This morning, many worship services across the country are being devoted to the work of justice and equality in civil rights – a work in which King was at one time one of this country’s primary leaders and which, in large measure, he shaped with the force of his own moral and intellectual leadership. The reality is that much remains to be done before King’s goals of equality and justice in civil rights are finally attained. And, to my mind, what most needs to be done is the work of love. More especially, it is the work of the kind of love I believe to be characteristic of Unitarian Universalists more than any other group.

The nature of this love is prefigured in an ancient creation story. In the beginning the world was shapeless and indistinct -–a chaos without form. Out of this chaos sprang the first spirit, Eros, the spirit of love. After Eros became real, then emerged Gaea, the broad-breasted earth. She was followed by Erebus and Nox, darkness and night. From the meshing of darkness and night came Aether, the clear sky, and Hemera, day. And then out of the earth arose Uranus, the firmament, to cover the earth and hold the stars in place. Yet all still was sterile and unmoving, so Eros, who was at once the oldest and the youngest of the gods, began to stir up the things on the earth. Eros brought the gods together and made pairs of them. Especially, Eros brought Gaea and Uranus (earth and heaven) together and from them came the Titans, the Giants, and all the subsequent peoples of the earth. We have our world because Eros, love, made order out of chaos. This is the story of creation as the poet, Hesiod, told it over 27 hundred years ago.

I like this story. It is a myth that shows the primacy of love and suggests how love heals separation and estrangement, something we often would like to overlook. As a metaphor, it reminds us that love begins the world for us and yet, often, is reborn out of the pain of estrangement – or because of that pain. It reminds us that love must return time after time to still that pain, to heal our lingering hurts. Without love, or Eros, to move and mold and renew us, the stillness and sterility chaos is our lot.

Love, of course, is one of the most talked about notions in religion. It certainly figures as the key Christian metaphor if you take the Great Commandment as the summation of faith in God, as Jesus apparently did. That commandment was in two parts: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” [Luke 10:27] We will see later that it is at this early point that UUs begin to diverge from their Christian counterparts on the matter of love. But, first, let me get ready for that…

In my days as a young person (before I became a UU), I heard sermon after sermon on God’s love – that all-encompassing, self-emptying divine love which is human salvation from creaturely existence. In those days I took this notion of divine love to be the strongest point in favor of the Christian faith. Actually, I still do, but in a more mythical, metaphorical way. Also, in those days, I found the way divine love was presented to be strangely disquieting. Something did not fit quite right. Human love always came off second best. Only divine love could save us, said the preachers of my youth, and so say many of the preachers up and down the street today. In fact, we human beings, they would say, could love one another only because God first loved us.

This, of course, had an attractive ring to it. But almost in the same breath, the preachers would use divine love to justify whatever punishments or harsh judgments it might be God’s whim to impose on us. It is God’s all-encompassing love that leads God to impose pain and suffering, starvation and war, intolerances and hatreds, and consignment to Hell on recalcitrant humanity. After all, it is thought, how can an unrestrained creature be brought to love the Creator – except through stern, even harsh, judgments? The harshness, after all, makes it even nicer when God decides to be nice to us. Without the judgment of God, how much meaning would there be to the grace of God? All this according to the preachers of my youth. I still find it misses the point.

When I went to theological school, my grasp of what love really was wasn’t much improved by the way theologians and some psychologists put the notion under an intellectual microscope. In some ways it was helpful to understand, along with Paul Tillich and Erich Fromm, that love is expressed in four basic ways: as libido, eros, philia, and agape. These are fancy Latin and Greek words, of course. By libido, they meant sex; by eros, they meant creativity; by philia, they meant friendship; and by agape, they meant the unqualified giving of self by either a saint or by God. It is intellectually helpful to make these distinctions; but, ultimately, they strike me as sterile terms that dodge the issue. And, ultimately, even after careful analysis, everything seems to come back to the notion that, unless God loves us first, we cannot love! In my seminary days, this position was intensified even further when the blanket statement (in I John 4:8) that “God is love” was appealed to. This seemed to settle the matter for most of my fellow students and some of the professors. It is like saying, if there is no love, there is no God; if there is no God, there is no love. Love exists only because God directs it toward us. We creatures have no real role in its initiation – and if we cannot initiate it, how can we create it where it does not exist?

