31-aug-08

Genuine Love The Rev. Joseph Winston August 31, 2008

Sermon Grace and peace are gifts for you from God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.1 O. Henry introduced his short story about Mr. and Mrs. James Dillingham Young in the following manner, One dollar and eighty-seven cents. That was all. And sixty cents of it was in pennies. Pennies saved one and two at a time by bulldozing the grocer and the vegetable man and the butcher until one’s cheeks burned with the silent imputation of parsimony that such close dealing implied. Three times Della counted it. One dollar and eighty-seven cents. And the next day would be Christmas. There was clearly nothing to do but flop down on the shabby little couch and howl. So Della did it. Which instigates the moral reflection 1

Romans 1:7, 1 Corinthians 1:3, 2 Corinthians 1:2, Galatians 1:3, Ephesians 1:2, Philippians 1:2, 2 Thessalonians 1:2, Philemon 1:3

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that life is made up of sobs, sniffles, and smiles, with sniffles predominating.2 With these few words penned by O. Henry, we learn about Della and the distressing predicament that she finds herself in. It is Christmass Eve and she has no money to buy anything for her dear husband.3 Della is one-half of the couple known as Mr. and Mrs. James Dillingham Young. Times are tough in New York for the Young family. You see, James her beloved husband used to bring home a salary of thirty dollars a week. With this meager amount of money, they could make the needed payment on their furnished flat. All that was required on Della’s part was a little bit of hard work. Her effort magically transformed the remaining twenty-two dollars into everything that they needed for their daily bread. In the past few months, the affairs at the Young household have taken a dramatic change for the worse. James now only makes twenty dollars a week. No matter how much Della promised James that they would be able to get by, this thirty-three percent decrease in take home pay has been hard for her to swallow. With only twelve dollars a week to run her house, she must pinch every penny just to make ends meet. The results have not been promising. After months of devoted effort on her part, she only has one dollar and eighty-seven cents for Christmass gifts. As you listen in on the life of the Young family, you soon realize that O. Henry 2

O. Henry, The Gift Of The Magi, (1906). Christmass is spelled with two “s” to remember that this day is a worship celebration, otherwise known as a Mass for the Christ child. 3

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has done something wonderful with the almost two thousand words that he wrote in 1906. This story, known as The Gift Of The Magi, does an excellent job of capturing the way of life the Apostle Paul describes in his letter to the church in Rome. Let me tell you a little secret. If you have not already heard The Gift Of The Magi, you will soon learn that James and Della love each other very deeply. In fact, they love the other person so much that they are willing to do whatever it takes to express that love for their spouse. But finding that exact same attitude might be difficult to hear in today’s letter from Paul to the Romans. The English version that we used today says, “Let love be genuine (Romans 12:9a NRSV).” It is as if Paul hopes that love is authentic. It might seem that Paul wishes that love is true. It could be that Paul wants love to be honest. None of these interpretations of the original language are correct. The three Greek words that make up this sentence do not have a verb.4 This phrase contains only a direct article, a noun, and an adjective. Normally, the direct article is translated as “the.” The noun is next and its meaning is “love.” The final word, the adjective, has a prefix that means “not.” The rest of the adjective comes to us from the theater. The word is actually “hypocrisy,” which means in Greek “acting a part in a play.” The last thing that you need to know about this type of sentence is that when a verb is missing, you add a form of the verb “to be.” This sentence should be translated as, “the love is not hypocrisy.” A more 4

ἡ ἀγάπη ἀνυπόκριτος.

