Augustine Orviston is the main character in a novel by David James Duncan titled “The River Why.” For those of us who grew up alongside a blue ribbon trout stream and occasionally were able to make a visit to Dan Bailey’s Fly Shop in Livingston, Montana, the name is a giveaway about the novel. Orvis is a company that now probably sells more clothing than fishing gear, but when I was a kid, it was known as a source for split bamboo fly rods - a piece of fishing equipment that we knew we could not afford, but nonetheless got our attention each time we went into the store. If you have a whole lot of money and are really into fishing, you can still pay $3,500 for a fly rod from Orvis. The name, however, is a very small detail in the novel, which came out after I was an adult and a father and was quite comfortable fishing with low-priced equipment. In the book he is occasionally referred to as Gus, but most of the time the reader simply doesn’t need to know his name because the story is told in the first person.

The story is only sort of about fishing. It’s clear the the author knows quite a bit about fishing, but like another story that I have loved and quoted, Norman Maclean’s “A River Runs Through It,” fishing is only one of the themes of the book, and perhaps not the most important one. Gus’s story is really the story of love. It begins with the love of his parents and continues through his own discovery of love in his life mate. In a passage that I have often quoted, and have included in wedding services many times, Gus says, “People often don’t know what they’re talking about, but when they talk about love they really don’t know what they’re talking about. The one sure thing you can say about love is that there isn’t much you can say about it.”

Even though it has been decades since I first read that novel, I still think about that quote quite regularly. Now that I am retired after having been a minister for my entire adult life and having sorted through my books and given away two thirds of them and moved twice and tried to give away more books, there are still two copies of that book on my bookshelf. I keep the second one because I recommend it so often that I’m still at risk of giving a copy to someone who visits our home, but I don’t want to give away the copy with the dog-eared pages that make it easy to find the quote.

It seems to me on this morning of the fourth Sunday of Advent, the Sunday of Love, that it is entirely possible that I invested an entire career preaching about love - that is what ministers do - and that I really didn’t know what it was talking about. I’ve preached a lot of sermons about love. I’ve preached about love at weddings and at funerals. I’ve preached about love on the fourth Sunday of Advent for as long as I have been a preacher. I’ve preached about love on Christmas and I’ve preached about love on Easter. And, it seems, it is quite possible that I haven’t know what I was talking about at all.

In life, I’ve been lucky in love. I was born into a loving family with parents whose love I still feel in my everyday life. I met the love of my life when I was a young teenager and we went on our first date when I was sixteen years old. She, too, came from a loving family who were generous with their love and who have shared love with me. From the love we received from our families have come two children who themselves grew up and fell in love and from their love have come five grandchildren. Whether it is a two year old crawling up into my lap with his blanket or my wife tucking me into bed at night, I am surrounded by the simple fact that I am loved. It doesn’t need to be explained. It simply is.

That doesn’t keep me from trying to talk about love, however. What I know that while love can be expressed in an emotion that sweeps over one with incredible intensity, it is much more than a rush of emotion. Love is concrete action that involves self sacrifice and putting the other first. Love is expressed in generosity that gives with no expectation of return. Love is endurance over the long haul. Love can be hard work. Love can't be manipulated or faked. It is a gift. And I could continue to write sentence after sentence without really capturing love in words.

Like other elements of the Christian calendar part of the reason why we observe the Sunday of love every year is that it is something that we need to observe over and over again. We need to think about love every year. We need to focus on love all the time. We need the candle of love to burn in our hearts even when the advent wreath has been extinguished and put away for another year.

Today we light the candle of love not because we fully understand love. We light the candle not because we are able to speak about love in perfect words. We light the candle not because we are able to explain love. We light the candle not because we have captured perfect love. What we do is light the candle because we know love is real and because we know it is beyond our ability to capture. We light the candle because love is a gift - because love is THE gift.

That gift is not limited to a single Sunday or a particular season of the year. It is the life force from which we have come and which sustains us through all of the seasons and all of the ups and downs of life.

I’ll keep talking about love, even though I really don’t know what I’m talking about.