Pastor Darren: I'm glad that you are all here.
Pastor Darren: So we've been walking through this Les Mis series and just to remind ourselves a little bit.
Pastor Darren: We started with Jean Valjean, the character that modeled grace for us, not only learning to offer grace, but learning to accept grace and to let it affect the way he acts and the way he lives.
Pastor Darren: Then we moved to Javert, the law, the authority who leaned into justice.
Pastor Darren: It became kind of a contrast to grace and we saw the difficulty in trying to lead a life of pure justice in an imperfect world.
Pastor Darren: We learned about Fantine, who was a character that represented the people who can fall through the cracks of our society, those who can fall into those places where they aren't cared for in our systems, where they are left to figure it out for themselves and often do not.
Pastor Darren: But today, this chapter is the bright spot in the middle of Lent.
Pastor Darren: We are talking about God's gift of love, romantic love, agape love, godly love, and it is modeled in this relationship, this romantic relationship between Cosette and Marius.
Pastor Darren: So are you rooting for him?
Pastor Darren: Right?
Pastor Darren: We have to root for him a little bit in this thing for sure.
Pastor Darren: Well, remember Cosette.
Pastor Darren: Her life starts out pretty rough.
Pastor Darren: She's the daughter of Fantine, remember the one single mother who tried to make it and just didn't quite make it.
Pastor Darren: She was left with this innkeeper and his wife who turned out to be pretty non-reputable, and after an understatement, I guess right, and she ends up with this couple.
Pastor Darren: But Fantine, when ultimately she dies, valjean is able to connect with her and to understand that he actually played a part in Fantine's dying.
Pastor Darren: Here's about Cosette, this young daughter that she was trying to get back with.
Pastor Darren: So Valjean commits to finding Cosette right and takes her with him and begins to raise her as his own.
Pastor Darren: But in all of that turmoil he ends up having to escape to hide again.
Pastor Darren: If you'll remember, Valjean is actually still a criminal and so the justice, javert, is always hunting.
Pastor Darren: And so in all this turmoil of getting Cosette, well, he starts getting exposed again.
Pastor Darren: So they have to go hide.
Pastor Darren: They hide in this monastery.
Pastor Darren: Well, cassette starts to grow a little bit and starts to feel pretty hemmed in, maybe even prison-like circumstance, living in this monastery, hiding.
Pastor Darren: And slowly Valjean lets her kind of get out into the world and she connects with this young man named Marius and the romance, the chemistry, is there right from the beginning and as that romance begins Valjean gets worried again, possibly a self-serving anxiety, in the sense that he had finally learned to love somebody else, a daughter, cassette, and now he might lose her to this Marius into marriage.
Pastor Darren: So he takes her away again.
Pastor Darren: So now I'm going to switch to Marius, just to get you all caught up, because not everybody has read the story or is reading through the book with the rest of us.
Pastor Darren: But Marius, born into aristocracy, so often humanity tends to lean towards haves and have-nots.
Pastor Darren: Well, the aristocracy would be haves.
Pastor Darren: But he starts to wrestle with this idea of how that works.
Pastor Darren: He starts getting sympathy for those who are leading toward revolution, those in the rebelling stage of all of this, and so in the midst of this, he falls for Cosette, although they are mostly in hiding, so they kind of have to be tricky about how they find each other.
Pastor Darren: But when Valjean realizes that this is happening, he gets spooked.
Pastor Darren: He takes her away again.
Pastor Darren: Marius, very upset that this young lady that he loved now doesn't know what to do with his emotions, what to do with his grief.
Pastor Darren: He jumps into the rebellion with both feet.
Pastor Darren: Now he's really ready to fight and he's there, he's at the barricade, and you might appreciate, pastor Matt's, if you're reading the book with us, his description of this barricade, because it's kind of interesting.
Pastor Darren: Everybody's there for kind of weird purposes.
Pastor Darren: You think they're there for this rebellion, but everybody else has this other thing too.
Pastor Darren: Valjean's checking out Marius.
Pastor Darren: He wants to know if Cosette really ought to love him.
Pastor Darren: Javert is in disguise trying to undermine the rebellion but also find Valjean.
