since left the manger and were now living in their family home. The word they use to ask Herod the whereabouts of the one born to be King of the Jews is not the word for infant; it’s a word for young child or toddler. This makes Jesus’ birth year, again according to the calendar most of us use today--Jews excluded--6 BC or BCE. What we now treat as year zero, the point at which we had thought Jesus was born, was actually Jesus’ sixth year; he was six years old in the year the errant scribe computed his birth year as year zero.

We have incorrectly thought of the wise men as shooting over from Iran to Bethlehem almost as fast as the shepherds did who were just around the corner from the stable in which Jesus was born; it’s not possible. Nor does a careful reading of the story bear out those conclusions.

We know the Magi followed a star to find their way to where a person born for greatness had been born. We have realized that a star visible to us only shines at night and then only on certain nights so we have said that the star shone intermittently, and the Magi had to keep on their toes to see it when it was up and to try to find where it was leading them. That makes sense, but in what they say to Herod to try to describe their mission in a nutshell raises the need for more thinking about these details. “For we observed his star at its rising, and have come to pay him homage.” That sounds to me like they observed the star at its rising, that one time, and that was it. They didn’t follow a guiding star; rather they saw this magnificent star once, and figured right at the outset, being the professional star gazers they were, where this star was drawing them. It took them a couple of years to make the trip, no doubt with lots of trial and error, wrong turns and detours.

After Herod was no help at all--and in his defense he didn’t know anyone had been born who’d been named his successor or he’d have already killed that person since he didn’t believe in successors--the star showed up again after two years to illuminate the place where Jesus was now living. A star cannot provide great precision with focused lighting the way a sun beam can, the star can get them to general areas. If the star had been able to guide to where X makes the spot, the Magi would have had no reason to stop and ask for directions--and from the last person whom they should have asked, a violent and paranoid old king who somehow iMagined that he would occupy his throne forever.

When Herod heard this news, he was polite enough to the Magi, but when they were out of his sight Matthew’s Gospel says that he was frightened. Terrible translation choice. Herod was not “frightened”; he was uneasy, edgy. If someone had been born to be his successor that disrupted his desire to see himself as immortal; this meant that he was going die and that he could not be King of the Jews forever. So he was troubled or uneasy, but he wasn’t frightened. When he was upset about something everyone who lived near his palace became upset too because he was likely to go on some kind of tirade in which someone or someones were going to end up injured or dead.

He wracked his brain trying to figure out how a king could be born that could supersede him, and the only one he could think of was the Messiah promised from ancient times who’d never come. Some Jews still looked and hoped; others thought Messiah had just been a symbol of some kind, and others thought those looking for Messiah were wasting their time. They believed that those who predicted a Messiah had just been wrong--pious and sincere, but wrong.

Herod pretended to be trying to help them on their search. He told them tradition had named Bethlehem as the site of Messiah’s birth. He told them how to get there, and asked them to come back to tell him where they had found the little boy so that he, too, could go and pay his respects. Of course, Herod had no intention of paying respects. He was going to kill off this little boy if he found him.

Well, the Magi found the home shared by Joseph, Mary, and Jesus, and they honored him with gifts fit for a king: gold, frankincense, and myrrh. A two year old kid didn’t know what to do with any of these gifts; he probably tried to bite on the gifts or eat them. After the ceremonies, the Magi were warned in a dream not to go back Herod so they skipped him altogether as they prepared for their long journey back to Iran.

Almost simultaneous to that, Joseph also had a dream in which God’s messenger told him of the danger to Jesus in Jerusalem and directed Joseph to take Mary and Jesus into Egypt, which was the only place Jesus could have been kept safe from the violent Herod. God’s messenger in the dream told Joseph to stay in Egypt until in another dream he’d be told to come home. Joseph followed those directions, and Jesus was saved from Herod’s jealous rage.

Assured that he would get rid of the Messiah-to-be--messiah meaning God’s anointed one--Herod ordered his thugs to kill off all the little boys two year old and under in the Bethlehem area. Bethlehem was hardly a thickly populated area, and we’re talking only a few little boys killed. Even so, every life is of tremendous value to God, and every child has a mother a father. The pain of those parents as Herod’s thugs killed their little boys two years and younger went up as a blood curdling cry. This tragic situation reminded the writer of Matthew’s Gospel about an event in the experience of the ancient Hebrews so the writer closes this section of his story by quoting the Prophet Jeremiah who’d written about that tragic event: “A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be consoled, because they are no more.”

Children still are at risk just as Jesus himself as a child was at risk. He was spared a cruel death as a child, but only because his father was sensitive enough and attentive enough to follow God’s lead and get him out of there. We have to assume that the same messenger who came to Joseph in a dream attempted to do the same for the other fathers in Bethlehem since God certainly did not love their sons less than God loved Jesus, but they didn’t hear; or they didn’t understand; or they had no means to make the trip. They lost their children to Herod’s ignorance and hatred--a Jewish king killing little Jewish boys.

