Love Songs for God Who is Love

Transcription

1 Love Songs for God Who is Love Pitt Street Uniting Church, 14 August 2016 A Contemporary Reflection by Rev Dr Margaret Mayman Pentecost 13C Isaiah 5: 1-7; Luke 12: 49-56; Contemporary reading: excerpt from Touching our Strength by Carter Heyward This reflection can be viewed on You Tube at under Sunday Reflections tab God is love. Love is God. We say it lightly. But too often the love of the divine power is removed from our understandings of earthly love. What does it mean to engage with holy energy in a way that we are deeply affected because of the depth of our passion? And more than this, if we can really have a relationship with the sacred, shouldn t the divine also be affected by us? Shaped and moved by our love. One genre of Christian music that I really do not like is what I call Evangelical love songs to Jesus. The problem with these songs is not Love. Sublimation and disembodiment are the problems. In these songs the beloved is distant from, and unmoved by, the lover. We have long been told that God is immutable, unchanging, constant. And it is true that the qualities of divine of justice and compassion are reliable. But this does not mean that God is unchanging. Would you love a person who refused to be affected by your love for him or her? Loving our friends and lovers teaches us that we grow and empower one another in the process of our relationship. I am not the same person that I would have been had I not been loved by my parents. The same is true for relationships with friends and lovers. Some of that may have been more for worse than for better, but nevertheless, there is always change in both the lover and the beloved. And in a twenty-year relationship of love and intimacy such as I have with my beloved Clare, I am still changing for the better because of her wisdom and kindness. Process theology sees the universe as creative, inter-relational and dynamic; open to the future. God is relational, present in every moment in our lives and in all entities and all levels of being. The world is interconnected, in effect a giant ecosystem where what harms or blesses one, harms or blesses all. A Reflection by Rev Dr Margaret Mayman Page 1 of 5

2 The readings we heard from Isaiah and from Luke, and also from Carter Heyward are full of relational passion. We can almost see the smoke rising from the Biblical texts, so passionate is their love, anger, disappointment. The Isaiah and Luke texts resonate with domestic discord. The Isaiah text is the famous parable of the vineyard. It begins beguilingly as a love song. But like a classic Country Western song, it turns quickly to cheating hearts, disappointments, infidelity, threats, and despair. The contrast is striking between the tenderness of the love that produces the vineyard, a symbol of care and love and planning for a future together, and the anger that promises to destroy what was so lovingly made. There was a time when things were good between the lovers; promises were made; a future was planned. But now, says Isaiah, it s all different. The beloved did not respond as intended, as desired. The parable leads to its heavy conclusion: In this pleasant planting, Yahweh looked for justice, but behold, bloodshed; for righteousness, but behold, a cry! Righteousness is another word for right relationship. That s all God yearns for, a just relationship with the beloved. And justice is an indicator of the health of that relationship. At the heart of a loving relationship gone wrong is the feeling that some injustice has been perpetrated. God looks for justice, but instead finds brokenness. God looks for right relationship, but finds only hopelessness. Reading through these texts, these smoking texts, I thought about which texts in our culture speak to the risk, the passion of relationship, that might help us to understand the dynamic nature of our dance with the Spirit. The passion of country music reminded me of a song titled I don t believe I care from the New Zealand band The Dunstan Rangers. The singers are Chris Nichol and Charlotte Yates. It is a raw song of tentative abandonment to love and passion, despite past hurt, and future risk. For both the singers, the male and the female, the beloved is a woman. It s a song about human love but as you listen, I invite you to let it illuminate your engagement with the divine. In our relationship with the Holy, there is risk, there is passion, there is letting go A Reflection by Rev Dr Margaret Mayman Page 2 of 5

