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The Love That Knows No Bounds Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis May 10, 2009, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Ruth 1:1-17 John 7:1-10 Galatians 3:26-29
“I believe” begins Cecile Gilmer in her essay for the NPR series This I Believe, “that families are not only blood relatives but sometimes just people that show up and love you when no one else will.” With one major addition, Gilmer’s belief finds warrant, on this most sacred of Hallmark holidays, in the Book of Ruth, John’s gospel, Paul’s letter and in the lives of so many who have wondered through the doors of this sanctuary. Gilmer tells of a day in May of 1977 when, at age fifteen, she was sharing a room in a Howard Johnson’s motel off of Interstate 10 in Houston with her dad. His marriage was in trouble and they had both been thrown out of the house by Gilmer’s stepmother the week before. On this day a man and a woman showed up and took her into their home. They did this, says Gilmer “because their only daughter, Su, my best friend, asked them to. I lived with them for the next seven years.” Sometimes, Gilmer believes, the people that just show up, and love you when no one else will, become your family. The addition I would make to Gilmer’s belief takes us to the heart of the gospel for the morning: I believe the people that show up to love you when no one else will, show up not simply by chance but by the design of a God whose providence (whose providing) uses every near-at-hand means to sustain, govern, direct and uphold you in life. God knows many of us in this sanctuary struggle to believe that God is a God who swoops in and selectively saves this one from cancer or that one from the flood or the next from consuming fire. But I tell you this: I have seen God’s providence in the people who show up to love you when no one else will. I have seen God’s providence in adopting moms and foster dads, in sleepovers with our homeless guests and not so random acts of kindness on the streets of the city as well as in my mother who often has said of me that I was something only a mother could love and in a schizophrenic man a few decades ago in Trenton Psychiatric Hospital who said, “I have asked God again and again to help me out of this hell and God does not answer.” Pausing he added “But God must have sent you.” Therefore on this Sunday I want us to put on the lens of God’s providence as we consider the assortment of families we find ourselves in due to the God whose love knows no bounds. How we see the family from God’s perspective is anything but self-evident save that when God chose in freedom to see from our perspective, God assumed our humanity in the person of Jesus Christ. Paul’s admonition to “Put on Christ” invites us to see the family through the redemptive lens of his earthly eye. What we will see, Paul predicts, is that “in Christ Jesus we are all children of God through faith.” In the first place, we begin within the bounds of a relationship many identify as the norm of God’s providential care and others claim to be God’s only way of giving us into each other’s intimate keeping: the relationship of marriage. When counseling a couple down this aisle with the help of the 1948 wedding service, we often stop on a line inviting us “reverently to remember that God has established and sanctified marriage for the welfare and happiness of humankind.” That marriage is established and sanctified by God presumes we must add a third character to the story told in answer to the question, “How did you meet?” The details stand: an encounter on the internet that led to a carefully considered date; a chance conversation on the train from the city that has yet to end; a set-up by friends no one believed would work; a long-standing friendship turned slowly to love. But if it is God who has established and sanctified marriage for our welfare and happiness, we have to say that these meetings are more than mortal affairs. What other possible means could God employ on earth to sustain, govern, direct and uphold us but by giving us to one another in plenty and in want, in joy and in sorrow, in sickness and in health, as long as we both shall live? Moreover, if God’s purpose is for the welfare and happiness of the offspring that may be born or adopted into the human association we define as “family,” then the nuclear family (nuclear in the sense of basic, cardinal, central…and sometimes explosive!) must surely be God’s will for everyone. But in the second place and unlike God’s most ardent fans, the Creator of the Heavens and the Earth is not generally a proponent of too doctrinaire a similitude. Consider the lilies of the field and the dandelions and the daffodils and the delphiniums. That is why, through the lens of God’s providence, some have begun to notice that the means God uses to sustain, direct, govern and uphold God’s children do not always coincide with the nuclear family as it is defined by politicians hoping to be reelected or decreed by religious institutions intent upon maintaining the culture’s status quo. Families include single mothers, whole villages, grandparents raising grandchildren whose parents are in prison, friends with children sharing homes and pooling resources, gay men adopting babies, lesbians bearing them. We could go down all of these roads less taken this morning, but with the newspaper (such as it is) in one hand and the Bible in the other, we would do well to consider the families of same sex couples through the lens of God’s providential care. In God’s name, though without the church’s sanction, I have counseled two men down the makeshift aisle of a living room crammed with friends and family come to witness the vow that “forsakes all others”; and I have counseled two women down the aisle of a chapel who promised the same. I swear to you that the providential hand of God was as evident with these