Sandra Martin:

I dream a dream of peace and safety for children. I dream of a world in which each child is cherished and in which tears occur only because of bumps, bruises, and broken toys. However, I live in a world in which hundreds of children are sexually violated by someone that they love and trust. I live in a world in which children experience the most painful physical injury at the hands of those with whom they should be safe. I work in a world of violence, tears, nightmares, and fear.

The Great Still Are Born Among the Humble

I.

Joan of Arc was born a peasant. Her place of birth was a small town in France, Domrémy. Looking back on her growing up years, she said, “As long as I lived at home, I worked at common tasks around the house, going but seldom afield with our sheep and cattle. I learned to sew and spin and was as good as any woman in our town.” This was a way of saying that she grew up as any peasant girl of her time and place would have grown up--nothing unusual, nothing to predict greatness.

In the year 1425, she began to have visions. Later in her life she described these unusual visions.

When I was thirteen, I had a voice from God to help me govern myself. It was St. Michael’s voice, who, along with St. Catherine and St. Margaret, told me of the pitiful state of my country, France, and told me that I must go to assist the King of France in saving our nation.

Twice, Joan tried to acquire a suit of armor and a horse as well as an audience with King Charles VII. Both attempts were denied. The visions, however, had been powerful, and, in terms of her personality, she was persistent. Her third effort to be suited up in armor, borrow a horse, and get an audience with her King was the charm; all three requests were honored by authorities. In 1429, she found herself standing before the King of France; she thought of herself at that time as possessing both stereotypically feminine as well as masculine personal traits. On the feminine side, in her mind--so don’t get mad at me for being a chauvinist, she had a pretty feminine voice, ate and drank little, had a cheerful face, and cried a lot. On the masculine side of her personal traits as she saw them were: a “virile bearing”--whatever that is exactly, an enjoyment of weapons, and a love for riding horses. Again, if you have a beef with what she saw as masculine or feminine, I can tell you how to get in touch with her.

Charles was in trouble at home, in that not all of France accepted him as its King, and in terms of national security as English forces were beating the pulp out of every group of French soldiers they encountered. Charles was desperate, and he took Joan to be a kind of sign from God to him that he must fight on for the sake of his country. Joan impressed him in many ways--most notably with her profound connection to God; this was so pronounced that Charles VII regarded her a saint, and that was the assessment of her that spread through his troops.

In April of 1429, Charles appointed Joan of Arc captain over a troop of men; I assume all the soldiers fighting for Charles were men. They, with Joan as their commander, won a decisive battle for Charles, for France. This boosted the public view of him, and he was able to celebrate his coronation as King of France, a ceremony after which he had the full allegiance of all the French people--well, at least as much as Barack Obama has the full allegiance of all the American people. Joan had become a trusted military advisor to Charles, and she stood in a prominent place as he was crowned King.

In 1430, the English captured her and charged her with heresy. Charles could do nothing to help her or protect her from an ecclesiastical tif, a run-in with papal authority as it were, and while there were certainly heretical issues at hand, this was an underhanded way of, for the most part, of keeping politics and, thus, French troops out of picture.

Joan never had much of a chance at a fair trial. She was declared a heretic for several reasons, but the climax of this tense exchange came when Joan renounced her Roman Catholic faith because of some personal religious experiences she had had that caused her to believe differently than the Pope believed. Formally, she was charged with being a witch and violating the Church’s standards for Christian women by wearing men’s clothing. The relatively small civil issue that came into play got her charged with

fraud; they said she was a woman pretending to be a man, but that wasn’t the case. Charles knew she was female, and so did the troops she led, troops who followed her with enthusiasm because they, like Charles, believed she was a saint. As her punishment for tthese “grievous” offenses, Joan of Arc was burned at the stake by the English in the marketplace of Rouen on May 30, 1431. Ironically, and I mean sick irony here, the same Church that found her heretical later named her a saint. That would be like having the KKK, still hating all people of color only because of their color, suddenly finding some honor to bestow on Clarence Thomas.

His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama is the head of state as well as the spiritual leader of Tibet; his government has been in exile since 1959 when his Holiness escaped into India after a harrowing fifteen-day secretive journey on foot after which the Chinese government took charge of Tibet and remain its captor to this day. His given name as the Dalai Lama is Tenzin Gyatso, He is one of the great religious leaders in our world today--regardless of what anyone may believe about each of his points of philosophy and theology.

His birth name was Lhamo Dhondup, and he was born on July 6, 1935, to farming family in a small village in Taktser, Amdo, which is in northeast Tibet. Very humble surroundings, wouldn’t you say?

A small group of men was charged with the responsibility of locating the successor to the Thirteenth Dalai Lama who had died. Tibetan Buddhists believe that each successive Dalai Lama is the reincarnation of the First Dalai Lama. In addition, all Dalai Lamas are believed to be manifestations of Chenrezig, the Bodhisattva of Compassion and patron saint of Tibet. Bodhisattvas are enlightened beings who have postponed their own nirvanas and chosen rebirth, which--having reached Nirvana--they are no longer required to do; but they do so willingly in order to serve humanity.

