Divine Love, Lived Daily
A sermon by our guest preacher, Helen Holbrook, for the Sixth Sunday in Eastertide on 1 John 5:1-6 and John 15:9-17, offered on May 9, 2021.
Here is Helen’s written reflection, based on her sermon notes:
God’s great project of the incarnation is all about love. Love that became flesh in Christ. This love experience touched me as a six-year-old child at Convent of the Sacred Hear School. At school we would go to chapel once a week carrying candles and were asked to sing up the stairs to the second floor. The song that keeps resonating with me is “Christians let us love one another” and these are the words in the first reading from John 1. “Everyone who loves, is born of God, Jesus is our light, God is love”. God is love and love thy neighbour a truth I always desired to live as a child and adult.
We are children of God, living this love and the Mystics sought out this love. Love in the writings of St. Theresa of Avila that pulled her through that mansion, that house full of several rooms. These rooms each challenging her to grow in awareness of God’s love. A love she craved as she suffered from complicated grief due to the early loss of her mother. This loss, this hole filled through her mediations and immersing in God’s love. Such love lived through her as she lived out through ministry to others.
Ministry of listening of care is demonstrated in prayer. When we pray for people, I have heard so many times from patients in the hospital say they sense that prayer and it enables them to carry on. Such community prayer was provided at St. Bens in the side chapel, and I know all those who went for this prayer felt a Devine Love. I have heard someone described as being bathed in God’s love.
Divine love is experienced by each of us according to our personality, it animates us in a variety of ways. These ways include and are not limited to this list, in music such as Steve Bells this is love; “But this is not the same, it’s another thing, Altogether, this is love.” Such music covers a wide variety of styles including Jazz, classical, anything at all that some how touches us at our inner core and we sense something so much bigger that ourselves.
Music is one way but relationships and how we treat each other can give us a deep sense of divine love. I remember a doctor who was willing to spend the hour to listen to a family’s struggle to remove life support of their loved one. The doctor sat with them, listened, echoed back their concerns. I witnessed the discussion and asked him how he could connect with this family. He simply answered that “it is how I would like to be treated”. This interaction reminds me of Christ’s invitation in the gospel today to join him in Devine friendship.
Is it not true that in the scriptures Christ sat down face to face with people listened, spent the time to hear their story? The scriptures reveal who Jesus is, how he lived Divine Love. Scripture is what I was asked to meditate on weekly for seven weeks with the goal of meeting Christ. When we meet Christ, we see him as listener, patient with the disciples, and challenging the traditions of the time. He did sit with outsider (woman at the well), he did approach the sick (man at the pool), he did engage those with mental health challenges (man in the cave), he did empathize (he wept with Mary and Martha when their brother died). These examples are just a small sample of who Christ is and he demonstrated Devine love.
Divine love that helps us see the beauty in ourselves and in all those we meet. This love challenges us to grow, to go beyond our biases, fears, and pain. May you always be aware of those instances of daily doses of Devine love. A dose could be when you wake up in the middle of the night to pray for someone or someone calls you and says I was just thinking of you for some reason. Doses can include that sunset, that flower, that free coffee, that time of laughter, that time of creating art, etc. May you always sense Gods’ love and share that it with others for we are all the Creator’s children.
The Rev. Helen Holbrook