Pastor Darren: Marius is kind of in there, he's fighting but really he's just upset that he's lost Cosette.
Pastor Darren: Everybody's kind of in these mixed emotions, this mixed stage of we're rebelling kinda, until Gavroche, the young kid.
Pastor Darren: He gets killed as the battle begins on either side of the barricade and everybody straightens up and says wait a minute.
Pastor Darren: The innocent kid gets killed.
Pastor Darren: I remember why we're here.
Pastor Darren: Battle ensues, marius gets injured in this battle, seriously injured, and Valjean rescues Marius, rescues him most likely because of Cosette, whom he loves as a daughter.
Pastor Darren: He rescues Marius, brings Marius back to where he can heal and be made well.
Pastor Darren: But it's worthwhile noting that Marius doesn't know.
Pastor Darren: It's Valjean that saves him.
Pastor Darren: So they start their life together.
Pastor Darren: Valjean is a patriarch of sorts.
Pastor Darren: Marius and Cosette are now romantic and then Valjean, again feeling guilt, not being able to deal with grace given to him, confesses to Marius about all the bad things that he has done, but none of the good things.
Pastor Darren: And so Marius starts to pull cassette away from this bad guy, valjean.
Pastor Darren: And it's not until the very end that Marius learns that it was Valjean who actually saved him.
Pastor Darren: And they get this climactic scene in which they're able to come to Valjean and acknowledge this super selfless act that he had learned in his full story arc to be a selfless man of grace that not only received it well but shared it well.
Pastor Darren: And there's your light and your shining hope.
Pastor Darren: Isn't that fun.
Pastor Darren: All right, what are we 10 minutes in?
Pastor Darren: And all I did was tell you what happened in the story, all right, well, now I can preach a sermon, because we're all caught up a little bit.
Pastor Darren: Hopefully you're understanding.
Pastor Darren: The theme for today is love itself, and in Les Mis, in this version, we're seeing all the different variations of how love is often played out.
Pastor Darren: We have romantic love, obviously, with Marius and Cosette, but there's familial love too.
Pastor Darren: Probably Fantine is the best, loving her daughter, so much she says I got to figure out how to make this work and does everything she can to try to make sure Cosette gets taken care of.
Pastor Darren: And then I would say agape love, godly love, may be best represented by Valjean in rescuing Marius, even though he kind of wanted Cosette for himself.
Pastor Darren: So you see, all these different love representations, and the interesting thing to me is how those representations, those understandings, start to overlap.
Pastor Darren: How are they the same?
Pastor Darren: We think of romantic love and godly love as being so distinct, and yet are there things that are similar, are there things that they share?
Pastor Darren: And so we're going to do that with 1 Corinthians, 13, 1 through 13.
Pastor Darren: And many of you had this with your wedding.
Pastor Darren: Seriously, yeah, okay, there we go, all right.
Pastor Darren: A couple of you are honest, the rest of you?
Pastor Darren: What would you have read up there, besides the love passage?
Pastor Darren: For gosh sakes, my goodness, love is patient, love is kind.
Pastor Darren: It just takes me right to weddings when I hear this passage.
Pastor Darren: I really do appreciate it.
Pastor Darren: So this is Paul, all right, I can't think of anything funny to say.
Pastor Darren: I'm usually good with something about sirens, and no, it's not there.
Pastor Darren: Anyone Say a prayer, someone's having a bad day.
Pastor Darren: There we go, all right.
Pastor Darren: Today's not the day of prayer.
Pastor Darren: Is it the day of prayer?
Pastor Darren: May.
Pastor Darren: Every time I hear a siren.
Pastor Darren: Oh well, there you go, you're right.
Pastor Darren: Maybe that's our invitation when you hear a siren, to say a little prayer because somebody's in danger.
Pastor Darren: All right, with the siren having moved on jumping back into 1 Corinthians 13.
Pastor Darren: They call it the love passage because he's defining love.
Pastor Darren: This is Paul who wrote the letters that are most of our New Testament, writing to the church in Corinth, who have turned out to be kind of a feisty bunch.
Pastor Darren: You know, it's good for us to remember this is early, early church.
