Expanding the bounds of love

Sermon preached at Ripon Cathedral

Easter 5 (Year B) - 10th May 2009

One of the stranger news reports over the last week has been the update on Van Gogh’s ear.  I know this is not exactly topical, taking place in 1888, though it did get a mention on Have I got news for you, but there is new evidence about what happened.  For over a century it was thought that Vincent Van Gogh, the Dutch artist famous for his portraits of sunflowers, lost his marbles and cut off his own ear.  This is largely because that is what he said.  After 10 years research two German academics have concluded that his loss of ear was down to a row with his friend Paul Gauguin, who sliced it off with a sword.  Van Gogh decided to protect his friend, Gauguin, by covering up the truth and so the self mutilation story was born.  Van Gogh died two years later after shooting himself in the chest – thus adding credibility to the story.

History is full of examples of friends taking the rap for one another; protecting through taking the blame for something someone else has done.  It is an act of love and self sacrifice, sometimes for a higher cause, sometimes out of misguided loyalties, sometimes simply out of love that places the other’s wellbeing above their own.  There is a natural desire to protect, even at personal cost.

It is experiences like these that provide a ready lens through which to view our second reading with its long advocacy of love (1 John 4:7-end).  And because we know what it is to love and be loved, to have such a strong bond of affection and loyalty to another, we think we know what this kind of passage is talking about.  This is a passage that pops up in the wedding service, everyone who loves is of God because God is love and to live in love is to live in God.  What could be more romantic and spiritually fulfilling?  And when a covenanted relationship involves the union of two people at such a deep level, then it becomes a vehicle of God’s grace and the language of sacrament – an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace – becomes highly appropriate.   We are blessed and enriched beyond words through such relationships and the profound intimacy that they give life to.  As the Song of Songs expresses it, love is strong as death, more powerful than anything else (8:6).

But before we get carried away on a haze of adulation and misty eyes, the first letter of John is not so much a celebration of love as an encouragement to it.  The implication is that when preachers talk about love it means that the churches are actually being beastly to one another, that’s why they are making the point.  John is actually trying to expand the horizons of his readers to love beyond whatever boundaries they might otherwise create.  It is easy to love our loved ones, those who love us and are closest to us, even if they are being annoying – and we all are at times!  But that passage moves us to love our brothers and sisters and this is about more than the relationships between siblings.

Taken with other passages of the New Testament, the encouragement to love is to love everyone and that starts to become a radical proposal.  It means loving the stranger, so much so that we take the parable of the Good Samaritan to heart.  It means loving those who hate us, so much so that we will look for transformation more than retribution, for change and new life more than getting our own back.  Having had the lead stolen off my church roof this past week, I will have to wrestle with that one.  It means asking what love really means.

Today Christian Aid week begins.  This is the week of the year when many of us will trudge up and down roads delivering red envelops; stationery of transformation.  It is the annual reminder to expand the horizons of our loving to strangers in other parts of the world, many of whose toes will get wet with the effects of rising sea levels before ours do.  It is a challenge to think beyond the narrow confines of the credit crunch in this country and explore the effects of world trade on the majority of the earth’s population.  It is a challenge to share of our wealth and poverty – we are never too poor to share and expand our loving.  It is when we are poor that we find out what true hospitality means, both in terms of offering it and receiving it.

This loving grows out of God’s grace.  It is the spiritual fruit of abiding in God.  Our gospel reading (John 15:1-8) gave us the picture of a vine: a classic biblical image of blessing and plenty.  Gardeners know that vines need to be dressed; to be pruned and tended so that they bear an abundance of grapes that refresh and can be distilled into wine for celebration and revival after a hard day.  That allusion reminds us that branches that are cut off from the root die and become firewood.  Living branches are connected to the sap that feeds life.  So our Christian living and loving needs to be connected to the source of grace, God, and the loving is the fruit we bear.  The God who gives, gives abundantly and grace abounds.  We know this when we meet it and also when it is absent!

So, today the mystical and the active combine.  The active outworking of loving is rooted in our feeding and abiding in Christ.  Our adoration of God bursts out transforming our deeds and words.  This is itself rooted in the firm belief that faith does make a difference but only when the grace of God is allowed to work through our ‘yes’ to the Spirit, when we make Mary’s response our own.  The corresponding implication of this is that when we fail, when we fall short, as we do from time to time as fallen, fallible human beings, sometimes spectacularly so, we are suffering a deprivation of grace and need to pray more earnestly for God’s healing and life restoring presence.  This is partly what the new Bishop of Sheffield refers to as ‘extra grace required’.  He is actually talking about when people wind us up and we suffer a deprivation of Grace, but I think it applies more broadly too.  Of course sometimes, we think we have failed when we haven’t; it is just that we have a distorted picture of what we should be like – but that is a whole different sermon – and I’ve been told by Paul to keep this fairly short!

Our loving and our living combine in God’s grace.  In that grace the boundaries of our concern expand because God’s love for us is unbounded.  Working out the implications of that is a radical challenge that strikes at the foundations of how we behave and relate, but it is a challenge rooted in the Spirit of God, whose love transforms everything it touches, even ourselves.

© Ian Black 2009