The Pressure of Divine Love—Covenant All the Way Down

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the Second Sunday of Lent, February 28, 2021, by the Very Rev. Tyler Doherty, Dean & Rector.

There’s an old joke, a version of which is told by Stephen Hawking in his book A Brief History of Time, that goes like this. 

A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: "What you have told us 

is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise." The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, "What is the tortoise standing on?" "You're very clever, young man, very clever," said the old lady. "But it's turtles all the way down!"

From the Christian perspective, of course, it’s not turtles, but God, Love, all the way down. The reality of the living God is the One in whom we live and move and have our being. There is nowhere we can go, nothing we can do, that will separate us from the indissoluble bond of love that God creates in God’s covenant with God’s children. As the Psalmist sings

Where can I go then from your Spirit?/Where can I flee from your presence?/If I climb to heaven, you are there; if I make the grave my bed, you are there also. If I take the wings of the morning/and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea,/Even there your hand will lead me and your right hand hold me fast” (Psalm 139: 6-9).

Or take those sky-tearing words that God speaks at the baptism of Jesus--”“You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased”--which reveal to us not just the reality of Jesus’ identity, but our own identity as beloved children of God. In a culture that tells us we are not enough, in a culture that tells us that we are what we buy, or our worth is measured by the number of likes we get on Facebook, and how many followers we have on Instagram, in a culture that pronounces some of God’s children clean and heaps privilege upon them for the mere fact of the color of their skin while casting out others to languish in the wilderness of racial and economic inequality, the non-negotiable pronouncement of our belovedness, as children of God created in God’s image and after God’s likeness, is world-changing, transfiguring; the promise that how things are now is not how they have to be.

God covenants with us, but the story, the adventure into love as we walk down the path of discipleship, doesn’t stop there. Once we connect with God’s unshakeable fireman’s hold of belovedness on us, once that becomes a living reality for us, we are then called to live that same reality of the indissoluble bond of love for others. Our baptism pledges us solidarity with others--all others. Our baptism establishes an indissoluble bond with the poor ones, the oppressed ones, the downtrodden ones, the shelterless ones, the healthcareless ones, the shamed ones, the voiceless ones, the cast off and excluded ones, the lynched ones, the shot in the back for reaching for their wallets ones, the countless George Floyds whose names we don’t know, but whose families continue bear the cross of pain, trauma, and grief because of their senseless deaths. 

Baptism implicates us, pledges us, binds us to everyone and everything including plants and animals, mountains, rivers, oceans. That one who’s been bound hand and foot, gnashing her teeth in the outer darkness? We’re pledged, bonded, bound to her too. She is wailing our name with an urgency of call and demand that love cannot ignore. We drop our net mending and go. We leave the ninety-nine and search for the one. We light a lamp, sweep the house, and turn the entire house upside down looking for the misplaced coin even though we still have nine other dracmas.

So it’s not just Love all the way down, but covenant all the way down. Bonds of affection within bonds of affection. Interpenetrating webs of relation within interpenetrating webs of relation. God’s covenant with us and our covenant with all of God’s children and God’s good creation. God doesn’t break God’s covenant. Again and again he calls us to return, to abide, to dwell in God’s love for us that we might be that love for others. People, however, are not God (just a little Lenten reminder for you!). People are fallible. Prone to self-will, and self-love, victims of our addictions to power, control, safety, security, affection and esteem, human beings do break our covenants. And that’s why at the start of today’s service we prayed the Litany of Repentance--naming before others and before God the ways we have, individually and corporately, strayed like lost sheep, gone our own way, broken the bonds of love for God, God’s children, and God’s good creation. That’s what good liturgy does for us oftentimes--it names what we feel, but cannot express. It gives shape and voice to what is inchoate and unvoiced yet still lurking, still running our lives. Liturgy shines a light, names, diagnoses, in order that we might recognize and acknowledge that there is an illness in need of a cure. What goes unnamed, undiagnosed, festers and spreads unchecked like a cancer, like a (ahem) virus. Any addict knows this better than the average Sunday church-goer. It’s in the acknowledgement of a problem and in the acknowledgment of their powerlessness over the addiction that the process of healing and liberation begins. “My name is Tyler and I am a forgiven sinner. Hi, Tyler!”

