First Congregational Church – Glendale – UNITED CHURCH OF CHRIST
Sixth Sunday of Easter – May 17, 2009
The Rev. Anne G. Cohen
John 15:9-17
FOR REFLECTION
Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread;
re-made all the time, made new.
-Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven 1971
Love is a force…. It is not a result; it is a cause.
It is not a product. It is a power, like money, or steam or electricity.
It is valueless unless you can give something else by means of it.
-Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Locked Rooms and Open Doors 1974
Creative love flowing feely among all persons and organizing their common life –
this I take to be the meaning of God in history.
-F. Ernest Johnson, The Social Gospel Re-examined 1940
Computer Dating, Looking for Love
Once upon a time there was a man who was God. His mother had been intimately involved with God, took the risk and did not protect herself from the consequences of Divine Passion. She provided safe haven for God, actively being reborn in this world, a fugitive from men who perceived them-selves to be gods. She managed to give birth and to raise her God-child to adulthood – knowing that every day her power to guide and protect slipped slowly away – and the power of the world to disguise, distort and destroy increased exponentially. Once upon a time there was a man-who-was-God – and his mother loved him fiercely.
This God, a man of his time, the product of Divine Passion and fierce love, made no claims to power but had a following. And his following made claims FOR him. This complicated things – and may have inadvertently brought about his death. This may have also brought about his second coming – even if his resurrection was a complete surprise – although it shouldn’t have been – him being God and all.
This God was said to have said a number of things that are still being verified and declassified and obfuscated and retranslated 2,000 years after his affaire du coeur with the human race. He is said to have said that he is in his God-daddy and his God-daddy is in him – which was taken to mean that he and Abba-God had Interbeing – took up the same space – shared DNA – identical essence – Divine Passion.
He is said to have said that anyone who believes in him…does what he does –
that he himself lives on in those who do what he did – and vice versa. (John 14:11-14)
Because to believe in someone is to value, to esteem them – to desire, to love them.
(Etimology of English word Love: Leubh – care, desire, love, believe
– The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language 4th edition)
To love someone is to recognize kinship, sense shared values, experience an underlying sense of oneness – Interbeing. (ibid)
So this man-who-was-God has come again – and again – and again – every time someone has loved and acted upon that love – in other words, believed and acted upon that belief.
But again – terms must be defined or the agents of distortion will misuse everything said for their own gain.
This man-who-was-God is said to have said “If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Abba’s commandments and abide in his love…Love one another as I have loved you…” Lay down your lives for one another as I have for you. (John 15:9-11)
For him love is not just recognition and affection; love is a verb. To really love is to “keep his commandments” – code words for doing what he has done – loved God with heart, soul and mind – and loved our neighbors as ourselves.
And that love isn’t just sugar-lending love – it is sacrificial love – involving life blood and livelihood – voluntary and involuntary loss.
We followers of the man-who-was-God love to use words like “God Is Love.” But do we get the implications of that? God is certainly love – and like God’s name – which means something like “I will become what I will become” – it is a verb. To believe in God – to believe in the man-who-was-God – we have Interbeing – we reside in one another. To reside in God and host God within ourselves – we become the verb. We act upon the verb. We apply the verb – our value system lines up with the verb – our lives manifest the verb. We become what we become – which is God – which is love – if we believe in God, if we love God, if we pass God-love on to others. Got it? Okay then.
So what do we know about God-love – being it, doing it? Just as knowing a person is like knowing a river – knowing God-love is like knowing a river. We cannot know the river by scooping up a cupful of water and looking at it or drinking it. If we stand still, we see what has arrived at our time and place from the source – but we don’t know the source. We can see what passes by us – but we don’t know where the river is going.
To know a person fully is to travel with them – explore their source – travel with them to their destination – keep our eyes open on the journey. To know God-love fully is to explore the source – travel with – keep our eyes open – and recognize all things, including the river, as one with the self. Like all other spiritual disciplines, it is a verb even when we are on our knees – even when we are going with the current – even as we are being what we are doing.
We each, we all come to know God-love in different ways through our different experiences and lenses and gifts and limitations. My disabilities when it comes to knowing God can be accommodated by keeping my eyes and ears open when you tell your story, publish your pictures on your Facebook page and share your God-love river-journey with me. And what I look and listen for in you is Divine Passion and fierce love. When I experience that in you, I come to know God better. I come to BE God better.