The search party found its way to Lhamo Dhondup by a number of signs. One of these concerned the embalmed body of his predecessor, Thupten Gyatso, the Thirteenth Dalai Lama, who had died aged fifty-seven in 1933. During its period of lying in state, the head was discovered to have turned from facing south to northeast. Shortly after that a highly respect Tibetan leader had a vision. Looking into the waters of the sacred lake, Lhamo Lhatso, in southern Tibet, he clearly saw three letters of the Tibetan alphabet float into view. These were followed by the image of a three-storied monastery with a turquoise and gold roof and a path running from the monastery to a hill. Finally, he saw a small house with strangely shaped guttering. He was sure that one of the three letters referred them to Amdo, the northeastern province, so it was there that the search party began its search.

Another letter, the believed, pointed to the monastery at Kumbum, which was indeed three-storied and turquoise-roofed. They now only needed to locate a hill and a house with peculiar guttering, which the third letter should guide them to. So they began to search the neighboring villages. When they saw the gnarled branches of juniper wood framing the roof of a small farm house, they were certain that the new Dalai Lama would not be far away. Nevertheless, when they knocked on the door of this house, they did not tell the family there who they were; they pretended to be travelers in search of a place to sleep for the night. The family welcomed them.

The leader of the party, pretended to be a servant to his fellow travelers so that he would not be expected to sleep in the room or rooms of those whom he supposedly served. This gave him a greater opportunity that night to observe the youngest child in the family and to play with the little boy.

Amazingly, the little boy recognized him and called out, “Sera lama, Sera lama.” Sera was the location of the monastery at which he had studied. The next day the search party, but returned several days later and told the family who they really were. On this second visit to the home, they brought several items that had belonged to the Thirteenth Dalai Lama, and they spread these out, mixed in with several items that had not been owned by the late Lama. In every case, the boy correctly identified those items that once had belonged to the Thirteenth Dalai Lama saying, “It's mine. It's mine.” This confirmed for the search party that they had found the one who was to become the Fourteenth Dalai Lama.

II.

“Greatness” is a relative term. What is seen as great in one person’s eye is not greatness at all in someone else’s eye. In modern American cultures, we tend to associate greatness with power, prestige, and financial holdings. Not everyone in our country, and certainly not many people around the world, agree with that. Historically, there has often been a whole smattering of ways of determining what “greatness” is all about.

One of the examples I used earlier in the sermon was a young woman who was martyred for her faith--at least, in part for her faith. Typically, we do not accord greatness to someone who dies unless she or he is already prominent before death comes. Death, as a rule, is not a part of what makes someone great as many people see it; an exception would be someone who loses her or his life in warfare, serving her or his country. President Obama recently presented a serviceman with the Medal of Honor--the first living servicepersons to have received our nation’s highest honor for valor since the Vietnam War. All others since Vietnam, sadly, received their Medals posthumously.

Joan of Arc, as I said, was an exception, and so were many in the early Jesus movement who lost their lives because of their faith in God as Jesus portrayed God through his teachings. At one point, there was no higher honor, no mark of greatness more pronounced than being a martyr for the faith; in the extreme, some of the faithful were forcing their enemy to kill them so that they could be martyrs and, thus, achieve greatness in this world as well as the next--according to their beliefs of what the next world or realm held. Ironically, it was not terribly unlike what radical Muslims promise those who are willing to be suicide bombers becoming, according to what their religious leaders teach them, martyrs for the faith by killing off enemies of the faith, which most or all of those radical leaders identify as non-Muslim Westerners.

The evident difference between the early Christian martyrs and the modern Muslim martyrs is that the Christians didn’t hurt anyone; they simply put themselves in positions in which they were highly likely to lose their lives. Some would later question whether the term “martyr” applied to those who brought death upon themselves--those who didn’t have to die, but who forced an enemy to do them in.

By the time the Apostle Paul wrote his letter to the Church at Philippi, this martyrdom-as-ultimate-greatness idea was at its peak. As far as I know, German Christian Scripture scholar, Ernest Lohmeyer, was the first to notice this theme in Paul’s brief letter to the Philippians and run with it.

Philippians 2:5-11:

Let the same mind be in you that was in Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death— even death on a cross. Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus is Lord, to the glory of God (NRSV, adapted).

Instead, then, of being preoccupied with the suggestion in this hymn that Paul quoted in his letter to the Philippians that Jesus existed in God’s realm before being born into the human realm, the real message of this hymn, which Paul borrowed and did not write himself, is that Jesus’ greatness resided in his willingness to let go of all the prominence he had as someone preaching divine love, all the accolades bestowed upon him as someone more closely connected to God than the average human and die at the hands of enemies of a God of love about whom Jesus would not stop preaching. Jesus’ tragic and unnecessary death was not the last word about this man. Instead, God Godself exalted him and named him great. God Godself said, in those subtle ways God communicates, that everyone should honor this man who had come from virtual anonymity, without power and possessing none of the positions or possessions typically used to measure greatness.

Another example is in the third chapter of Philippians, verses 18-19:

For many live as enemies of the cross of Jesus; I have often told you of them, and now I tell you even with tears. Their end is destruction; their god is the belly; and their glory is in their shame; their minds are set on earthly things (NRSV).

