“This common identity as God’s beloved children is the only sure rock from which to build our identities. From this secure base we can become aware of how our cultural group memberships can overrun our common identity as all of God’s children.”
Sermon by Sally Howard at All Saints Church, Pasadena, on Sunday, April 29, 2018.
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Love has the run of the house! As we take up permanent residence in a life of love, we live in God and God lives in us. Amen!
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Greg Boyle once wrote that our image of God can get tiny if we aren’t careful. Touch stone images of God, he said, can help our minds and hearts expand with the vastness of God’s love. Because the God we have is always much greater than the one we think we have. Do you have a touchstone image of God that helps ground you in God’s love for you?
I remember spending time at my grandparents’ house when I was a little girl after my father died. It was much quieter than my own home. There was room to run around outside and enough order to daily life that I felt free to play and create. Most importantly, there was always a sense of being loved. When my grandmother introduced me, she almost always said, “This one is mine.” I belonged to her and that helped ground me in a sense of belovedness that even now, helps me when I feel afraid or like I’m not enough. When my grandmother and I talked and prayed, we thanked God for the prophet Martin Luther King, Jr. and she taught me that all God’s children were beloved forever. My grandparents’ love helps me imagine what it means to dwell where love has the run of the house.
When we’re blessed with healthy experiences, in our human relationships, it can give us a glimpse of the power and depth of God’s love. But sometimes our human relationships can be hurtful and conflict ridden and abusive.
Fortunately for us, God is so much bigger than even the true love present in our best human relationships. God is abundant Love, flowing through this world and through us all of the time. God is always with us. God’s love envelops us, even when we can’t feel it or remember it or hold onto it. Life is hard and we rub against each other in ways that hurt. We get distracted by the chaos, violence and hate that seems to be filling our common lives together as human beings living on the planet earth at this time.
The touchstone image of my grandparents’ love has been a beacon in my life. It is part of what resonated when I got here to All Saints. Here I felt the love of God who cherished and welcomed me, no matter who I was or where I was on my journey. I was introduced to an expansive view of God, a God who is obsessed with proximity and hospitality, and wanted absolutely everyone to be invited to the table. Here, we experience a community drawn by that radical hospitality to face its fears and stand up against racism and homophobia. To this day, I continue to experience first hand how a deep connection to God’s love for me that empowers me to trust God with my well being and significance, and I can take action in the world on behalf of others.
With the image of the vine in today’s gospel, Jesus is giving his disciples a touchstone image of God to instruct them and help them connect to God in the way that Jesus had. In these I AM teachings, Jesus, the rabbi, the teacher who Cynthia Bourgeault identifies as being from the wisdom or contemplative tradition, is trying to get us to understand something of the energy and power of this amazing, abundant Love that is available to all of us, all of time. This Love is so much bigger than we can picture. Jesus works hard in these passages to give us a way of experiencing who God is. I am the living bread, the light of the world, the door, I am the good shepherd. These are all ways of describing a mystical, contemplative experience beyond words. God’s abundant love lives in the realm of parable and metaphor and poetry and awe.
The “I AM” statements of Jesus harken back to Moses, the first person in the Bible who is spoken of as knowing God “face to face,” and “who would speak with Yahweh as a man speaks with his friend”. Moses was fleeing a murder, when God initiated a relationship that grew into an amazing intimacy of dialogue and mutual self-disclosure, which is the pattern of all love affairs.
“A blazing bush that does not burn up.” This image captures God’s divine love—a heat of blazing light that does not destroy. Moses is caught between running forward to meet the blaze and coming no nearer and taking off his shoes. This response to the daunting mystery of God who is Wholly other and yet uniquely compelling and attractive is recognizable in mystical experience from Moses through Julian of Norwich and beyond.
During his early experience with God’s presence, “Moses covered his face and was afraid to look back at God”. After receiving a glimpse into who God is–Being Itself, Existence Itself, a nameless God beyond all names, a liberator God—Moses, like most of us, felt shame at his absolute dependence. He had to be taught how to look back. As Moses hides his face from the burning bush, God commissions him to confront the pharaoh of Egypt and to tell that Pharaoh to stop oppressing the enslaved Hebrews. The experience of God’s personal Presence and social engagement are intertwined vine and branch, from the very beginning of our tradition. Moses’ awareness of God’s desire to abide with him and God’s presence within him, allows him to slowly absorb the daring freedom of God to become the person God called him to be.
In the forefront of the image of vine and vine grower, Jesus conveys that his relationship with God is one of intimate connection, interdependence, and mutual abiding. The vine needs the vine grower as much as the vine grower needs the vine. The vine needs the vine grower for its optimal growth and production, even its abundance. It will produce more fruit, fruit in abundance, if cared for. Out of this profound sense of interconnection and mutual belonging, Jesus knows his identity as the true vine. He trusts and loves God who loves him beyond all measure, and it gives him the courage to stand against all that stands against love, even the powers of death.
It is important to note that Jesus himself experienced being pruned, maybe even weaned, from that which was false. I can imagine what some of those moments might have been, moments when his identity was challenged. Like the temptations in which Jesus faces the choice of whether to go for the glitz and glory of power used for one’s own enhancement or whether to identify with being a servant leader who uses his power for and with others.
