{"id":897,"date":"2014-05-25T11:00:19","date_gmt":"2014-05-25T15:00:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/?p=897"},"modified":"2019-11-12T10:57:23","modified_gmt":"2019-11-12T15:57:23","slug":"in-the-love-of-god","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/2014\/05\/25\/in-the-love-of-god\/","title":{"rendered":"In the Love of God"},"content":{"rendered":"

Acts 17: 22-31<\/a><\/p>\n

Psalm 66: 8-18<\/a><\/p>\n

1 Peter 3: 13-22<\/a><\/p>\n

John 14: 15-21<\/a><\/p>\n

Click here to hear the full service.<\/a><\/p>\n

Click here to hear the sermon only.<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I. Learn to love what you do not understand \u2013 God<\/b><\/p>\n

So, here we are in Marsh Chapel with its Cram designed neogothic nave, its Connick stained glass, and its Casavant organ.\u00a0 Just as we have had four deans of Marsh Chapel named Bob, apparently if you want to work on the infrastructure of the chapel your last name must start with \u201cC.\u201d Here we are, listening to texts written neigh on two millennia ago, singing songs sung over the past five centuries, and yet inflicted with a preacher only three decades old.\u00a0 Here we are, in a chapel dwarfed by its surrounding schools and colleges, at the heart of a great research university, in the midst of the city that Oliver Wendell Holmes cited as \u201cthe Hub of the Solar System.\u201d\u00a0 Here we are, pausing for a moment of awe, groping for a touch of wonder, steeped in the richness of history, and inspired by the presence of mystery.\u00a0 Here we are, come Sunday, that\u2019s the day.<\/p>\n

Do you know why you are here?\u00a0 My parents and my in-laws are here because I put coming to church on their itinerary for their trip to Boston, but the rest of you are here of your own volition.\u00a0 You have no excuse!\u00a0 What are you doing here?\u00a0 Why have you come?\u00a0 What possessed you, motivated you, inspired you to either make the trek in to church, or to flip on your radio, or to navigate to our live stream, or to download our podcast?\u00a0 And on Memorial Day weekend, no less!<\/p>\n

Well, the reason that most people come to a major research university is that they do not know.<\/p>\n

Now Brother Larry, you\u2019re starting to sound like that student last semester cited in The Bunion<\/i>, Boston University\u2019s satirical student newspaper: \u201cRich Girl in Dining Hall Can\u2019t Even.\u201d\u00a0 Just as a fictional employee in the story wonders, \u201cWhat can she not even? \u2026 That\u2019s barely half a sentence!\u201d so too we have to ask, they do not know what?\u00a0 What is it that they do not know?<\/p>\n

Well, dear friends, particularly in the case of matriculating undergraduates, the answer again is: they do no know.\u00a0 That is, they do not know what they do not know.\u00a0 Before you can learn what you want to know, first you have to learn what you want to know.\u00a0 At the masters level, of course, we expect you to at least have some idea of the general field out of which your questions arise.\u00a0 Then at the doctoral level we expect you to have honed your question to such a narrow degree that you can write a dissertation entitled something like \u201cThe use of the conjunction \u2018and\u2019 in the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson written between May 1 and May 17, 1841.\u201d\u00a0 (They\u2019re funny.\u00a0 They think I\u2019m kidding!).\u00a0 Of course, the greatest accomplishment of a PhD is learning exactly how much it is that you do not know.<\/p>\n

Why would you go to a university if you already know?\u00a0 Libraries are places where knowledge is stored; universities are places where knowledge is pursued.\u00a0 But here\u2019s the thing: at their best, churches are more like universities than they are like libraries.\u00a0 That is, church should be a place we come to pursue God, not a place where God is packed away in storage.\u00a0 In the life of the church, God is the great unknown for whom, as Paul says in our reading today from the Acts of the Apostles, we would search, and perhaps grope, and find.\u00a0 Paul identifies the God of Christ with the unknown god of the Athenians.\u00a0 Then, rather than presenting knowledge about their unknown God, Paul goes on to further affirm God\u2019s unknowability.\u00a0 God is not like things we can know, like images made of gold, or silver, or stone, \u201cformed by the art and imagination of mortals.\u201d\u00a0 Rather than knowledge, Paul presents a paradox: \u201cGod who made the world and everything in it \u2026 is Lord of heaven and earth,\u201d and yet God \u201cis not far from each one of us.\u201d\u00a0 God is transcendent and immanent; God is aloof and intimate.<\/p>\n

