Advent 3, 2013 - Love
By Charles Rush
December 15, 2013
John 1: 1-5, 15: 10-13
[ Audio
(mp3, 6.0Mb) ]
sterday, I had my grandson Cy riding with me on the tractor. I say to him, “Cy, I thought this would be a good time to talk about your future”. Cy is a loquacious 4 and change. I say to him, “Cy, when you grow up are you going to Princeton or Harvard?”
“Papa, when I
grow up, I'm going to ride Black Beauty.” I love that, don't understand the question, answer
a question you do understand. Framing the debate is more than half the battle.
I let the
little fella down on. His eight year old sister is skating her first skate on the pond which is beautifully
frozen over. He runs across the pond and flying eagle tackles her on her skates.
I come over and say, “Cy, I saw you tackle your sister.
Can you go tell her that you are sorry.”
He sighs and
says, “Okay Papa.” He looks up at me, my Catholic grandson, and says, “Papa, we
don't need to tell God about this do we?”
I look back at
him and say, “Cy, have I ever shown you the secret fraternity hand shake?” He looks at me, “No”. I shake his hand and get this
look like, “Papa, you de man.”
You probably
know that Christians originally chose to celebrate the birth of Jesus during
the Roman festival of Saturnalia, the mid-winter week long feast of food and
alcohol, during the shortest days of the year that looked forward to the
beginning of the return of spring. The birth of Jesus was depicted as a kind of
star of hope on the horizon, just after the darkest day of the year that
beckons forth a new hope next year, a new hope that will grow in the spring and
come to full harvest in the future.
We tell this
story that God loves us. When the shepherds came in wonder, when the smartest
priests who were also the smartest scientists and mathematicians in their day,
came in search of a star, they brought their ideas about God. They came looking
for “The director of the heavens who holds the key to the fate of each
individual life”; they came looking for “the great power that enrages the sea
and causes volcanoes.” They came looking for the one behind nature that can
give us miraculous cures for our failing health. They came looking for the
great Mind behind the complex, inscrutable universe that puzzles us limited
humans. What did they find on their esoteric quest? They found the love of a
Mother for her infant. Whatever else we thought God must be or has to be, God
came to us with the healing, hopeful response that behind the math, behind the
physics, behind the complex mystery that befuddles us, there is love.
We won't know
everything but in spite of that be trusting because God is love fundamentally.
And God wants for us to become what we are to be in our fullness. God is a
comfort, a joy, a compassion. God cares about you and
what you are going through. God loves you and you and you.
Love is really
wonderful. A principal in Newark was
telling me about a woman in his school from Guatemala. She cleans houses in
Short Hills and has been in our country for about 5 years. She lives in a
falling down section of Newark because that is all she can afford. She stood
out, in the Principal's mind, because she is always there with her son Luis.
She has Luis in crisp clean clothes for school every day. From day one at
school, she made Luis introduce himself to the Principal and to his teacher,
shake their hands, and say, “Good morning.”
Despite the
broken community around her, she was intent on filling that boy with
discipline, a sense of respect, a love for learning. Luis was her project and
her love for that boy filled him, day in and day out, with the character to
rise above his situation and make a better life for himself.
He was blooming.
Or the teacher in the wonderful movie Music of the Heart,
about a classical musician that began teaching in a school district in Harlem
at a school that had never had a music program. She encounters all of
the brokenness that poverty brings to a community… no resources, social
anarchy, kids with attitudes, children acting out as a full time occupation,
ridicule.
Her first
students are the marginal kids because music, of course, is not cool to the
cool kids in the Hood. But she stays with it, teaching them violin. Over the
course of time, she gets to know some of the parents,
begins to understand some of the special burdens that are laid upon the poor,
makes some changes to accommodate other students. Shortly, she has a parent
here and there, stopping her and asking her plaintively, “Will you teach my
child?” The class grows, the kids develop the habits, and this new dimension of
their personality begins to grow, the part that appreciates beauty. And as they
develop talent, they have a newfound sense of self-esteem, self-respect.
Cornell West says that the greatest spiritual damage that poverty wreaks upon
people caught in the Hood is a culture of lovelessness that makes people unable
to love or respect themselves. Day by day, this teacher was reversing that
trend. She was giving them a way to develop self-respect, self-esteem, to
create and participate in beauty.
One day, she
decides that the children need a goal to work towards and she figures out what
they need to do to play in Carnegie Hall, just a few dozen blocks south, but a
whole world away. All of the kids get pumped. The parents become galvanized.
Eventually, all the parents and all the kids have to get organized and raise
some money to make this all happen. Community Spirit just blossoms in their
midst. That self-respect and self-esteem have some contagious radial
consequences. Parents start to care, start to get involved, start to take on
some responsibilities and themselves get caught up in
this positive energy. Way leads to way, and the next thing you know, the higher
reasons for which we were born start to become manifest.
And they get
to Carnegie Hall and they sound marvelous. Audience claps, then they stand. And
then the parents just break out in fuller more raucous celebration. You see
these kids drink in the blessing. The best thing is that they finally get to
say to themselves, “I'm really here. I belong here”.
It opens up a whole new world.
Love is like
that. Love blooms people into their fullness. Love is patient. Love is kind; it
is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on doing things only one way; it
is not irritable or resentful. Love rejoices in small signs that things are
going right and does not glower over setbacks great or small. Love is capable
of bearing a great weight of responsibility. Love believes when there is no
evidence around us that belief is warranted. Love is hope filled; it can endure
to the end….Faith, hope, and love abide… But the
fullest of these is love.
