Audio of Pastor Darren Cowdrey's weekly message, as we work together toward fulfilling our mission statement: "Setting a Course for a Better Life."
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The bright spot in our Lenten journey through Les Misérables has arrived as we explore God's gift of love through the romantic relationship between Cosette and Marius. Their love story unfolds against a backdrop of revolution and upheaval, offering a glimpse of hope amid darkness.
Victor Hugo's masterpiece reveals multiple dimensions of love throughout its narrative. We witness romantic love between young Cosette and Marius, familial love through Fantine's ultimate sacrifice for her daughter, and agape love (godly, selfless love) when Jean Valjean rescues Marius from the barricade despite his personal desire to keep Cosette for himself. What's remarkable is how these seemingly different expressions of love share a common foundation.
Turning to 1 Corinthians 13, we discover Paul's powerful message to an overconfident Corinthian church. His profound contrasts cut through spiritual pride: speaking in angelic tongues without love makes one merely "a noisy gong"; understanding all mysteries and possessing mountain-moving faith without love means "you are nothing." These aren't harsh judgments but urgent reminders that love must be our foundation.
This message resonates perfectly with Les Misérables' character journeys. Jean Valjean's transformation culminates when he sets aside his desires to save Marius for Cosette's happiness. Similarly, we're challenged to examine whether we've merely intellectualized love rather than allowing it to transform us spiritually. Have we become like that Corinthian church – convinced we have everything figured out while missing love's deeper reality?
The wisdom shared by our long-married congregants – some celebrating 40, 50, even 60 years together – confirms what both Scripture and Hugo teach us: authentic love requires profound humility. This virtue appears essential whether we're discussing agape love, familial bonds, or romantic relationships like Cosette and Marius.
Join us as we continue discovering how these timeless stories illuminate our spiritual journey. If you've found value in this exploration, we'd love for you to share your own reflections on how love and humility have intersected in your life.
I'm glad that you are all here. So we've been walking through this Les Mis series and just to remind ourselves a little bit. 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. Then we moved to Javert, the law, the authority who leaned into justice. 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. 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. But today, this chapter is the bright spot in the middle of Lent. 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. So are you rooting for him? Right? We have to root for him a little bit in this thing for sure. Well, remember Cosette. Her life starts out pretty rough. She's the daughter of Fantine, remember the one single mother who tried to make it and just didn't quite make it. 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. 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. Here's about Cosette, this young daughter that she was trying to get back with. So Valjean commits to finding Cosette right and takes her with him and begins to raise her as his own. But in all of that turmoil he ends up having to escape to hide again. If you'll remember, Valjean is actually still a criminal and so the justice, javert, is always hunting. And so in all this turmoil of getting Cosette, well, he starts getting exposed again. So they have to go hide. They hide in this monastery. 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. 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. So he takes her away again. 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. Well, the aristocracy would be haves. But he starts to wrestle with this idea of how that works. 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. But when Valjean realizes that this is happening, he gets spooked. 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. He jumps into the rebellion with both feet. 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. Everybody's there for kind of weird purposes. You think they're there for this rebellion, but everybody else has this other thing too. Valjean's checking out Marius. He wants to know if Cosette really ought to love him. Javert is in disguise trying to undermine the rebellion but also find Valjean. Marius is kind of in there, he's fighting but really he's just upset that he's lost Cosette. Everybody's kind of in these mixed emotions, this mixed stage of we're rebelling kinda, until Gavroche, the young kid. He gets killed as the battle begins on either side of the barricade and everybody straightens up and says wait a minute. The innocent kid gets killed. 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. He rescues Marius, brings Marius back to where he can heal and be made well. But it's worthwhile noting that Marius doesn't know. It's Valjean that saves him. So they start their life together. Valjean is a patriarch of sorts. 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. And so Marius starts to pull cassette away from this bad guy, valjean. And it's not until the very end that Marius learns that it was Valjean who actually saved him. 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. And there's your light and your shining hope. Isn't that fun. All right, what are we 10 minutes in? 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. 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. We have romantic love, obviously, with Marius and Cosette, but there's familial love too. 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. 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. So you see, all these different love representations, and the interesting thing to me is how those representations, those understandings, start to overlap. How are they the same? 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? 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. Seriously, yeah, okay, there we go, all right. A couple of you are honest, the rest of you? What would you have read up there, besides the love passage? For gosh sakes, my goodness, love is patient, love is kind. It just takes me right to weddings when I hear this passage. I really do appreciate it. So this is Paul, all right, I can't think of anything funny to say. I'm usually good with something about sirens, and no, it's not there. Anyone Say a prayer, someone's having a bad day. There we go, all right.