as with the multitude of men and women whose lives I have been privileged to join in marriage over the last 35 years. I also must admit that the odds are about the same: I am one for two. Likewise when I think of the families I know that are headed by two daddies or two mommies, I struggle not with five verses of Scripture whose admonitions do not address a family’s fidelity being practiced against all odds. Rather I am struck by the massive ways we miss the God revealed in Scripture who shows up, in spite of our religious and cultural blinders, to love the sons and daughters of mothers here today and their partners and their children who were made no less marvelously in the image of God than you and I were made. I think in particular of God’s providence in the life of Bishop Gene Robinson and his daughter. A week ago last Tuesday at the Prince Theater he recounted the night he told his oldest daughter that he was gay. Before he opened the bedtime storybook, he asked Jamie if she knew what homosexual meant. She said she knew that boys loved girls and girls loved boys but that sometimes boys loved boys and girls loved girls. He told her that though he loved her mother very much, he was one of the boys who loved boys. Then together they read a book whose title was something like, Bob and Harry Love Amanda. The drawings were of domestic life with two daddies making pancakes, being roused from sleep to play, welcoming mommy who had come for a visit. After the story was over, prayers said, lights out, Robinson said he was halfway down the hall when he heard a little voice call out to him, “Daddy, I hope you find a Harry.” I believe this is the voice of God’s providential care, evidence of God’s upholding and sustaining and governing we have been taught not to hear. “Notice” counsels essayist Richard Rodriguez in reflections on gay marriage and the American family, “…the couples at city hall waiting, often with their children [and see] your uncle there at city hall, your niece, your cousin, your accountant, your clergyman, members of our American family—he and he, she and she. People who have internalized a huge burden of loneliness in their lives suddenly stepped forward in the light of day to announce themselves publicly. Each said ‘I do,’ searching [as each of us has searched] for ‘we.’” As we look for the family through the eyes of Christ in the second place, I believe we glimpse God sustaining, directing, governing and upholding God’s children in families found outside the bounds we erect in God’s name…but within the love that knows no bounds. For this reason the lens of God’s providence invites us finally to see through a wider angle, focusing our eye now on God’s own Son who showed up to love us in all our unloveliness when no one else would. The love revealed in Jesus Christ is a love that has always threatened our legally sanctioned attempts to love one another. It is a love that forgives and even forgets. It is a love that does not end in death [Love is not love, says Robert Jenson, that promises only “till death do us part.”], but cares for us beyond the bounds of our vision, even as we have been cared for in this earthly world. In the meantime and in this earthly world, it is a love that surely leads any who are in Christ also to show up when no one else will and to love those who bear the internal burden of loneliness; to be family to those no longer seen as Jew or Greek, slave or free, male and female, black and white, rich and poor, gay and straight, “for all are one in Christ Jesus. If you belong to Christ,” says Paul, “you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise.” At issue for Paul was not the covenant made at the end of an aisle and our birthright as children of that covenant, but rather how in the waters of baptism we become children of God. John says the same in his prologue: that we are born not of the will of the flesh or of mortals but of God. This is just a guess, but it occurs to me Jesus’ uneasy relationship with his blood relatives is mentioned in every gospel for this very reason. In John’s seventh chapter, Jesus’ interaction with his brothers mirrors his interaction with his mother at the wedding in Cana. His blood relatives want him to show himself to the world—to come out, if you will, as the Messiah. But John adds in parentheses: “(For not even his brothers believed in him.)” Therefore not to blood relations but again “…to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.” Then speaking for the third time in John’s gospel to a family member by blood and now before he breaths his last, Jesus says, “Woman, behold thy son,” and to the beloved disciple, “Behold thy mother.” In Christ, says John, we literally are given to one another not by the law but by his grace. As dysfunctional as it is, the earthly family that God in Christ intends for us in plenty and in want, in joy and in sorrow, in sickness and in health is the church. He says to us on this day when the culture would focus all eyes on love within acceptable bounds, behold the people into whose keeping I have given you; who show up and love you when no one else will. “I was your rebellious son,” writes poet Wendell Berry in “To My Mother”
I wonder if you do remember, so complete has your forgiveness been. So complete has your forgiveness been I wonder sometimes if it did not precede my wrong, and I erred, safe found, within your love, prepared ahead of me, the way home, or my bed at night, so that almost I should forgive you, who perhaps foresaw the worst that I might do, and forgave me before I could act, causing me to smile now, looking back, to see how paltry my worst, compared to your forgiveness of it already given. And this, then is the vision of that Heaven of which we have heard, where those who love each other have forgiven each other, where, for that, the leaves are green, the light a music in the air, and all is unentangled, and all is undismayed.” |