Another might have been in Jesus’ experience with the woman from Cana. This woman was a descendent of bitter enemies of Israel-enemies whom Israel had conquered and displaced from their land. Jesus is definitely the non-target person in this interaction, and although he identifies as God’s beloved, there are aspects of his story that are rooted in a group identity that differentiates itself by emphasizing differences rather than commonalities with others. He initially rejects the Canaanite woman’s request to heal her daughter. Yet she persists, insisting that she is worthy of inclusion in God’s healing circle. This challenged Jesus identity. She enlarged Jesus’ story about God and God used her love of her daughter, to prune back Jesus’ cultural isolation. Jesus’ connection to his baptismal identity of belovedness, empowered him to let go of those aspects of his group identity that were contrary to the love of God. Jesus’ circle of inclusion expanded and he was able to join more fully God’s dream of turning the human race into the human family.
This stands out to me as very important for us at this time and place. Because we are being called to a new level of multiculturalism and heterogeneity that is difficult for human beings to live into. It’s not because we are bad; its just who we are. Because every person has some aspects of their identity—our stories about ourselves and what makes us safe or belong or have importance—that are vulnerable to disruption in the face of someone else’s culture or story. Therefore, some aspects of cultural isolation are natural to us and comforting. Research on interpersonal attraction suggests that familiarity is the most powerful predictor of friendship. We tend to like people who seem familiar to us, and we perceive people who are completely unfamiliar as less likable. Without intentionality, we are going to naturally befriend people who seem familiar. Our homogeneity becomes like a cage entrapping our group, preventing us from becoming familiar with culturally different others.
This is born out in our church communities. American churches are increasingly homogeneous across ethnic, cultural, and theological lines despite the fact that America is becoming increasingly diverse. 90% of all American churches are composed of congregations that are at least 90% racially the same.
As human beings, we also conserve our cognitive energy. We develop mental shortcuts to deal with the volume of information that comes at us everyday, a volume that far exceeds our ability to process it. So we categorize. Putting things into categories makes it easier to navigate the world and it feels safer. We don’t like too much ambiguity and it takes more energy cognitively to interact with people and things we can’t easily categorize.
Categorizing also creates in groups and out groups. In fact we often differentiate ourselves from other groups, just like Jesus did with the Canaanite woman, even when there’s no logical reason to do so. Fixating on differences leads us to ignore glaring commonalities. Furthermore, research shows that division between groups tends to result in prejudice and prejudice tends to result in division between groups. What begins as seemingly harmless homogeneity can snowball into distrust, inaccurate perceptions of other groups, prejudice and hostility.
Lastly, our identities and self-esteem get wrapped up in our categories. We define ourselves by what groups we belong to. We all have a powerful need to feel good about ourselves. Feeling like we matter is as essential to emotional and spiritual health as food is to our bodies. And you guessed it, our need for affirmation creates a desire to surround ourselves with those who validate our culturally distinct ways of life and whose differences don’t threaten our identities and sense of safety. Hearing different languages or different music in a service can be upsetting, not because we are bad, but because we are vulnerable and need to belong.
But praise God, perfect love casts out fear.
God knows we need to feel secure that we matter and we need a sense of belonging that never waivers. God knows that we must have a secure sense of our belovedness and worth before we can like Jesus, prune our identities of things that are false. We need to abide in God’s love like Jesus did. We are eternally loved beyond all measure and nothing can separate us, not even death, from existing in God’s love. This common identity as God’s beloved children is the only sure rock on which to build our identities. From this secure base, we can become aware of how our cultural group memberships can overrun our common identity as all God’s children. We can recognize how we separate ourselves from individuals or groups that are not highly valued by our society. Research shows that when we stop thinking of ourselves as us versus them and begin to think of ourselves as one large in group, as a “mwe”, as Dan Siegel put it, many of the processes that wreak havoc on our world are reversed.
To take up permanent residence in a life of love, we need to dwell in God’s presence. It is only when we are connected to God’s reckless outpouring of love that we can truly be free to love one another.
We can only love because we are loved. That’s what it means to be a dependent being. Jesus said, “Abide in Me, and I will abide in you. A branch cannot bear fruit if it is disconnected from the vine, and neither will you if you are not connected to Me.” This kind of connection my friends, takes practice. I have to admit that I really disliked practicing the piano as a child and it took me some time and encouragement to develop a regular spiritual practice. Sitting quietly still does not come naturally to me, so I have to work at it. But even when we feel totally distracted and impatient or when God’s presence feels opaque, God longs to be with us and always meets our intention with God’s Presence.
Spiritual practices, like centering prayer, lecto divino, or walking meditation, are ways of remembering to see the glory that is at the heart of every moment. It’s not about seeking to know about God, but to know God, like Moses, and Mary, and Jesus. It is to seek the experience of Presence.
Thomas Merton said that spiritual practice is about three things:
Remembering that deepest within us is God
That the very ground of our being and everyone else’s is a “pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven”.
That we will find true strength for the holy work of transformation of the world by digging deep into the foundations of our being.
Enduring strength for turning the human race into the human family will be found in our essence, not in our egos. In the realization of our oneness with God, we are liberated from our tendencies to derive our security and identity from anything less than God. God’s perfect love casts out fear. We can absorb the daring freedom of God by finding our truest identity in the very ground of our being. The way of God is love and in Christ, God reveals God’s self to be the great lover, par excellence. By following God’s spirit of love within us, we are intimately instructed how to be great lovers ourselves.
Amen
