Madness, Faustian Bargain, or Will of God?

2 Pentecost  Cycle B  proper 5 June 10, 2012  

Psalm 130     Genesis 3:8-15
2 Corinthians 4:13-5:1   Mark 3:20-35

Lectionary Link

  The Bible is a collection of writings that spans many hundreds of years and these writings record the inspired attempts of people to find meaning in life.  And there are all sorts of attempts at finding meaning in the Bible and the writings comprise a variety of discourses and modes of presentation to arrive at meanings.

  One of the questions of meaning that we ask endlessly and often in futility, is “Why?”  We ask this question about the motivation for human behavior.  The Garden of Eden story tries to give an answer.  Why do we misbehave?  Well the devil made me do it, or more specific to the Genesis story of origins, “The serpent made me do it.”

  The Bible represents in writing the attempt to give sweeping cosmic and theological explanations for the cause of human behavior.  On the other side of the continuum is science that wants to provide a scientific law to explain, not cosmic behavior but very specific cause and effect patterns in specific chains of events. Scientists want to chart a reliability and a consistency in behavior of all things in the natural world and we depend upon that consistency.

  In the human realm we cannot always depend upon reliability and consistency in human behavior unless we can say that the fickleness of human desire is consistent in throwing a wrench into the works to wreak havoc on human success.

  One of the causal mysteries of humanity involves speculation about human genius.  The world’s most incredible people are often the reformers who initiate a new order, a new paradigm and a new way to see and interpret life.

  Most often these reformers are controversial in their own time, even rejected or killed.  How many starving artists’ paintings are now sold for millions of dollars?  Aquinas, Luther and many other religious reformers were rejected or persecuted in their own time.  What happened to the Archbishop who wrote the First Book of Common Prayer?  He was burnt at the stake.  Our liturgy was written by one who was regarded to be a severe threat to the order of religious life in England by people who had the power to remove him from life.

  Killing geniuses and reformers out of this life is what the powers of the old order do when they feel threatened.  Along with killing reformers out of this life, they also kill them, not so softly with their words, their horrible words.

  And what were the killing words that were uttered by the opponents of Jesus of Nazareth and even by his family?

  Some of the family of Jesus said that Jesus was behaving the way he did because he was mad.  The “mad genius” motif was not meant to be flattering.  When his family were confronted to explain the behavior of Jesus, they perhaps were a bit flustered and at loss for words.  How come Joe and Mary’s boy is so different from others?  How did you raise him?  Does he reflect your family values?  What’s wrong with him?  How come he’s not like you or the rest of us?   Well, he must be “mad.”  His mind has left the accepted modes of the thinking patterns of our community and so he has “lost his mind,” and this answer seemed to be an easier one than saying, “he has left the clichés and standard ways of thinking of his community of birth.”  Jesus challenged the thinking of his days and so either he was in a new “soundness of mind” or he was mad.   Jesus did not get much respect from the family and associates who used the “madness” explanation to explain why he was different.

  Another causal answer for genius might be called the “Faustian” bargain.  This bargain has definition from the Germanic legend which was reworked in the famous writing of Goethe.  Faust makes a pact with the devil’s representative for unlimited knowledge and pleasure and gives his soul to the devil in exchange.  Often genius is explained as a Faustian bargain; some claimed that the famous violinist Paganini attained his virtuosity through a pact with the devil.

  How did Jesus whisper people whose minds had been wrecked by the diabolic forces of unclean spirits?  Some said that Jesus could only do that by making a pact with the chief of diabolic forces, even Beelzebul himself.  Why would the “Lord of the Flies” want to get rid of all of those interior pestering flies torturing the interior wounds of people to afflict them?

  The early Christian community believed it to be quite unforgivable to blaspheme the Spirit of such a healing work by calling it demonic.  Jesus whispered people through a Holy and Clean Spirit and he presented tortured souls a free choice to become rid of forces that had come to determine the inner lives of people.

