July 6, 2008 - "Agaperos and Matrimonotony"

Crescent Hill Baptist Church
Louisville, Kentucky
Pentecost 8
July 6, 2008
W. Gregory Pope

AGAPEROS AND MATRIMONOTONY
Genesis 24:34-38, 42-49, 58-67 Song of Songs 2:8-13;
Romans 7:15-25a Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30

With help from an old Crescent Hill saint, Grady Nutt, I teach you two new words today. Grady may have taught them to some of you. Others of you may not have heard them before. You may not even be able to pronounce them. But chances are many of you have experienced them both.

Along with the books he published during his lifetime, Grady used to write a column for the monthly periodical, The Student, and occasionally he would invent words to write about. That is the source of the two new words in the sermon title this morning: AGAPEROS and MATRIMONOTONY. One is the cure for the other. Let’s begin with MATRIMONOTONY.

MATRIMONOTONY comes from the two words “matrimony” and “monotony.” As I said, some of you may have experienced this word before. Monotony in marriage comes from many things. From getting in a routine, from being so busy you don’t have time to be creative with your marriage, and settling in a rut. It’s doing the same thing the same way for years. Nothing new. No adventure. So easy to do.

In her Pulitzer Prize winning novel, Breathing Lessons, [1] Anne Tyler takes us through a day in the life of the marriage of Maggie and Ira Moran. They spend the day on a road trip to a funeral. The husband of Maggie’s best friend has died suddenly. On the way home from the funeral they also pay a visit to see their granddaughter who now lives with their son’s ex-wife, a granddaughter they have not seen in several years.

Anne Tyler shows us the delicate and difficult beauty of marriage; the sometimes awkward dance of daily conversation, compromise, and decision making that can be so monotonous but comprise the reality of long-term relationships. It’s not all Hollywood material.

Maggie’s daughter, Daisy, who has observed her parent’s marriage and particularly her mother’s life, says to her one day with a kind of fascinated expression on her face, “Mom? Was there a certain conscious point in your life when you decided to settle for being ordinary?” [2]

And yet, much if not most of life is lived in the ordinary. The ordinary can be beautiful and holy. Sometimes, however, it can be boring and monotonous. So, how can we live in the ordinary without a deadening monotony, especially in our marriages?

Grady Nutt said the cure for MATRIMONOTONY is AGAPEROS. Grady wrote about his growing up years of learning about love. How he was told about the good kind of love - agape - undeserved love, God’s kind of love, unconditional love that seeks no reward. But he was not allowed to think unless with guilt about eros - erotic love, passionate, sexual love. For Christians eros is enemy, agape is Savior - so he was told. So were many of us told. (It’s what I’m telling my children!)

Courtship for Christians, he said, involved mixed leaf-raking, group marshmallow toasts, and prayer dates. On the occasion of his 15th wedding anniversary he writes that 15 years of marriage had taught him one supremely valuable lesson: agape and eros are both good words and make one super word together: AGAPEROS - a passionate, self-giving love. He even wrote a book with the title AGAPEROS. [3]

To help with the matrimonotony, AGAPEROS teaches us the need for passionate love (eros) and self-giving love (agape). First, eros, passionate love.

Marital monogamy does not have to be equated with marital monotony. Bookshelves are full of titles like Hot Monogamy and Holy Sex. On the cover of this week’s Time magazine are the words: “Does God Want You to Have More Sex?” For sermon research purposes I had to read it. It tells the story of New Directions Christian Church in Memphis, Tennessee that launched a program entitled “40 Nights of Grrreat Sex,” providing participants daily planners for their sex life. Now there’s an idea for Lent! The pastor even had a blog where people could share their experiences. [4]

I also found on the magazine shelf that in the August issue of Cosmopolitan Scarlett Johannson talks about the benefits she has learned from monogamy. Monogamy does not have to become MATRIMONOTONY.

I feel I have been granted permission to preach this sermon from Home Life magazine, a conservative periodical of the Southern Baptist Convention. I figured if they could publish an article entitled “Secrets of an Irresistible Woman,” I could preach a sermon about eros! By the way, I read the article. It has its good points, but it doesn’t live up to its title. Too much advice from Proverbs, and not enough from the Song of Songs.

What about you? Were you like Grady, confused about love? Were you told that agape is good love and eros is bad love, or it’s bad at least until you get married? We were told this no doubt to try and make us behave, and it worked for some of us. But while the experience of eros is meant to be shared in the context of a lifetime commitment, to be told it is bad and ugly until that time has a way of bringing an attitude of shame to sex even within marriage.

The Song of Songs, from which we read earlier, which is quite explicit in places, was so embarrassing for many that for centuries it was interpreted by the church as an allegory for God’s relationship with Israel, though nothing in the Song calls for such an interpretation. The Song of Songs is a sequence of lyrical love poems, with beautiful phrases, such as: “Your loving is better than wine,” “You are beautiful my love, daunting as the stars in their courses.” And those are the tame ones!