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elegant way of saying the same thing would be either “love is not hypocrisy” or “love without hypocrisy.” Paul is telling us that Christian love is authentic. He is reminding us that Christian respect for one another does not contain any traces of acting. It is real. Love is genuine. Listen to how O. Henry describes this type of love, Now, there were two possessions of the James Dillingham Youngs in which they both took a mighty pride. One was Jim’s gold watch that had been his father’s and his grandfather’s. The other was Della’s hair. Had the queen of Sheba lived in the flat across the airshaft, Della would have let her hair hang out the window some day to dry just to depreciate Her Majesty’s jewels and gifts. Had King Solomon been the janitor, with all his treasures piled up in the basement, Jim would have pulled out his watch every time he passed, just to see him pluck at his beard from envy. So now Della’s beautiful hair fell about her rippling and shining like a cascade of brown waters. It reached below her knee and made itself almost a garment for her. And then she did it up again nervously and quickly. Once she faltered for a minute and stood still while a tear or two splashed on the worn red carpet. On went her old brown jacket; on went her old brown hat. With a whirl of skirts and with the brilliant sparkle still in her eyes, she fluttered

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out the door and down the stairs to the street. Where she stopped the sign read: “Mne. Sofronie. Hair Goods of All Kinds.” One flight up Della ran, and collected herself, panting. Madame, large, too white, chilly, hardly looked the “Sofronie.” “Will you buy my hair?” asked Della. “I buy hair,” said Madame. “Take yer hat off and let’s have a sight at the looks of it.” Down rippled the brown cascade. “Twenty dollars,” said Madame, lifting the mass with a practised hand. “Give it to me quick,” said Della. Oh, and the next two hours tripped by on rosy wings. Forget the hashed metaphor. She was ransacking the stores for Jim’s present. She found it at last. It surely had been made for Jim and no one else. There was no other like it in any of the stores, and she had turned all of them inside out. It was a platinum fob chain simple and chaste in design, properly proclaiming its value by substance alone and not by meretricious ornamentation – as all good things should do. It was even worthy of The Watch. As soon as she saw it she knew that it must be Jim’s. It was like him. Quietness and value – the description applied to both. Twenty-one dollars they took from her for it, and she hurried home with the 87 cents. With that chain on his watch Jim might be

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properly anxious about the time in any company. Grand as the watch was, he sometimes looked at it on the sly on account of the old leather strap that he used in place of a chain.5 We all know what must happen next in the story. Della needs to go home and make herself ready for her beloved Jim. One summery of these actions could be. Even though it was Christmass Eve, Jim had to put in a full day of work. Della knew this fact and it gave her a bit of time to gather her wits. When she finally arrived back at the apartment, she tried her best to repair the temporary damage done to her hair. Short, tight curls soon covered her head and had it been the roaring twenties, she would have been in style. Next, she needed a way to woo her man. Out came the coffee and the pork chops – a perfect meal to mark this momentous occasion. Jim arrived, as expected, at 7 pm. As he entered the house, his eyes lighted on Della and they saw something different. Della’s hair was gone. The look in his eyes frightened her because she was not expecting this type of reaction. Della jumped up and tried her best to explain why she cut off her hair. She told him that she loved him so much that she had to give him something special for Christmass – something that showed Jim her undying devotion for him. Now is a good time to return back to O. Henry’s version. Jim drew a package from his overcoat pocket and threw it upon the table. 5

Henry, The Gift Of The Magi.

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“Don’t make any mistake, Dell,” he said, “about me. I don’t think there’s anything in the way of a haircut or a shave or a shampoo that could make me like my girl any less. But if you’ll unwrap that package you may see why you had me going a while at first.” White fingers and nimble tore at the string and paper. And then an ecstatic scream of joy; and then, alas! a quick feminine change to hysterical tears and wails, necessitating the immediate employment of all the comforting powers of the lord of the flat. For there lay The Combs – the set of combs, side and back, that Della had worshipped long in a Broadway window. Beautiful combs, pure tortoise shell, with jewelled rims – just the shade to wear in the beautiful vanished hair. They were expensive combs, she knew, and her heart had simply craved and yearned over them without the least hope of possession. And now, they were hers, but the tresses that should have adorned the coveted adornments were gone. But she hugged them to her bosom, and at length she was able to look up with dim eyes and a smile and say: “My hair grows so fast, Jim!” And them Della leaped up like a little singed cat and cried, “Oh, oh!” Jim had not yet seen his beautiful present. She held it out to him eagerly upon her open palm. The dull precious metal seemed to flash with a reflection of her bright and ardent spirit. “Isn’t it a dandy, Jim? I hunted all over town to find it. You’ll have to 7

