Christopher Thomas
Sermon for the Fifth Sunday in Lent, Year B – 3/21/21
Jeremiah 31:31-34
Psalm 119:9-16
Hebrews 5:5-10
John 12:20-33
Set me as a seal upon your heart
as a seal upon your arm.
For love is strong as death!
Many waters cannot quench love,
neither can the floods drown it.
Set me as a seal upon your heart
as a seal upon your arm.
For love is strong as death!
- Song of Songs 8:6a, 8:7a
Song of Songs (Song of Solomon) has got to be my favorite book of the bible. (Ok, they’re all good, for different reasons, but for today’s purposes, it’s Song of Songs, the story of passionate love, frightening love, the kind of love that reaches in to your chest cavity and grabs your heart, massages it around, refusing to let go. That kind of love is deeper, and wider, and stronger, and more resilient, and resounding, than anything you merely “feel.” It’s love that grips at all of your senses.
This is the kind of love that you know (that you know that you know).
Have you experienced that kind of love, the kind of “…love that will not let me go?”
Set me as a seal upon your heart; for that kind of love is strong as death. That is the kind of love that stretches beyond death, maybe even overcomes death. Maybe that kind of love lives completely outside the bounds of death?
When I was young and growing up (way back in the stone ages, it now seems), I remember so clearly that each Sunday Eucharist service at the little green church at the corner of Greenwood Avenue and Second Streets started with this admonition:
Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind and with all your strength. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets. (BCP, p. 324, paraphrased)
Because I don’t spend much time these days in Rite I, I went back to lovingly caress that phrase again, noticing the preceding rubric for the first time:
“The Ten Commandments may be said, OR the following:”
I don’t remember, with the exception of possibly Lent, starting with the Ten Commandments; we always started with Jesus’ summation of the law.
And so, I guess it shouldn’t strike me as odd, or strange, or queer, that my earliest memories of church all revolve around these two commandments, the admonitions to love.
For surely the days are coming when I will make a new covenant with the houses of Israel and Judah, with you, and you, and you (all of us). This new covenant will not be like the old one, written on passion-less tablets of what turned out to be perishable stone. No, for this covenant I will reach in and imprint directly onto your hearts, the locus of love, and I will be your God, and you will be my people!
Set me as a seal upon your heart
as a seal upon your arm.
For this kind of love is strong as death!
The law of love. The law is love. Love IS the law!
Stone is perishable? Hearts are not?
What does this mean, this symbiotic, synergistic dance of love?
You know what this means. You don’t need me to tell you. If you have experienced love, truly embraced love, you know what love implies, the passion that love belies, the pain that will not be denied. Because this love is, in fact, stronger than death.
Somewhere, deep within, this must have been part of Jesus’ divine knowing. The grain of wheat simply must fall to the ground and die, but only for an instant (an Easter instant?) a moment in time. Something in that process of falling separates the seed from all of the cares, the concerns, the trials and tribulations of the world. For if that grain of wheat is bathed in love, the love that overcomes death, it will rise again, it must rise again.
The love that came down at Christmas, Incarnation, Immanuel, “God among us,” even that Jesus, designated by God God’s self, the great high priest according to the order of Melchizedek, even that Jesus becomes a part of the seal that gets written upon our hearts.
Why?
Love.
Love motivates. Love believes that seed grain forward. Love transforms God’s new world order into existence.
It is not the lynching tree of the cross that is the transformation, but the love enshrined in Christ’s willingness and obedience to go to that lynching tree on our behalf, in our place, to allow the seed of himself to fall to the ground in death, that allows all of us to rise up to new life. It is the imprint of that love, written by God, onto each of our own hearts, that pushes us forward toward that same new world order.
And so, we spend the season of Lent examining ourselves, our hearts and our minds, looking ever more deeply inward, reflecting, evaluating, preparing for the coming Christ-act, considering how we might die to self and rise to new life in God’s passion-filled, passionate love.
That same passionate love must motivate us forward as well, if we are to follow the same path, the same journey, to, through, and beyond the cross, all of our own crosses. We must go find it, within, written on our hearts, tap into it, get passionate about it, and then, for God’s sake, do something about it. If it is, in fact, really there, if the passionate love of God is in our hearts, if that seal is set upon our hearts, how can we help but act on it? Inaction simply is not an option.
What does that mean?
Love radically.
Loving radically means standing up for those who are oppressed. When any one person is oppressed, we are ALL oppressed. What happens to any one of us is happening to ALL of us. That is the radical nature of God’s love, that love that is bound into and onto each of our hearts.
When Asian American and Pacific Islanders are targeted in hate-filled acts of fear-mongering over the “China virus,” “Kung-flu,” how do we respond from that love that God has written on our hearts? How?
When duly elected public servants glorify public lynching and vigilante justice as right and good ways to operate society, how do we respond from that love that God has written on our hearts? How?
When trans people of color are targeted, and senselessly murdered, because of who they are, how do we respond from that love that God has written on our hearts? How?
When our very own #BlackLivesMatter signage meets with vile and disgusting, hate-filled epitaphs, how do we respond from that love that God has written on our hearts? How?
We know that feeling of oppression, of being the focus of a school yard bully, or maybe worse. We know what it feels like to be denied rights, and justice, and fairness. How do we respond from the love that God has written on our hearts? How?
Let me be clear. If that love is really there, on our hearts, as I believe it is, not responding is not an option. Not responding is not a loving action. Not responding is a fear-based action. For us, that is part of what we are dying to when the wheat grain seed of ourselves falls to the ground. Not responding because we are nice people, or we don’t want to get involved, or we are worried what others will think of us, or we don’t want to risk any of our own privilege or social capital, THAT is what we are dying to, so that we can be born into new life.
When what happens to others is more important than what happens to us, then we know we have taken up the cross of Jesus and followed him. The love that will not let me go has taken hold of me, it is on my heart, and I will love the Lord my God with all my heart, and with all my mind, and with all my soul, and with all my strength. And the second command is exactly like it. I WILL love my neighbor every bit as much or MORE than I love myself. On these two commandments the whole blessed thing called creation hangs!
Amen!
