The Chemistry of Love: A Valentine's Sermon

The Orangeburg Series

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Mark 12:28-34
February 12, 2012

For nearly 25 years now, I have been telling college students and congregations and anyone else who would listen that the two great frontiers for theology in our time are astrophysics and neuroscience.

Astrophysics just might get closer to “reading the mind of God,” as the great physicist Stephen Hawking put it, than any other discipline. The farther out in space we look, the farther back we are seeing in time. And in theory, at least, if we can see far enough out, then we can to see far enough back to see the first light of the beginning of time when “God said, ‘Let there be light.’ And there was light” (Genesis 1:3).

But in addition to “reading the mind of God,” theology must plumb the depths of the human psyche as well, so the other great frontier for theology in our time is neuroscience, the study of the structures that underlie the human mind. If, as Jesus says, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your . . . mind” (Mark 12:30), and the apostle Paul says, “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 2:5), then the structures of the brain that underlie the human mind are of utmost importance to theology.

Exploring the mind of God in astrophysics and delving the underlying structures of the human mind in neuroscience are the great frontiers for theology in our time.

But I know very well that you didn’t come here this morning for a lecture on astrophysics or neuroscience either one. What most of us feel that we need from church on Sunday is something we can carry away that will help us recover from the week that we just had and get through the week that lies ahead. So come with me for a few minutes to the grocery store. After all, that’s where we usually go to get the things we ran out of last week and need for next week, isn’t it?

Maybe you still need a Valentine’s Day card or a box of candy or a big helium balloon or a handful of cheerful flowers. Whether you’ve been dating for six months or married for 60 years or anyplace in between, you better come home with something on Tuesday.

I did a double take as I walked down the aisle. I was passing the magazines when a picture caught my eye. It was of a dark-haired couple in a romantic embrace, eyes closed, face to face, very nearly—but not quite—lips to lips. The photo was slightly grainy, sultry, steamy looking. In the bottom right corner, superimposed in red letters on a field of black was the word “Love.” Maybe Time would run this cover photo or The National Enquirer. But there was no mistaking the fact that this blissfully sensuous and romantic moment was framed by a bold yellow border that communicated as clearly and as incongruously as the white capital letters across the top: National Geographic. National Geographic? What kind of geography is this? Sign me up! I wanna be a geography major.

I did a double take and walked on by. After all, it wasn’t love I came to the grocery store for at 10:00 on a weeknight after having been up since 4 a.m. It was children’s Tylenol, a gallon of milk, and 0.7 mm lead for a middle-schooler’s mechanical pencil. Only to have my attention distracted by a grainy photograph in a yellow border. I walked away with the picture on the magazine still in my head, and I had to ask myself, “What is it I’m here for?” “Keep moving,” I said. “You’re not here for ‘Love’—or National Geographic either.” So I waited until the next time I was in the grocery store—about three days later. A gallon of milk, a loaf of bread, and National Geographic, the February issue 2006, just in time for Valentine’s Day.

Since a whole bunch of you are signed up for the Valentine’s Day Banquet tomorrow night, I decided to return this morning to the topic of that first “fruit of the Spirit” in Galatians 5:22-23: Love. “Love: The Chemical Reaction” was the cover story. Lauren Slater’s article was a blend of Cosmopolitan, Anthropology Today, and Scientific American. And Jodi Cobb’s photographs from Argentina, Cancun, Italy, Las Vegas, Pennsylvania, and Ohio were vintage Geographic with a Generation Next edge.

The article introduced the reader to an anthropologist named Helen Fisher at Rutgers University who studies “the biochemical pathways of love in all its manifestations: lust, romance, attachment, the way they wax and wane” (p. 35). It turns out that the chemical pathways in the brain that light up when you are “madly in love” are those that are associated with a chemical neurotransmitter called dopamine. “Dopamine [is a chemical in the brain that] creates intense energy, exhilaration, focused attention, and motivation to win rewards. [Dopamine] is why,” writes Slater, “when you are newly in love, you can stay up all night, watch the sun rise, run a race, ski fast down a slope ordinarily too steep for your skill. Love makes you bold, makes you bright, makes you run real risks, which you sometimes survive, and sometimes you don’t” (ibid.).