Using martyrdom as the interpretive key to the book of Philippians, when we read this passage we are pressed to interpret “the cross of Jesus” both as Jesus’ own martyrdom AND the goal of all true followers of his--to be martyred like their Master. Those who are “enemies of the cross” of Jesus are those who are unwilling to be faithful to Jesus’ teachings if the price for such loyalty is death. Making one’s belly one’s god means that my own self-preservation matters more than the principles for which I have said I would stand; when push comes to shove, however, “Who is Jesus? Jesus who? Never heard of him. You have me mixed up with someone else.” The greatness or glory these traitors can look forward to rises no higher than shame for their pretense and their cowardice; in other words, there is no greatness at all in what they have done.

Martyrdom is excessive, and there’s no reason to push for it. If one dies for a great cause--on a battlefield or on a motel balcony in Memphis, Tennessee--her or his death is no less tragic than any death, but we see greatness in a life snuffed out because the person was living for a cause greater than herself or himself. Have you heard Palin’s latest repulsive criticism of President Kennedy’s failure to hold strong to his faith?

So, anyway, martyrdom isn’t the only basis of greatness, thank goodness! But getting rich and selfish, regardless of who is willing to kiss your backside, has nothing at all to do with greatness. People of means who share their wealth for the betterment or the wellbeing of others--they may become great, even if no one ever knows whose benefactors they have become.

Jesus had a really odd take on greatness. Jesus said, in his way, that the circumstances of someone’s birth has nothing at all to do with the potential for greatness. Jesus said that the truly great people in the world are those who aren’t required by economy or circumstance to serve others, but, instead, are those who can afford to be served--by position or pocketbook--but who refuse the service of others in order to be servants themselves. Jesus was Rabbi--teacher and master--to those who followed him; few people in any Jewish society were more highly regarded than one’s teacher, especially one’s religious teacher, one’s Rabbi. Still, it was Jesus who at his last earthly supper with the women and men closest to him, bowed down with towel and basin before each of them and washed their feet--clearly the job of a slave or servant in any household or at any social gathering.

In the oldest of the four scriptural Gospels available to us so far, the Gospel of Mark, we find two very important excerpts on greatness from Jesus’ point of view. Here’s the first one:

James and John, the sons of Zebedee, came forward to him and said to him, “Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you.” And he said to them, “What is it you want me to do for you?” And they said to him, “Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory.” But Jesus said to them, “You do not know what you are asking. Are you able to drink the cup that I drink, or be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?” They replied, “We are able.” Then Jesus said to them, “The cup that I drink you will drink; and with the baptism with which I am baptized, you will be baptized; but to sit at my right hand or at my left is not mine to grant, but it is for those for whom it has been prepared” (Mark 10:35-40 NRSV, adapted).

These guys had gall. Probably thinking that Jesus would rule over an earthly and ultimately a heavenly empire, they wanted to make sure they got top slots in his cabinet, and Jesus says to them, in essence, “Those who serve others the way I try to serve others will be up for those positions, and the ones who get them will be obvious choices because of how well their philosophies of service match mine. No one will hold any position of importance because of appointment or political payback.”

Here’s the second of the two especially important passages on greatness from Jesus’ point of view.

So Jesus called [some of his followers] and said to them, “You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. But it is not so among you; instead, whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all. For the Child of Humanity [one of the ways Jesus referred to himself] came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many” (Mark 10 42-45 NRSV, adapted).

III.

Nearly everything about the Gospel of Luke’s retelling of the the events surrounding the birth of Jesus, one of only two birth narratives that made it down to us, stresses the humble circumstances of Jesus’ birth. The angels in heaven take note of the birth and break out in joyous musical rejoicing, but on earth no one takes note of the birth of Jesus except a handful of shepherds who get a tip from an angel that someone born to be great had just been birthed not far from where they were tending to the sheep of their employer.

The shepherds were shocked for a number of reasons--most significantly that anybody born who’d be destined for greatness wouldn’t be born anywhere near their pastures. Further, if news needed to be spread that a baby destined for greatness had just been born, the shepherds would have been near the bottom of the notification list. All the social higher-ups and uppity-ups would be notified first, and then, eventually, the news would circulate, and people at the periphery of society like shepherds and tanners and fishermen would hear third and fourth hand--perhaps from an employer or a customer.

Of course, the writer of this Gospel, presumably Luke, is putting the oral versions of the story he’d heard for years on parchment or papyrus about eighty years after the birth of Jesus. That’s a long time away from the event itself. If you stop to think about how differently each of us recalls the Christmas Eve celebration at Silverside two years ago, some not remembering it at all in particular because in their memory banks that service blended in with the ten or twenty or thirty other Christmas Eve services they attended at this suburban location of the church. Many of the details presumably remembered would be vivid in someone’s mind, and she or he could tell about that service with great precision and reliable detail. Others, with good memories, couldn’t tell you a thing about that particular service, but could give a gist of what most Silverside Christmas Eve services have been like across the years.

