For the Love of God: May 17, 2020

Sixth Sunday of Easter

John 14:15-21

Unlike the often fleeting infatuation of first love, the love John speaks of is deep intimacy rooted in profound experience of care. It is a love that survives death and that models for us the kind of love we are invited to have for each other.

While this kind of love possesses many qualities, we will focus on four: obedience, companionship, revelation and union.

Obedience is the ability to be open to listen to the authentic invitations for life and to respond in a way consistent with one’s best sense of self.

Companionship highlights the commitment of care that heralds authentic love. When love exists between two people the commitment is also present. The focus is the other’s well-being, which involves helping that person grow in responsible selfhood. . .

Revelation includes transparency and vulnerability based on trust. Because one experiences oneself as cared for, one risks revealing more of oneself. . .

What is startling about the love poem on Jesus’ lips is that the love it reflects is the heart and source of our lives. It is God’s love for us, the gift of grace. But unlike some expressions of intimacy, this love is manifested in the experience of loving and being loved by the other.

We come to know God and God’s love through the experience of love in creation, in each other and most radically in Jesus the Christ. God’s love is not one that asks us to choose between God and the other. It asks us to choose God through the other. Our very ability to live in obedience, companionship, revelation and union with ourselves and others is founded on and strengthened by God’s love. —Blair Gilmer Meeks

Acts 17:22-31

According to Paul’s sermon in Acts 17:22–31, how do we know God is near to us?

What do you think Paul means by saying God is not “served by human hands” (v 25)?

What do we learn about God from being God’s offspring?

Whom is the resurrection of Christ meant to assure?

—Blair Gilmer Meeks

1 Peter 3:13-22

“Christ also suffered for sins once, the righteous for the sake of the unrighteous, that he might lead you to God.” (1 Peter 3:21)

We now find ourselves without a living tradition of rich baptismal art and discourse when it comes to understanding and implementing a far-reaching restoration of initiatory liturgy in our day. . . .

We are rendered deaf and blind to our tradition’s baptismal images, such as standing in great peril (being swallowed whole by some horror from the deep, eaten by lions, betrayed by colleagues, reviled by the jeers of the unclean, and so on), and to great baptismal figures, such as Jonah, Esther, Moses, Israel escaping Pharaoh through the Red Sea, Daniel, the three young men in the furnace, John the Baptist and finally Jesus the Christ, to name only a few. . . .

But with such images and figures we are forced to think much harder about the very heart of conversion and its costs, and we can see more clearly that the life baptism opens to us issues from the very core of reality itself—if we are first brave enough to die to that existential constriction and minimalism known as sin. –– Excerpt from a talk by Aidan Kavanaugh (Washington DC: North American Forum on the Catechumenate, 1987).

Blair Gilmer Meeks, was at the time of this writing, a pastoral minister, writer of worship-related resources, and leader of workshops on worship living in Brentwood, Tennessee. Among her four books is Standing in the Circle of Grief: Prayers and Liturgies for Death and Dying (Nashville: Abingdon, 2002).

Homily Service 38, no. 6 (2005): 7-14