Donatella Marazziti is a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pisa, in Italy. She studies another chemical pathway of love. Her studies of people who could be identified as “passionately in love” have shown that their blood levels of the chemical serotonin are 40% lower than normal, which corresponds to level of serotonin exhibited by people who have been diagnosed with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. In the best one-liner in the article Slater writes, “Love and mental illness may be difficult to tell apart” (p. 38). “More seriously,” she writes, “if the chemically altered state induced by romantic love is akin to a mental illness or a drug-induced euphoria, exposing yourself for too long could result in psychological damage” (p. 44). In fact, “Studies around the world confirm that indeed passion usually ends. Its conclusion is as common as its initial flare. No wonder some cultures think selecting a lifelong mate based on something so fleeting is folly” (pp. 43-44).

A few years ago, I sat with a group pastor-colleagues looking at each other in shock when we heard the news that a well-respected young colleague of ours had separated from his wife of five years because, they said, they just didn’t “have the same chemistry” any more. That’s what they said. They didn’t “have the same chemistry.” Duh. The chemistry of courtship is an unsustainable imbalance in the brain more akin to mental illness than to any other human condition. The brain chemistry of a couple in love is literally different after four or five years of intimacy.

Sustainable loving relationships inevitably move “from the dopamine-drenched state of romantic love to the relative quiet of an oxytocin-induced attachment,” writes Slater. “Oxytocin is a hormone that promotes a feeling of attachment, connectedness, bonding. It is released when we hug our long-term spouse, or hug our children. It is released when a mother nurses her infant” (p. 45). We tend to speak of the “chemistry of love” as metaphor, but it turns out that the literal chemistry of love in a long-term relationship is different from the heady brew of a romantic chase. Our body produces is less dopamine and more serotonin and oxytocin, so that long-term relationships are chemically less like mental illness than courtships are. It’s no wonder that our concept of love is sometimes so confused. The literal chemistry of our love changes over time.

Our relationship with God also changes over time. In this morning’s gospel lesson, Jesus said that there is no commandment greater than “you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength” (Mark 12:30). That sounds almost dopamine drenched, serotonin-starved, enthusiastic and obsessive, doesn’t it? All, all, all, all! And there is a second, he says, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Mark 12:31). That one sounds oxytocin rich: attachment, connectedness, bonding with others. Who would have thought that biochemistry and the Bible, neuroscience and Scripture, could be so much alike?

Look at how the Old Testament book of Hosea talks about the growth and development of our relationship with God. In chapter 2, we read of God’s courtship, God’s wooing of God’s people Israel: “I will now allure her, and bring her into the wilderness, and speak tenderly to her. . . . There she shall respond as in the days of her youth” (Hosea 2:14-15). Do you see the allure, the responsiveness, the underlying passion of courtship in these verses? But the relationship does not end there.

The relationship moves from short-term courtship to long-term commitment: “On that day, says the Lord, you will call me, ‘My husband.’ . . . and I will take you for my wife forever” (Hosea 2:16,19). When the relationship moves from courtship to long-term commitment, we no longer read of allure and passion. The prevailing terms of the relationship shift to righteousness and justice, and steadfast love and mercy. “I will take you for my wife in faithfulness; and you shall know the Lord” (Hosea 2:19-20). In Hosea 2, God’s relationship with Israel—and with us—is described as though it moves from a dopamine-drenched, serotonin-starved courtship in the wilderness to an oxytocin-rich relationship grounded in core covenantal commitments: righteousness, justice, steadfast love, mercy, faithfulness.” Those are some marriage vows! Those core covenantal commitments long outlive the initial energy and enthusiasm, obsession and compulsion in a relationship and replace them with attachment, connectedness, bonding.

