My mother was a lovely woman, but she was no theologian. As a case in point, she often would say, “All religions can be reduced to love. It’s all about love.”
Now I’ll admit, it’s hard to argue against love. But there are all kinds of love. In fact, some of the worst acts in history have been committed in the name of love. As with most things, then, the devil is in the details.
At the risk of sounding like a heartless curmudgeon (though I was genuinely happy for the couple and pray they prosper), I found the sermon during the royal wedding this past Saturday to be decidedly wanting. This, despite the fact that everybody seems to be going gaga over it.
The headline from the New York Times the next morning summed it up: “A New Era as Prince Harry and Meghan Markle Wed,” it began. “An extraordinary ceremony showed a push to modernize Britain’s royal family.”
Not only did I find this headline, despite its utter predictability, insulting to the British people, it also expresses precisely what I’ve been critiquing on this blog over the last few months in terms of contemporary mainline Protestantism.
The preacher, Michael Curry, bishop of the Episcopal Church in America, quoted Martin Luther King, Jr.: “We must discover the power of love, the redemptive power of love. And when we do that, we will make of this old world a new world, for love is the only way.”
Now, again, on the face of it, this sounds great. In fact, I remember my father once telling me that when he was being trained on Madison Ave., he was told to always include the word “new” in his copy. We human beings are suckers for this sort of thing. It’s downright intoxicating. It’s NEW!!!
Yet I couldn’t help thinking how presumptuous the preacher sounded. A culture that has produced such luminaries as William Shakespeare, John Donne, Emily Brontë, John Keats, and Anne Bradstreet, to name but a few, surely knows nothing about love.
But beyond that, the liturgy offered during the ceremony betrayed the glorious depths of a Christian tradition that has existed in Great Britain since Roman times. That generation upon generation, going back over more than a thousand years, has said and/or heard these words says far more about love than the overly-enthused theatrics of the American preacher for the day.
But the main point I wish to make relates to Bishop Curry’s call for this newly discovered love to change the world, to create a “new world,” as he put it. (Presumably this has never been tried.)
The bishop then references Teilhard de Chardin, the early 20th century French philosopher and Jesuit priest, who, caught up in the thinking of his day, advanced the progressive notion that history was moving inexorably from the “Alpha” stage (Creation) to the “Omega Point,” that moment in historical time when humanity finally reaches perfection, heaven on earth.
Now if you’ve been paying attention to my previous posts, you can see that this is really warmed-over rhetoric from a bygone era. And yet we all seem to buy into it as if it’s a fresh new idea. We love thinking that with just a little more love and the right social engineering, we humans can build nirvana, having fixed all of life’s problems. It’s heady stuff. And flattering, too.
But is the human condition really any different than before? As far as I see it, each generation still has to struggle with sin, evil, brokenness, and the myriad and constant challenges that conspire to prevent us from loving God and neighbor the way we know we should. It is in these tough everyday challenges that we work out our salvation, with fear and trembling.
Of course, the New York Times and Bishop Curry would convince us otherwise. Just add a little more “love” into the mix, and, presto!, peace on earth. A new world. LOVE!!!
To repeat, I would submit that there was more substance and more power in the dignified words spoken as part of the marriage liturgy, reflecting the profundity of the ancient biblical message from some 2,000 years ago, urging the couple (and us) not toward a “new” love or a “new” world, but toward the sometimes unglamorous, often prosaic, everyday “old” world filled with the timeless, godly demands of obedience, faith, and, yes, love.