Permission to Love

Sermon

Dear confirmands, You did it! You got through the confirmation process of going to the Neels’ cabin and learning the basics of our Christian and Presbyterian tradition. You learned that Dean really likes the “Bee Movie.” You stayed silent when the seven card hit Spicy Uno, and you survived epic games of Mafia narrated by Sarah Neel—except when you didn’t, because she killed you.

And now you’re ready to become an official member of this church. This must really be something you want to do. It’s not like it’s the thing that everyone’s doing at your school. Unlike, say, getting a pair of Nike Dunks, which everyone seems to be wearing, which I know I mention every week at youth group I still want for me.

And the preaching lectionary just happened to come to a scripture passage that happens to summarize in many ways the whole point of this church stuff, the summation of the life of faith. The greatest commandment: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind” and “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

And here is how I would put it: Jesus gives you permission to love. Jesus gives you permission to love.

Now you might be thinking, Why do I need permission to love? Love seems… fine. People write songs about love all the time. It’s obviously the good thing to do, people like being loved, and adults have been telling you since preschool that the best thing to do is love. Why do we need permission to do something we all want, right?

The truth is, the older you get, the more the choice to love, to really love, is the harder thing to do, especially in the face of hardship.

Look at the context of this Bible passage. We are in the final days of Jesus’ life on earth. The Pharisees, the religious leaders, weren’t curious students trying to learn. They were trying to get Jesus killed! And they were trying to trap him into saying something blasphemous. And why did they want to kill him? Because of the way that Jesus loved. Jesus’ love brought him in solidarity with the poor and the oppressed. Jesus’ love challenged the religious powers and the status quo of the Roman Empire. And notably, the act of love that really ticked them off was when Jesus went into the temple and turned over the tables of the moneychangers making money off religion. Love seems great until you touch people’s stuff.

And these same forces play out today. You will be told the choice of love in many situations is unrealistic or upsetting or rocking the boat, and you will be tempted to go down the easier path or do what seems what everyone else finds acceptable. But Jesus gives you permission to love.

I need to start by saying that being given permission to love does not mean you have permission to be irresponsible. You should not follow the whims of every impulse you have. You probably shouldn’t just run away and do something crazy with that crush of yours just because it feeeeeeels like love. You should probably listen to your parents about that thing they keep bugging you about, you should take into consideration whether that dream career you’re thinking of can pay the bills, and yes, when there’s that black-and-white thing you are really, really convinced you have to do or believe in, there are probably things you aren’t considering and you should take a step back to consider them.

These things are true. And. There are things that happen as we grow into adulthood that tend to make us lose sight of the essence of love. And as someone who has been in full-time youth ministry for years, I actually think you as young people, and particularly knowing you, Ella and Fiona and Ella, you have something that I don’t want you to lose as you grow up. Young people often have a clear-eyed understanding of right and wrong, a capacity for passion and loyalty and willingness to give into—in the best ways—the encounter with those emotions and a sense of hope that you will be told is dumb. And Jesus gives you permission to hold onto that and cultivate it in a mature, responsible way.

And I particularly see how society tries to drain the love out of you not just as a teenager but as a teenage girl. For so long, the wants and desires of the teenage girl were deemed frivolous and beneath real important society things, which of course extends into not treating or believing the desires of adult women and non-gender-conforming folks—basically, not men.

It is hard to describe how the pop culture trifecta of the “Barbie” movie, the Beyoncé Renaissance tour, and the Taylor Swift Eras tour, and the honoring of what young women like, would have never happened when I was your age. And as you know, I’m not that old.

Feminist writer and activist Bailey Poland says discussions of what teen girls love often seem to be ripped from 19th- and early-20th-century attitudes about female “hysteria.”

She says, “There’s an underlying assumption that teen girls are not in control of their emotions or interests and become overly excited or upset for no reason. When the reality is that teen girls are often very intentional about what they’re interested in and aware of the social influences behind those media products, and they deliberately use excitement and passion as the foundation for community-building and empathetic development.”

Society treats the passion and dare I say the love of teenage girls the way the man treats Taylor Swift in “All Too Well.”

“And there we are again when nobody had to know
You kept me like a secret, but I kept you like an oath.”

All Taylor Swift wanted was to love openly, but the man kept squashing it, denying it, keeping it a secret.

That’s what society does to teenage girls in particular and therefore ALL people. Society wants us to keep our love a secret. We are human beings with such innate and incredible capacity for LOVE. And we are told, keep it squashed inside, stop it, that’s not the real world, don’t show emotion, don’t be excited about something, don’t be tender, don’t think there’s a way of the world outside of violence and domination.

And that attitude doesn’t just squash teenage girls, it hurts men. Bell hooks wrote about how men want to also live being able to have emotions other than anger, to be tender and compassionate and loving, but society drains the love out of men. I wish as a teenage boy, I was told that I could cry or show emotion and not be called a girl or gay, as if that was bad.

And here’s the thing. That same energy that society throws at teenage girls is the same energy that resists any movement that breaks the status quo, the same energy that resists women and LGBTQ folks and people of color and poor folks from owning their own power, that resists rich white men from owning the true power that comes from inclusion and compassion. When you grow up, and you try to live your authentic self or try to cultivate a better world, you will come up against forces that say Very Serious People who think Very Serious Thoughts actually know how the world works, and you have to conform.

And it is in those moments when you need to know that Jesus gives you permission to love.

When I was about your age, a junior in high school, I lived in Old Bridge, New Jersey, a suburb of New York City. And I will never forget the attacks of September 11, 2001, when terrorists flew planes not just into the Pentagon in Washington, but into the World Trade Center in New York. This was not a far-away news event; I had friends whose parents died that day. My father-in-law worked in one of the buildings and survived by escaping. It was awful.

But just as much, I will never forget what happened in the days afterward. I had friends whisper to me, “I just want to rip the turbans off all the Muslims.” Muslim teenagers were afraid. And the adults riled kids up, saying in social-studies classrooms, America deserves bloodlust and revenge. Those adults were riled up by Very Serious adults on TV news and in the halls of the government, with hysterical whims of bombing the brown people into the ground barely masked as intelligent, sophisticated foreign policy. Very Serious Powerful Men are just as emotional as teenage girls; they just have systems hiding it. Even as a teenager, I knew in my guts that bloodlust and revenge can’t be the only way.

As the adults around you talk about what’s happening in Israel and Palestine, and what this country with its influence in the world can do, let yourself wonder if there is another way besides bloodlust and revenge. Even with geopolitics and American self-interest and all the big words adults hide behind, don’t forget that Jesus gives us permission to frame all those things through the lens of love, and it is good to call for a response rooted in love.

And finally, whether in big societal issues or in the classroom or at home, you should feel confident in choosing love, every single time, because of the foundation of love you already have in God. Flip the greatest commandment around. God loves you with all her heart and mind and strength. God loves neighbor as self.

The Spirit carries the love of all whom Christ has ever dwelt in, the love of grandmothers and great grandmothers of ages past, the love of the bright-eyed groom at the altar at his wedding, the love of the organizer and activist calling for peace, the love of my father-in-law whose laugh and charm lit up every room he went into, all in communion with the love of Jesus who broke bread with outsiders and wouldn’t even let death and persecution stop him from loving us. And that love as expansive as the ocean is also somehow contained individually as a love for you in the depths of your being. That is how much you are loved.

So, dear confirmands, you have permission to love. And if you start to feel pressure to do otherwise, just remember:

The players gonna play, play play play play.
And the haters gonna hate, hate hate hate hate
You’re just gonna shake, shake shake shake shake
Shake it off, shake it off.