This is why we have come, and more, this is why we were made: to be struck by awe, to be transformed in wonder, to emerge from history into the heart of mystery.\u00a0 We are travelers on a journey, not dwellers in a homestead.\u00a0 We are learning, we are traveling, we are growing, here on Sunday, and day by day in the classroom, and the laboratory, and the field site, we learn to love what do not know, we learn to love what we do not understand, we learn to love God.<\/p>\n

God is here! As we your people<\/p>\n

meet to offer praise and prayer,<\/p>\n

may we find in fuller measure<\/p>\n

what it is in Christ we share.<\/p>\n

Here, as in the world around us,<\/p>\n

all our varied skills and arts<\/p>\n

wait the coming of the Spirit<\/p>\n

into open minds and hearts.<\/p>\n

II. Embodied feeling of God – Spirit<\/b><\/p>\n

On this Memorial Day weekend I remember my childhood friend Marion McCrane.\u00a0 Now, Marion was my childhood friend because she was my friend when I was a child, even though Marion herself was of an age to be my grandmother.\u00a0 She and her sister Edna lived across the street from us, and my brother and I would go over to spend time with them, to hear their stories, to explore the antique artifacts of their childhood and family, to pet their three dogs and two cats, and to help care for the flora that proliferated under their deliberate care and guidance in both front and back yards.\u00a0 Marion died this past fall, and I had the privilege of presiding at her funeral.\u00a0 In preparing to lay Marian to rest, I found this story in Bernard Livingston\u2019s book Zoo, Animals, People, Places<\/i>.<\/p>\n

One of the more interesting examples of skillful simulation of motherhood for a zoo animal was the experience \u2026 of Marion McCrane in hand-rearing a two-toed sloth born at the National Zoo.\u00a0 The two-toed sloth is a nocturnal creature that spends practically its whole life \u2013 eating, sleeping, traveling \u2013 suspended upside down in the trees by its limbs.\u00a0 The infant lies on the mother\u2019s abdomen as she lethargically moves about the forest.\u00a0 Ms. McCrane, as a zoologist on the National staff, had hand-reared everything from monkeys to snakes, but as far as they knew nobody had ever hand-reared a two-toed sloth before\u2026<\/p>\n

Ms. McCrane was equal to the challenge.\u00a0 After experimenting with a number of techniques that did not quite work she managed to succeed in simulating the precise position that an infant sloth assumes while nursing in his upside-down world.\u00a0 And a bottle of half-strength evaporated milk did the trick for little Mary Jane\u2026<\/p>\n

Ms. McCrane solved the material-contact problem by housing Mary Jane in a strong basket packed with towels, blankets, hot water bottle and a muff to which the infant clung as a substitute for her mother\u2019s abdomen.\u00a0 The waking nocturnal hours were filled in with feeding and a bit of clinging to Ms. McCrane herself.<\/p>\n

Can there be any experience of greater awe and wonder than that of mothering love?\u00a0 Here was Marion, living out of the history of her own experience and into the mystery of mothering this small, vulnerable creature in love.\u00a0 As Jesus said, Marion lived, \u201cI will not leave you orphaned.\u201d<\/p>\n

For Paul, we do not know God, and yet in God \u201cwe live and move and have our being;\u201d God \u201cis not far from each one of us.\u201d\u00a0 We do not know God, but we feel God, we encounter the mystery of God in our bodies.\u00a0 Awe and wonder are not thought; they are felt.\u00a0 We feel God in the quickening of the heart, in the shortness of breath, in the fleeting failure of words and concepts.\u00a0 It was the great Protestant theologian, and grandfather of liberal theology, Friederich Schleiermacher, who said that religion is \u201cthe feeling of absolute dependence.\u201d\u00a0 We do not know but we feel ourselves dependent on God for our very being and the world in which we live and move.<\/p>\n

