Love is Love

 

Blessed be God who animates our lives and loves us beyond measure that we too might bring love into the world. AMEN

What a joy and honor to be here! I have been privileged to journey with Dana and now, to witness with her cloud of witnesses the sacrament of ordination, is something to behold! 

Anyone who knows Dana knows she is passionate about the two great commandments and one of the creative ways she marks this covenant of Love with a capital L is to point consistently to the Robert Indiana Sculpture, that famous square of L O V E! (parenthetically the work of art also marks her love of Philadelphia) But let me use Love as the jumping off point today for it seems to me that no matter what or where or when, the Gospels point us to the Love of God or more accurately toward the God who is Love. And this love is expressed and lived and surrounds us through the mysterious and powerful dynamic of the Trinity.

Moreover in our precious sacramental lives, ordination being such a moment but noting there are many ordinary sacramental moments as well, we mark the invisible grace which flows into our lives and in which we swim, with visible signs or as I like to expand, with perceptible signs in fact or in story.

Someone recently gave me a button which says simply: Love is Love in celebration of Pride. When I first looked at it I thought to myself…YES. And I confess there was a moment in preparing this sermon that I thought well just give them all the button and step away from the pulpit. That really says it all…almost.

What we come together to honor is not just a syllogism like Love is Love but rather to confess the Christian truth that God is Love. Moreover we who follow and model Jesus Christ have received the responsibility of the Spirit of Love not just as a notch on our achievement list or resume but as the source of life and identity. 

Love is who we are and who we are becoming.

Love propels us, encourages us, comforts us, imagines us as we in turn attend to and console others. 

Love transforms us.

Love is the air we breathe and the ground upon which we walk.

How is it then that we forget or get stuck or deny this sacred gift? How is it we deny our very being?

We get caught up in the shoulds and the accomplishments and the hegemonies of life? 

Much like the incredible cloud of smoke, biblical in it own right, which invaded our lives this week, we are too often shrouded from the glimmering of Love always present.

I felt a bit renewed and refreshed when reminded of that simple truism: Love is Love and I reclaimed those lenses which refract and focus shafts of God’s love

One of the sure reminders of this love is a story which comes from a program called the Roots of Empathy. This program founded by Mary Gordon goes into underserved school populations with stories and demonstrations and testimonies of that love which may have evaded these children, empathy, compassion and care. I am taken by the word roots and its relationship to our radical Christ as well as by the word empathy which calls us outside ourselves as Jesus does.

Gordon tells the story of Darren. Growing up in challenging inner city environment, he had been held back twice and was thus much older in his eighth grade class than anyone else. More concerningly, Darren had witnessed things no human, much less child, should. He had watched his mother be murdered. 

And so through bouncing around in the system and numbly stumbling through school, he was thought to be the tough guy and much feared.

One day as part of the Empathy program’s work in underserved middle schools, a young mother came with her infant to the class to talk about child care. She carried the baby in a carrier in which he faced out. The mother declared that the baby always seemed to want to face out and she wished so much that he would face in and snuggle. At the end of class she offered for any student who wanted to try on the carrier. No one took her up on it as it was lunch time...no one except Darren!

He strapped on the brightly colored carrier, which in and of itself presented a paradoxical and evocative image, and then asked if he could put the baby in! The mother was understandably reluctant but acquiesced. 

What happened next is the miracle of it all! The baby was quietly placed face in and snuggled into Darren’s chest. All was calm. All was still. 

And awe came upon them…

There was, in the poets words, a shimmering of something

That divine force of love changed everyone still in the room, invisible and so mystically powerful…

I would suggest that love transformed me and perhaps you the listeners.

Nothing in Darren’s life story would suggest that he knew this love and yet there it was calming and assuring like a whisperer with no words…

Like the Holy Spirit the holy comforter…

This story causes me to think about the Gospel stories of Love which of course are the stories of Incarnate Love among us.

I place the hush of the unsettled baby alongside the gesture of the woman who anointed Jesus with precious nard.

Something was shimmering

I imagine a new recognition descending on the mother, the teacher, the baby and even Darren of an energy never before known. I liken it to that divine power walking with the journeymen to Emmaus. I newly realize a baby’s, a mother’s and young man’s and my own heart burning…with love.

Another shimmering of ember glow

This transforming moment came from the most unlikely of sources. It is unclear who might have demonstrated such love to Darren. And yet there it was! In his very presence. It was who he was…a baby whisperer, snuggler and caregiver.

We too often skip over that question which is at the heart of the Christian faith and that is who am I? That critical question is related always to Who are we? 

If the answer to that question is We are the body of Christ becoming the beloved community then the answer to the individual question must be consistent: I am one who lives and moves and breathes in God’s divine Love. I am beloved and beloving

So much love is shimmering today:

The promise for a newborn being formed in the womb

The pastoral assurance which psalm 23 offers always

The fruits of endurance and persistence in service to God rendering never disappointing hope.

And of course the love always offered in truth by our lord and savior in subversive stories and inchoate answers.

I anticipate looking at your faces, themselves the visible reflections of grace, when the hymn Precious Lord take My Hand is Sung. They might shimmer.

In today’s Gospel, once again the disciples might get the question wrong or leap too quickly over it. Jesus reminds them that being the greatest is not part of the Christian service calculus. There is no measurement for Love…Love is well Love! And they and we are called to embody that identity. It is that simple!

Here we are in ordinary time considering extraordinary things! An ordination is anything but ordinary in the humdrum sense. But I would suggest that walking out of this sanctuary into your “ordinary” lives you will notice Love differently, you will hopefully be Love differently, and that beloveds is the most extraordinary thing of all.

No matter what, no matter how, there is a shimmer of something sacred and grace-filled in the most ordinary of circumstances.

Admittedly, often our socks are knocked off by more than a shimmer and we are met with something more like a lightning bolt or flagrance inextinguishable. the story of Lazarus comes to mind! However in that day to day stuff like in a middle school classroom, or a daily walk along the shore, or driving to work, we notice things which glimmer if we pay attention and shake off the numbness or stare into the clouds!

I pray that something shimmers for you today

I also pray that you encounter the Living Loving God in your ordinary lives and let that God hold you and bring a stillness to you. I pray that not only will you discover newly configured wonder and consolation but that you will be transformed such that you become the transmitters of compassion in a developing, forming consciousness.  

In the words of St Augustine, may you behold what you are and become what you receive.

And so after a lot more words than love is love I offer one of my favorite poems by Brian Doyle which will bring I believe a sudden yet clear and blessed end to this sermon. 

A Shimmer of Something

Well, the aged mother of the woman who married me died,

And there are so many stories both sad and hilarious to tell,

But let me tell you just one, because it is little and not little.

At her Mass, after the miracle, but before the electric bread

Went into every soul, as people are shuffling slowly toward

The altar, everyone in the line on the left side, as they came

To the front pew, touched my wife. Some bent down to hug

Her. Some touched her hair gently. Some just placed a hand

On her shoulder. One woman reached down and cupped her

Face in her hands for an instant. Sure I wept. We touch each

Other when we have no other way to speak. We speak many

Languages without words. We are so much wilder and wiser

Than we know. There are so very many of us without words,

Speaking the most amazing and eloquent languages; we sing

With our hands. I have seen it happen. You have seen it, too.

It's a little thing, but there's a shimmer of something beyond

Vast. See, I am trying to say an epic thing in this small poem,

And here we are at the end of the poem, where I stop talking.