  The breath of the whispering physician Jesus was a clean and Holy Spirit that brought interior health to his needy patients.  To attribute such good health to the work of evil forces was so distorted it only deserved the designation of being, “eternally unforgivable.”  And of course, something is only eternally unforgivable until it becomes eternally forgivable through repentance and amendment of life and restoration to being able to call good, what is truly good.  And what is truly good is a healthy untortured and peaceful mind.

  The Gospel for today ends with one of those enigmatic family value statements of Jesus: A crowd was sitting around him; and they said to him, "Your mother and your brothers and sisters are outside, asking for you." And he replied, "Who are my mother and my brothers?" And looking at those who sat around him, he said, "Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother."

  The natural order and one’s natural family can sometimes be in competition with the “will of God.”  The early followers of Jesus believed that a new order had arrived with the life of Jesus and what was family and familiar could prevent people from entering into this new order, this new understanding of God and life and the decision and actions that would come from understanding God and life in a new way.

  Today, we still pray to God, “Thy will be done on earth as it is done in a more perfect order than what we’ve yet achieved here.”  By asking for God’s will we hope that we are still in the family of Christ and we hope that we are truly free to choose even if we have to bear the shame of being called mad or Faustian.  Let us again commit ourselves to the excellent will of God today.  Amen.

The Holy Trinity, Mere Canon Law or Invitation to Mystery

Trinity Sunday  cycle b, Proper 4  June 3, 2012  

Isaiah 6:1-8  Psalm 29

Romans 8:12-17   John 3:1-17

Lectionary Link

   We live our lives by reducing large masses of experiences into words, into language.  And we might think that language can perfectly translate our inner and outer experience into what we call words.  The relationship between our experience of a tree and the sounded word “tree” and the written “t-r-e-e” is quite an arbitrary relationship.  The arbitrary sound and written symbols have been learned in a community and there are different sounded words and written words for “tree” in other languages.  Words are a translated reduction of human experience.  In human experience there are experiences of the holy and the sacred and these experiences are sublime in such a way to necessitate words to designate what seems to be extra-human, more than human.  So the word “God” or corresponding words for the sublime have entered our vocabulary.   People who limit human meaning only to empirical experience find the word God to be meaningless because the word “God” does not seem to have an empirical referent, even though God-experiences have been confessed by countless number of people for a very long time.

  People who use the word “God” do so in some rather unique ways.  The prophet Isaiah had a visionary experience of God and the experience of God was not like any other human experience.  He heard the words “holy, holy, holy.”  Unique, or special or completely other.   Yet sometimes religion makes God seem so ordinary.  We build churches and we have holy books and we have nice formulaic creeds to standardize the teaching about God for the masses.  However, with all of these “positive” presentations of God in religious institutions, the reality of God begins in the negative. God is not anything we can say or imagine.  And if God is not anything that we can say or imagine, how do we say anything positive about God?

  We do so by analogy, anthropomorphic projection or by analogical imagination.  Why?  We accept our limitations in our human experience and we admit that God must allow the experience of the extra-human to be stated in human words as a way of declaring the meaningful traces of the sublime in our lives. 

  One of the major results of anthropomorphic theology in Christian history is the doctrine of the Holy Trinity.  This doctrine became particularly enshrined in the Nicene Creed that derived from Church Council in the year 325.  The Emperor Constantine saw the success of the Christian movement but he also saw the religious division between different ways of expressing the relationship between Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  He did not want religious division to divide the Empire and so he had the bishops gather to set the “official” beliefs of Christianity.  So the bishops argued the finer points as they applied Greek philosophical concepts to the more Hebraic and Aramaic notions of Father, Son, and Spirit that are found in the Gospel narratives and other New Testament writings.  The Council of Nicaea truly located Christian thinking within Hellenistic thought forms away from the Hebraic foundations of the Jesus Movement.

  The Creed and positive theology bring about a human temptation; rather than seeing positive theology as a way of drawing us to negative theology when we simply drop our jaws in worship and are speechless before God’s sublime majesty, we can be tempted to make the statements of positive theology and creeds into idols or precise interpretations to define a religious party.  We offend the Trinitarian Names by presuming to understand them, rather than realizing that the whole point is to bring us to the point of mystery in not presuming to understand God as we accept that we are overwhelmed by God’s majesty. 