We do not know God but we feel God and we desire God.\u00a0 Jesus, speaking in the voice of John the Evangelist, does use the language of knowledge to describe our relationship with the Advocate, the Spirit of truth.\u00a0 But is this the knowledge of facts or the knowledge of lovers?\u00a0 Well, apparently we will know the Spirit because the Spirit \u201cabides with\u201d us, and \u201cwill be in\u201d us.\u00a0 This hardly seems like knowledge acquired by pure reason.\u00a0 Rather this is the language of eros, of desire, of embodied feeling.\u00a0 \u201cOn that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you.\u201d\u00a0 To be sure, erotic language in relation to God is dangerous.\u00a0 There is a reason that our Jewish brothers and sisters prohibit reading the Song of Solomon until you are both married and have passed your thirtieth year.\u00a0 Nonetheless, what other language could express the intimacy that is the embodied feeling of God other than the language of desire between lovers or the image of the loving and nurturing parent?\u00a0 \u201cI go and I will come to you and your heart shall rejoice.\u201d\u00a0 We know, in that we feel, in our bodies, the love of the unknown God in the intimate presence of the Spirit.<\/p>\n

O Comforter, draw near, within my heart appear,
\nAnd kindle it, Thy holy flame bestowing.<\/p>\n

O let it freely burn, til earthly passions turn
\nTo dust and ashes in its heat consuming;<\/p>\n

And so the yearning strong, with which the soul will long,
\nShall far outpass the power of human telling;<\/p>\n

III. Suffering persists \u2013 Christ<\/b><\/p>\n

And yet, suffering persists.\u00a0 Our feeling the glory and love of God, while it may transform suffering, does not overcome it.\u00a0 \u201cThe resurrection follows but does not replace the cross.\u00a0 The cross precedes but does not overshadow the resurrection.\u201d\u00a0 The Advocate, the Comforter, the Spirit of truth accompanies us on the journey of life and faith into the never-ending depths divine unknowability, but cannot walk the path for us.<\/p>\n

On this Memorial Day weekend we remember too many who have endured suffering and death as a result of human failure: lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, and pride.\u00a0 In the end, these seven deadly sins are our human succumbing to fear: lust is the fear of solitude, gluttony the fear of hunger, greed the fear of poverty, sloth the fear of being overwhelmed, (no offense to Mary Jane!), wrath the fear reconciliation, envy the fear of being enough, and pride the fear of being wrong.\u00a0 Alas, these sins are all too often most deadly to those who surround those who commit them.<\/p>\n

In March, Bishop Elias Toume, Greek Orthodox bishop of the Valley of the Christians in Syria gave the keynote address at the annual Costas Consultation on Global Mission hosted by the Boston Theological Institute.\u00a0 He spoke of the suffering of Christians in Syria, in the midst of the suffering of the Syrian people generally.\u00a0 He reminded us that Christianity was, in a sense, born in Syria, with Paul\u2019s conversion on the road to Damascus.\u00a0 He wonders whether Christianity now will die in Syria.\u00a0 Bishop Elias told the story of facilitating a prisoner exchange between the military and the rebel forces, in which some of his congregants were caught in the middle.\u00a0 At the end he said, \u201cBeing a bishop is not about going to parties and presiding at ceremonies.\u00a0 Being a bishop is about being ready, at a moments notice, to lay down your life for your people.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cBut if you suffer for doing what is right, you are blessed.\u00a0 Do not fear what they fear, and do not be intimidated\u2026 For Christ also suffered for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, in order to bring you to God.\u201d (1 Peter 3: 14 & 18).<\/p>\n

Abide, then, in the love of the unknowable God.\u00a0 Feel the flaming desire of the Spirit in your heart, in your gut, in your spirit.\u00a0 And even in the midst of suffering, keep the commandments of Christ, whom God has appointed to judge the world in righteousness.\u00a0 Amen.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

~ Br. Lawrence A. Whitney, LC+<\/em><\/p>\n

University Chaplain for Community Life<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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