It mirrors one of the most romantic scenes in all of literature which is found in the Bible when Isaac and Rebekah meet for the first time. You should read the story in Genesis 24.

Isaac’s father, Abraham, sent one of his servants back to the homeland in order to find a good woman for Isaac. It was also important to Abraham that Isaac's wife not be coerced into marriage, as was often the case.

The servant swore under oath that he would find such a wife for Isaac and off he went. Traveling a long distance, he rode into the town of Nahor, and stopped at the local drive-through well. He was greeted with the lovely sight of many “daughters of men” who were gathered about the well. This presented him with a most beautiful problem to solve: which daughter was the right one for Isaac.

The servant, faced with this problem, set out to pray to God in order to find the right answer. His prayer was simple. He would ask one of the daughters for a drink of water. Whichever one replied affirmatively and then also set out to water his camels, that young lady would be the woman for Isaac.

Immediately following his prayer, a woman named Rebekah appears. She is described as very beautiful. The servant asks her for a drink. She gives him a drink and offers to draw water for his camels. Believing this to be the sign he was looking for, the servant asks Rebekah whose daughter she is and if there is room in her father's house for him to spend the night. She tells him who she is and leads him to her house. And the engagement process begins.

After the servant talks with Rebekah's father, the father offers Rebekah to be Isaac's wife. Rebekah is asked if she would like to go and she says yes.

Isaac waits for the servant to return. He paces the field, waiting for his bride. He feels as if his life is finally about to begin. And as all who are married know, marriage is the beginning of a whole new life.

Isaac is out one evening walking in the fields and looks up and sees this caravan of camels coming. Rebekah looks up and sees a man walking toward her. She slips down from the camel and asks the servant, “Who is that man over there, walking in the field to meet us?” And he says, with a smile on his face I'm sure, “That is my master.”

Rebekah then takes her veil and covers herself. The servant explains to Isaac all that has happened. Then Isaac takes Rebekah into his mother Sarah's tent, and, scripture says, she became his wife, and he loved her. Hollywood and Harlequin, eat your heart out!

Eros, romance, passionate love is a gift of God that needs to be celebrated, not degraded. In the story of creation our sexuality is affirmed. The man and woman were naked and unashamed. In the Song of Songs, our sexuality is celebrated.

The Bible is not opposed to sex. As a matter of fact, it cares more about sex than we do. The Bible might even indicate that the problem in our sex-saturated society is not that we think too much about sex, but that we think about it so poorly. Our problem is that we forget what manner of persons we are.

The Greek philosophers separated body and soul, seeing them as enemies. But the Scriptures look upon us as a unity. We do not simply have a body; we are a body. We do not simply have a soul; we are a soul. The body is not an evil thing, but a part of God’s good creation, woven through with soul. And because the Bible has such an exalted view of the body, it cannot have a cheap and degrading view of sex. Eros - erotic, sexual love is not our enemy; it is a good gift of God. It seems by the number of pregnancies reported in recent days within our congregation that many of you have discovered that good gift.

Eros has gotten a bad name because it has wrongly been defined in terms of “lust.” And lust has been wrongly defined as “sexual desire.” But sexual desire is not sinful. It is part of our very nature, a physical drive that begins way too early. As a teenager did you ever feel like God had pulled a joke on you by turning on your hormones so early. Now we know why in biblical days they got married at 13 and 14!

Erotic love and sexual desire are powerful forces. When Paul talks in Romans about doing what we doesn’t want to do and sometimes feeling as if he cannot do what he knows he should do, we can identify.

But let it be clear that sexual desire is not dirty. Sexual desire is not “lust.” Lust is the untamed sexual desire to possess another person. And eros is not lust. Eros is the passionate gift of God, and joined with the self-giving love of agape takes sexual desire and transforms it into one of God’s most wonderful gifts of intimacy and sharing. A sharing that creates a union - a physical, emotional, psychological and spiritual union. And that is why sex is intended for the covenant of marriage. It creates a “one flesh” union that is deeper than just physical. And wounds are left when that union is torn apart.

Erotic, passionate love without a committed, self-giving love is a distortion of what sex and love are supposed to be. For eros to be experienced as the good gift of God it must be joined with agape - the unconditional love of commitment.

Eros apart from agape can be dangerous and harmful. The passion of eros involves the giving of your self to another person in a most intimate way. And that needs to be done with great care. The writer of the Song says that love must not be roused carelessly. She writes, “Swear to me that you will never awaken love until it is ripe.” There is a time and place for eros.

AGAPEROS, says Grady, is loving right for the right reasons with the right person. It is joyfully becoming one flesh in the healthy knowledge that God created us as sexual beings, that it was all God’s idea, and God thought of this one as very, very good.

In fact, if you want to take some of the monotony out of your marriage, go home tonight and read the Song of Songs to one another. It will bring a whole new perspective to reading the Bible together. In fact, you may think twice before you tell your teenager to read the Bible on dates. You may just want to give them a New Testament with the Psalms.

