by Liz Young
(Based on John 15:1-8; Acts 8:26-40; 1 John 4:7-21)
In the Gospel, Jesus said, “I am the vine, you are the branches.” Such a close, natural reminder of our relationship with Jesus.
Then comes the reading from Acts, where Philip, on the road from Jerusalem to Gaza, met the Ethiopian official of the Empress, reading Isaiah, who had prophesied, “… as a sheep is led to the slaughter: justice was denied Him …” And Philip was moved to tell this official, a Gentile, the good news of Jesus’s love, and then baptized him in water found by the wayside. And, finally, that beautiful reading from John 1: Beloved let us love one another, for love is of God and he who loves is born of God and knows God. No man has ever seen God, but if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us. God is Love. He who abides in love, abides in God and God abides in him.
Last year I visited the Orkney Islands, and the stone rings set up there 10,000 years ago, where people would come annually to meet, feast and celebrate the sun’s solstice. 5000 years later more stones were erected further south in the Orkneys and, finally, in 2000BC, similar stones were erected at Stonehenge, all with amazing astronomical accuracy.
People have stood in awe and worshipped the sun for thousands of years.
We worship Jesus, the one true vine, and belong to a church with branches all over the world, celebrating Christ’s Love.
The Bible has many stories of love, both in the Old Testament (eg, Ruth and Boaz, Elisha and Elijah, Nahum) and in the New testament, where Jesus taught us both to love God and to love each other; and gave us pithy, challenging examples of how to do that, such as the story of the good Samaritan.
Today’s readings are all about Love.
The Greeks had several different definitive names for Love:
Philia – a soul connection; affectionate love between like-minded friends.
Storge – family love, devoted love within the family.
Ludus – playful love, shared laughter.
Eros – erotic romantic love.
Pragma – enduring love (celebrated at Golden weddings, etc).
Philautia – self-love.
Mania – selfish, obsessive love.
And, finally, Agape: selfless love, love which goes on giving.
Many of the medieval mystics, such as Julian of Norwich, meditated on Agape. Costly Love.
St. Francis, an ex army man, taught us to love animals and plants.
[We reflected on this costly love, last Thursday, when we remembered and honoured those people who gave up their lives in the First and Second World Wars, for our freedom. We remembered not only those that lost their lives but also those who were damaged mentally beyond repair, those who suffered from shell shock, now known as PTSD.]
Today we remember Jesus’s costly love for us, his death on the cross.
When we love we want to share. The Collect for today reads, Christ of the New Covenant, give us the happiness to share, with full measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over, all that you give us.
This prayer encourages us to show that Love in practical ways, by sharing, and so I thought about the ways we share here in Tairua.
We share water: in the first house John and I lived in on Paku we had 2000 gallons of roof water in a concrete tank and only ran out once. Once the fire brigade filled our tanks, and it rained the next day! We were told to stop using this tank water in 1982, and now we’re being asked to put in tanks in newly built houses; so now we will need to know what we can paint our roof tops with, and whether the water we’ve collected is safe to drink.
We share knowledge: in schools, on the internet and in libraries. We share magazines. I take my copies of the Listener and the New Scientist when I’ve read them, and drop them down to the library for others to read. And at coffee morning at the Golf Club we share women’s magazines.
We share clothes: we’re all grateful to the Op Shop.
Many of us share plants and cuttings.
For me it’s our plum tree, whose fruit is eaten by our neighbours while we’re at sea in February. Our citrus fruit, and maybe we should put in a fig tree. Recently I’ve realized that I should have planted a pecan tree, and a pine nut tree, twenty years ago, and they could have been a legacy for those who will live in our house after we’ve died.
These are all good examples of the sharing we do now or could do in the future.
When we reflect on our own actions, when we confess our sins, we also review how our love for others, for our own family members, often falls pitifully short of Jesus’s expectations; and thinking about failures leads me to thinking about forgiveness … which leads to recalling South Africa’s ground-breaking process of truth and confession (under Desmond Tutu in the ’90s), leading to forgiveness and healing.
Let us make an effort to quickly acknowledge when we hurt someone else with thoughtless words, spoken without emotional intelligence, and ask for their forgiveness.
Jesus said, “Love your enemies.” We are blessed in New Zealand that we have few international enemies; we are too small.
But each generation has its own bogeyman. One of ours is currently Putin, whom I try to understand as a threatened child. His childhood would have been awful, encouraging him to fight his way to the top, and if the media is correct, he still lives with fear every moment.
But we no longer live in fear, we live and trust in the knowledge of Jesus’s love.
Yes, we need to pray for peace and justice. I was encouraged this week to hear that Australia has pledged to help Tuvalu retain enough land, and to create new sand dunes, for Tuvalu to remain an independent nation. May we each seek out ways to help those we love, and are responsible for, to achieve their own independence, and to make their own decisions.
If we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.
Let us leave here thinking of Christ’s Love for us, and let us work out how we can show love to all around us.
Amen
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