Pastor Darren: They're just figuring out how to be church at this point.
Pastor Darren: It's this new understanding of coming together, this new way of worshiping, this new direction to God and this group in Corinth.
Pastor Darren: They'd become kind of feisty and Paul wanted to help them remember what was really important In all of this.
Pastor Darren: As we lead church, we can do good things, but if you're not doing it with love, you might not be doing it right.
Pastor Darren: It's interesting too, pastor Matt, who wrote the book we're working through.
Pastor Darren: He talks about Paul sort of feeling his way around it, just throwing things out there.
Pastor Darren: But I have sympathy for Paul, because have you ever tried to define love in words?
Pastor Darren: I mean, sometimes we have a hard time even deciding if what we're feeling is love right, when you're getting down to that stage of well, do I want to spend 80 years with him or not?
Pastor Darren: Right?
Pastor Darren: We've all had that question that we're wrestling with.
Pastor Darren: And if you're talking about godly love the wrestling with understanding godly love and how to accept it but also how to share it in the best ways I mean we wrestle with that.
Pastor Darren: We're trying to figure out how to do it best.
Pastor Darren: It's not always easy knowing how to live something like that out, and for me, I count that as job security, because as long as we wrestle with that, I got something to say for 20 minutes on Sunday mornings.
Pastor Darren: We wrestle with love and understanding exactly what it is.
Pastor Darren: So I have sympathy for Paul as he wrestles with it, but he does have this one tight principle this one he's holding on to really, really tightly principle this one he's holding on to really, really tightly and I would say it has something to do with.
Pastor Darren: Love is not just a head thing.
Pastor Darren: It's not all about what's going on in your brain.
Pastor Darren: Listen to the first part of this passage again.
Pastor Darren: If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels.
Pastor Darren: A good thing, yes, if you're speaking the words that angels are bringing to this world and sharing.
Pastor Darren: We assume angels are connected to God, sharing words that are important to us from God.
Pastor Darren: If we are able to speak in those tongues, we're feeling pretty good about ourselves.
Pastor Darren: Right, if I can speak like angels and say the things angels want, said, we're feeling good and yet listen to what Paul does here.
Pastor Darren: If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.
Pastor Darren: You see the counter position there.
Pastor Darren: Do you feel the car just stopping really fast?
Pastor Darren: If you find yourself doing amazing things but don't have love, then you're doing nothing.
Pastor Darren: I hope you're feeling that contrast.
Pastor Darren: He continues on.
Pastor Darren: And if I have prophetic powers, prophetic powers, you're able to again to speak for God, maybe even to look into the future and speak into that future in the way God would have you speak.
Pastor Darren: You have prophetic powers.
Pastor Darren: You understand all mysteries and all knowledge.
Pastor Darren: Right, he's laying it up thick and high.
Pastor Darren: If you have prophetic powers, you understand all mysteries, all knowledge, and if you have faith so as to remove mountains I'm going to call that strong faith, we're moving mountains, removing mountains.
Pastor Darren: Strong faith you can have all of this but do not have love.
Pastor Darren: You are nothing.
Pastor Darren: Do you feel that contrast?
Pastor Darren: I mean Paul's laying it thick here.
Pastor Darren: He's going right at us saying you could have the absolute best, but if you don't have love, you're just playing around.
Pastor Darren: If I give away all my possessions and if I hand over my body so that I may boast Now remember this would be a Christian virtue, especially 2,000 years ago Very selfless, I'm handing everything over, I'm giving it to people who need it.
Pastor Darren: I'm not owning anything, overly relying on anything.
Pastor Darren: It's very, very selfless.
Pastor Darren: I give away all my possessions.
Pastor Darren: This massive contrast that he's trying to get us to understand you could have everything that we in our brains and in our lives see as amazing, but without love it's nothing.
Pastor Darren: This is what I feel him holding on to here.
Pastor Darren: He's trying to tell us at least in my reading, that there's something here that is deeper than our wisdom can reveal, deeper than our brains, our simple minds can take in.
Pastor Darren: We can find the logic in a certain concept or philosophy, in love, but if that's all we found, we've missed what I would call the spiritual reality of that concept of that philosophy.