look at the time a hundred times a day now. Give me your watch. I want to see how it looks on it.”6 The pain that we all feel when we finally come to the realization that Della sold her hair for Jim’s watch fob and that Jim has traded in his watch for Della’s hair combs reminds us of one harsh fact. It can be very difficult for anyone to love and to live in this world. Our lives tell us over and over again that good people get hurt. Take a close look at the hurricane in the Gulf if you do not believe me. Someone in Gustav’s path will severely injured by this storm’s action. It has already occurred in the past and unfortunately, it will not be the last time. This first hand knowledge of all the pain in this world makes it very difficult for us to reach out to others because we know what ultimately will happen. We will open up and our loved one will die. This grief is almost too much to bear. Of course, it does not take something as drastic as death to remind us of all the suffering in this world. We see it all around us and we react. We carefully calculate the cost of our relationships and see whom we will love and whom we will not. And then there are the cases that we do not like to admit. All too often, we cannot love those people who are so dear to us. We know this for a fact so the example that comes next is no surprise at all. It is practically impossible to even like our enemies much less have the ability to give them the basic items necessary for life. When we acknowledge the realities of this world and the way that we live, 6

Henry, The Gift Of The Magi.

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we must come to the following conclusion. We hear the words from Paul not as a personal invitation into the very life of Jesus but as a command. This love that we must have is but another task that we must do. Here is what we think. Give genuine love or else you will pay for it. Love those around you or God will get mad. Love your enemies or you are not one of God’s children. Each of these examples along with all the others that we can come up with violates the command given to us by Paul. Love without hypocrisy. Even more importantly, every one of these cases breaks the Lord’s command to love our neighbor as yourself because what now is in our hearts is no longer love. It is a duty that we must perform or to put it more bluntly, some of us think it is a cross that we must carry. Certainly, this cannot be the correct interpretation of the love Paul expects each Christian to have. Surely, Jesus is not asking us to do an impossible task that we can never perform. Without a doubt, we must be missing something. There must be more to the story. What we have here is a good, old-fashioned case of human pride. We feel that we can do whatever is needed and by God, we will love everyone as the Lord commanded us or die trying. And that is exactly what will happen to us if we try to love everyone one our own. It will kill us. It may not happen right away, but it surely will occur. Because that the day will come, sooner rather than later, when we ultimately realize that, our type of love is not what God expects. And when that finally happens, it will 9

be our love that condemns us to die. The solution to this problem facing all of us is to own up to the fact that we can never love others all by ourselves. We require help. The aid that we need to follow God’s command to the letter cannot come from you or me. It has to be given to us by God Himself. This is what Jesus has done for us. All the baptized have been incorporated into His body. We are now one with Him. Paul reminded us of this fact in the lessons last week and if you look just before today’s lesson, you will see it stated once again in Paul’s letter to the Romans. We are joined together in the Lord. This reality where we are Christ’s body can only occur because Jesus allows it to happen. He has invited you and he has asked me to join with Him. Together as One, we can do what He wants. We can love without hypocrisy. O. Henry finished out this story of Della and Jim like this, [H]ere I have lamely related to you the uneventful chronicle of two foolish children in a flat who most unwisely sacrificed for each other the greatest treasures of their house. But in a last word to the wise of these days let it be said that of all who give gifts these two were the wisest. O all who give and receive gifts, such as they are wisest. Everywhere they are wisest. They are the magi.7 During the five months that I had the privilege of serving you as your pastor, you have given me the gifts of hospitality and honor. You have welcomed me into your homes. You have invited me to your parties that have celebrated life. You 7

Henry, The Gift Of The Magi.

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have accepted me as your pastor. You have trusted me with the education of your children and grandchildren. You have asked my opinion on important manners. You have let me bring you the gifts of God in Word, Water, Bread, and Wine. You have been the magi for me. “The peace of God, which passeth all understanding, keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.”8

References Henry, O., The Gift Of The Magi, (1906).

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Philippians 4:7.

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