Pastor Darren:
Today's not the day of prayer. Is it the day of prayer?
Pastor Darren:
May. Every time I hear a siren. Oh well, there you go, you're right. Maybe that's our invitation when you hear a siren, to say a little prayer because somebody's in danger. All right, with the siren having moved on jumping back into 1 Corinthians 13. 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. You know, it's good for us to remember this is early, early church. They're just figuring out how to be church at this point. It's this new understanding of coming together, this new way of worshiping, this new direction to God and this group in Corinth. 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. It's interesting too, pastor Matt, who wrote the book we're working through. He talks about Paul sort of feeling his way around it, just throwing things out there. But I have sympathy for Paul, because have you ever tried to define love in words? 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? Right? We've all had that question that we're wrestling with. 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. We're trying to figure out how to do it best. 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. We wrestle with love and understanding exactly what it is. 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. Love is not just a head thing. It's not all about what's going on in your brain.
Pastor Darren:
Listen to the first part of this passage again. If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels. A good thing, yes, if you're speaking the words that angels are bringing to this world and sharing. We assume angels are connected to God, sharing words that are important to us from God. If we are able to speak in those tongues, we're feeling pretty good about ourselves. 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. 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. Do you feel the car just stopping really fast? If you find yourself doing amazing things but don't have love, then you're doing nothing. I hope you're feeling that contrast. 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. You have prophetic powers. You understand all mysteries and all knowledge. Right, he's laying it up thick and high. 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. Strong faith you can have all of this but do not have love. You are nothing.
Pastor Darren:
Do you feel that contrast? I mean Paul's laying it thick here. 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. 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. I'm not owning anything, overly relying on anything. It's very, very selfless. I give away all my possessions. 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. This is what I feel him holding on to here. 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. 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. We've got it wrapped up in our brain and organized in our brain but we're not feeling it. Well then, we're going to stick to it, only as long as it continues to make sense. 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. They've got it all organized At least they believe they've got it figured out. And Paul wants them to know. I'm not sure you figured it out. You might have nothing. You figured it out, you might have nothing. Dr Crouch, in workingpreachercom he points out this description. He says the church's factions seem to exude this attitude. 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. Do you hear that? 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. There's a certain overconfidence. I wouldn't be surprised if people in this room had actually been part of a church like that, that super confidence. We've got it figured out. Certainly not here at United Methodist Church of Westlake Village. We have proper humility here. 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. 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. Because this love that we're talking about, this love that Paul's talking about, it's only the beginning. It gets tougher. 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. Loo k at all the ways we're supposed to be loving. We're supposed to love our enemies. Cardinal fans, Pirate fans, Detroit fans. 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. Paul's talking about it in Romans, etc. Etc. You know what else? We're supposed to love the stranger, love the alien in our midst. If you look through Scripture, it's in Leviticus, the Old Testament. 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. 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. I think this humility might be the uniting principle that is undergirding all of our understandings of love. We've been talking about Agape love and its being essential to godly activity. 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. If we want to know God in our good acts, love needs to be at the center of that. We talk about familial love. 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? Marius and Cosette? What advice would we give them about a successful marriage? What part would humility play in that advice? 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. Anybody up to 35 years of marriage yeah Right.
Pastor Darren:
40? Yeah, all right. How many are right in that 40 range? Well, right in the 40. All right,J ohn, what have you learned? He looked right at her. O h shoot, what am I allowed to say? What better
Pastor Darren:
I say? Humility, an important part of 40 years? I don't know that you get very far. 45 years anybody in that range? 45 years, right, I'll get there. I'll get there A little patience. 45 years I'll get there, I'll get there A little patience. 45 years Humility is that important.
Pastor Darren:
Have we learned that Ken already was humble, so he didn't have to learn it? He's Canadian. Those guys, they were humble from the beginning. Got the Canadian roots All right.
Pastor Darren:
50?, 55? Oh, man, we're still going strong over here. Barb and the Weavers All right. 60? Wow, oh, here we go. All right, what's the secret? You have it figured out? 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. Is humility involved there? Would you tell Marius and Cosette how important that was? Yes, what other words would you use? It's a little too much honesty right here for a Sunday morning. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Oh God, for shame. 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. My name is Marius Pontmercy and mine Cosette Cosette. I don't know wha t to say. Then, make no sound. I am lost. I am found A heart full of light, a heart full of you, and you must never go away. Cosette, Cosette. This is a chain we'll never break. Do we dream we're awake? A heart full of love, a heart full of you... 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.
