The Sure Foundation of Loving-Kindness -Fourth Sunday after Pentecost

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the Fourth Sunday after Pentecost June 25, 2023 by Rev. Holly Huff, Associate Priest

Our Collect of the Day, the Collect for Proper 7, addresses God saying, “Lord, you never fail to help and govern those whom you have set upon the sure foundation of your loving-kindness.” “The sure foundation of God’s loving-kindness…”, is the loving-kindness or mercy, pledged covenant unshakable faithfulness that is God’s very nature and God’s gift to us. This loving-kindness is what God wants to give us in place of all the self-sacrificial acts of spiritual heroism and great deprivation we imagine are required. And the sure foundation of God’s loving-kindness is important background for our other readings today—the sure foundation of God’s loving-kindness is the foundation from which we read scripture as it tells us we have been baptized into Christ’s death, that Jesus brings not peace but the sword, and that you must lose your life to find it.

These are texts pointing to creative and ultimately generative dissolution. God, in God’s infinite tenderness and loving-kindness, loves us as exactly as we are. But, God is not content to leave us as we are. And so we hear today, from that sure foundation of loving-kindness, a call to actually experience our own weakness, vulnerability, dependence and limitation—and to experience them as held and contained in Jesus’s identification with our humanity. “Our weakness he did not despise”—he willingly empties himself, descends into the depths of those chaotic waters of creation where all the sea monsters dwell to be with us in our human life, including our inescapable vulnerability and dependence. And so our deepest fears, everything we are most tightly defended against, don’t have to be faced alone. The letter to the Romans assures us that “All of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death,”…”buried with him by baptism into death, so that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.” Paul points us to a newness of life that follows the hospitable welcome rather than hostile denial, the hospitable welcome of all that we experience as a kind of death. Like Abraham at the tent door, might we spread the table to welcome those strangers that are constantly turning up: weakness and dependence in the forms of illness, concern for one’s children, isolation and loneliness, fears about growing old, fears about making a mark on the world, longing for connection, longing for purpose? Welcomed in, greeted, and mourned, the death in each fear and each loss reveals itself to be an occasion to also welcome and experience newness of life, the truth of a “dearest freshness deep down things,” springing up in each of us, as God’s grandeur expresses itself through each one of our faces. “Baptized into Christ’s death” is very good news, heralding a process of creative disintegration where we let go of all the external ways we’ve stabilized our identity by seeking after power possessions and prestige. We let that search go under the baptismal water, buried in Christ’s death, and instead let our I AM rest in the Great I AM, laying our weary head on the sure foundation of God’s loving-kindness.

In our gospel passage we hear Jesus say, “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household.” Strange words from the Prince of Peace. What is Jesus getting at here, as he quotes from the prophet Micah? Set upon the sure foundation of divine loving-kindness, how can we understand this as a message of liberation from a God who is determined to break every yoke that keeps us from receiving that loving-kindness and mercy as truly unconditional? It’s okay to love your family, no question, but Jesus is trying to wake us up here to the ways relationships can entrap us and those we love. He has come to set us free from every false peace that masks a subtly violent status quo. The eruption of conflict that’s been festering under the surface can be a very good thing. “There is nothing hidden that shall not be revealed.” Better to get it out in the open, let whatever has been wounded come out into the sunlight, where it can be seen honestly, acknowledged, welcomed, and mourned. The crushing weight of familial expectations, the indelible legacy of early childhood experiences, the pressure to put on a good face and represent the family name: all of these are forms of unfreedom and untruth, trapping us in false and partial selves, held captive by a fearful attempt to hold onto love we fear is all too conditional. Jesus comes with a sword to slice through all that like silk, to set us on the sure foundation of divine loving-kindness, to place us there on the steady, reliable, can’t-earn-it, can’t-lose it ground of our being. God’s eye is on the sparrow. Even the hairs of your head are all counted. In that stable beautiful love, we can start to release our relationships with our closest loved ones as possession or control, and we find that like the thrashing child who Jesus takes in his arms, heals, and then gives back to his father, we are held, healed, and given back to each other. “Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.”

Baptized into Christ’s death, not peace but a sword, lose your life to find it—these are all different ways of talking about life in the spirit as a process of creative disintegration. We have to let love crack us open. Opening our hearts is intensely vulnerable—and this vulnerability is essential if who we were made to be is to develop and unfurl out into the world. And it is God’s dream that who we were made to be develop and unfurl out into the world, that we loosen our binding ideas and expectations and stories about ourselves and find our real lives, “hidden in Christ with God.” God wants us to exist, the God who creates out of nothing wants us to exist, you and me, each one a fresh expression of ancient beauty, now in newness of life. God’s dream for the world is lived out and realized in one small way after another, through our loving relationships with self, neighbor, and all creation. This happens in the particular, in your particular life, welcomed just as it is, cut free from polite or cheerful falsehoods, set free to flourish as a genuine rich unique expression, open to the whole range of joy and sorrow flowing through you, and set on the sure foundation of God’s loving-kindness. In that trust we can pray with the psalmist through it all, with a full assurance we will be cared for just as the sparrows and the lilies of the field: “In your great mercy, O God, answer me with your unfailing help.” “Answer me, Lord, for your Love is kind; in your great compassion, turn to me.” Amen.