This is the 6th Sunday in the season of Easter
and an interesting conjunction of Mother’s Day,
Rogation Days – which are earth centered days of prayer
leading up to the Feast of the Ascension on Thursday,
and yesterday commemorating Julian of Norwich
in the church calendar,
and all these loosely link together with the readings for today.
It’s been a full week since I got back here after a little break to see family.
The Diocese held our annual Clergy Conference
by Zoom again
but full of information, reports and group work.
We were looking at the Landscape report
which is the Diocesan version of the CAT survey for congregations.
And at the same time here I was engaging in conversations
with various members of the parish in response to reactions to the message on the reader board of our church sign.
I’ve stirred up some strong feelings,
some reflecting back to incidents from the past,
some sorting out what is political and what is morality,
so I want you all to know that I am available for conversations,
and I hope you will engage those conversations with me.
As much as we may want to move on,
there are still some conversations we need to have
for reconciliation and unity in the love of Christ to be actualized.
This is a regular part of life in the faith community that we all share in.
So let me share some thoughts here
based on this continuing theme in the scripture readings
during the Easter Season
about how we can come together.
I don’t know how many of you are familiar with Dame Julian of Norwich,
but she is commemorated on our church calendar
for her writings which have become a spiritual masterpiece.
She survived a near fatal illness
during the time of the pandemic known as the Black Death,
and in that she experienced a series of visions which she wrote up
and that then were published
in one of the earliest books in the English language.
The focus of her writings is on God’s love for us.
Here is a beautiful sample of her work:
For we are so preciously loved by God
that we cannot even comprehend it.
No created being can ever know
how much and how sweetly and tenderly God loves them.
Love, in the Gospel for today, is, like it was last week,
linked with abiding in Jesus,
that is, having your self-identity connected with Jesus,
having your self-identity connected to Jesus.
And this, Jesus says, is the key to being able to keep the commandments.
In verse 10 we read that the commandments are kept
because of dwelling in union with Jesus.
Jesus is saying, “If you remain in my love
you will keep my commandments,
just as I remain in the Father’s love
and thus keep his commandments.”
To abide or remain – That means,
don’t go back to the old mind set of thinking you are unloved.
Don’t get hooked by pressure from the world view about thisof being alienated and separated from one another and from the Creator.
That is not reality.
Remain in the love.
Remain in the mindfulness that God is love,
and that as God’s creatures, God’s creation,
it is in God that we live and move and have our being.
As my old spiritual director would say,
“You can take a lot of hits from the world,
if you are wakeful to this love.”
Agapay is the word for love in this Gospel reading. As I said last week
it is this kind of love that is Godly love, unitive love,
that which makes no distinction between lover and beloved.
In agape love that distinction is gone, has been transcended.
There is no longer lover and beloved, now only love expressing.
That is why Jesus could say so clearly and repeatedly
that he and the Father were one,
and why he would continually urge the disciples
to remain in him and in his love, for that love was unitive.
That is why we can say that God IS Love.
Love, in fact, is the condition of the Kingdom of God.
To have come to the realization of this kind of love
is to have eyes to recognize the Kingdom of God at hand.
John’s Gospel may seem to be belaboring the point,
but he wants to make sure that we get it,
that this love thing is pretty important.
And Love just keeps showing up in a lot of the rest of scripture,
as you probably have noticed.
Then there is verse 13:
“No one has greater love than this,
to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”
I remember well what one former parishioner said about this.
He said he felt mightily challenged by this verse of the Gospel.
How could he know that he could lay down his life for those he loved
if at the breakfast table
he could hardly lay down his newspaper for his wife?
On our own, if we are honest,
our love is not this pure agape love of such self-forgetfulness.
The Gospel says that Love is linked with bearing fruit, being useful to God,
and it is also about being chosen.
Vs. 16 “You did not choose me but I chose you.
And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last…”
Chosen – We tend to think about being chosen as being selected out,
over and opposed to others not chosen, something exclusive.
But that is not really what is going on here.
The choosing is Jesus’ initiative, not a selecting out, but creation.
“You did not initiate a choice, but I chose to create you,”
Jesus is saying.
Choosing is the power of affirming the action of love.
First you are loved,
then comes the capacity that you are given for loving others.
What I am getting at is a significant shift in our perspective
or a way of thinking about stewardship, for example,
stewardship as caring for something that is not our own.
Stewardship in this way is living out of agaph love,
living out of the orientation of union in God,
so that everything, even our relationships with each other, belong to God.
The implication in all this
is what Jesus demonstrated by his own example
of his life and ministry,
and of his own laying down his life for his friends,
for us whom he calls friends.
“It’s not about me.”
Stewardship is service that is not about me,
but is a natural flow of love in recognition that all belongs.
All belongs.
Another spiritual master, whom I deeply respect, put it quite simply:
“Love is not complex — it is simple and spontaneous.
Indeed, love is our essential nature.”
I have been in a life long process of discovering
that it is our basic nature to love.
For me,
how that love is expressed continually goes through a process of refinement,
and I am far from finished with this refinement process.
And I can only cooperate with that work being done in me
through the mercy and grace of our Lord Jesus.
love being expressed without needing in return attached to it,
love that becomes ever more inclusive.
But this is the point, that it is our basic nature to love.
We have been created to love.
Let’s return to Dame Julian of Norwich.
One of her most beautiful quotes is about our meaning in life.
Wouldst thou learn thy Lord’s meaning in this thing?
Learn it well: Love was His meaning.
Who showed it thee? Love.
What showed He thee? Love.
Wherefore showed it He? For Love.
Hold thee therein and thou shalt learn and know more in the same.
But thou shalt never know nor learn therein other thing without end.
Thus was I learned that Love was our Lord’s meaning.
I think we all here are of one heart and mind about this kind of love.
So I say all this to encourage each of us
to persevere in being refined in this love
And Jesus tells us today in the Gospel:
Abide in my love.
I chose you.
Love one another.
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