Sunday
May 1
A Topography of Love
By Marsh Chapel
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“Jesus answered him, ‘Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them.’”
You are invited to walk in the land of love, from this day forward. Walk in love. Walk across the landscape of love. Make love your aim. Love one another. Here is a Johannine topographical map for your travels in just one verse alone, John 14: 23.
Our earth science teacher had a way of finding a way to excite 13 year olds with the mysteries of topography. A. He traced the advance and retreat of glaciers, and their deposits, in kells and drumlins and valleys and lakes. He reminded us that we are ice people, up north here. He pointed out the undersides of the mountains and the different geological formations underneath the similar beauties of the Adirondacks and Catskills. B. With great energy, he showed us how rivers formed and wound around and changed course. He reminded us that Susquehanna means ‘winding river’, and then would drift off into meditations upon other native names: Onondaga, Tioghnioga, Canandaigua, Oneida. These place names, a part of one local topography, in his merriment and memory became lodged in us, placing us in their places. The best of the days were those spent pouring over the maps, and the ways that rivers remake landscape. There is a flow to things, a watery fluidity underneath and sometimes well above the apparent surfaces of life. C. He took us beyond the constellations—Ursa Major and Minor, Draco the Dragon, Orion the Archer, Cassiopia on her throne—which we had already located in scouting, and spread out the universe, 14 billion years of age, endless ranges of galaxies, meteors sailing, suns exploding, darkness and light. He was trying to say something to us, looking back, about our place in the great Place of the Cosmos. D. He gestured to the winds, the gusting climactic climate about us. Freezing points, dew points, compass points—all good points. Behold the topographical mysteries!
Ours today is a topography, not of earth but of heaven, not of earth science but of heavenly science, not of land but of love.
Love. Are we lovers anymore?
It can feel blasphemous to speak of love at all. In a world where warfare continues to bubble up and out of Tutsi and Hutu history; in a world where Ecuadorian huts and barrios are wrecked in natural catastrophic earthquakes; in a world in which Columbian children are kidnapped and made child warriors; in a country, our own, in which there is lasting dispute about whether non-rich children should have full access to education and health care to age 21; in a country in which democracy—as both the ancient Greeks and our constitutional founders soberly feared—suddenly seems to give way to demagoguery (largely it must be underscored, due to the habits of mind, forms of rhetoric, and decades of contention exported from one party and this year from one candidate); in a country that comes to resemble, in spirit, the ancient Israel decried by Amos, and others, shot through with personal depravity, vapid worship, rampant neglect of the poor, and haughty, foolish overreliance on military might; in a culture that prizes counting but not reckoning; in a culture which emphasizes knowledge to the exclusion of relationship producing citizens who are often knowledgeably advanced but relationally delayed; in a culture, bounded by misogyny, blinded by racism, bordered by greed, which sees no longer any eternal horizon, nor values any longer the traditions of self-giving which themselves gave the culture its very birth; in a week of further gun death, including that of a two year old shooting his mother from the back seat of the car; in a week of violence in city after city; in a week of smaller slights, hidden swindles, and personal abuses which all fill in the Latin phrase, homo homini lupus, man is a wolf to man; in such a world, country, culture and week it can seem the height of hubris, or naivete, to utter in public the word ‘love’ at all. It can seem blasphemous to speak of love at all.
Nevertheless….
Here we are! Here you are! Bearing witness, giving thanks, offering prayers and tithes, seeking the Lord together. Sursum Corda: Lift up your hearts!
Our Gospel does so speak. Of love.
Are we lovers any more?
Do we let love be our aim? Do we think daily, and act weekly, and practice monthly the scales, vaults, verifications, and measurements of love? Do we love God and love our neighbor, loving the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength, and loving our neighbor as ourself? Are we going on to wholeness, to becoming healthy and whole in love in this lifetime (Are you going on to perfection? Do you expect to be made perfect in love in this lifetime?) For what do we live? If you are not going on to wholeness in love, what you are going on to?
Are we familiar with a topography of love—its glacial forms, its meandering rivers, its celestial stars and lights, its wind blowing where it wills?
Are we lovers anymore? Are you ready to get the lay of the land? God’s nature and name is love. Are we loving people?
Our topography of love is a verse in four phrases.
“Those who love me”
Ages ago glaciers cut lakes and hollows and mountains into lasting shapes. Love has done the same, cut lakes and hollows and mountains into lasting, existential shape.
Faith is a gift. Faith is not a task, not an achievement, not a work, not an accomplishment. Faith is a gift, through which we live out our lives in thanksgiving. Faith is a gift. You gain no praise in receipt of such a gift, and you incur no blame in the lack of such a gift.
For those who have been seized by the love of God, the faith of Christ, the confession of the church—is this who you are?—love is the form, the topographical outline of life. Walk in love.
It must be stressed that, at least here in the Holy Scripture, and at least here in the Gospel of John, John 14: 23, there is no argument that some should jump across a line, or make a personal choice. It is geological, glacial force at work, here. Those called to love, those called to love Him, are those called to love, those called to love Him. Is this you (pl.)?
The verse affirms that there are those who have a revelation that they are meant to love. They have the gift, the faithful gift of love. Some have the gift of strength, some the gift of music, some the gift of philanthropy, some the gift of insight. Faith (pistis) is such a gift. Love (agape) is such a gift.