Things that stand out in people’s minds across the years are tied to an event with particular emotional attachment to it or a service with something in it that the person trying to remember especially loved such as a magnificent musical piece or a service that the person sorting through memories especially disliked. Several years ago, in place of scripture readings on that Christmas Eve, I asked several readers to read news clips about places in the world where, at Christmas time, life was especially bleak--war zones, poverty, bereavement, and so on. My effort was to make the point that Christmas is far more than the warm, fuzzy feelings many us privileged people in the world associate with the holiday. Baby Jesus, after all, would grow up to take a special interest in the sad and the struggling. Even so, I think that was the most hated of all the Christmas Eve services I planned here--a decade’s worth. At the following Deacons’ meeting, I got the message from the Deacons themselves as well as other members who’d complained to them that Silverside people didn’t want to hear about sad stuff at Christmas time, and so we let that experimental approach go by the wayside even though I think it has merit.

I like the idea that if Jesus were around today he’d be telling military personnel on the front lines that God loves them. He’d be trying to gather up food for the hungry, and he’d be trying to find shelter for the homeless. Jesus would find a seat next to someone who lost a loved one to this world and who misses that person all the time, but especially at holidays, and he’d whisper, “You know, that the grief-pain that won’t go away is proof you loved your dear one with intensity; it by no means suggests that God is absent or that God is ignoring you in your ongoing loss.” Jesus would be trying to knock some sense into the heads of those who spend and over-extend to buy fancy gifts for those who already have more than they need by saying, “If you have money to spend, to spare, remember first those who have nothing.” Even so, to prove that I can be flexible and compromise--now a widely known and accepted fact--I let it go of that approach to Christmas Eve.

Mary, very pregnant Mary, is required by law to travel with her betrothed, Joseph, to be registered in a national census. She shouldn’t have had to do that, and Joseph shouldn’t have had to leave her to register right at that time. They were subject to Roman law, however; and the Emperor had ordered the census so everyone had to comply--the ill and the elderly included.

Poor Mary, nine months plus, on a mule--every step causing her pain of some sort. Her water broke while she was atop the mule who thought someone had poured a bucket of water on him instead of giving him something to drink.

All of the inns were full because of the others who also had to travel to the city most closely associated with the Hebrew tribe of their ancestors. Joseph, was where his ancestors, descended from the tribe of Judah, had to report: their key city, Bethlehem--a not-so-great place whose only claim to fame was that King David had been born there.

A kindly innkeeper did make his stable available to them since he recognized the duress they were in so Jesus was born in a stable. His first bed was a food trough for barnyard animals. Mary must have considered the possibility that the birth could take place on this trip so she had brought along the strips of cloth that would be wound around the baby soon after birth to keep her or him warm, to keep bones straight from the get go, and to hold a little salt near the baby’s body to protect the baby from disease; these strips of cloth were known as “swaddling clothes.”

Not grand birth circumstances, huh? Nothing about how he was born or how he lived signaled greatness--although his preaching, teaching, and healing did attract crowds from time to time. He was a bivocational carpenter/preacher whose life was cut short when he was unjustly sentenced to death by a lazy, good-for-nothing Roman governor named Pontius Pilate, and he died a high-level criminal’s death.

He was a faithful, committed Jew who had no intention of starting a new religion, and he never knew that that is what eventuated. There was no such thing as Christianity until long after his execution; yet, today more people in the world today who associate themselves with any organized religion name themselves Christians more than any other religion. A full one-third of the world’s population today say they are Christians; plus, there are a few of us who aren’t so pleased with what many Christians are doing with Jesus’ name who still consider ourselves devotees of the God about whom Jesus taught.

Many acts of justice are done in his name and according to his example. A large percentage of hospitals and nursing homes in this country are built largely on the contributions of people seeking to honor the concerns of Jesus for the sick and the suffering and those can’t take care of themselves. Peace is waged in his name despite the tragic fact that war and terror are also waged in his name. His place of birth and his place of death have become holy ground for those who would want to put their feet anywhere he had been.

When he was dead
He was laid in a borrowed grave
Through the pity of a friend

[Twenty] centuries have come and gone
And today Jesus is the central figure of the human race
And the leader of [hu]mankind's progress
All the armies that have ever marched
All the navies that have ever sailed
All the parliaments that have ever sat
All the kings that ever reigned put together
Have not affected the life of [hu]mankind on earth
As powerfully as that one solitary life (Dr. James Allan).

Amen.

Rudyard Kipling and "Late Came the God"

I.

Some folks are serious about falling in love. If you have your love in your life right now, and some of you have had that special love in your life for decades, then this is not something you think much about for yourself. You may get caught up in someone else’s search for the love of her or his life when your child is making that great search or when one of your friends gets divorced and begins to try again at love or in your favorite genre of reading material. Otherwise, you are happily settled and in love.

Not everyone is concerned about love and falling in love, but it is a major theme in the history of humanity. Most people have been or are concerned about finding true love, falling in love, staying in love. It’s the theme of untold numbers of books, films, and poems.

For the person who has trouble finding Ms. or Mr. Right, there’s an abundance of help. There are well-meaning busybodies who double as your friends. There are fretting parents. Today, it’s mechanized on the internet, and before that there were introduction services. Before those, in some cultures, there were those, mostly women, whose job it was in a village or community to provide matchmaking services; they were called “matchmakers.”