Pastor Darren: We've got it wrapped up in our brain and organized in our brain but we're not feeling it.
Pastor Darren: Well then, we're going to stick to it, only as long as it continues to make sense.
Pastor Darren: Not because it touched our hearts.
Pastor Darren: The church in Corinth it kind of gets characterized, as you read through the letter, as this church that feels like it has it all figured out.
Pastor Darren: They've got it all organized At least they believe they've got it figured out.
Pastor Darren: And Paul wants them to know.
Pastor Darren: I'm not sure you figured it out.
Pastor Darren: You might have nothing.
Pastor Darren: You figured it out, you might have nothing.
Pastor Darren: Dr Crouch, in workingpreachercom he points out this description.
Pastor Darren: He says the church's factions seem to exude this attitude.
Pastor Darren: We are right Pillars of the church, beacons of truth, giants of faith, and we tower above you people who are not one of us.
Pastor Darren: Do you hear that?
Pastor Darren: How he's describing, how we see Paul describing this church in Corinth, why he feels he needs to write this passage to this church?
Pastor Darren: I think that we might possibly have even had engagements with churches like that Kind of feel like they've got it rigged.
Pastor Darren: There's a certain overconfidence.
Pastor Darren: I wouldn't be surprised if people in this room had actually been part of a church like that, that super confidence.
Pastor Darren: We've got it figured out.
Pastor Darren: Certainly not here at United Methodist Church of Westlake Village.
Pastor Darren: We have proper humility here.
Pastor Darren: But you know that church the type of church it might be greatly proud of its mission program but rarely engaging with anyone that they're serving this kind of church might feel good about itself, so good about itself that it doesn't really reach out or share the witness that they've come to understand, the love that they've come to understand about God, just pleased with who they are.
Pastor Darren: It might be that kind of church.
Pastor Darren: And the message I think to that kind of church, and when we become that kind of people, is that this passage may be better characterized not as the love passage but the humility passage, the passage that wants us to remember how important it is that we understand not just the logic of it but have some deeper sense of the love that lay underneath it, that we have it so strong that even when we start wrestling with it, we still trust that it lay within our hearts.
Pastor Darren: Because this love that we're talking about, this love that Paul's talking about, it's only the beginning.
Pastor Darren: It gets tougher.
Pastor Darren: Paul also tells us w ell, many people tell us in our scripture, and if we're going to look at a full context of scripture.
Pastor Darren: Loo k at all the ways we're supposed to be loving.
Pastor Darren: We're supposed to love our enemies.
Pastor Darren: Cardinal fans, Pirate fans, Detroit fans.
Pastor Darren: We got to love them all.
Pastor Darren: It's not easy, but listen in scripture it says this in Matthew, in Luke, 1 Peter, in the Hebrew Bible, old Testament, Exodus, Proverbs.
Pastor Darren: Paul's talking about it in Romans, etc.
Pastor Darren: Etc.
Pastor Darren: You know what else?
Pastor Darren: We're supposed to love the stranger, love the alien in our midst.
Pastor Darren: If you look through Scripture, it's in Leviticus, the Old Testament.
Pastor Darren: It's in Deuteronomy, it's in the letter to the Hebrews, letter to the Romans, it's in the gospel of Matthew, et cetera, et cetera.
Pastor Darren: That love that Paul is calling us to, it's big, it's tough.
Pastor Darren: It's the center of so much of what we're supposed to be understanding, or at least trying to understand, about how to live here, how to live well, how to live abundantly.
Pastor Darren: I think this humility might be the uniting principle that is undergirding all of our understandings of love.
Pastor Darren: We've been talking about Agape love and its being essential to godly activity.
Pastor Darren: We have to have love for God and love for others in order to truly be experiencing what God wants us to experience in that love, in that sharing.
Pastor Darren: If we want to know God in our good acts, love needs to be at the center of that.
Pastor Darren: We talk about familial love.
Pastor Darren: If we don't embrace humility in our relationships, we're likely only to love others for what we can make them, not who they are, which really isn't that just a celebration of ourselves and not God, not the other person?
Pastor Darren: And what about romantic love?
Pastor Darren: Marius and Cosette?