It has become a cultural pastime in post-modern America to go looking for love rather than recognizing it and doing it. We see bachelors and bachelorettes in unnatural settings, in camouflage and makeup – trading superficial language and inappropriate behaviors in order to choose life partners. In such a situation, I’d look to the first person who walks off the set and goes home – and check out their source, their value system, their verb.
One common tool for finding love is computer dating – perhaps an attempt at making the globe a small town – finding the girl you might have met in church or English class a century ago – the guy who might have been the soda jerk or the rancher from a neighboring property. This tool has its hazards – the increased likelihood of camouflage, superficiality, lies, stagnant waters.
If the tool is used to match value systems, to uncover Divine Passion and fierce love in its purest forms, to explore ways in which people might come together to increase the good they can do in the world – perhaps it’s not such a bad tool. Like any tool, what matters is how it is used – how it becomes a verb.
It has been said by many theologians in one way or another that “Love cannot live where there is no element of justice…”
(see MLK, Tillich, Niebuhr, Dalai Lama, Thich Nhat Hanh, Jesus…)
As I understand God’s value system – as I have come to know it on the journey so far – justice is a central tenet of God-love. Where God-love is manifest, human rights are protected, vulnerable creatures are cared for, sacrifices are made by those who can make them on behalf of those who cannot.
In a financial environment like the one we are experiencing now – some of us with housing may need to share ours with those who have none.
Some of us with incomes may have to share more of ours with those who have none. Some of us with two cars may have to donate one of ours to someone who can use it to get to work – or even as a place to sleep.
Some of us may have to choose to stop participating in as many unjust financial arrangements as we can – which will take focused attention and work and true sacrifice. I wrestle with this daily – and with increasing urgency – as more and more faces come to the window of my car and the door of the church.
My first husband and I lived in Echo Park and had a car we rarely used parked on the street. For six months a homeless man slept there and our nearest neighbor left food for him outside the car door. Ours was a passive – even lazy – sacrifice – made with a sense of helplessness in the face of great need, few resources for our mentally ill neighbors, and our own guilt – justified or not.
That was 25 years ago. It could have been yesterday.
I came to a decision last Wednesday that – I am ashamed to say – I actually had to wrestle with. I have been deeply moved by the denial of human rights inherent in outlawing marriage for consenting adults who also happen to be gay – some of them partnered longer than I’ve been alive. A colleague has shared that if the courts uphold Proposition 8 – outlawing same-gender marriage – he will refuse to perform any weddings – for anyone – until the decision is reversed.
It took me a week to ponder this – and to decide, last Wednesday, to join him in that pledge. I am appalled by my own self-absorption – worrying that because I want to change this item in my contract with this church I put my job in jeopardy – concerned because weddings are a second source of income for my family – anxious because I don’t want to hurt other people with my “no” to their “please!”
But two things occurred to me – finally:
1. Plenty of people are being hurt BECAUSE of marriage laws – and if I continue to participate in an unjust system, I too am acting unjustly.
2. The reason “taking a stand” is a risk – is because it involves sacrifice. Otherwise it would just be an easy, perhaps meaningless exercise. NOT doing weddings will be a sacrifice for me – and not even a HUGE one – like annulling my own marriage would be. So who am I as a privileged married person to NOT take a stand?
My last scheduled wedding to perform is next Friday. Should the courts uphold Proposition 8, that will be my last wedding until the laws change and my gay sisters and brothers have the same rights I do. According to my value system, this will be an act of love and justice – a tiny way of DOING love – finding Interbeing with the God I profess to believe in. In this less than monumental decision, I find a glimmer of Divine Passion and feel in myself some amount of fierce love. For me, it is the right thing to do.
I long to hear stories from you – about those decisions you are making – large and small – decisions that you believe will increase justice and love in the world.
Share them with me – with one another – so that each of us might come to know God just a little better.
Once upon a time there was a man who was God. He is alive even now – even here. He comes again and again – in those moments when each one of us chooses to embody and enact the love of God.
May it be often – and may we remember him.
Scripture Reading for Sunday May 17, 2009 – Easter 6
John 15:9-17
9As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love. 10If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love. 11I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete.
12 ‘This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. 13No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. 14You are my friends if you do what I command you. 15I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father. 16You did not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask him in my name. 17I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another.