This understanding of love, as far as I am concerned, is limited by a profound misperception that is based on an inability to acknowledge the metaphorical quality of the concept of God. That misperception has to do with the way most people do not understand the implication of Jesus' Great Commandment for what love is and where it comes from. What often seems to escape notice is that, in the commandment, Jesus does not say, "God's love of you enables you to love God with all your heart -- and your neighbor as yourself." What he says is, "Love God! Love your neighbor!" There is no implication in that statement that the human being cannot love out of his or her own capacity and resources. Rather, Jesus, in effect, asserts that love is something the human being makes, love is something the human being does! Jesus assumes love is a human capacity. Of course, a basic part of Jesus' teaching was that God loves human beings. But the important thing to remember is that the Great Commandment assumes that, for us to become whole, fulfilled human beings (say "inherit eternal life" here, if you wish), we have to have a love that begins within us and goes outward to both God and neighbor. And even more important, with the words, “as yourself”, it implies that our loving must be grounded in love of ourselves first, before we can love anyone else -- God or neighbor. Our love not only starts within us it is directed toward us, ourselves, before it can go outward to others.

This, obviously, is different from the usual orthodox position that love is possible only if God does it first. It is more like the position of the creation story with which I began my remarks. It is where, I believe, our own liberal religious understanding of love is grounded. In the orthodox view, God gives us love to direct back toward God, expecting it to trickle from God through us downward and outward again to our fellow human beings and the world. For the orthodox God has to give us love before we can love one another. But the liberal understanding is grounded in our own capacity to relate to the world and to others positively and affirmatively. Love is already of our nature to give. Even Jesus agreed with that, at least implicitly.

The problem with the orthodox way is that it absolves us from initiating anything ourselves. If we do not feel the love of God flowing through us, we can rationalize all manner of ethnic cleansings, racial prejudices and repressions, and interpersonal cruelties. The notion that love must flow from God before it can flow from us, usually, only means that it doesn’t flow at all.

For the purpose of excusing bad behavior, what it comes down to is that, whereas the orthodox excuse themselves from actually loving their neighbor by putting the responsibility on God to prompt them to do so, religious liberals avoid actually loving their neighbor by claiming that, neither God nor the devil, but human frailty made them not do it. This is a natural, and a normal, human dodge. But deep down we know that it is a dodge. We know that, since we have the capacity to initiate love, love will not exist unless we do initiate it. We know that, no matter how we may explain things to ourselves, ultimately, too much of life is hate-driven and angry, too much of life has no meaning for us unless we love something. We know that, as one poet has said, “What no one loves, no one rushes toward, or shouts about.” (Robert Bly) And we know, also, that loving does not deplete us. It restores us, it heals us. We know that it is Eros issuing from us that makes order out of chaos.

0 The relevance of this for us this morning is that tomorrow, Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, is another sobering reminder of what the absence of love does to people. Of course, there have been some major advances in equality between the races and in the fairer sharing of civil rights. But our country still generates intolerance and bigotry to a devastating degree. Our country still consigns whole categories of people to poverty and ignorance and subjugation simply through unloving, uncaring social and economic policies and bigoted legislation-- all of which benefit the few and repress the many.

The relevance of our liberal approach to the virtue of love places a profound responsibility upon us. Those who have looked to God to create love for the neighbor have not done so well. When Martin Luther King, Jr. was in Birmingham jail, he wrote a letter to the leadership of the white churches of this country. In it he said, “I have heard numerous religious leaders of the south call upon their worshippers to comply with a desegregation decision because it is the law, but I have longed to hear white ministers say, ‘Follow this decree because integration is morally right and the Negro is your brother” -- i.e. your neighbor. King was pointing out that those who have claimed that “God is love” have seemed to feel that they had no responsibility for being love themselves. In another place in his letter, King wrote, “I have stood and looked at white churches with spires and towers pointing to heaven and wondered, 'What god do they worship there?” I would ask, how can that god be a god of love? For love does not divide us whereas white spires and towers often have.

For my own part, I believe the goals of the civil rights movement can be accomplished only by people who really believe they can generate love out of themselves. Most Unitarian Universalists seem to believe that. That makes us especially relevant to whether people can learn to accept one another. That makes us necessary leaders and opinion makers in this chaotic, responsibility-avoiding, repressive world! Metaphorically, that makes us the vehicle of Eros, the at-once youngest and oldest of the gods.

I realize that saying “Love one another” does not solve the problems of this world. It never has. But I believe that saying, “You can and you do love one another” is the hope of humanity. It is the hope that, someday, will lead people to find such faith in one another that they will open the floodgates that have for so long impounded their good sense and compassion. It is the human hope that someday, to use the words of Amos, one of my favorite Old Testament prophets, will “let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an everflowing stream.” [Amos 5:24] By “righteousness”, of course, I mean the way people are when they are true to their highest sense of morality.