Encountering Love – Br. Lain Wilson

Preached at The Church of the Redeemer, Lexington, MA

The Sixth Sunday of Easter

Acts 17:22-31; John 14:15-21

On behalf of my Brothers of the Society of Saint John the Evangelist in Cambridge, I’m delighted to be with you all this morning. And happy Mother’s Day to everyone here, and to those watching online (including my mom!).

I’m especially delighted to be with you all on this Music Appreciation Sunday. I grew up surrounded by music. My earliest memories are filled with it. As a teenager, I sang in the cathedral choir. There, I learned what it was to be an Episcopalian. I learned the treasures of the Anglican musical tradition. Hymns and anthems continue to be one of my primary encounters with scripture and theology – including today’s gospel, which I still can’t help but hear in Thomas Tallis’s lush setting, “If ye love me.”

Music has also, in an important way, saved my life.

When I was in my early twenties, I found myself questioning my faith. Why did I believe what I believed? Did God exist? Was God necessary? Was I behaving irrationally or delusionally in clinging to belief? Wouldn’t it be better, more intelligent, more reasonable simply to let it go?

I spent a lot of time thinking, reading, and discussing this. And yet, one question persisted in the back of my mind. “What about Bach?”

“What about Bach?”

In my own journey of faith, this question was something like a lighthouse, its clear beam cutting through the storms and fog of doubts and uncertainty.

Maybe it was irrational to believe in something unseen, maybe I had doubts . . . but what I experienced in listening to Bach (and Benjamin Britten and Bill Evans and Jeff Buckley and so many other artists) was a transcendent beauty that seemed to go beyond what I could explain. Music was a place for me of encounter, shining a light to reveal the living God’s presence and activity in our world. “What about Bach?”, that annoying and persistent question, was the light that guided me home, back to my faith.

Saint Paul in his missionary activity sought to be that lighthouse, shining a light in the minds of his listeners and helping them to notice and encounter the living God. In the passage we’ve heard this morning, Paul speaks to the gathered assembly in Athens. He asks them to look anew and notice what’s there already, just in front of them. The altar, among the city’s objects of worship, may have been dedicated to a god who was unknown to them, but not to Paul. This was the creator God, the Lord of heaven and earth. This was the God active in all nations and peoples, drawing them to search, to grope, and perhaps to find. This was the God he worships, the God of Jesus Christ, in whom “we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28).

Paul invites his listeners, past and present, to know and encounter this living God: infinitely beyond our imagining, and simultaneously closer to us than our own skin, the ground of our being and the framework of our existence.

Each of you will have your own experience of encountering this God, present and active. It may be when you take and eat the mystery of Christ’s Body and Blood in communion. It may be when you join with the gathered voices of the rest of creation in praising our Creator, in the bleeding colors of a sunset, the magnificence of a summer thunderstorm, or the perfume of a lush garden. It may be when you recognize God’s perfections in the beauty of a mathematical equation or the impenetrable wonders of our universe. It may be when your daily work is done, and you are able to simply be in silence.

How have you come to know and encounter God? And, perhaps just as importantly, how will you be open to encountering God, who is always present, anew? The founder of our Society, Richard Meux Benson, noted that “there is no limit to what [God] will call us to. . . . As God calls us nearer to Himself, it is not merely that we may know Him more perfectly according to that manner of knowledge, or that manner of fellowship, which He has vouchsafed to us already, but He would teach us to know Him in new ways. We are to seek, and find it, from day to day.”[1]

Paul and Father Benson urge us to be open to seek and encounter God anew each day. And Jesus, in this morning’s gospel, reminds us that who we meet in these encounters, the living God present in our midst “not far from each one of us,” is Love.

Jesus gathers his friends together for a final teaching before his walk to Good Friday and Easter. “I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you. . . . On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you. They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me; and those who love me will be loved by my Father, and I will love them and reveal myself to them” (John 14:18, 20).

What Jesus intimates to his friends is something that we Brothers affirm in our Society’s rule of life: “the very being of God is community; the Father, Son, and Spirit are One in reciprocal self-giving and love.”[2]

God is love. Period. And this love is offered to the community of Jesus’ followers, then and now. Christ’s body – you and me and all who gather today and any days that have been or are yet to be – all gathered together into this great nexus of community, of belonging, of love.

This is so vital, because so many of the loudest voices proclaiming Jesus today may cause us to ask where the love is. We Brothers see this, and I know many of you do, too. Lifelong Christians come to us questioning not their faith but whether that faith is “Christian” anymore. Young seekers grappling with what it means to be faithful in a rapidly changing world don’t hear of a God of love and community, but of grievance, vengeance, and domination. Twenty years ago, I questioned whether Christian faith was rational; today the struggle is often about what being “Christian” actually means.

The good news is that God calls us to bear witness to what it means to be Christian in the example of our lives. We cannot encounter this living God, this One who is Love and community, and go away unchanged. We cannot meet the God whose Love abides in us without being transformed. “One soul really and truly sanctified” – made holy, as our Father Benson writes – “is capable of transmuting a whole world into newness of life. . . . The love of God shines out in the love of [us humans . . . and] there can be no limit to this love.”[3]

The good news is that if we are well and truly changed by our encounter with love, we become agents of that love. We become God’s lighthouses, our faithfully lived lives shining a light to bring others home to rest in God’s love. We become for those seeking after meaning, after purpose, after God the question that demands their attention, the example of a life transformed, the voice calling them to recognize the God of love, “in whom we live and move and have our being,” already present and ready to meet them.

Amen.

[1] R. M. Benson, The Religious Vocation, 74, 75.

[2] “The Witness of Life in Community,” ch. 4 of The Rule of the Society of Saint John the Evangelist (Cowley Publications, 1997), 9.

[3] Benson, Religious Vocation, 41, 42.