A homily for the Sixth Sunday of Easter, May 9, 2021
Acts 10:25-26, 34-35, 44-48, 1 Jn 4:7-10, Jn 15:9-17
If you are a fellow believer in the notion that coincidence is God’s way of staying anonymous, then having today’s Scriptures’ overarching theme about Love with a capital L be proclaimed on Mother’s Day is Heaven-sent.
Movies and music, poems and paintings — all forms of art or literature or classical or popular culture — start by framing love in the romantic sense, and romantic love is a good doorway into the true essence of Love.
There’s something about that someone that makes them special. There’s something that catches our eye, makes our hearts skip a beat or two, makes us want to know them better, to spend more time with them, maybe share the rest of our lives with them.
God our Creator hard-wired that into her children, so that, among other things, we could continue the work of divine creation and live harmoniously on the Earth. God hard-wired our ability to feel something as powerful and precious as romantic love into us so we would feel joy, know happiness, holler “Wahoo!” every now and then.
Romantic love is a template for all Love.
God hard-wired us for relationships. Singular relationships. Group relationships. Relationships with brothers and sisters we haven’t met yet.
We are social creatures. Even our websites and apps are called social media, and our activities on them are lumped into the loose category of sharing.
So with whom do we have relationships and what do we share with them? How do we share?
We love.
We form bonds with people we know from work or school, from church, from recreation leagues, from around town, from anywhere we find people with whom we can strike up a conversation. We bond with strangers, with the needy, with those people whom society has pushed to the margins, even if those bonds are temporary and situational as we act to renew their dignity as human beings
We work to strengthen those bonds, because all relationships need work and because relationships are two-way, given and received.
We can’t really love ice cream because ice cream can’t love us back.
This first step on the upward spiral of love ensures that we realize love is the act of caring and ensuring that all of God’s children — and all of Creation — have what they need to survive and, inshallah, to prosper.
Next, we form deeper bonds with family members and closer friends who become family. With them, the giving and receiving are more active and emotional. Parents’ love for their children — Happy Mother’s Day in Heaven, Mom — exemplifies this love. It’s selfless and tireless and endless. Sometimes it seems more like all giving and no receiving, but that impression is deceptive and wrong. Just ask any parent who received a handmade greeting card with spray-painted macaroni glued on.
Upward we climb to the one-on-one love between two people who proclaim to each other and the world that “You’re The One, The Only One.” Sometimes that relationship is ignited by a thunderbolt; sometimes it simmers long before it comes to a boil. The love of a couple incorporates all other aspects of love they’ve experienced and then flowers with the exciting qualities that Renaissance and Impressionist and neo-Classicist painters spent eras trying to capture.
All of this leads to — and begins with — God who is Love, and God who Loves.
God, with whom our deepest and strongest relationship should and must be.
God, whose love gave us our love. Whose love gave us ourselves. Our parents. Our children. Our world. Our salvation.
God, whose examples of love teach us how to love.
God, who commands us to love always, especially when it challenges us.
God, who loves us, and fills us with that love so we can share it in God’s name.
God is Love. God Loves.
We can do no less.