Notice one more thing about this long-term commitment. It is only in the long-term relationship of attachment, connectedness, and bonding with God that the book of Hosea says we “know the Lord” (Hosea 2:20). So many recent converts to the Christian faith make the mistake of assuming that the way they feel at the beginning of their Christian walk—the energy, the enthusiasm, the passion, the obsession and the compulsion of their feelings for God—are the substance of a relationship with God. But the book of Hosea very clearly says that’s only the courtship phase. After the courtship phase comes settling down and settling in for the long haul in righteousness, justice, steadfast love, mercy, and faithfulness, the core covenantal commitments.

There are entire churches that are designed for courtship. Their mission is centered almost exclusively on match-making between God and new believers. They design their worship experiences and their ministries to elicit energy, enthusiasm, passion and obsession for God and for the church. Those are exciting and lively churches. After all, Psalm 47:1 says, “Clap your hands, all you peoples, shout to God with loud songs of joy”; and Psalm 150:4 says, “Praise God with tambourine and dance; praise him with strings and pipe!” Those churches are as noisy as teenagers in love. Every Sunday is Valentine’s Day.

But other churches are designed almost exclusively for marriage, the long-haul relationship with God in this life that is characterized not so much by obsession and passion but by familiarity and trust, in “the relative quiet of an oxytocin-induced attachment.” Habakkuk 2:20 tells us, “the Lord is in his holy temple; let all the earth keep silence before him!” There’s no clapping and shouting there, but silence in the presence of the holy one. “The effect of righteousness,” says Isaiah 32:17, “will be peace . . . quietness and trust forever.” Every Sunday in those churches marks an Anniversary Day decades long in the making.

One of the unfortunate things about the American church scene in our time is that these two kinds of churches talk about each other as though each is the only kind of church that is really church. The old marriage churches call the new courtship churches “all style and no substance,” while the new courtship churches call the old marriage churches “cold and dead.” And even some people inside their own church sometimes launch attacks based on “hot” and “cold,” “style” and “substance,” “loud” and “quiet.” And all the while, those criticisms are signs of arrogance and ignorance.

It’s arrogance, because that criticism asserts that where I am in my relationship with God and my walk with God and my worship of God is where everyone else should be. And it’s ignorance, because it knows nothing about the chemistry of love, the profound and powerful ways that our deepest and most intimate relationships begin in enthusiasm, passion and obsession, and then develop and change over time in attachment and connectedness and bonding, “quietness and trust.”

Whichever church you’re in, don’t get caught up in the arrogance and the ignorance of criticism.

By the way, it turns out that I was in the grocery store for love at 10:00 p.m. on a weeknight. It isn’t the dopamine-drenched, serotonin-suppressed love of the first four or five years of Bev’s and my romance. Instead, it’s the oxytocin-rich love of 34 years of marriage and four children and all the joy and the anguish, all the gratitude and the disappointment, all the happiness and the heartache that comes with the chemistry and the core covenantal commitments that are at the heart of love that lasts.

And I’m still in love with the local church more than 30 years after my ordination, not for the rush of it that it was in the beginning, but for the core covenantal commitments between God and God’s people at the intersection of time and eternity in Jesus Christ.

So if ever find yourself asking, “What is it I’m here for?” I suggest that you consider answering this way: I’m here for love in all its manifestations, and above all, love for God with heart and soul and mind and strength and love for neighbor as for self.

Copyrighted © 2012 by Jeffrey S. Rogers. It may be copied or disseminated for non-commercial use, provided this notice is included. The author can be contacted at jeffrogers110@bellsouth.net.

Reservoirs and Cisterns: The Spirit Dwells in You

The Orangeburg Series

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Ezekiel 36:24-30; Romans 8:1-14
January 22, 2012

I want to begin this morning by taking you on a quick tour of three locations in the mountains of Upstate South Carolina.