The Song of Songs, however, does not speak simply of the physical nature of sex. It makes it clear that there is a fidelity to all true love. In chapter 6 the man suggests there had been numerous opportunities for promiscuity when he could have had maidens without number, but he had said no to them all.

When eros is coupled with agape, there is a faithfulness present. “My beloved is mine and I am his,” writes the poet. Love has a permanence about it. In chapter 8 the poet of the Song says, “Set me as a seal on your heart, for love is as strong as death. Waters cannot quench it; floods cannot drown it.” The permanence of love. That is agape. It is a self-giving, committed love.

Agape and eros - AGAPEROS - can teach us much about the fullness of love. The words “love” and “sex” has been so misused and overused that it’s hard to know the true meaning of love and the true purpose of sex.

In Tyler’s novel, Maggie and Ira are talking about their son’s ex-wife and how young she and her son were when they married with a baby on the way, saying she didn’t know the first thing about love, which prompted Maggie to ask, “What was the first thing about love?” [5] It can be confusing.

In romantic love, there’s that beginning stage of a “sick-at-your-stomach” love - where you can’t eat, sleep or function in the civilized world. And then there’s the kind of love that exists between the couple who just celebrated 50 years of marriage, who know each other inside and out (perhaps better than they want to know each other), who through all the conflicts and disagreements and frustrations and monotonous ordinary days have managed somehow to stay together. From the “sick at your stomach” love to the “sticking together for 50 years” kind of love, there are many degrees of emotion and expression and commitment that fall under that word “love.”

Teenage pop-star Vanessa Hudgens, expressing her naivete, says, “If you love someone, you really shouldn’t have to work at it. You finish each other’s sentences and have the same sense of humor.” Let’s hope she gets the opportunity to sit down with couples who have been married fifty years and changes her understanding of love. Because if she doesn’t I hate to see how many times she will be married and divorced.

Deep joy and meaning are found only in agape, in God’s kind of love. C. S. Lewis called it “gift-love.” God gives of God’s self to us all each and every day of our lives. God loves us with a passionate desire. God loves us because God delights to give. That is agape.

And we are called to love as God loves. We all need both to love and to be loved. To give love and receive love. For without love we die. We cannot live without love. It is a basic human need essential to our well-being.

We are told that sex is a basic appetite, like our need for food and water. But we sense, I think, that our sexual longing is something of a different nature than our need for food and water or sleep. Something spiritual abides in a sexual relationship, something far more profound than a full stomach or a rested body. Sexual needs run deeper than the physical. Eros must be united with agape. For agape is that emotion and decision of the will to give in order to make the other person happy.

Agape gives of the self in commitment and sacrifice. It is the strong foundation upon which relationships are built. Though agape involves our emotions, relationships cannot be firmly established on emotion alone. Because in time, we will no longer be sick at our stomachs with love. We will be eating and sleeping and functioning in the world again. We will before long discover our partner has more than one flaw. And not a small one at that.

MATRIMONOTONY, frustrations and arguments will arise and demand more than a “sick-at-your-stomach” kind of love to keep things together. It will demand a love as strong as death. A love that the floods of conflict and hardship cannot drown. In order for our relationships to be healthy and long-lasting, it will take the commitment and sacrifice of agape - the love that gives of the self.

Grady Nutt found it to be the cure for his marriage. He once wrote, “I have been happily married for eleven years and unhappily married for five years before that - all to the same woman - Eleanor. The main problem we had - to quote Eleanor - was that we couldn’t agree on who loved me most!”

Love is something we all need. Who among us does not need to know that we are loved? Love involves giving and receiving. Long-lasting love demands the balance and unity of agape and eros - AGAPEROS - passionate self-giving. For they both spring from the same human impulse to know someone fully and to be fully known. It’s hard work, but the reward is joy beyond measure.

In Tyler’s novel, following the funeral, two of Maggie’s old friends were talking about mixed marriages as one of them was married to a person of another race. Then one of the friends said, “Doesn’t it sometimes seem to you like every marriage is mixed?” [6]

There is the mixture of two distinct persons with two distinct histories who often experience things in two distinct ways. Yes, every marriage is a mixed marriage.

And to live in the mix requires a love and a strength greater than our own. It calls for the love of God and the grace that comes from resting in that love. Jesus said, “Come to me, you who are weary and carrying heavy burdens - even the burden of relational problems - and learn from me and I will give you rest.”

Maybe Anne Tyler is right: “Breathing lessons” are required for the daily ins and outs of long-term relationships. Some days all you can do is breath in and breath out. Perhaps we could see prayer as breathing lessons, breathing in the love of God to satisfy the deepest needs of our souls, breathing out the love of God into the lives of others - with the passion of eros and the self-giving of agape - AGAPEROS. We can start those breathing lessons even now in the silence.

___________________________

1. Anne Tyler, Breathing Lessons, Knoff, 1988.
2. Tyler, 30
3. Grady Nutt, Agaperos, Broadman, 1977
4. Time, “Does God Want You to Have More Sex?” July 7, 2008
5. Tyler, 15
6. Tyler, 84