Feast
of St. Peter and Paul (Transferred), a Reflection All Saints’,
Southern Shores, NC June 23, 2013 Thomas E. Wilson, Rector
This
coming Saturday is the Feast of two followers of the living Christ,
Saints Peter and Paul, who emptied themselves out so that we might
know the Christ within us. They experienced the Risen Christ in
different ways, but they listened to each other in love. Don’t tell
the Bishop, but I changed the lessons of that date to this date in
order to remind us to live into our name of “All Saints.”
“Do
you love me?” is the question that the Risen Lord asks Simon Peter.
“You know I do” is the response.
How
do we know that someone loves us? For that matter, how do we know
when we are in love? When I was younger I fell in love a lot. I
figured that love meant that I looked at someone who I thought was
“cool”. The definition of “cool” meant something that I
thought was missing in my life and that I wanted to incorporate into
my life - a little like the statement “I love that car” meaning
“I want that car.” The identification of “cool” status was
accompanied by an overwhelming rush of emotion. If she responded to
the overture, maybe she could rub off some of that “cool” status
on me. However, I had to project the image that I was perfect all by
myself, and therefore “cool”, but willing to grant her access to
me. But wait a minute; I had more than a little nagging feeling that
I was not perfect. No problem, I thought. I’ll just fake it by
doing all the sorts of things that will make her love me, and she
will be so grateful that she will think I am perfect. I would really
know that she loves me when she also has that same rush of emotion,
and it will cause us to want to merge into an amorphous ego mass,
feeling the same things, saying the same things, liking the same
things, spending all our time with one another, and swapping saliva a
lot. That would mean that we love one another.
So
what happens when we discover that we don’t like the same things?
Let’s say in music I like (a) opera and (b) the Rolling Stones and
(c) Jazz, which she considers (a) as pretentious and boring, (b)as
crude and (c) as pointless because you can’t dance to it. If we
believe love means you never disagree, who has to change?
Suppose
the merge of ego is not seamless? Suppose she or I desire to grow,
deepen, have our own agenda, or have a depth of complexity within
ourselves? Does that mean we are too different and, therefore, must
end the whole thing?
I
had a love affair with Jesus at several times in my life. I thought
he was “cool” and was everything I needed in my life. He could
control himself. He could heal people who were not whole. He was
admired and I tried to be like him. I put Jesus on a pedestal,
singing songs about him in Sunday school, having a picture of him on
the desk on which I did my homework, and I even had a plastic glow in
the dark statue of him that I earned in Vacation Bible School at the
Presbyterian Church in the 2nd
grade. I took his body into mine when I was allowed to take
communion. I joined my mind to his, memorizing the things that he
said and trying to do the things he did. I asked WWJD, “What Would
Jesus Do?” every day. The problem? I realized that I could only
love him from afar since we were so different. I kept on not being
perfect, even when I tried real hard, even when I promised I would be
better. I was judgmental of others who said they loved Jesus but I
saw no Jesus in them. I worshipped Jesus, even though Jesus had told
us not to but to see through him to connect to the one who loves us
and in whom we have our being. There have been several times when I
dismissed Jesus as this plaster figure created by my own desires. I
sang “Jesus loves me” but I knew it was a lie since I knew that I
fell so short of the goal, but I kept faking it, hoping I would win
his approval.
“Feed
my sheep”, “Tend my lambs”, Jesus said to Peter, for these were
not deeds to be done to earn love but outward and visible signs of
living in the Kingdom of heaven where love is the norm. It took me
years to figure out that love is not something that is given to me,
or you, as a reward for being “cool” but as a life that is given
freely. Love is not the closing of a hand on a possession but the
opening of will. A joining of bodies and an agreement of minds can be
mistaken as love, but without first the joining of spirit, those
things are only charades. Love is not what you get but what you give.
It is counter to all that we learn about life in our culture where we
amass and count ourselves rich, but the richness of living comes from
the giving. Jesus, in order to show what is the nature of God,
empties himself out for others, or as Victor
Hugo in Les
Miserables
echoed Paul in I Corinthians, “Love is the foolishness of men, and
the wisdom of God.”
Love
is what we who are fools and God do. The task that we do in the
church is to move from a love affair with Jesus as the perfect human
to taking and joining the Spirit of the Living Christ to our own
spirit and will. There will be times when we will disagree - that
happens. There will be times when what we do will fall short - that
happens. But those times never reduce the love. One of the ways we
can see the love of the Christ within us in action is between two
people in a committed life-long relationship, where the space between
the two people is Holy Space as their spirits are joined together.
As
Rumi, the 13th
Century Persian poet and mystic, said in the poem Spring Giddiness,
Out
beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I will meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about
language, ideas, even the phrase each other
doesn't make any sense.
there is a field. I will meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about
language, ideas, even the phrase each other
doesn't make any sense.
I
do a lot of weddings, and sometimes they are celebrations of parading
what someone is to get - “look at that groom; look at that bride”
- or just expensive pageants of the transfer of property from father
to husband, or the throwing of holy water on “coming of age”,
where there is more than enough competing or dueling cleavage by
bride, mother, and bridesmaids. The weddings I like are where we
focus on the marriage rather than the wedding, and it is a matter of
the joining of spirits by the emptying out of themselves to one
another in the name of God. They become the ministers of the
sacrament of the presence of God, and I try to get the couple to hand
out the bread and wine as if to say, “Take in our love for each
other and see Christ coming into your life.”, or to go back to
Hugo, “The reduction of the universe to only one being, the
dilatation of only one being unto god, this is love.” In the
musical, that line is changed to “To love another person is to see
the face of God.”
Any
chance I get I want to underscore that possibility, and so I bug
people to redo their vows on their anniversaries. I especially need
it since I helped to destroy my first marriage by focusing on the
“What is in it for me?” question instead of the “How can I
share my spirit, so that the world is changed?” question. Today
Bill and Sylvia Wadsworth agreed to ask our blessing at the 8:30
service. They know something about disagreeing, about facing rough
times, about messing up, about falling short, but they sure know how
to love, and that is all that matters. Listen to Rumi again;
Out
beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I will meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about
language, ideas, even the phrase each other
doesn't make any sense.
there is a field. I will meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about
language, ideas, even the phrase each other
doesn't make any sense.
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