  It is not the precision of the words about the doctrine of the Trinity that magically bring us Christian unity, rather it is the way in which the words invite us to the mystery of God and bring us to the event of worship.  The Council of Nicaea did not unite the church; it took more time and more church councils to further consolidate Christian understanding.  If we view the Creed and our liturgy as presenting precisely fixed understandings of God then we have a right to be bored.  But if we understand the words to bring us to the place of awe or silence, then they have been successful in their purpose.  We cannot allow the Nicene Creed to be but a statement for crowd control in domesticating Christians to all understand God in only one way and in a repetitive way.  Such practice has the skeptics saying that the Nicene Creed is really about the political administration of God.  And so truth becomes administration, mere crowd control to keep all Christians in standardized meaning.  Truth in this practice becomes but canon law.

  Today, let us walk back to the implicit presentation of the Trinity in the life of Jesus.  The prayer and devotional life of Jesus is presented as his relationship with his immanent Guide, whom he addressed as his Father.  This parent aspect of his own personhood was an experience of personal relationship with his sublime Father.   And what was the legacy that he wanted to leave in this life?  He wanted all people to experience their own inner personal parent guide.  And how did he think that this would happen?  He believed that this Parent guide, his Father would send a Spirit, a Holy Spirit to create this parent-child relationship between his disciples and God.  So the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit were not really Greek philosophical concepts, they were/are personal modes of the inner experience of God between the particular Jesus in the historic human condition with his Father who was understood to be the ground and plentitude of everything.  And then there was the active personal energetic interchange between the two, the Holy Spirit.

  And where does all of this leave you and me today in relationship to the Trinity?  How can it have personal meaning for us?  Is it a useful metaphor for us to understand ourselves as daughters and sons of God?  And what could that mean?

  I would suggest that the experience of our Divine parentage is useful for us.  We can come to experience our selves as overly or totally determined by our environments, by imperfect people who have marked our lives and helped to form the range of habits and repetitions of our life, some useful and others not so useful.  How do we free ourselves from the sense of being totally determined by nurture or by the DNA codes of our own nature?   How do we come to know genuine personal freedom?  I believe it comes in an experience of the sublime, and one such experience is to know an experience of being loved by a sublime God as our Parent Guide.

  And if Jesus was fully human but also became the paradigm of the intersection the human life with the sublime divine, then it means giving acceptance to human experience as a valid way ever to be reaching beyond the horizons of human experience for another kind of freedom.  In our belief in Jesus as Son of God, we also accept as true and vital the particular ways in which you and I have come to know ourselves in our experience as sons and daughters of God.

  And finally we name the very condition to be in relationship with anyone and everything, the omni-presence of God’s Spirit.

  When we break up the Trinity in a chronological and linear way there seems to be three; but the oneness is known in the simultaneity and synchrony of God, as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  And if the names of the Trinity persons do not work for you, there are many other biblical names and metaphors for God that may help you name your own encounters with the sublime.  The belief in God, as Father, Son and Holy Spirit is not a limitation upon the metaphors for the sublime; they are in fact, an invitation to us to go beyond any particular metaphor of God into accepting the mystery of our experience with God.  Let us seek what the Trinity would invite us to in our experience of God.  Amen.

Philabuster preaching

What is Philabuster preaching?


It is oppositional Phil-speak to delay the reader from making a choice to do something worse than reading Phil-speak.

The Holy Spirit, God's Breath as a Sign of Life

Day of Pentecost   May 27, 2012  

Acts 2:1-21  Psalm 104: 25-35,37
Romans 8:22-27  John 15:26-27; 16:4b-15

 Lectionary Link

  I have a harmonica here.  What makes this harmonica make a sound?  I blow in the little holes, and my breath pushes across some little reeds. The reeds in each hole are different sizes and that is what makes each sound higher or lower.  I also have a Pan Flute.  And when I blow across these bamboo tubes I can make many sounds.  What is the difference between a whistle and the harmonica and the Pan Flute?  How many sounds can a whistle make, you know that whistle that the referee uses at the soccer game.  A whistle only makes one sound.