My favorite matchmaker is not someone who, in real life, has tried to fix me up with someone they thought could be my true love; rather, she is Yenta, the matchmaker, in the marvelous musical, “Fiddler on the Roof.” The role was originated on Broadway by the late Bea Arthur, the great comic actor most remembered for her trailblazing television show, “Maude,” and for her long stint as Dorothy on “The Golden Girls.”

In “Fiddler,” the daughters of even a poor milkman like Tevya will get their husbands through the work of Yenta, and they are encouraged not even to think about trying to match themselves up with a love interest through their own efforts. The daughters sing one of the three or so most memorable songs from the musical, “Matchmaker, Matchmaker, Make Me a Match.”

Matchmaker, Matchmaker,

Make me a match,

Find me a find,

catch me a catch

Matchmaker, Matchmaker

Look through your book,

And make me a perfect match

Matchmaker, Matchmaker,

I'll bring the veil,

You bring the groom,

Slender and pale.

Bring me a ring for I'm longing to be,

The envy of all I see.

For Papa,

Make him a scholar.

For mama,

Make him rich as a king.

For me, well,

I wouldn't holler

If he were as handsome as anything.

Matchmaker, Matchmaker,

Make me a match,

Find me a find,

Catch me a catch,

Night after night in the dark I'm alone

So find me a match,

Of my own.

Some people who can’t find love become desperate. They pick out the person they want, even if they’ve never met that person, and seek out all sorts of ways to be noticed by the person with whom they’ve decided to share love. In the extreme, the person on the prowl for love may become a stalker. Movie stars and other famous people are often the love interests of lonely fans who cross the line, trying to establish intimacy.

There are also those who are jilted in a relationship or an affair who simply can’t take, “No,” for an answer. Simon and Garfunkel furthered their tremendous popularity singing, “There Must Be Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover,” but none of those could ensure that the left lover would agree to the new arrangement. If you ever saw the chilling film, “Fatal Attraction,” you’ll never forget Glenn Close’s creepy character who will not stand for Michael Douglas’s rejection.

Some jilted lovers have killed the one whom they said they loved with all their hearts. Some jilted lovers, as is also the case with some lonely lovers, take their own lives because they cannot share love with the one they want or because they feel that there is no one in all the world who loves them.

Anyone who has ever had to struggle for the cause of love, for the sake of love, whether that meant dealing with the pitfalls of a long distance relationship or having to wait patiently for one’s beloved to let go of heavy baggage certainly understands, heart to heart, Diana’s song in “A Chorus Line,” “...won’t forget, can’t regret, what I did for love.”

It interests me that in societies where arranged marriages are the norm, and there are several places in the world this is still the case, love isn’t taken to be a requirement in the arranged relationship. Matters of functionality take the lead. Who does this chore, and who does that chore in the maintaining of the household? If love evolves, that’s a wonderful extra, but it’s not a requirement for a successful marriage.

Almost every couple we come upon in Hebrew and Christian scripture came together because their relationship was arranged, and this applies to men who had more than one wife. We see a few instances of inspiring love that has grown between them, but this wasn’t the norm; and again it wasn’t the expectation. Adam and Eve are mythological characters, not historical people, but their relationship was of utmost importance to the ancient Hebrews and later the Christians who included Hebrew scripture as a part of their Bible. There is no indication that Adam and Eve loved each other unless the writer’s assertion that the two of them became one flesh is meant to point to love; I think that is not the case. There IS evidence that Adam preferred the company of Eve to the company of a donkey, and there is evidence that Eve and Adam relied on each other and were helpmeets; but love isn’t required for that.

Literalists want to make Eve’s and Adam’s relationship the paradigm for all successive relationships in history. Those who interpret the creation stories in such a way as to make the relationship of Eve and Adam exemplary for all relationships in all generations after them miss a lot of key points. One is, Eve and Adam were not married. Their creation predated the establishment of marriage. Today, the judgmental folk call such an arrangement, “living in sin.” Oops!

Furthermore, all of Eve’s and Adam’s children were born to unwed parents. Are these the kinds of “family values” that James Dobson has in mind for his “Focus on the Family” principles? No, not at all, but the stories of creation can’t be twisted around to accommodate modern, Christian, fundamentalist views on just what marriage is.

Adam and Eve were never married--though they were monogamous, which was pretty easy considering the fact that for the longest time there were no other humans with whom they could have cheated; and when there were other humans, they were the children and grandchildren of Adam and Eve. There is no indication whatsoever that Adam and Eve loved each other; in fact, Eve didn’t mind encouraging Adam to get involved in her ploy to disobey God. Adam, for his part, to rationalize his inappropriate behavior blames Eve for luring him into the act that displeased God, and he blames God for creating Eve to begin with. They were companions by default, but there is no indication of love.

Things were good in the sex department, but hot sex doesn’t have to have love as an ingredient.

It’s worth throwing in here, too, that the fact the ancient storytellers envisioned God as creating one man and one woman at the dawn of creation is not a condemnation of homosexuality. The human race had to propagate so a woman and a man were required to get things rolling. This did not presume that all Eve’s and Adam’s progeny would be straight and would be child bearers. This silly slogan, “God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve,” is based on homophobic biblical illiteracy.

