6 Easter cycle b May 13, 2012
Acts
Ps. 33:1-8,18-22
1 John 4:7-21 John 15:9-17
On Mother’s Day, it might be appropriate to
speak about love and the Gospel lesson certainly also gives us the occasion to
speak about love.
If we are to believe the Gospel lesson, we
might say that the Christian movement was founded upon love. The followers of Jesus came into a friendship
with Jesus. They understood that Jesus
call them his friends. The very word in
Greek for the word friend is another word for “love.” Philos is the Greek word for
friend and phileo is the verb form
for “love.” The Greek language has four
words for love, agape, phileo, eros and storge.
In English we might specify the kinds of love that encompass these four
notions of love; love as justice and respecting the dignity of all. Love as friendship, fondness, favoring
preference, affinity and affection. Love
as sensual attraction. Love as familial affection. And what more can I say about love that
Country Western Music has not already said?
There are many quotable phrases about love in
the Bible. We are to love God with all
our hearts and love our neighbors as we love our selves. We cannot say that we love God who is not
seen, if we do not love our brothers and sisters who are seen. Love is patient; love is kind; love is not
envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it
is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices
in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things,
endures all things. Love never ends. Love
is greater than faith or hope. We are to love our enemies. Love is also expressed in the negative: The
love of money is said to be the root of all evil. In the Gospel of John, we aren’t supposed to
love the world or the things of the world.
And also some people love darkness better than light because their deeds
are evil.
Love is one of those oceanic words that we
use all of the time and it has inspired lots of clichés because most people at
some time in their lives relate to the cliché of love. At some point in one’s life, the word love
seems to be the right word at the right time that says what needs to be said.
I think love is a word that in its most general
sense designates the cosmic personal glue of the universe. We cannot live in this world without
acknowledging that we are with other people and with other things. And love is one of those words that is used
to specify the quality of our relationship with everything in life. When we try to assess what we value in life
we must deal with the word love. Love
expresses how we are attached to the people and things in our life.
Why do we love someone? Why do we love sports? Why do we love baseball or football? Why do we love the San Francisco Giants, the
Forty-Niners, the Raiders, the Cal
Bears? Why do we love pizza and not love
broccoli? Why do some people like anchovies and others do not? Why do
we like certain fashions or clothes? Why
do we love the Episcopal Church? Or our
political ideas and affiliations? Why do
we like certain locations? Why do we
like Music? Not just music but certain
kinds of music? And not just certain
kinds of music but certain songs or tunes that are performed by certain
artists? How is it that people, things,
events, activities, beliefs come to be our favorites and our preferences such that
they become part of the repetitive patterns of our lives? How do we become attracted to what and whom
we like in life? I am not sure that even
as we acknowledge love as the glue of all life, that we ever understand how we
come to love what we do love or how other people come to love us. I think that we all must confess that we are
partakers in love without fully understanding all of the motivations of love.
For people who don’t think that they have
religion or belief, I ask them to take an exercise in discovering the loves of
their own life. And if they can discover
the loves of their own life they may discover their values, their gods and
beliefs. The way in which you and I can
analyze the loves of our lives in honesty is to be honest about the objects of
our desire? To track your own relationship
with love, sit down and write out an entire series of top ten lists.
What were the top ten experiences of your
life? Who are the top ten most
influential mentors in your life? Who
are the top ten friends or lovers in your life?
What are the 10 best things that you have done for other people? Best books you’ve read? 10 most influential people in world
history? 10 most wonderful places you
have been? 10 happiest occasions of
joy? 10 favorite meals? 10 favorite articles of clothing? 10 times you felt closest to God? On and on make your top ten lists and when
you’ve finished that make your “bottom”10 list.
List the 10 worst things in every category of your life. If you can produce a whole series of lists
you may be able to look at your relationship with what we call love or the glue
that keeps us connected to what we are experiencing in life.
And it will probably turn out that in many of
your top ten lists, it will involve other people. Such people will turn out to be those who we
might call friends. And if we understand
the notion of friend, we can understand the founding the church. The church began with the friendship that
Jesus had with his disciples. Friendship
was a quality of life together which involved the early followers of Jesus
using such expressions as love, joy and laying down of one’s life for the
other.
Friendship love is a mystery. How does it happen? It does involve what we call a projection of
our selves. Why do we love others? Because in some way we find our own personal
fulfillment connected with the people whom draw our desire. We find personal enjoyment or fun or
opportunity for the release of our mentoring gifts with the people who draw
from us our creativity. But in
friendship love we find our limitation since our profound desire expects much
more of the people, events and things of our life. Even while people, events, places and things
can provide great enjoyment, we still have a gnawing desire for more. And that should tell us something about love
and our capacity to love. St. Augustine
in his confession said that our hearts are restless until they find their rest
in God. Eventually we find that our
hearts are made for more than our environment can contain in terms of people,
events, or things onto which our desire can be drawn. Our hearts ultimately desire God who has no
environment, because God is the one in whom we live and move and have our
being. And in accepting our love for God,
we can learn to understand love as a way to regulate the enjoyment in life for
people, events and things so that we can learn the balance of justice. Justice is the eternal quest to give
everything and everyone proper dignity in life.
As such justice is never finished because love is never finished. Love is always a commandment for the next
occasion of doing justice to the people, events and things in our lives.
We are most fortunate in life if we had a
mother who befriended us with her love.
We are fortunate that Jesus came and befriended his disciples and
followers in such a special way that this Christian tradition of befriending
has continued for all of these years.
Befriending involves being drawn into relationship where we find it appropriate
to lay down our lives. The Greek word
for life here is psuche, our
psychological life or soul life.
Befriending is a love that makes us check our egos at the door so that
community and communion can occur.
Certainly, mothers lay down their lives for their children. They check their egos and give psychical
space to let the identities of their children come forth. This is what Jesus did for his friends and
the result was the communion of the church coming into being.
It is to this communion of befriending that
you and I have been called. And it is a
type of befriending that we dare to call Christian love. Amen.
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