Love expands
our sense of compassion, one of the principal themes of the Christmas story. It
allows us to love people we don't know well, remembering that God loves all of
us. I remember reading an article in the New
Yorker more than a decade ago from a reporter that was in Sarajevo when it
broke out in ethnic violence.
There was an
American who was in the city one day when sniper fire erupted. He saw a young
girl get hit and fall to the ground. A man ran into the middle of the road and
picked her up. The American had a car, so he jumped in, drove over to the man
and said, "Get in. I will take you to the hospital."
They started to head for
the hospital. On the way the man holding the girl in the back seat on his lap
said, "Hurry mister, she is still alive."
A little while later he
said, "hurry mister, she is still breathing." He drove faster.
A few moments later he
said, "Hurry, she is still warm."
They got to the
hospital, turned the child over to the doctors. The man said, "Hurry
please. She is getting cold."
They brought her inside,
got her to the medical team and the medical team pronounced her dead. The two
men were leaden in distress and they stood together over a sink, washing the
blood from their hands. The man who had carried the young girl had tears in his
eyes. He said, "I don't know how I am going to tell her father that she is
dead."
The American was
astonished. He said, "I thought she was your child."
The man looked back at
him and said, "Aren't they all."
That is the way God
looks at it. They are all God's children. "No one has ever seen God” says
I John, “if we love one another, God lives in us, and God's love is perfected
in us."
"Those who say, 'I
love God,' and are indifferent towards their neighbors, are liars; for those
who do not love the neighbor whom they have seen, cannot love the God whom they
have not seen."
Love takes us
out further in compassion than we imagined we might and it also makes us
deeper, sturdier when in our closest relationships.
They give us
the confidence and acceptance to find our dreams and live them. The great baseball
player Jackie Robinson… His wife Rachel and he had a profound love life
together and they raised three children as well.
Jackie
Robinson was a terrific athlete and an important role model in American history
as the first black baseball player in the major leagues. Jackie Robinson had to
endure not only the insults and humiliation that was hurled against him at the time, he was always on stage, always in the public eye. And
there were some people that were waiting for him to fall. No matter how much
you love the game, that is a lot of spiritual pressure
to live under.
And Jackie had
the pressure that generation of black leaders had to go through of being the
first at this, the first at that. He couldn't just be ordinary. I'm sure he
internalized a standard of excellence just knowing that so much was on the line
for his people as well as himself.
Rachel gave
him the confidence and the courage to endure and become all that he became. He
once wrote of her, "Strong, loving, gentle and brave, never afraid to
either criticize or comfort." Great relationships are like that. They are
a team effort. Jackie might have been the one that had his name on the marquee
but when you talk to the Robinson kids it was a team effort. There wasn't
Jackie without Rachel.
Mo Vaughn, the
first baseman for the Boston Red Sox, wore #42 on his jersey in honor of Jackie
Robinson… He once said "Jackie Robinson couldn't have been Jackie Robinson
if it wasn't for Rachel Robinson… He wanted to quit. She wouldn't let
him." That is what we hope, that we will be an inspiration for each other,
a quiet confidence that blooms each other, that makes us sturdier, makes us
deep.
Arthur Aron, a psychologist at SUNY has done a simple experiment
that shows how important it is to be present with one another. He takes random
couples and puts them in pairs. In the experiment, they are asked to do things together, each of them has to give directions so that each
of them have to follow one another in turn. In addition, they have to share
some important personal information with each other. Finally, he has them stop
and look into one another's eyes for a full two minutes. Two minutes is a long
time to look at each other. What do you think he finds? He finds that a high
percentage of these total strangers report feelings of attraction to one
another.[iii] Try it at home, not with a stranger, but with your spouse and let us know.
This is not rocket science but we have to be intentional about paying attention
to one another. It is like Arnold Schwarzenagger says
about body building, "You have to put in the time."
I think that
one of the reasons we have this festival of peace is to give you the chance to
put in some face time. And it is important to be strong for each other, to make
each other sturdy, especially when we are going through hardship and difficulty.
A few years
ago, I took one of our Field Education students with me to the hospital. One of
our church members was there who was about to be discharged to go home because
the doctors couldn't do any more for him. Our student said something to him
about how awful it must be and he waved that off with, ‘I've had a great life.
When I think of everything I been able to see and do, all the opportunities
I've had, don't cry for me…' We chatted about this and that. I closed with a
word of prayer. I put one hand on his head, held his hand. We prayed, we said
‘Amen', and
this man still had hold of my hand in a
pretty tight grip for another minute or so. My Field Ed student was watching
the two of us sharing a grip in silence.
We walked out
and the student commented on how he held on to my hand. I said, “Yes, it is not
easy to let go of the life that you love. What a privilege to be on the
supporting end of that grip.”
"Socrates
had it wrong; it is not simply the unexamined life but finally the uncommitted
life that is not worth living. Decartes too was
mistaken; "Cogito Ergo Sum- I
think therefore I am? Nonsense, it is not mere rationality. Amo ergo
sum- I love therefore I am. Or, as with unconscious eloquence St. Paul
wrote, "Now abideth faith, hope, love, these
three; and the greatest of these is love."[2] Spread the love.
So as you go, remember that the point of the season is that
it leads us to embody and spread the love, to friends, to our funky extended
families, to our colleagues, to the strangers that the Good Lord just might
place in your way, to the war torn, to the desolate, to those in pain and want.
Reach out. Open up. Give. Receive. I
close with a prayer from St. Patrick that I found in Ireland.
Christ be with me, Christ within me,
Christ behind me, Christ before me.
Christ beside me, Christ to win me,
Christ to comfort and restore me,
Christ beneath me, Christ above me,
Christ in quiet, Christ in danger,
Christ in hearts of all that love me,
Christ in mouth of friend and stranger.
Amen