  Today is a special feast day.  It is the feast of Pentecost. It means that the season of Easter is finished.  It means that the season of Pentecost begins.  And what is the color for the Day of Pentecost?  How did you know?

  Pentecost is the day when we celebrate the birth of the church. So it is our birthday party.

  And how was the church born?

  Well, more than 2000 years ago after Jesus left this earth, his friends were wondering if God was going to be gone and absent from their lives.  But you know what they discovered?  They discovered that God was still with them.  They discovered a wonderful energy and a wonderful happiness and joy within them.  And even though Jesus was gone, they felt that God was very close to them and with them.

  And so when God was close to them and with them, do you know what they called God?  They called God the Holy Spirit.

  The word for Spirit means wind or breath.  Can you blow air out of your mouth?  What does blowing air out your mouth mean?  Does it mean that you are alive?  Can you see your breath when you blow it?  You can’t see it but you can feel it, right.  How do you know your breath is there?  You feel it against your hand.

  So do you see why people began to call God, the Holy Spirit.  Even though God’s Spirit could not be seen, the results of God’s presence was known.

  So we can know God’s presence without seeing God or without seeing Jesus, because God is the Holy Spirit.  And the Holy Spirit gave birth to the church, because the church feels and knows the presence of God without seeing God.

  Just as I blow into the harmonica and the Pan flute and make different sounds.  Can you imagine the breath of God blowing through you?  Can you imagine God’s Spirit in you, living through you and doing something special in this world?  Just like each sound in my harmonica is different when I blow through, so each one of us is different and when the Holy Spirit blows through and lives through us, the Holy Spirit is able to do something special and different through each of us.

  Today, on Pentecost Sunday, let us each know that God’s Spirit is in us, teaching us to love and help this world in a special way.  I want you to remember always that the Holy Spirit is living in you.  Can you remember that?

The Church as a Pipe Organ

Day of Pentecost  Cycle B  May 27, 2012  

Acts 2:1-21  Psalm 104: 25-35,37

Romans 8:22-27  John 15:26-27; 16:4b-15

Lectionary Link

  The name of our parish newsletter is “In the Spirit.”  Where did that name come from?  The author of the book of Revelation is St. John the Divine.  And where have you heard that name before?  St. John the Divine is the patron saint of our parish.  And why is he called the divine and not the apostle or the evangelist?  The author of the book of Revelations was caught up in a visionary state and he wrote that he was “in the Spirit.”   It was such a unique visionary state that I do not think that anyone can fully understand it.  Being in the spirit, being in this visionary state is what the ancients used to call divining God’s truth or being divinized to some extent as a human being

  The Feast of Pentecost is about being In the Spirit, or to be more exact,  being  in the Holy Spirit.  How did the early Jewish followers of Jesus come to accept the religious experience of non-Jewish followers of Christ?  They discovered that Jews and non-Jews could be In the Spirit.  They discovered that Gentiles could be filled with the Holy Spirit.

  As we consider the Holy Spirit in the church on the feast of Pentecost,  let us liken the dynamics of the Holy Spirit to one of the most fascinating musical instruments of all time, the pipe organ.  What is a pipe organ?  It is essentially lots of different sizes and shapes of whistles that make distinctive sounds when wind or air is forced through them.  Imagine a very large pipe organ with more than 10,000 pipes in an old European Cathedral.  A very old pipe organ that is still in use today has most likely been rebuilt many times.  Each time an organ is rebuilt older pipes are retained and new pipes are added to present the sound desired by the organ builder and organ tuner.  An old pipe organ then is a mixture of pipes of varying ages. In a pipe organ, the sound comes from the wind of one blower and it is fed through bellows and wind chests with many holes and a pipe sits on each hole.  There is one wind source and that wind is made to sound in 10,000 different ways, some times in harmony, and some times in dissonance.

