Love Actually. Loving can hurt, loving can hurt sometimes, but it s the only. thing that I know. When it gets hard, you know it gets hard

Transcription

1 Love Actually Loving can hurt, loving can hurt sometimes, but it s the only thing that I know. When it gets hard, you know it gets hard sometimes, it s the only thing that makes us feel alive. Ed Sheeran, Photograph, released in 2014 with almost 140 million Youtube hits. I want to talk about love this morning, love in the context of a verse from the Isaiah passage we have read: The Lord God hath called me from the womb; from the bowels of my mother hath he made mention of my name. I cite the AV there s a balance and poetry that gives Isaiah s sentiment gravitas. And it s gravitas that I want to get at, because Isaiah relates calling to our being created, to who we are and how we are named not by ourselves, but by God who hath made mention of my name. Love is not just the expression of who and what we are as created in God s good providence; love is the means, the way, whereby we come to know who and what we are. In loving we know we are alive, as Ed Sheeran sings, and it can hurt sometimes. At the end of John s Gospel we have a story exemplifying the nature of the Christian discipleship: the famous dialogue between the risen Christ and Peter. The exchange about following centres around 1

2 the question Do you love me? The risen Jesus asks Peter three times: Do you love me more than these? This is the most basic question that Christ can ask of any who follow him; it s the basic ecclesiological question of belonging to Christ, of being in Christ. But as Peter recognizes, the one who asks this is the one who knows all things, God. Christ is therefore not asking Peter this question because he doesn t know the answer. He is asking it because Peter needs to know something something about his own disposition now towards Christ; something that has changed because of the Easter events. Peter needs to know that he loves and maybe that his loving though beginning and ending in friendship has to become self-sacrificial. Secondly, that loving carries consequences: feed or nourish my lambs, tend, guide, govern my sheep, feed or nourish my sheep. To love in Christ installs us in a delicate web of relations, a web as fragile and diaphanous as the web of a spider frosted on one of our bright winter mornings. These relations are vibrant with life and light and darkness and tension. When it gets hard, you know it gets hard sometimes. But it is only in and through this web of relations that we will ever come to know Christ as the way, the truth and the life: relations to ourselves; relations to Christ; and relations to others. There are no relations to ourselves or to Christ with relations to 2

3 others. In this web of relations Peter himself will be hollowed out by that loving; that s what loving does. BUT, and this is crucial: being hollowed out in Christ is the most positive experience of redemption. What all of us are called to is to love as a labour. I have labored in vain, Isaiah tells God. I have spent my strength for nought. And God corrects him. The labour has not been in vain. The labour will help to bring about, in its own small way, salvation unto the end of the earth. As a labour, love is a craft we have to learn, a craft in which we too have our being crafted. This love has to discipline all our desires. And this disciplining so vital to discipleship cannot be done in our own strength. I have the power to lay down my life, Jesus tells his disciples. We don t have that power. If loving is done in our own strength then what the hollowing out that love, that selfsacrifice, produces can be dangerously negative and have violent effects. The power of love comes from elsewhere, beyond us. It comes from God; it is God. It is a divine outpouring out of which all things were created, in which we ourselves have our being. We are here because of love; love is written into our nature and our destiny. In all our loving of other people we are living out something of that divine love, that divine name that he hath made mention of. We are 3

4 exploring and experiencing that which is divine. In all our loving we come to participate in Christ as the way, the truth and the life. I m saying this because all week the primates of the Anglican Communion have been meeting and most of us know the topic that is tearing them apart with disagreement is homosexuality. They have made it plain homosexuals are a problem for the Anglican Communion. I m saying this about love, about its hurts, the times when it is hard, its rootedness in learning Christ, in our being called to be who we are by God from the wombs of our mothers, because the love between two women, between two men, is exactly that: love actually. And it cannot be denied. I m not going to argue about the rights and the wrongs, because this is not a moral issue. Love between consenting adults, between two human beings, in and through all the mysteries and creative energies of attraction, desire and embodiment is not a moral issue. The treatment of gay people as second-classes members or deviants from the gospel or disabled in some way is a moral problem. Persecution is a moral problem; as injustice is a moral problem. I m not even calling for tolerance. In the face of the hollowing out that loving performs tolerance is a mealymouth word that often masks indifference. I am calling for celebration; the celebration of a God given gift and destiny coming 4

5 from nothing less that that calling from the bowels of my mother and that mention of my name. It is the way Christ is learnt and encountered, and salvation unto the end of the world is proclaimed and wrought. In my pastoral capacity I have heard of DDOs refusing to allow gay people to go forward for ordination until they repent. I have heard of bishops refusing to find parishes for those who have realized who they are while training. I have talked to people from Jamaica and several African countries who have come here for a year and are terrified of returning. I have met others who have to live lies because their careers would be on the line. I have even mourned the suicide or attempted suicide of a few. And, once, I encountered the sheer overwhelming beauty of an evangelical family deeply wounded by their son s coming out to them who slowly came to see he was the same person they had always known only much much happier. And they repented, and the son and his partner were welcomed and embraced. And all of us witnessed salvation in Christ. So I say to you this morning, and through you to the church as one who serves the church: let us live, let us love, let us be who we are, how we were created. We have a testimony. We have a faithful witness to the gospel of Jesus Christ. Loving can heal. Loving can 5

6 mend your soul. And it s the only thing that I know It s the only thing we take with us when we die. Ed Sheeran. 6