5
Easter B April 29, 2018
Acts 8:26-40 Psalm 22:24-30
1 John 4:7-21 John 15:1-8
Lectionary Link
One of the effects of the experience of the sublime is to be "shut up," or left stammering with repetitive tautologies or a profoundly simple word like "Wow!"
In human experience, if a person is fortunate, one is able to be able to use the word love authentically. To be brought to stammering by the sense of love or the encounter of love or the sense of having been transported by love is perhaps the most fortunate human experience of all.
The Belle of Amherst, Emily Dickinson wrote about sublime love in very few words, short and simple, and yet it is taunting to the reader to want to have the experience of love. She wrote: "That love is all there is, is all we know of love." It seems so simplistically stated but it invites us to know what it means and to know whether it is true and whether it is true in a meaningful way for me.
If there is some sub-atomic unifying essence in everything in a place where the material world joins with the relational world of personality, then such an invisible relational unifying magnetic energy in the English language is reduced to the word "love."
Love must be meaningfully true since it creeps into all human traditions; and it must be more than magnetic lust for procreation; it has to include the hopeful wish of mutual well-being exchanged between people in relationship.
When the dialoging Plato's Socrates tried to emulate a hired hand rhetorician, he spoke in rhetorical performance like a hired speech maker, against love. But then he recanted and apologized to Love, who was Eros who was a god for the Greeks.
Can Love be interchangeable with God? Can God be Love? Can Love be God? One can find words about love and God within Holy Scripture. The Song of Songs, or Song of Solomon is a sensual love confession, where God's name is not mentioned, and the images seem all too human, all too deliciously human, and yet so divine the ancient rabbis thought that the beauty of such love had to be in the canon of Scriptures. And Christian canon makers, those whose votes counted on what books to include in the Bible, also included this sensual love confession within the Christian Bible. The love is so expressive of the lucky gift of mutual relational well-being, Christian expositors could only say it was an analogy of the soul's relationship with God. The experience of intense mutual relational well-being evokes the elevating poetry and when one rises to the sublime, one wants to confess that which attains being God-worthy, God-inspired, God-incarnate.
Another apparent bachelor also wrote profoundly about love, St. Paul. When compared with faith and hope, St. Paul said that love was the greatest of all.
Today, we have the portion of first Epistle of John and we find the writer stammering about love and God. In woeful lack of stylistic variation, the writer mentions love 28 times. "Get a Thesaurus!" one might say. In the same short passage, there are also 39 uses of God and mentions of members of the Trinity and pronouns for the same. God and love are used so often in such a short passage so it is not surprising that the writer uses the ultimate metaphorical tautology by writing, "God is Love." One could see how this confession about God would have some resonance in the wake of Hellenistic culture in the Roman Empire. Love as the name of God was familiar poetic discourse.
As exalted and as poetically sublime that this confession of love is, it is also very much down to earth. How so? One cannot say that one loves God who is not seen, if one does not love one's brothers and sisters whom one does see. It is no good elevating love to a sublime name for God or for a sublime feeling toward God, if one's regard for one's fellow human being does not ratify one's confession of love for God. Charlie Brown confessed the hypocrisy of "mere" pious love when he declaims, "I love mankind! It's people I can't stand!"
We as those who are trying to be worshipful and piously respectful toward God can find it much easier to love an invisible ideal God than to love in messy details the people of our world. The writer of the Epistle of John warns us not to separate the piety of love for God and the messiness of the love of fellow human beings in the practice of gritty justice and care.
How indeed do we avoid a pretentious love piety for God in swooning mystical experience with contradictory misanthropic behaviors toward our fellow people?
First we confess the truth about how hard it is to love people unconditionally. We might be tempted to limit the use of the love to what we really mean by "like." But we cannot reduce love to mere personal affinity or personal taste. How do we bring the energy of swooning mystical love of God who is Love to the messy details of human interaction?
I would suggest that attempting love in human interaction teaches us failure at love. So what do we do with failure at love? Do we avoid? Do we fuel our disillusionment with imperfect people into misanthropic behaviors? Or is our failure to love, the crucible to ask for the higher Power of God's love to be present even within our imperfect bodily vessel? Let us have the humility not to think that we originate such a wonderful thing as love and with this humility we ask for the power, the gift and the fruit of the Spirit, God's love.
The discourse in the John's Gospel with Jesus saying, "I am the vine and you are the branches and my Father is the vine grower," does not mention directly the third member of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit.
But we can read between the lines. The Holy Spirit would be the Holy Sap. Sap is plant blood. It flows and delivers life throughout the plant. How does the branch abide in the vine? Through sap. How do we abide in Christ? Through the presences of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the life and power of God in us, loving through us even when it is difficult for us to love some of the people in our world.