  This is image that I would like for us to ponder to consider the feast of Pentecost.  Let us think of ourselves as the pipes in the God’s pipe organ.  And the Holy Spirit is the Wind of God that plays through us to make us a beautiful work of art to benefit this world and to prove the work of God in our world.  Imagine God as the Total Organ, the Spirit as the Wind within the Pipe Organ and imagine Jesus as the composer and the organist who plays the music.  And so you have an image of the Trinity on Pentecost Sunday.

  When you hear a pipe organ play, you feel like there is wonderful life within those apparent lifeless pipes.  Those lifeless pipes can come alive with power, beauty, grace, softness, thundering, trumpeting and rhythms fast and slow.  And the music is the end result of the life of wind being blown through all of those different pipes.

  Can you and I begin to see our lives as lives that are given over to God and composed and played by Jesus and animated by the Wind of God’s Spirit?  Wouldn’t it be boring if all of the pipes on a pipe organ were of one size and shape?  Wouldn’t it be boring if God’s Spirit had only one human body and personality proto-type that was cloned over and over as a sort of robotic Christian?

  On the feast of Pentecost we recognize that we are not robotic and cloned Christians.   We are people of diverse shapes and sizes that represent our bodies, souls and spirits and the special time and place where we find our selves living.  God has made us to be played by the Holy Spirit in our special time and place.

  So today on Pentecost Sunday, let each of us find the special way that the Holy Spirit wants to sound through our lives.  Let us not worry too much that the Holy Spirit makes different sounds through other people.  Why?  Because we all have special places and ministries given to us by the Holy Spirit because of the unique shape and constitution of our life experience.

  Let us pray that we will accept the One Spirit, the one breath of God to blow through us to make wonderful music for the benefit of our world through the ministry of our lives.  And if we do this, we will know that Jesus Christ is the Composer, and the music maker of our lives.  Amen.

The Risen Christ: Oracle of Prayer

 7 Easter B            May 20, 2012   

Acts 1:15-17, 21-26  Psalm 1
1 John 5:9-13  John 17:6-19

Lectionary Link

  You have seen the four letters WWJD, meaning what would Jesus do?   WWJP could mean What would Jesus pray?   WWTAOJTTJWP would mean, What would the author of John think that Jesus would pray?  And with all of these unpronounceable alphabetic acronyms, I hope that I am confusing you.

  Today in our Gospel lesson we have the longest recorded prayer of Jesus.  It is not in any other Gospel.  And one wonders how in the days when there were no hidden microphones, how such a verbatim prayer of Jesus could have been remembered by someone particularly if Jesus was praying alone.

  The sheer logical confusion does invite us to look at the oracular function in the early Christian community.  How did the early followers of Jesus understand oracle or the channeling of the insights of Jesus within the community long after he was gone?  Could the channeled words of Jesus through one of his followers be regarded as the words of Jesus himself?  Such a question is only raised by us who live in the age of ownership of so-called intellectual property.

  The prayer of Jesus in the seventeenth chapter of John requires us to ponder the conditional verb tenses in  if-then statements.  The writer of John’s Gospel wrote the prayer assuming a relationship with the risen Christ in this conditional mode: If Jesus were here now, then he would be praying in this way.  And now as we read it move to conditional past-perfect tense: If Jesus had been present with the community of John, then he would have prayed in the way that it is written in John 17.

  I mean to be confusing because art and oracle can make present those who are absent.  Does Shakespeare become present when his plays are read or performed?  Does Mozart become present when his music is played or performed?

  The community of John took very seriously this belief about being one with Christ and one with God the Father.  They believed that Christ was their vine and they were branches and their branches were coursing with the interior sap of the Spirit of Christ so that there was a sharing in their inner life, the very life of Christ.  And that sharing of inner life could produce “words of Christ” and “prayers of Christ.”  And because of this oneness factor, the spoken words and written words that came from the state of unity with Christ could be regarded as the words of Christ or the oracle of Christ who was alive and speaking within the community of followers.

  Art and oracle confuse time; how else could this Gospel quote Jesus as praying, “And now I am no longer in the world….and while I was with them.”  Where is the physical location of such a Jesus who is praying these words?  Where is Mozart when some musician is channeling his music?  Does Mozart attain a trans-historical presence and immortality in his creations?

