Do you remember when you were a kid on the playground, engrossed in a game of tag or kickball or soccer, and do you remember how, if the game wasn't going your way, if a close play benefited the other team, or a controversial call went against you, do you remember how you would cry out, "Do over; it's a do over!" Did you ever do that when you were little? Don't you wish it still worked? [Laughter] Well, I'm hoping it does today because today's sermon is a little bit of a do-over of sorts, a second try. Because the first time I preached it, I didn't quite get a chance to complete the thought. As a result I've had lots of questions about it, lots of strong reactions to the sermon, both positive and negative. The sermon in question, the one I'd like to clarify, was the one I preached just last month on September 10, homecoming Sunday. If you were here that Sunday, you'll remember that I told a story during that sermon, a story that subsequently has proven to be the source of some contention.

So I'd like to begin today by telling that story again, and being a little more clear about what I mean when I tell it. You know, it never hurts to hear a good story more than once. The story that some of you remember dates back to the Third Century and a band of monks who lived in a community out in the desert of North Africa. It goes like this.

One day, Abba Agathon was walking through the desert on his way into town to sell figurines that he'd made in order to have money to buy provisions for his community. But on his way into town that day, Abba Agathon met a man lying in the brush by the side of the road, paralyzed from the waist down. The man asked the abba, "Father, where are you going?" And Agathon replied, "To town, to sell my wares." "Do me the favor of carrying me into town." Now Abba Agathon was a good and pious man and knew his religious duty, so gladly he took the man who, as I mentioned the first time I told the story, wasn't a small man, and took him up onto his back and carried him three miles through the desert into town. As he approached the town the man said "Just put me down in the market where you'll sell your wares," and Agathon did just that.

Not too long afterwards, when Abba Agathon sold his first figurine, the man asked him, "How much did you sell that for?" And when Agathon told him the price, the other man said "With that money, buy me a cake." And he bought him a cake. Then Abba Agathon sold another of his figurines and the man again asked, "How much did you sell that one for?" When he told him, the man said "Buy me some clothes with your profits." And, though the monk thought the man a tad presumptuous for asking, he bought him a brand new suit of clothes.

Well on and on it went, all day long, each time Agathon sold a figurine the man would ask for something more until, at the end of the day, Agathon had sold all of his goods and had absolutely nothing to show for it, nothing to bring back to his community. And still the man asked, "Won't you do me the favor, good father, of carrying me back to the place where you picked me up this morning?" So, once again, Abba Agathon drew the man up onto his back, this time with all the possessions he'd garnered throughout the day and took him three miles through the desert and laid him down by the side of the road where he had picked him up that morning. And, as Agathon was leaving, the man said to him, "Abba Agathon, bless you." And raising his eyes, Agathon saw that it had been no man, but an angel come to test him.

Now, if you were here last month when I told that sorry, you'll remember that when I finished it there was an awkward silence, followed by nervous laughter. None of us seems quite sure what to make of this strange story. Or, if we thought we did know what it meant, many of us didn't like the moral. And I admitted that the day when I had first heard the story it had made me angry too. But that after tracing that anger back to its source, I concluded that the story had some value. For me, the story reveals what I have always feared and always secretly known about love, which is that it will demand more of us than we will willingly give. It reminded me that love asks much of us and then asks some more, and then still more, and that there will be times when we are called to love even when it doesn't feel good.

Our conventional understanding of love is that it's a feeling, a warm emotion, and certainly that's one dimension of love. But what the story is trying to tell us, I think, is that when considered spiritually, love isn't only a feeling. It's an ethic, a discipline, a spiritual practice and, like other spiritual practices, it will only bear fruit when it's repeated over and over again, with intentionality, even when we don't feel like it. We can't rely merely on good feelings to carry us through. Love, as an emotion, is not strong enough, in and of itself, to redeem us. But when that emotion is coupled with love as a discipline, and a life-long intentional practice, well that's another possibility.

Now that's about as far as I got last month and people reacted to the sermon immediately and intensely. Generally there were two kinds of responses. For instance there were couples who approached me after church, holding hands, saying to me, "Yes, Rob, we learned long ago; we wouldn't be here together today if we hadn't learned that love was a discipline." And there were others who came to me and said "Rob, thanks for reminding me what's gotten me through so long in my struggles for peace and for justice; sometimes I need reminding.