Our first stop is the iconic Table Rock. It’s picturesque in every season from almost any angle. But my interest this morning is not the mountain. It’s Table Rock Lake at the foot of the mountain. Table Rock Lake is a man-made lake. It was completed in 1930 to provide drinking water for the city of Greenville. As reservoirs go, it’s relatively small by today’s standards, covering 36 acres and holding an estimated 9.25 billion gallons of water. East of Table Rock, the newer and larger North Saluda Reservoir was completed in 1961 and stores approximately 25 billion gallons. Larger still, to the west in Oconee and Pickens Counties is Lake Keowee, which began to fill in 1970 and covers more than 18,000 acres with some 300 miles of shoreline.

One of the seldom-told stories about the growth of Greenville over the last 50 years is the role of these three reservoirs. Without them, its expansion in population and business and industry and quality of life would have been impossible. Now, the point of this quick tour is not to promote Greenville. After all, self-promotion is one of Greenville’s favorite pastimes. And besides, these days I’m wearing City of Orangeburg cufflinks; and I love walking along the North Fork of the Edisto River, the longest free-flowing blackwater river in North America; and every chance I get, I stop to smell the magnificent roses right here in Orangeburg.

The point of the quick tour through the mountains of the Upstate is to get us thinking about reservoirs. “Reservoir” is a French word for “storehouse,” a place where what you need is stored up, reserved for when you need it. Let me show you a set of reservoirs from the time of Jesus. Out in the Judean wilderness, down near the southernmost tip of the Dead Sea, there is a massive, rocky outcropping called Masada. It rises over 1,400 feet above the Dead Sea. On top of Masada, Herod the Great of biblical fame built a luxurious three-level palace and a nearly impregnable fortress.

One of the most impressive parts of Herod’s Masada was its water-storage system. Masada is located 20 miles from the nearest source of fresh water, so Herod’s engineers designed and excavated twelve huge cisterns—underground reservoirs—carved out of solid rock and plastered from top to bottom to keep them from leaking. They were fed by rainwater and could hold some 40,000 cubic meters of water. That’s more than 10.5 million gallons, enough to provide Masada with drinking water for an entire year and to fill Herod’s several swimming pools and Roman-style bathhouses and to provide irrigation for small-scale agriculture.

I call your attention to Herod’s cisterns at Masada to remind you that in addition to external reservoirs—lakes laid out on land—there are also internal reservoirs, cisterns carved out on the inside. Do you have an internal reservoir? Do you have a spiritual cistern? Do you have a place where you are able to store up, to reserve, what you need to sustain your relationship with God, even in the dry seasons of your life? Do you have a place where “the Spirit of God dwells in you”?

In last Sunday’s sermon, I encouraged you to “Receive the Holy Spirit,” as Jesus says in the gospel of John (20:22), to embrace the constant, continuing, empowering, and purifying presence of God in your life. Next Sunday, I will begin a series of series on what the apostle Paul calls “the fruit of the Spirit” (Galatians 5:22). Jesus says, “Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit.” (John 15:5). In Romans 7:4, the apostle Paul says that we are to “bear fruit for God.” This morning, I want you to consider what it is going to take for you to “bear fruit for God,” as Paul says, and “to bear much fruit,” as Jesus puts it.

One of the distinctive things about the cultivation of fruit is that fruit-bearing shrubs and trees don’t spring up quickly like the grasses and flowers of the field. Fruit-bearing plants grow and bear slowly over a long period of time, and they require reliable and sustained sources of water to bear fruit. Do you have a reservoir, a spiritual cistern within you, so that you can provide reliable and sustained irrigation to your life to bear fruit, as Jesus and Paul say? Especially in the dry seasons of our lives, we need spiritual reservoirs, deep cisterns within us for the Spirit of God to dwell in us.

Sometimes we think of the Spirit of God as a force or power that comes to us from far away, like the rain-bearing storms that sweep across the United States from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic, or the ones that flow up from the south out of the Gulf of Mexico or from the Gulfstream of the Atlantic. In that way of thinking, the Spirit of comes to us intermittently, unpredictably, from somewhere far away. Other times, we think of the Spirit of God as located somewhere not so far away where we can gain access to it more consistently than just waiting for it to rain down on us from above. For example, we keep a goodly pool of the Holy Spirit right here at 1240 Russell Street on The Square in Orangeburg. This room, this congregation, is a reservoir for the Holy Spirit. Whenever we need a little or a lot, we can come here to get it, right? Those are common ways of thinking about the Spirit of God, and both of them reflect something true and authentic and entirely biblical about the way we experience the Holy Spirit.