  Today is Ascension Sunday; I remind you that the Feast of the Ascension was celebrated on Thursday to a less than standing room crowd.  The ascended Christ is the inspired imagination of the church’s dealing with the obvious sense of Christ continuing presence even while he could no longer be seen or touched.  But the ascended Christ could definitely still be heard and could be known as a continuing oracle with the people who gathered to pray in his name.

  As we move on toward Pentecost and Trinity Sunday, we see that it is Jesus who is responsible for the Trinitarian confusion: “I and the Father are one,” said he.  The Father-God aspect of the personality of Jesus and his teaching of the Parent-God aspect of the personality of his followers created this “alternate” family and this alternate way of being in the world, but not just the world, but also an alternate world, the world into which one was born by the Spirit of God.

  Art, poetry and oracle confuse time and space and for that reason I believe that the communities that generated the New Testament writings as God’s word presented those words as an aesthetic bending of the dimension of time and space.  The aesthetic bending of the dimension of time and space account for the apparent logical confusion in the use of the same words in multivalent ways.  Take the case of the Greek word,  cosmos  or world.  Cosmos or world in John’s Gospel is a world that is loved by God, but not supposed to be loved by the followers of Christ.  The kingdom of Jesus was not supposed to be of this world; so the kingdom of Jesus was an alternate and parallel world.  The followers of Jesus were to be in the world but not of the world.  The writer of John’s Gospel believed that Jesus taught us to live in two families, our natural and spiritual families.  Jesus taught us to live in two worlds, the natural world and the spiritual world.  The apparent confusion of language has to do with the fact that every word can be interpreted from the point of view of the natural world or from the spiritual world.  If we don’t understand this in John’s Gospel, we can find it to be a very confusing book indeed.

  Consistent with John’s Gospel theme, “In the beginning was the Word”  the Risen Christ is still the One who has ascended to a closer proximity with his heavenly parent.  And as the older sibling, Christ is the one who prays words for us and for our success in befriending each other toward the values of the Gospel.  The Gospel of John portrays Jesus as an ever present oracle of prayer who offers endless words of petition for our well-being.  In our recognition of Christ as ever-present oracle, we in our attention to prayer try to enter into the words of Christ who has gone to that other interior world which we can only partially perceive and live in now but we can become more aware of it as we make the effort to attend to this alternate world.

  I hope that my words today have confused you; made you bend time and space dimension not to some TV Twilight Zone do-do-do-do reality, but to the reality of the sacred, which is a parallel reality that all of us can experience in this very seeming “ordinary” world.

  And if my words seem to confuse you now, in just wait a few minutes and I’ll be selling you an even bigger Brooklyn bridge, when I hand you bread and wine and tell you that they are the body and blood of Christ.

  Good art, poetry and our experience of their sublime effects seems to bend space and time and so does the experience of the sacred.  As we have read what Jesus might have prayed, we see that the words invite us to know another kind of relationship of oneness to a parent who is not an earthly parent but who is a spiritual parent who is known because the metaphor borrows from the notion of what an ideal parent-child relationship might be. What does a parent want?  A parent wants to be able to share the very best with one’s child.  Jesus came to teach us that God wants to share everything of the Godly world with the family of people who inhabit this earth.

  Let us continue to go to the risen Christ as our oracle; we need not claim that we have any infallible interpretations of this oracle.  We but ask for insights from Christ as our oracle to get us through this day with the excellence that we need to be the best we can be for the well being of the world that we live in.

  The writer of John’s Gospel believed that he knew what Jesus would have prayed.  And now and you and I turn to Christ again as our oracle, and ask what Jesus would pray even now?  And what would the risen Christ pray through us?  To the answer of this question we now give our lives.  Amen.

The Origins of the Church? Mothering, Befriending Love

6 Easter cycle b         May 13, 2012

Acts     Ps. 33:1-8,18-22

1 John 4:7-21      John 15:9-17      

Lectionary Link

  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.