Sermon preached by the Revd Neil Fernyhough, 5th Sunday After Easter (May 10, 2009).
Readings: Acts 8: 26-40; Psalm 22: 24-30; 1 John 4: 7-21; John 15: 1-8
Fads and fashions in popular music come and go, but one theme that stretches across time and genres is love. From the sappiest, eye-rolling schmaltz to the loudest thrashing punk death-metal anthem, that four letter word gets tossed around like a hapless beach ball. You’d almost think love was as cheap and plentiful as oxygen, and as natural a human impulse as breathing it! As a Christian and as a pastor, all I can say is, “I wish!”
Our readings are on the same theme as a Celine Dion tearjerker – love. But with a twist. That beautiful passage from the First Letter of John, which many of us know so well from weddings, devotional books, and dare I say greeting cards, proclaims the truth that God is love, and we should abide in love. We are meant to understand that the eunuch who, converted and baptised, rejoices and goes on his way, has discovered that love. And, in our final reading, our Gospel, we have unmasked that love in which – or rather, in whom – we are called to abide. Jesus Christ, the risen and ascended God.
Love is such a messy, fascinating, complicated, joyful, and – yes – terrifying human reality. You could spend a lifetime trying to define it, and never do more than peel off the outer skin of an onion. But since it is Mother’s Day, and the season of Easter, love is definitely in bloom (to quote another old love song). But what the heck is it, for us as Christian people?
For the author of the First Letter of John, love is not only from God, and of God, love is God. It prompts us to recall that when Jesus is asked to sum up the teachings of the law and the prophets, his response is, simply, love – love God with all your being, and love others as yourself. A complete circle of love, a complete inhabitation of love.
Which is fine. But it still doesn’t get at what love actually is or how to do it, so let me hit it with my best shot, to quote a more modern love song. Love is a state that exists only in relationship. When the love is between two beings with thought and will, the relationship requires sacrifice in order to remain healthy. In other words, I need to give up some of my desires in order to help fulfill the desires and needs of the one whom I love. This is seen in the sacrificial love of Jesus – obviously in his self-offering on the cross, but also in his teaching. Thus, as an illustration of the love commandment, the Parable of the Good Samaritan features a man who sacrifices money, time, honour, and reputation in order to live out love – thereby entering into a relationship with someone whom ordinarily he would have had ignored. So lesson one is that love is not about using another to fulfill one’s own needs or desires. It is, instead, the impulse to fulfill theirs.
Love fails to thrive when relationships are damaged, ignored, or never even begun. And there are, sadly, many examples of this in the church. The common denominator is objectification – turning a subject into a self-serving object. And so, we objectify the Church when we fail to develop approaches to worship and doctrine which transcend disagreement. We objectify our fellow human beings when we fail to engage with culture and give the place of honour to the poor and oppressed. And we objectify creation when we fail to take leadership in the environmental crisis, in word and action.
To love God with all of one’s being, and to love one’s neighbour as oneself requires us to view the Church, our fellow human beings, and all of God’s created order as subjects, rather than objects. God is not something for which we “do” religion; nor are the poor objects of pity, to whom we “do” charity; nor is the environment a collection of unrelated objects out of which we extract materials to “do” any number of things. Belief, salvation, and life itself are focussed on you and me only in the context of our wider relationships – with families, households, nations, and creation as a whole.
It is significant that we believe God, in Christ, perfectly united the physical and spiritual. Jesus was a living divine lesson that everything imbued with the Spirit of God. In this interpenetration of the spirit with matter, we see the perfect ideal of the sacrifice involved in loving relationship. The physical is emptied to take on the spiritual; and the spiritual must adapt to physical finitude. Sacrifice is the being of loving relationships and the nature of reality itself.
For us, this means that we must give something of ourselves to and for the other – the Church, our fellow human beings, and Creation itself; limiting our desires in order to nurture our God-given relationships. But love must begin inside – since self-acceptance is the precondition to relationship with others. You can’t fulfill the commandment to love your neighbour if you can’t love yourself. The forging of one’s identity with integrity is one of the most difficult tasks you can undertake – or avoid. Yet self-acceptance is impossible if one is not accepted in a person-to-person relationship.
Søren Kierkegaard defined Christian heroism as “risking unreservedly being oneself, an individual human being alone before God, alone in this enormous exertion and this enormous accountability.” Let us risk being ourselves to ourselves, and with one another, and from this acceptance, let us renew our relationships, and extend our love to every one and every thing, according to Christ’s commandment. Amen.
© Richard Neil Fernyhough, 2009.