But in this morning’s New Testament lesson, the apostle Paul offers a third way of thinking about the Spirit when he says in Romans 8:9, “the Spirit of God dwells in you.” “The Spirit of God dwells in you.” Paul says that the Spirit of God does not come to us intermittently or unpredictably from someplace far away. Paul says that the Spirit of God is not in some location where we must go to experience it there. Paul says the Spirit of God is in you. “For those who are in Christ Jesus,” Paul says in Romans 8:9, “the Spirit of God dwells in you.”

Now, Paul didn’t invent that idea. He got it from his Bible, the Jewish Scriptures, what we Christians now call the “Old Testament.” In Ezekiel 36:7, in this morning’s Old Testament lesson, God promises, “I will put my spirit within you”; and so in 1 Corinthians 3:16, the apostle Paul asks, “Do you not know that you are God’s temple, and that God’s Spirit dwells in you?” Not far away. Not just in this place. In you.

How about you? This morning I want you to think about how much room there is in you for the Holy Spirit. Is there room for the Holy Spirit in you? Or are you so busy, crowded cluttered and distracted on the inside that the only room for the Holy Spirit in your life is on your outside? Or maybe in your case, it’s not busy-ness or clutter or distraction, but you are simply impervious to the Spirit. You are one of those folks who doesn’t let anything inside you. Your insides are like the rock of Masada before Herod’s engineers went to work carving out the cisterns. Is there room for the Holy Spirit in you?

The great 16-century Spanish pastor and reformer and mystic, John of the Cross, spoke of “deep caverns of the soul” (Living Flame, 3.18). He said, “The capacity of these caverns is deep, because that which they can hold is deep and infinite; and that is God” (Living Flame, 3.22). God becomes present “wherever [God] finds space,” John said (Living Flame, 1.15).

According to John of the Cross, most people who struggle to “find God” present and active in their lives just haven’t made room for God. They haven’t cleared the space in their lives and in their souls for God who always becomes present “wherever [God] finds space.” John writes sadly of people who come to God but then “leave God just as they came.” They “leave God just as they came because their hands were already full, and they could not take what God was giving” (Letter dated 11/18/1586).

If we want to experience God’s presence and activity in our lives—not intermittently and unpredictably, not somewhere we must go to find go, but with us and in us day and night, day-by-day and hour-by-hour—then we must create space for God in our lives. We must carve out or expand our internal reservoirs, our spiritual cisterns, for the Holy Spirit of God to “dwell in us” to irrigate our lives so that we may “bear fruit,” as Jesus says, even in the dry seasons and the droughts that come our way in life.

Creating space for God, making room for God to dwell in us, takes three things. First, it takes vision. Vision. Vision is the capacity to see an alternative future. Some people never make room for God in their lives because they cannot see beyond the conditions and the circumstances of the present. Whether the conditions of the present are desperate and degrading or comfortable and convenient, some people cannot imagine, see, envision, a life with God and in God and God in them any different than the life they are living. It takes vision to motivate us to take the necessary steps to dedicate precious time and energy and resources and interior space to prepare for bearing fruit, fruit that will last, in our lives. Some people never develop interior reservoirs, spiritual cisterns, because they never see the need.

The truth is, interior space may not be necessary to sustain physical existence at some level or another. Human beings can survive without it, as some of us here this morning are living testimony. But there is a huge difference between surviving and thriving. When Jesus said that we are capable of bearing much fruit, he was not using an image of subsistence farming, of merely scratching out an existence from the land. In a dry and rocky region of the world, the Palestinian landscape of Jesus’ day, “fruit” is an image of opulence, luxury, the abundant blessing of God.