So this morning we acknowledge the ways we have consciously and unconsciously participated in systems of oppression and exclusion that obscure, or flat out deny, the dignity of every human being. Time apart in this space of pandemic has allowed the true nature of our broken covenants with God, each other, and creation to come into focus. That’s what time apart often does--it opens our eyes to realities that are always before us, but which because of our busyness, our preoccupation, our sometimes willful blindness, we’ve ignored. There’s another old joke that captures this nicely, “There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is water?” 

I’m always hesitant to speak of “gifts of the pandemic,” but I do see the naming, and even grudging (by some) recognition of the social and environmental sins that have been thrust upon us--Me Too, Black Lives Matter, the pressing reality of Climate Change--as movements of the Holy Spirit, manifestations of the pressure of God on us, the voice of silenced calling us back to ourselves, calling us to become a new people. The pandemic has made a little space, created an opportunity for us to name, recognize, acknowledge the water in which we’ve been swimming. We’ve come to see that the water we swim in and enjoy is not so enjoyable for all of God’s creatures. For many, for most even, it’s actually toxic. It kills. Structural inequality, systemic racism, environmental degradation are predatory, prowling around, sniffing hungrily for the next meal, the next morsel of meat for the meat grinder. 

Those lines from 1 Peter come to mind: “Discipline yourselves, keep alert. Like a roaring lion your adversary the devil prowls around, looking for someone to devour. Resist him, steadfast in your faith, for you know that your brothers and sisters in all the world are undergoing the same kinds of suffering”(5: 8-9). Might, this time apart, I ponder in my heart with Mary, be a moment when we have been roused from our comfortable, privileged collective slumber? Are we, perhaps for the first time in our lives, able to see that lion on the prowl? Are we now more certain in who God is calling us to be as a Beloved Community, and to see in those suffering others, not people who aren’t trying hard enough, not rainforest fodder just waiting to be converted into more hamburgers, but brothers and sisters, hurting and trampled upon members of the one body?

In his beautiful little book The Burning Bush Lev Gillet writes, 

Divine Love is comparable to the atmospheric pressure surrounding us, which sustains each being and also exerts pressure from all sides. Love lays siege to each being and seeks to discover an opening, a path leading to the heart, by means of which Love can permeate everywhere. The difference between the sinner and the saint is that the sinner closes his heart to Love while the saint opens himself to this same Love. In both cases the Love is the same and the pressure is the same. The one rejects, the other accepts…. The difference does not come from God’s side but from man’s.

The pressure of Divine Love surrounds us on all sides. Gillet even says it “lays siege” to us seeking to “discover an opening” a hairline crack of vulnerability in our armour. These forty days of Lent are a time when we practice opening, yielding to the pressure of Love so that Love might permeate everywhere. Repentance, changing our mind, turning around, brothers and sisters, is our way of yielding, of accepting the pressure of Love in our lives and undergoing its process of healing and cure. As Leonard Cohen croons in his song Anthem, “Forget your perfect offering/There is a crack, a crack in everything/That’s how the light gets in.” Who can deny that a crack has appeared? At some level we see it, we feel it, we hear its crumbling groan. 

And now we have a choice. We can go back to sleep and pretend the crack isn’t there. We can explain it away. We can blame it on the victims. We can call it fate, or dismiss it as just the way things are. Or, as children of the Gospel, we can name, recognize, and acknowledge our participation in the crack that runs through our world, the great chasm that exists between rich and poor, global north and global south, people of privilege and people of color, and invite the healing, transfiguring light of Divine Love in. Veni sancte spiritus. God is still calling God’s people like he called Abram and Sarai out of retirement. Like he called Moses. Like he called the Israelites out of Egypt. Like Jesus called the first disciples away from mending their nets into the risky, messy, adventure of Becoming the Beloved Community. God’s indissoluble bond has been established--once and for all. Our bond with others, our neighbors near and far, has yet to be realized. That is the work we have been given to do, what it means to take up our cross and follow Jesus as reconciling love, repairers of the breach.

It starts with naming the crack and repenting. It continues with letting God’s light shine through to “guide our minds, fill our imaginations, control our wills.” And it comes to fulfillment when we go as God’s prodigal, inclusive, boundary-crossing love, the words “on earth as it is in heaven” ringing in our ears--the whole world one body, one embarrassingly abundant table of welcome where we hold all things in common. Covenantal love all the way down.