Charity Never Faileth . . .
Torrey Commencement 2008
Honored Members of the Torrey Honors Institute, Faculty, Tutors, and Administration, Parents, and Torrey class of 2008:
Graduation is a day for love. In triumph, we find it easy to love everyone . . . we may even forgive the tutor who gave us such a hard time at Don Rags sophomore year. Gratitude, a sure sign of charity, overflows as we thank parents, friends, and others who have helped us achieve our goals.
We recall friends departed . . . especially good and great souls such as Dr. Clyde Cook whose recent graduation is still a fresh loss.
Saint Paul says, “Charity never faileth . . .” and, of course, he is right.
At first he does not seem right, which is a good subject for meditation on this important day.
Charity does appear to fail . . . despite what we say to our fellow graduate’s today, memory does fail. People with whom you shared so many memories the last four years will become difficult to recall . . . especially as age matures their form. It is hard to love someone you cannot recollect.
Death is crueler. It seems to remove, forever, those we still would love, but cannot see, hear, or touch.
The world is changing rapidly- as quickly as Microsoft patches Windows or as the next pop star supplants the last as our American idol.
Yet despite this Saint Paul says, “Charity never faileth . . .” and if we understand what he means by charity, then it will help us understand what we face in our lives and in this culture.
Biblical love comes from God and goes back to God. It is His and so our failures and even death cannot defeat it. What it teaches as it moves back to its source, it makes in some manner immortal. It martyrs our selfishness and realigns our desires.
This love, real love, never fails. It never changes- and is not subject to election, recall, or redefinitions. Humanity can try to redefine it- but that only changes the words and not the idea. Love is God’s and is His gift to us. It is about us only because He makes it so in His marvelous condescension.
When “marriage” means something else in popular usage than what Christianity meant by it, there will just have to be another word for the joyful mystery of the human imitation of Christ and His Church.
The change so trumpeted by graduation speakers is trivial compared to what is not changing: charity. Today as graduates you enter a world not one iota different in any way that matters. It will be the siren call of Satan to have you focus on the ephemeral, instead of the lasting.
Love does not change and in humans love is, as it always has been, birthed in need . . . a deep poverty in humanity that draws us toward a fount of deeper desire. This deeper desire springs from perfect fulfillment and a desire to see that perfection made universal.
Humans desire God, because we need His goodness. God desires us, not out of any need, but because He longs to see us whole.
We must acknowledge our poverty, but not cling to it.
Some foolishly view the deep longing as the highest possible pleasure. There is pleasure in it, as there is in hunger before a good meal, but it is foolish to reject the food in order to prolong the need. Some moderns want Lent but no Easter.
Do not make a fetish of your particular desires . . . since often our felt needs are not our real needs.
We must also not be satisfied with any initial encounter with the Infinite Love of God. Humans want to build altars where God was . . . and so often miss where God would take us. When our initial encounter with God grows stale, we act as if the problem is with religion or with God, but the problem is with our lack of true passion for the Divine.
Any given “religious experience” is not the answer . . . because the answer is a Person who refuses to be placed in a box or tamed. Like Aslan, He bounds into our lives and upsets our assumptions at every turn.
It must always be “more” for the lover when he turns to the Beloved. As the Bride of Christ, we long for an even deeper relationship with our Heavenly Groom.
His love will give meaning and fulfillment to our lack without overfilling us and sickening us. Why?
God is a person and not merely an experience. He is not merely an object for our manipulation, religious or otherwise. The good news of God’s total sovereignty is that He sets boundaries and acts for our good. He will not be manipulated, used, or ignored.
We can glut ourselves on objects which cannot protect themselves from our disordered desires. In doing this, we can learn to hate these objects. We can harm people or confuse our relationship with them by demanding from them what should not be and so spoil our love, but this is not true of God.
We can cloy on religion, but not on Him.
We can abuse any form or ritual, however, good and so tire of it. Graduates do not confuse any lesser good, even a Christian one, with God. Some of you will be tempted to hop from one form of faith to another in order to renew the old thrill . . . but this is not the love you need. Some of you will even be tempted to make a form of “no form!”
It is all beside the point and will not work.
We need God. Forms can help us worship Him, but they are not God.
Confusing any religious rite with God would be like confusing this culminating graduation service with education.
God is the End of our heart’s true longings. We are persons and no ideology that does not account for the whole person can be good for us.
Christianity is the great revelation of God to humankind of Himself.
Against this great truth, this noble myth, is arrayed all the lies of the world, the flesh, and the devil.
Materialism says that we are things and that things can meet our needs. This failure of love ends in ugliness.
Secularism says there is nothing in heaven and earth that is not dreamed of in Richard Dawkins’ philosophy. This failure of imagination cannot sustain a culture.
Hedonism denies the need for pain in this life and destroys the possibility of immortal pleasures. It ends with all joys spoilt and all pleasures stale.
Intellectualism argues that the head can make demands without accounting for the heart. It dies like all Gradgrind ideas in cruelty.
Anti-intellectualism pretends that we can follow our heart without accounting for the demands of reason. Our irrational passion too often destroys the very things we love.
These ideologies come between us and God and so are idols. God hates idols not because of some bizarre insecurity on His part, but because we are corrupting some good thing He made by misusing them, missing our real needs, and failing to give appropriate honor to Him.
Instead of these ideologies, we must confront God as seen in the person of Jesus Christ, most perfectly revealed in the pages of inerrant Sacred Scripture. The sign post of Scriptures, miracles, and the witness of Church history can point to Christ, but they too are not Christ.
We must find Him in these good things . . . or these good, holy, and great things will also become idols. We love the physical world, because God made it. We even see it as holy, because God became flesh.
The sacred things are sacred, however, because He exists. We must honor family, country, and church, but we can worship God alone. Love is always urging excess. This is wise, because there is a person for whom extravagance is appropriate.
God alone is where love can never become excessive, but only defective.
We love others out of the superabundance of our love for God. His image in them calls forth love . . . even in our enemies.
When we are children, we cannot understand any of this, though we often feel the truth of it better than we can express. Appropriately, we are in a position of receiving love and rarely of giving it. We need so much and we have so little.
This never changes relative to God. We are children to Him.
But as we mature in Faith, our love for Him should grow to the point where it overflows around us. We serve as slaves to those around us voluntarily . . . because there is so much love within us that we must discharge it or perish.
Childish love wants to own or possess the thing it sees. It makes the mistake of the American tourist who sees the David and wishes to take it home. The absurdity of this Florentine masterpiece bursting through the roof of his thirteen hundred foot tract home never occurs to the childish. Unlike the true lover he can even be satisfied with a cheap copy . . . “better” because he can own it.
The childish think that all beauty exists so they can buy it.
Having found Love- when we keep in relationship with Him- we can only act with virtue in imitation of what we love.
Our memory may fail, but He will preserve all that is good for us.
Cultures may crumble and men may die, but He will restore all.
God’s love will let nothing good, true, or beautiful fail or end. He will find a good place for it all.
Your life, graduates, will be a great circle of love- beginning in parent’s arms- loved unspoiled by false desire- only responding out of need and thankful for need being met- moving to giving and creating more love as parents of children and of good works and then, finally, helplessly falling again into capable parental arms- as love delivers you to Love Himself- a love that never faileth.