In Ezekiel 36, God says, “I will summon the grain and make it abundant. . . . I will make the fruit of the tree and the produce of the field abundant, so that you may never again suffer.” In gospel of John, Jesus does not say, “I came that they may have life and barely survive at it.” No. Jesus said, “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly” (John 10:10). Bearing fruit is a sign and symbol of that quality of life that Jesus calls “abundant.” Vision is the capacity to see or imagine a new quality of life that God offers us in Jesus Christ and in the Holy Spirit in us in order to motivate us to move toward a better future with God and in God and God in us.

In addition to vision, creating space for God, making room for God to dwell in us, takes will. Will. It takes an act of extraordinary will to build a reservoir. Because Orangeburg takes its water from the free-flowing North Fork of the Edisto, you may not have experienced the battles of will among civic and business leaders and the general citizenry that are necessary to set land aside for submersion. Bev and I were living in the Research Triangle of North Carolina when the B. Everett Jordan Dam was built to create Jordan Lake in Chatham County and when the Cane Creek Reservoir was under development in Orange County. It’s not a pretty sight when a municipality or a county determines that it is necessary to take a Carolinian’s land away to put it under water.

“They’re stealin’ my granddaddy’s farm!” we heard, and they were. “Our gubbermint’s finishin’ what Sherman started! He burned it, and they’re drownin’ it.” And they were. Whether we are talking about literal reservoirs or spiritual reservoirs, it takes an act of extraordinary will to create them. The parts of your life that need to be claimed and cleared—cut down and bulldozed—to make room for the Holy Spirit in you will fight back, I promise you. Nature abhors a vacuum. The laws of physics favor inertia. The status quo always resists change. It takes an act of extraordinary will to create internal reservoirs, spiritual cisterns, for the Holy Spirit. You have to decide—and decide again and again and again against the resistance you will experience—that making room for God in your life is worth the effort.

And that brings us to Work. Vision, Will, and Work. In addition to an act of extraordinary will, it takes an enormous amount of work to make room for God in your life. The reservoirs that we know as Cane Creek and Jordan Lake and Keowee and North Saluda and Table Rock didn’t happen on their own, any more than those enormous cisterns in the rocky outcropping of Masada did. There are spiritual analogies to acquiring the land and clearing it, building the dams, reinforcing the shoreline, or cutting the rock and lining the cisterns with plaster. It takes years and years and years of work to build adequate reservoirs, to cut sufficient cisterns to provide water for the dry seasons and the droughts.

Some people start out with the best of intentions. They try some worship; they try some Bible study; they try some quiet-time devotions; they try some prayer. They try for a while, and then they abandon the enterprise because they didn’t get filled up quick enough to satisfy them. “It just didn’t happen for me,” they say. “I went a few times, but I didn’t really feel anything happening.” Of course you didn’t. The hard truth is it takes years.

You have to acquire the interior ground; you have to clear it of obstructions; you have to reinforce the shoreline and dam up the outflow. And even then, after years of work, when the reservoir is ready, it takes more than a single rainy season to fill a reservoir or cistern large enough to carry you through the dry season and the droughts. It takes years and years of dedicated and determined effort in faith and in works, in worship and in Bible study, in fellowship and in prayer, in repentance and in confession, in forgiveness and in reconciliation, to create space for God, to make room for the Spirit to dwell in us so that when the dry season arrives or when the drought sets in, we are steadfast in our faith; we are tenacious in our hope; and we are unfailing in our love. Nothing less will do if you want do what Jesus says: “Receive the Holy Spirit” (John 20:22), and “Bear much fruit” (John 15:5).

Engage your Vision, your Will, and your Work to make room for the Spirit to dwell in you. Start today: acquiring and clearing the land, building the dam, reinforcing the shoreline, carving out the rock and lining it with plaster, to be filled with the Holy Spirit. Start today.

Copyrighted © 2012 by Jeffrey S. Rogers. It may be copied or disseminated for non-commercial use, provided this notice is included. The author can be contacted at jeffrogers110@bellsouth.net.