II.

Rudyard Kipling’s poem, “Late Came the God,” on which we focus today, is about a man who desperately wanted the love of a woman who didn’t return his love, and the god to whom the poem refers isn’t the God of the ancient Hebrew matriarchs and patriarchs; he is instead one of the polytheistic gods of love, such as the Greek god, Eros. It is a complicated poem, nothing at all like the straightforward poem, “If,” for which many people know Kipling as a poet.

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream--and not make dreams your master;
If you can think--and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with triumph and disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with wornout tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on”;

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings--nor lose the common touch;
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run--
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And--which is more--you'll be a Man my son!

Rudyard Kipling won the 1907 Nobel Prize for literature. He was born in Bombay, today called Mumbai, in 1865; he was educated in England. He returned to India in 1882 where he became a newspaperman. Though he would become most known for his short stories, his literary career began in 1886 with a collection of poems titled Departmental Ditties.

He was a prolific writer; he obviously loved to write, and he achieved fame as a writer very quickly--a rare experience for a writer, some of whom never receive any fame at all. One of his biographers has said, “Kipling was the poet of the British Empire and its yeoman, the common soldier, whom he glorified in many of his works, in particular Plain Tales from the Hills (1888) and Soldiers Three (1888), collections of short stories with roughly and affectionately drawn soldier portraits.”

His 1894 release, Jungle Book, took the children of the world by storm. Many of us first heard or read the unusual name “Rudyard” when we read the book or saw the Disney animated version of the unforgettable Kipling characters.

It is not surprising that he won many awards and had honorary degree after honorary degree conferred on him. In addition to the Nobel Prize, which I mentioned earlier, he also received the Royal Society of Literature’s Gold Medal. Kipling was the recipient of many honorary degrees and other awards. At the time he was named a recipient of this most prestigious award, only three others had received it: Sir Walter Scott, George Meredith, and Thomas Hardy. Interestingly he turned down the offer of several honors--most notably, perhaps, knighthood.

Behind many great works of art--whether visual art or writing or music--are artists who endured great pain on their way to producing their masterpieces. Kipling falls into that category. Another of his biographers said that he lived a “largely tragic and unhappy life.” Howso? Well, said this Kipling biographer,

He was starved of love and attention and sent away by his parents; beaten and abused by his foster mother; and a failure at a public school which sought to develop qualities that were completely alien to Kipling. In later life the deaths of two of his children also affected Kipling deeply.

“...starved of love and attention....” I assume that means as a child. Sadly, this area of his life didn’t improve so much in adulthood. His marriage wasn’t a particularly happy one. His wife, Caroline Starr Balestier, was a domineering wife who didn’t like a lot about the man she married. There are several reasons, perhaps, to ponder love frequently; the top two of those reasons, I’d guess, would be because someone is so loved that she or he is continually overjoyed or, in contrast, because someone wants love desperately and can’t find it. Kipling, evidently, fell into the latter category.

With that in mind, hear again our poem for today--which, by the way, closes out this brief sermon series, “God through Poets’ Pens.”

Late came the God, having sent his forerunners who were

not regarded--

Late, but in wrath;

Saying: “The wrong shall be paid, the contempt be rewarded

On all that she hath.”

He poisoned the blade and struck home, the full bosom receiving

The wound and the venom in one, past cure or relieving.

He made treaty with Time to stand still that the grief might

be fresh--

Daily renewed and nightly pursued through her soul to her

flesh--

Mornings of memory, noontides of agony, midnights unslaked for her,

Till the stones of the streets of her Hells and her Paradise ached for her.

So she lived while her body corrupted upon her.

And she called on the Night for a sign, and a Sign was allowed,

And she builded an Altar and served by the light of her Vision--

Alone, without hope of regard or reward, but uncowed,

Resolute, selfless, divine.

These things she did in Love's honour...

What is a God beside Woman? Dust and derision!

III.

In Kipling’s poem, “Late Came the God,” the God is clearly not Yahweh and must be one of the gods of mythology. A good candidate is Eros, the Greek god of love. Evidently, Eros is very angry with this unnamed woman for not falling in love with the narrator of the poem who could be Kipling or any unlucky-in-love man, wanting a woman who doesn’t return his love and may not even acknowledge him. Eros, through his minions, had made many efforts to cause the woman to become bedazzled with this man, but nothing worked. Eros read her refusal to respond to his will as arrogance, and one thing we learn quickly when we read Greek or Roman mythology is that human arrogance is what the goddesses and gods detested most about humans and what they were quick to punish.

For example, in Homer’s “Odyssey,” Odysseus’ troubles are compounded when, after a small victory of some sort, he has the gall to yell out, “I did this without the gods! I do not need the gods.” Already separated from his family for seven years, if I recall correctly Aeolus, Poseidon, and Zeus saw to it that he wouldn’t see his wife or son again for another seven years as a result of his arrogance.