For the first readers and hearers of this passage, our verse revealed a mystical union, a mystical audition, a mystical shift, a mystical experience, whose essence in retrospect became: We are meant to live in love, as those who love Him.
“Will keep my word”
The lakes and rivers that filled with water, over long, flowing, fluid, time, kept alive a saturation, a potential to slake the thirsts of life. Especially their propensity to meander, to wander, to saunter, to wonder, to move and live and have being, that propensity to fluidity makes a lively, loving word.
We may want to wrestle a bit with both the verb and the noun here.
To keep is not to obey, to keep is not to hold, to keep is not to hear, to keep is not to possess, although it is all those things and more.
In a small upper room, perhaps in Ephesus, maybe in the year 90ad, possibly with 30 or 40 present, a word is spoken and heard. It is a voice that speaks like no other, ‘so equable, magnanimous, and serene’ (J. Ashton). To hear it one needs to listen. One needs to learn to hear, to practice listening, to train the ear, as some music schools do.
A word is not text, ancient or cyber, nor a verse, however venerable or holy, nor a doctrine, even a powerful doctrine. The word is near your heart and your lips, too. How will you hear a word of God without listening for such a word? In Scripture, in Prayer, in Worship, in Conversation, in Meditation, in Sacrament, in Silence—day to day pours forth speech. But have we ears, ears to hear? There is a kind of turning of the back upon the world commanded by this word, His word.
(In an age sorrowfully awash in vulgar words, hateful words, misogynist, xenophobic, racist, artfully hateful words, in an age sorrowfully awash in a culture that languishes in the doldrums of a pervasive malaise, a pervasive amnesia, a pervasive torpidity, a pervasive ugliness, now unleashed, to our shame, in the political events of this year, one especially needs the care and cultivation of hearing.)
Good news: you may have confidence that such a word, yours to keep, yours for the keeping, may be spoken and heard. Here. Now.
“My Father will love them”
Now the celestial lights are before us. The planets, the stars, the meteors, the darkness and the light, the evening sky—these illumine our few days upon the earth.
We this week had sign board on the plaza for students to use to write out what they hoped to do and be in life. The word love was not absent, but almost so, as my friend pointed out. Many other words were written on the chalk board, but not love, not often. One wrote: I hope to find someone to love. Another: I want to love as I have been loved. But these sorts of sentences were few in number.
The day before we held vigil, again, for a student who died three years ago. Her mother, her friends, her former housemates gathered, three years on, at the monument, the King monument. You look for something sturdy in grief. We stood with flowers, wreaths, and photos. We ‘said some words’ (interesting locution). We waited in quiet. We wept, some at length and with profusion. We lit candles, shielding them from a light wind. When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.
Again, there is no transaction here, no quid pro quo, no love for love trade. Here is eternal love, ‘my Father will love them’. Topos is place; graphe is writing—the depiction of a space, a topography of love. No one has ever seen God. But if we love one another God’s love abides in us and is made whole in us.
Huston Smith, when teaching at MIT long ago, said: we are in good hands, and so it behooves us to bear one another’s burdens.
“We will make our home with them”
To see which way the wind is blowing you need an anemometer. A glacial form, a river bed, a sacred canopy—earth, water, stars—make up our topography of love, with one addition, by the strength of this verse, John 14:23.
There is to be an indwelling, a making oneself at home, Father and Son will come and take up residence, be present, become presence. Here our humble sacraments, of holy baptism and holy communion, of bath and meal, of washing and eating, of cleansing and nourishment may bring a helpful reminder, with thanksgiving, of presence, His presence.
Yet the earliest hearers and readers of our verse felt something more. They felt Him making a home in their midst. They felt Him living with them. They felt Him dwelling among them. I have seen Him in the watch fires of a hundred circling camps. They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps. I can read his righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps. His day is marching on.
Here is Paul in the seventh heaven. Here is Lydia opening her life. Here is the Psalmist at peace. Here is Augustine in the garden. Here is Aquinas calling a lifetime’s writing, ‘so much straw’. Here is John of the Cross, en una noche oscura. Here is Luther in agony. Here is Wesley in the rain of Aldersgate Street. Here is Harriet Tubman, walking north to freedom. Here is Martin Luther King, signing books on Manhattan, suddenly wounded and bleeding. Here is Francis, Bishop of Rome, in our time, imploring all to honor the conscience of the believer, which is inviolable. Here is Howard Thurman, on the beach. Here you are—formed by love, guided by love, embraced by love, now touched by love. You may recall in prayer: I am loved. So I can love. The topography of love carries a mysterious, no a mystical, wind, breath, breeze…spirit.
Are we lovers any more?
Do we let love be our aim? Do we think daily, and act weekly, and practice monthly the scales, vaults, verifications, and measurements of love? Do we love God and love our neighbor, loving the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength, and loving our neighbor as ourself? Are we going on to wholeness, to becoming healthy and whole in love in this lifetime (Are you going on to perfection? Do you expect to be made perfect in love in this lifetime?) For what do we live? If you are not going on to wholeness in love, what you are going on to?
Are we familiar with topography of love—its glacial forms, its meandering rivers, its celestial stars and lights, its wind blowing where it wills?
Are we lovers anymore? Are you ready to get the lay of the land? God’s nature and name is love. Are we loving people?
“Jesus answered him, ‘Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them.’”
– The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.
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