Love Poured Out and Overflowing
A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the Sixth Sunday of Easter by Holly Huff, Postulant for Holy Orders.
Today’s gospel picks up where last week’s left off. Jesus tells his disciples to abide in his love. I am the vine and you are the branches on the vine, so abide in my love. Today we hear Jesus’s new commandment to his disciples, to love one another as he loved us. Love one another. What could be more true, and what could sound more trite? A bit like Mother’s day, actually. How can we talk about this love in a way that not simpering or hokey but that comes to bear on the real work of receiving and then embodying the love of Jesus?
Love one another. It’s hard not to fall immediately into cliches and trite sayings, too cute to be believed, and at a remove from the reality of the world. And religion, spirituality, your life with God is meant to expose you to what’s real. To open you up and bring you in closer contact with what’s real and true, moment by moment. God is not an idea, confined to the limits of our minds. And God is not a fantasy, at odds with our experience of life as it is, in all its beauty and difficulty. God is the ultimate Reality and so if we’re just playing pretend for a couple hours on a Sunday it might be better to pack up and go home.
God’s love for each of us is no happy Valentines candied hearts sort of message. Nothing wrong with some Sweet Tarts, of course, but God is stronger stuff than this. Love is stronger stuff than this. Abiding love is not spun sugar that melts away at the first sign of storm clouds; abiding love is the flood itself. God’s love is continually poured out, poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit that has been given to us, overflowing and then poured through us into the world.
I like to go camping down in the deserts of Southern Utah, and I’ve yet to be caught in a flash flood, though I’m continually looking over my shoulder when I confuse the odd airplane engine’s rumbling for thunder. This has led to some undignified running through slot canyons. But hiking through that landscape you can see the evidence of what mighty waters do: carving canyons deep into the earth, washing away what seemed immovable. Water remakes and reshapes the earth. Time seems to slide on a different, much longer scale among so many layers of exposed rock, and none of them can withstand the water forever.
Today’s collect asks God to “Pour into our hearts such love towards you that we, loving you in all things and above all things, may obtain your promises, which exceed all that we can desire.” The love of God is being poured out like a flood, drilling deeper and deeper through the dusty unfeeling impenetrable layers of our sandstone hearts. I will take out your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh, God promised through the prophets.
Lord, give us this heart of flesh! We live so unfeeling, so dried up and at a distance even from ourselves, not to mention other people. To love one another we need God to restore us, to bring us back to the vine and root us there, to teach us to send out bright green new tendrils reaching outward, unafraid, willing to be changed and redone by the God we trust will restore all things and make them as they should be.
Fearing the flood, we can try to seal ourselves off, and we often do, living a parched life. But even then we are not safe (if safe is what we would want to be!) from the inbreaking love of God, which is no respecter of the petty boundaries we set for it. In the reading from Acts, Peter has just witnessed the Spirit poured out upon the Gentile outsiders and asks, “Can anyone withhold the water for baptizing these people who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have?” I think it’s not merely a rhetorical question. “Can anyone withhold this water?” No, we really can’t. God’s boundary-crossing love is continually pouring out, from the primal waters of creation to our experience in this place, right here, right now. No one can hold back this water.
And this love isn’t content to stay within the small furrows or designated channels we make for it. God has more to give us than we desire or imagine or think to ask for. Love is not especially safe or sweet, just as mothers know the miracle of new life, brought forth in blood and water, is not especially safe or sweet. All the cliches about love are ways we keep God’s strange and powerful workings at bay, and keep ourselves cut off from the difficulty of what it asks of us, which at first may be simply to allow ourselves to be loved.
And as we receive love, we become love for others. “As I have loved you, love one another.” Jesus makes love visible in the flesh. As Stephanie Spellers writes, “If you want to see Beloved Community enfleshed,”—what it looks like to love one another—“look to the community God created when he walked among us. Look to Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus purposefully gathered insiders and outsiders, scandalous women and illiterate men, hungry children and wealthy benefactors, all of whom had only begun to understand their own brokenness and need. He told them they were grafted onto one vine. When they tried to make it all about him, he turned their attention to God and to one another. When they obsessed over which of them was the greatest, he knelt and washed their feet.” Jesus makes love visible in the flesh. “What does love do? Love gives its own life for the sake of the beloved. How do we know God is love? Because, in Jesus, God gives God’s own self away.” This love is a “non-clinging, self-emptying, persistent love. It seeks wholeness and kindness, as the individual and the collective strive and sacrifice for the sake of the flourishing of the greater whole and for the end of all forms of domination and oppression that diminish the children of God.” (Church Cracked Open 34)
Jesus calls us friends and wants to share his joy with us. “All this is that my joy may be in us, and that your joy may be complete.” As the letter from first John says, his commandments are not burdensome. They are the most natural thing in the world. We are burdened by all the ways we keep love at bay. We were made for love, and love is already giving itself to us in every moment. To obey Jesus’s command to love one another we don’t need to try harder, use more effort, exert our muscular, instrumental acting on the world to bend it to our purposes. We need to stop damming it up, to make ourselves a sieve and let the love of God pour through us. It is already given, enough to overflowing. Let it do its occasionally terrifying work. Trust in its graceful outpouring that sweeps away the constraints we try to impose. Let the love of God remodel our lives, resurface the landscape, and renew the face of the earth.
As Jesus tells the woman at the well, the fountain of life is gushing up within you! Go deep enough and God is there, like water in the rock. We spend a lot of our days buried up to our ears in sand but say the word and you will be washed clean. There is no coercion in love and so you must utter your yes. Daily, over and over, return to the water. Reading scripture, in prayer and worship, giving your life away and sharing what you have found, resting in God, following Jesus in the Way of Love, you will find his commandments are not burdensome.
Lord, pour into our hearts your love, which is real and not a dream. Carve out space in our hearts and flow through us, that we may abide in your love and embody it, loving one another as you have loved us.
Amen.