Assembly at St Edwards School
Monday 10th January, 8:50am
Theme “Love”

I like films that make you feel good. One of my favourites is a film called Forest Gump which tells the story of a man with learning difficulties (in earlier years we would have said he was mentally handicapped). Forest grows up in America in the 1950’s & 1960’s and somehow seems to get himself involved in all the significant events of that time. We learn that it is was Forest that taught Elvis Presley his distinctive way of dancing and Forest who alerts the world to the fact that President Nixon is a crook.
Throughout the film Forest has an ongoing friendship with a girl named Jenny. Unlike Forest Jenny is of normal intelligence and it first it seems like it is she who is the one who is taking care of Forest but as the film progresses we find that more and more it is Forest who takes care of her. She is battered, exploited and used by everyone she meets with the sole exception of Forest. She spends most of her life searching for love without realising that she has it in Forest. He alone really cares about her and when she is discovers that she is dying of AIDS it to Forest she turns, and he is the one who cares for her through her last days.
Towards the end of the film, after Jenny has died, we hear Forest talking and he gives what seems to be a summery of what the film is really about. “I may not be a cleaver man”, he says, “but I know what love is”. And we who watch the film realize that this simple man somehow seems to have got things right where more complicated people miss the point.
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I’ve been asked to talk to you today about love, and it’s a big subject. A man named C.S.Lewis wrote a book in which he outlined four different meanings for the word love. Love he said can mean sexual attraction, it can mean friendship, affection and finally the kind of love that God has for his people.
One of the problems that we have when we talk about love is that people mix up the different kinds of love. The think that love is something that happens to them, a feeling, but it’s not really like that.
One day a man came to Jesus and asked him what the most important rules were that we find written in the Bible. Jesus told him that the most important rules were that we should love God and love our fellow human beings. Now if love is just a feeling Jesus words make no sense at all. It is as ridiculous to command someone to feel love as it is to command them to feel hungry or happy or tired. You either are or are not hungry, or happy or tired and someone ordering you to be any of those things can make no difference to whether you actually feel them or not. The same would be true if love were just a feeling, no matter how emphatically you commanded it orders cannot change the way someone feels.
What orders can change is the way someone acts. And that makes sense of what Jesus is saying. He is not saying that we feel in particular way but that we should act in a particular way. If we are ordered that we should love God above all things it means that we should act as though God were the most important person in our lives and give him the first place in all that we do. If we are ordered to love our fellow human beings in the same way as love ourselves it means we need to act as though their needs were just as important as ours, to act towards them as we would like them to act towards us.
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In the film, Forest seems to understand this despite the fact that he’s not a cleaver man. Poor Jenny spend most of her life missing this truth. And the sad thing is that in doing so it is herself that she hurts most of all.
So let me leave you with this thought. Love is not a feeling but an attitude. You can’t change your feelings but you can change the way you act. If you took seriously the command to love God and to love other people how would that change the way you acted?
Let us pray:
O Lord, who has taught us
That all our doings without love are nothing worth,
Send forth Your Holy Spirit
And pour into our hearts that most excellent gift of love,
The very bond of peace and of all virtues
Without which, whoever lives is counted dead before You.
Grant this for the sake of Your only Son,
Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.