But then there was a different kind of reaction, and it was also fairly prominent. It went something like this: "Rob, what exactly were you suggesting by that story? That we love until we have nothing left? What about Agathon's responsibilities to his community and to himself? Please don't tell me that the religious life demands that we just give and give and give until we're spent! Aren't there legitimate limits to our love?"

I want to respond this morning to that question of love's limits, because throughout my ministry at All Souls people have brought this question to me over and over again and I've always struggled with how to respond in that situation. I've struggled with how to respond in a way that is both caring and loving to the person who has come to me and that is also faithful to the larger demands of love. Because as I see it there are two sides to the story here. On the one hand, there are among us those who feel completely tapped out, exhausted. They give of themselves at home, they give of themselves at work, they give of themselves at church and in the community. They are, it seems, engaged in the work of love twenty-four/seven. And then I come along and I tell them the story about Abba Agathon and they ask, "My god, what more do you want from me?" And it's a fair question, because when we find ourselves in this position of giving until we are spent, then sometimes we do need another message. Sometimes we need a story that helps us balance a love for others with a love and caring for ourselves.

But I know there's another side of the story too. I know it from my own experience, just how easy it is for us to draw the boundaries of our love too close and to convince ourselves that we're not. This, is seems to me, is the perennial human error. And it's a particular danger, I think, for those of us who are fortunate enough to be able to go home every day to a comfortable home with four walls and a hearth and to there retreat from the demands of the world into a protected domestic sphere, to pull back from the demands of the world. For those of us in this position, we need a story like Abba Agathon's to remind us that the demands of love will stretch us beyond our comfort zone.

So I try to lay out for people when they come to me why I'm torn on this issue of how to respond to them, and they get that, and then they say to me, "But Rob, tell me, how do I know? How do I know if I fall into the first category or the second category? Can you show me where that fine line is in my own life, the legitimate limits of my love and responsibility to the world?" And this is where my counseling always falls short, because I don't believe that I can tell people where that line is for them. I don't believe I can tell you where that line is for you; all I can say is that I think for each one of us finding that line is one of the most important religious questions that we face. What are the limits of my care and my responsibility?

There is, however, a guide that I use when trying to find this balance for myself. It's a rule of thumb that I find helpful. Just about every religion offers some version of what is called in Christianity, "The Golden Rule." It's a simple rule: "To love God with all our heart and mind and body, and to love our neighbor as ourselves." We hear it all the time and, maybe because we hear it so often, it seems kind of trite to us. But for all its simplicity, there is really a brilliant truth to this little rule.

The admonition to love our neighbors as ourselves really forces us to see those two loves as balanced in our lives. I imagine that it was originally written as a corrective to the perennial human error of loving ourselves too much. It was telling us that if you're not loving the other as much as yourself, then something's out of whack. But it works just as well the opposite way, because what that rule teaches us is that if we don't have love and care for ourselves, we will have nothing to give the other, nothing to give the stranger. It suggests that the two are vitally connected.

But even more important in that little golden rule, I think, is the first half of the rule, to love God with all our heart and our mind and our body. Because you see, if you just take the last part of the rule, the love of self and love of other, then loving becomes kind of this balancing of the scale. It's as if love is this finite pie and that the only decision in our life is where to slice that pie up so that everyone gets the amount of love that they deserve. What the first half of the rule reminds us is that the pie is not finite because it's through our relationship with the holy, it's through our relationship with the spirit of life, that we come to know that our love can grow. That is the source of love in our life that we can tap back into so that the limits of our love expand, so that we're not just dividing up a finite piece of love. The holy is how the pie grows; it's how our love expands.

In our opening hymn this morning, we sang these words, "I've got love like an ocean, I've got love like an ocean, I've got love like an ocean in my soul." And I know it doesn't often feel that way, but I believe those words are true, that somewhere in our souls, somewhere at the center of our lives, is this source of love, plentiful, like an ocean. When we are in touch with that source, then we can find the strength to engage in the lifelong, ever-expanding discipline of learning how to love better.

May those refreshing waters surround us and replenish us as we seek to grow in love.

Amen.