The words of Scriptures invite to the reality of God as love. The words of Scripture warn us not to separate religious love from actual down to earth love. The words of Scriptures promise us help in learning to love as we abide in Christ, through the power of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Acts 8:26-40 Psalm 22:24-30
1 John 4:7-21 John 15:1-8
Lectionary Link
One of the effects of the experience of the sublime is to be "shut up," or left stammering with repetitive tautologies or a profoundly simple word like "Wow!"
In human experience, if a person is fortunate, one is able to be able to use the word love authentically. To be brought to stammering by the sense of love or the encounter of love or the sense of having been transported by love is perhaps the most fortunate human experience of all.
The Belle of Amherst, Emily Dickinson wrote about sublime love in very few words, short and simple, and yet it is taunting to the reader to want to have the experience of love. She wrote: "That love is all there is, is all we know of love." It seems so simplistically stated but it invites us to know what it means and to know whether it is true and whether it is true in a meaningful way for me.
If there is some sub-atomic unifying essence in everything in a place where the material world joins with the relational world of personality, then such an invisible relational unifying magnetic energy in the English language is reduced to the word "love."
Love must be meaningfully true since it creeps into all human traditions; and it must be more than magnetic lust for procreation; it has to include the hopeful wish of mutual well-being exchanged between people in relationship.
When the dialoging Plato's Socrates tried to emulate a hired hand rhetorician, he spoke in rhetorical performance like a hired speech maker, against love. But then he recanted and apologized to Love, who was Eros who was a god for the Greeks.
Can Love be interchangeable with God? Can God be Love? Can Love be God? One can find words about love and God within Holy Scripture. The Song of Songs, or Song of Solomon is a sensual love confession, where God's name is not mentioned, and the images seem all too human, all too deliciously human, and yet so divine the ancient rabbis thought that the beauty of such love had to be in the canon of Scriptures. And Christian canon makers, those whose votes counted on what books to include in the Bible, also included this sensual love confession within the Christian Bible. The love is so expressive of the lucky gift of mutual relational well-being, Christian expositors could only say it was an analogy of the soul's relationship with God. The experience of intense mutual relational well-being evokes the elevating poetry and when one rises to the sublime, one wants to confess that which attains being God-worthy, God-inspired, God-incarnate.
Another apparent bachelor also wrote profoundly about love, St. Paul. When compared with faith and hope, St. Paul said that love was the greatest of all.
Today, we have the portion of first Epistle of John and we find the writer stammering about love and God. In woeful lack of stylistic variation, the writer mentions love 28 times. "Get a Thesaurus!" one might say. In the same short passage, there are also 39 uses of God and mentions of members of the Trinity and pronouns for the same. God and love are used so often in such a short passage so it is not surprising that the writer uses the ultimate metaphorical tautology by writing, "God is Love." One could see how this confession about God would have some resonance in the wake of Hellenistic culture in the Roman Empire. Love as the name of God was familiar poetic discourse.
As exalted and as poetically sublime that this confession of love is, it is also very much down to earth. How so? One cannot say that one loves God who is not seen, if one does not love one's brothers and sisters whom one does see. It is no good elevating love to a sublime name for God or for a sublime feeling toward God, if one's regard for one's fellow human being does not ratify one's confession of love for God. Charlie Brown confessed the hypocrisy of "mere" pious love when he declaims, "I love mankind! It's people I can't stand!"
We as those who are trying to be worshipful and piously respectful toward God can find it much easier to love an invisible ideal God than to love in messy details the people of our world. The writer of the Epistle of John warns us not to separate the piety of love for God and the messiness of the love of fellow human beings in the practice of gritty justice and care.
How indeed do we avoid a pretentious love piety for God in swooning mystical experience with contradictory misanthropic behaviors toward our fellow people?
First we confess the truth about how hard it is to love people unconditionally. We might be tempted to limit the use of the love to what we really mean by "like." But we cannot reduce love to mere personal affinity or personal taste. How do we bring the energy of swooning mystical love of God who is Love to the messy details of human interaction?
I would suggest that attempting love in human interaction teaches us failure at love. So what do we do with failure at love? Do we avoid? Do we fuel our disillusionment with imperfect people into misanthropic behaviors? Or is our failure to love, the crucible to ask for the higher Power of God's love to be present even within our imperfect bodily vessel? Let us have the humility not to think that we originate such a wonderful thing as love and with this humility we ask for the power, the gift and the fruit of the Spirit, God's love.
The discourse in the John's Gospel with Jesus saying, "I am the vine and you are the branches and my Father is the vine grower," does not mention directly the third member of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit.
But we can read between the lines. The Holy Spirit would be the Holy Sap. Sap is plant blood. It flows and delivers life throughout the plant. How does the branch abide in the vine? Through sap. How do we abide in Christ? Through the presences of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the life and power of God in us, loving through us even when it is difficult for us to love some of the people in our world.
The words of Scriptures invite to the reality of God as love. The words of Scripture warn us not to separate religious love from actual down to earth love. The words of Scriptures promise us help in learning to love as we abide in Christ, through the power of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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