Pastor Darren: What advice would we give them about a successful marriage?
Pastor Darren: What part would humility play in that advice?
Pastor Darren: I know Brenda and I were sneaking up on 32 years of marriage, but I think we're probably babies in this room with that.
Pastor Darren: Anybody up to 35 years of marriage yeah Right.
Pastor Darren: 40?
Pastor Darren: Yeah, all right.
Pastor Darren: How many are right in that 40 range?
Pastor Darren: Well, right in the 40.
Pastor Darren: All right,J ohn, what have you learned?
Pastor Darren: He looked right at her.
Pastor Darren: O h shoot, what am I allowed to say?
Pastor Darren: What better
Pastor Darren: I say?
Pastor Darren: Humility, an important part of 40 years?
Pastor Darren: I don't know that you get very far.
Pastor Darren: 45 years anybody in that range?
Pastor Darren: 45 years, right, I'll get there.
Pastor Darren: I'll get there A little patience.
Pastor Darren: 45 years I'll get there, I'll get there A little patience.
Pastor Darren: 45 years Humility is that important.
Pastor Darren: Have we learned that Ken already was humble, so he didn't have to learn it?
Pastor Darren: He's Canadian.
Pastor Darren: Those guys, they were humble from the beginning.
Pastor Darren: Got the Canadian roots All right.
Pastor Darren: 50?
Pastor Darren: , 55?
Pastor Darren: Oh, man, we're still going strong over here.
Pastor Darren: Barb and the Weavers All right.
Pastor Darren: 60?
Pastor Darren: Wow, oh, here we go.
Pastor Darren: All right, what's the secret?
Pastor Darren: You have it figured out?
Pastor Darren: Well, I know Phil's not going to tell me because he's an engineer, but Jeanie, I think Jeanie will tell me what's the secret.
Pastor Darren: Is humility involved there?
Pastor Darren: Would you tell Marius and Cosette how important that was?
Pastor Darren: Yes, what other words would you use?
Pastor Darren: It's a little too much honesty right here for a Sunday morning.
Pastor Darren: Keep on loving each other, amen, amen, amen.
Pastor Darren: Well, my friends, I feel like what we're trying to learn from Les Mis, what we're trying to learn from our scripture, from Paul, is just the importance of recognizing that there is something larger than any of us.
Pastor Darren: God has offered and put amongst us the truth of love, and it's going to be something we're only getting tastes of, but they'll be blessed tastes.
Pastor Darren: Let's keep ourselves humbled so that we can always be accessing that love in the ways that God wants us to know that love.
Pastor Darren: Let's not get overconfident about thinking we have it figured out, but remember God is always leading us, god is always guiding us, god is always guiding us.
Pastor Darren: We're going to share our musical offering today, a Heart Full of Love, and I invite you in this time to be reflecting on the significance of love in your own life, both Agape love, but maybe in particular, the romantic love that Marius and Cosette share in this song
Travis Nunn & Simone Dorrough: A heart full of love, a heart full of song.
Travis Nunn & Simone Dorrough: I'm doing everything all wrong.
Travis Nunn & Simone Dorrough: Oh God, for shame.
Travis Nunn & Simone Dorrough: I do not even know your name, dear mademoiselle, won't you say, will you tell A heart full of love, no fear, no regret.
Travis Nunn & Simone Dorrough: My name is Marius Pontmercy and mine Cosette Cosette.
Travis Nunn & Simone Dorrough: I don't know wha t to say.
Travis Nunn & Simone Dorrough: Then, make no sound.
Travis Nunn & Simone Dorrough: I am lost.
Travis Nunn & Simone Dorrough: I am found A heart full of light, a heart full of you, and you must never go away.
Travis Nunn & Simone Dorrough: Cosette, Cosette.
Travis Nunn & Simone Dorrough: This is a chain we'll never break.
Travis Nunn & Simone Dorrough: Do we dream we're awake?
Travis Nunn & Simone Dorrough: A heart full of love, a heart full of you.
Travis Nunn & Simone Dorrough: .
Travis Nunn & Simone Dorrough: A single look and then I knew, I knew it too, From today, every day, for it isn't a dream, not a dream after all.