3 I don t believe I care. Chris Nichol and Charlotte Yates I was honest and told her It s years since I waltzed Years since I danced With that bouquet and flare And I told her quite simply Resolution was sweet We had no need to speak All my hardness of heart simply melted away Spite of all that we learned And the passion that burned Romance grew as we turned As we stepped and we swayed. So we moved with the music Her head on my shoulder She led me on slowly I m no Fred Astaire And she told me quite simply When it came time for leaving I drew her towards me I whispered so softly I think I could care And she told me quite simply The text from Luke, on the other hand, displays a rare moment when Jesus anger is given voice. I came to cast fire upon the earth. Do you think I have come to give peace on earth? No! What happened to the Prince of Peace? Where is the voice of healing and hope? There is a clue in the second half of the text, where Jesus calls his listeners to read the times. Wake up and pay attention. The tone of the text seems to be Jesus almost shouting at someone who is not paying attention to what he has been saying (like me trying to talk to my son Andrew when he s fixed on the internet wearing headphones.) A scolding comes, a warning. Jesus frustration is that his listeners aren t attentive to his teachings or his warnings about the state of the world. Jesus heart is troubled. Jesus is affected deeply by his disciple s lack of commitment. He is not some god-human who is acting out robotically the grand plan of a distant god. He hurts; he feels love and anger, like us. Everything is related to everything else. We live in an interconnected world, where the welfare of one affects the welfare of all. A Reflection by Rev Dr Margaret Mayman Page 3 of 5

4 This week thanks to the outstanding journalists of The Guardian, many of us have read the harrowing reports of abuse and trauma from Nauru. Through this text from Luke, I can still hear Jesus calling us in anger and passion to recognise the interconnectedness of all human life, of our lives in relationship with the people seeking freedom from persecution, and the life of God. Calling us to pay attention to that which is not well with the world to Aboriginal youths in detention in Darwin and to autistic children locked in cages in a school in Canberra. Jesus is calling us to right relationship, to love and justice, with one another, with the earth, with the divine. It makes sense then that the metaphor of a loving relationship is at the very heart of the divine character. In many places in the Bible, God s love for the world is expressed through divine feeling. God feels for the world. God aches for the world, struggles with it, moves with it to bring it to health and well-being. What loving partner doesn t do the same for their relationship? Why wouldn t it be the same for God, only more so? If God is love, that means that God is connected to the world through God s feelings. What the creatures do affects God. What the beloved does affects the Lover. Love means becoming open and vulnerable to the beloved, open to their love, but also to their hurtful acts. We are exposed to the complexities of life through love more than any other way. It is the same for God. By creating the world, establishing a relationship with it, covenanting with its creatures, planning and hoping for a loving future, the divine takes the risks of being hurt. That s the way love works. Why would be think that the holy is somehow immune from one of the dangers of what makes love love, that is, the risks involved in loving another? These texts are hot. They address matters of the heart, the desires of love and its many disappointments. They are about love that is real, earthy, passionate, risk-taking. Love songs are our culture s representation of the complexity of love. Love is in the air, quite literally, it is in the airwaves on radio and TV and movies and songs. We all understand love quite intimately. Love of friends and family, and love of lovers is a story, a dilemma. Might it not be the same with God? How else could it be? If God is love, then love must work similarly for God as it does for us, otherwise it would be something else, and we shouldn t call it divine love. What we do affects God/the divine/sacred power in relation. Our acts can cause God pain or joy. Our lack of action can cause divine and human suffering also I want to finish with another song; this time one that is less ambivalent and more committed and again ask you to listen past the human love song to the insights the song has for living a spirit tuned life. A Reflection by Rev Dr Margaret Mayman Page 4 of 5

5 This time the selection is rock, rather than country. The singer is Melissa Etheridge and the Song is.. Melissa Etheridge Past the devil's own temptation Beyond where angels sleep To the holy invocation Of a neon city street I feel your hand I hold you Through your eyes I see My love, wherever I go Down the road of my desires To the oceans of my peace Through the fueling of my fires Until my yearnings cease I hear your voice I know you In your arms I sleep My love, wherever I go Even though I've fed my hunger Even though I've named my fear I'll never understand it How the journey led me here But I have made a promise That I intend to keep My love, wherever you go In this week, will you take the divine with you, passionately living out the promise you have made to walk in Jesus way? To engage in relationship with the sacred, to live the love and justice of God; we have to be that committed, that passionate, that risk-taking, to take our lover with us always, affecting and affected, loving and beloved. A Reflection by Rev Dr Margaret Mayman Page 5 of 5