The woman in the Kipling poem did not love the man Eros chose for her; she loved another man, and Eros saw to it that she suffered for her choice. She appeals to a god for help with the pain that had been inflicted upon her; sadly, ironically, without realizing that Eros was the cause of her pain, she probably appealed to him. Of course, he did not relieve her pain.

Given these poetic circumstances, I’m thrown trying to figure out what the final line of the poem could mean: “What is a God beside Woman? Dust and derision!” This seems to be the opposite of what the poem has been getting at--that Eros is powerful enough to make the woman miserable. Yet, Kipling says that next to this woman, Eros is powerless; he is nothing more than dust and derision--meaning, perhaps, that the woman won out after all. She bore her pain yet stood her ground. She would not pretend to love a man she did not love, and, conversely, she refused to pretend not to love the man she DID love. In the end, therefore, she was more powerful than the god.

Romantic love is a mysterious force; it can’t be quantified, manufactured, or predicted. These matchmaking services that claim to be able to match you up with your ideal match find out your likes and dislikes in a romantic partner and rely on a computer to find an applicant based on a pairing of preferences, but a perfect pairing of preferences will not guarantee that love will grow. It might guarantee a decent dinner conversation, but someone can be with the person whose traits on paper would seem to make the person the woman or man of the seeker’s dreams with no fireworks; face to face, nothing at all may happen in the love department. It’s all about chemistry, which means that people often find themselves in love with someone their stated preferences on paper would have ruled out absolutely.

As a woman I barely know who friended me on Facebook said to her friends, automatically copying me, “Prince Charming may not have a 32-inch waist.” I hear the odds for straight men in nursing homes are really strong; there are so many more women than men still living in those higher age brackets.

The great rhetorician Aristotle, who obviously had a way with words, said: “Love is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies.” The gifted Lebanese American writer, Kahlil Gibran, saw love as the basis for making life anything more than life at its barest: “Life without love,” he wrote, “is like a tree without blossoms or fruit.” And John Keats’s poem has stirred many a lover:

I have been astonished that men could die martyrs for their religion--

I have shudder'd at it.

I shudder no more.

I could be martyr'd for my religion

Love is my religion

And I could die for that.

I could die for you.

Here’s a bad news/good news twist. The bad news is, very often love felt and expressed isn’t reciprocated. It doesn’t have to be reciprocated to be true love. It feels a whole lot better if it is reciprocated, but if you really love someone with all your heart, then you love her or him whether or not that love is returned. That’s the bad news. The good news is, we humans are capable of loving more than one person. When it comes to romantic love, I think it’s much more tidy to let that love extend to only one person at a time, and I wonder if those people who are carrying on loving romantic relationships with more than one person at a time aren’t diluting the true intensity of love for themselves as well as for those whom they love. But if I told you that you shouldn’t love more than one person at a time, that is if you are male, I’d be advising you to defy holy scripture. Women, however, are biblically limited to one husband at a time.

So, again, love doesn’t have to be reciprocated to be true love, and often it will not be. If it is not being reciprocated, the healthy thing to do is to acknowledge your emotions and move on. Someone will tell you, “There’s more than one fish in the sea,” which is no consolation whatsoever, but the good news is, it is possible to love someone else who may well love you in return; that’s the goal.

If you do head out in search of love when someone you love stops loving you in return or never has been able to love you in return, here is some really sound, solid pastoral advice, which also happens to be common sense: never settle. Never settle. I say that knowing that after facing rejection even by someone who is very kind about the rejection, saying that she or he just doesn’t feel what you feel, the easiest thing in the world to do is to take the very next halfway decent candidate who has limited baggage and no criminal background.

Love on the rebound rarely happens. Lust on the rebound happens all the time.

Waylon Jennings sang it this way:

I've spent a lifetime looking for you

Single bars and good time lovers, never true

Playing a fools game, hoping to win

Telling those sweet lies and losing again.

I was looking for love in all the wrong places

Looking for love in too many faces

Searching your eyes, looking for traces

Of what I'm dreaming of...

Hopin’ to find a friend and a lover

God bless the day I discover

Another heart, lookin’ for love

Sometimes, love, real love, happens at first sight; there is no question about it. It absolutely can happen that way, but often like evolves into love. Mariah Carey wrote and sung on her debut album, “Love Takes Time.” She was signing about something entirely different from we’re talking about right now, but the title to her song is, nonetheless, something someone searching for love should keep in mind. We’re so programmed, by having seen countless films where true love begins and blossoms in the duration of a typical movie that we let ourselves think a couple of hours should be enough time to see if true love is going to grow or not. Remember how well things worked out for Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks in “Sleepless in Seattle” in about two hours? That’s how many of us think.

There are plenty of couples who begin as friends and find themselves together more and more as the years pass, and only after a long time does the epiphany hit them: what they’re sharing is love. The real thing.

When love happens, you’d better be alert enough to grab it and nourish it if that is what you want; if not, don’t play with someone else’s emotions. It doesn’t come to everyone, or if it does, not everyone notices. One of the lovers speaking or singing to the other in the most erotic book in the Bible says this:

Set me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm; for love is strong as death, passion fierce as the grave. Its flashes are flashes of fire, a raging flame.

Amen.