Let it rain. Let the love pour down. Open the floodgates of heaven.
Is that the way it works? Is the love always there? Ready to pour down? On all of us? The good people and the people we see as evil? On all of us? Reliable and undiscriminating…like the rain?
Is it true, that there is nothing we have to do to earn that love?
And nothing we can do to un-earn it?
Could it be true that…when all is said and done…it is just not much about US? That it is more about love. That loving is what love does.
That somehow the love is always there…
Could it be that the only question is whether, in our busyness and our pre-occupation with ourselves…could it be that the only question is whether we take the time to notice…
Whether we can put aside our perfectionism and self-criticism for a moment…
Whether we can make space to notice that the love is always there for us…waiting for us to lift our eyes beyond the ordinary…waiting for us to receive it?
Could that really be the way this all works?
If you have heard me preach more than a time or two, you know that I am a love preacher and that this church invokes the spirit of life and of love every week.
Love is the doctrine of this church, we often remind ourselves…
You’ve heard me say that each and every one of us is loved….
Each of us loved. And each of us lovable…already…just as we are…
That regardless of what the world may say…in Love’s eyes…we are…each and every one of us…a worthy and welcome member of the family of life…each of us gifted…each of YOU a gift.
And that we can bring more love into the world…that that is a choice we can make.
I’m a love preacher.
And there are good sermons in all of those statements I just made. But you’ve heard those sermons, most of you. And I can promise you that I will keep on preaching that Good News…it is the core of our hope, the ground on which we move in the world and the center of our spirituality.
The theology here is clear.
It is like that cathedral with all the stained glass windows, with the light always streaming in…the light…the love…always there…
But we see that light…we know that love…as it is refracted by those complex windows…those windows beautifully crafted…by Jesus and the Buddha…by Celtic priestesses and humanist philosophers…by the stories of Santoria and the prayers of Islam and the many stories of the Hindu scriptures…by the poetry of both Mary Oliver and the hip hop artists…
Each of those windows refracts the light in certain ways, screens out some colors, and emphasizes others…
That is easy enough to understand. Right? Are you with me?
But …but…we also see that light through our own individual and family and cultural assumptions, through the stories we are given about who we are and our place in the world.
It’s almost as if we are, each of us, given glasses to help us see the world and that we wear those glasses into that cathedral.
I think of those cardboard 3D glasses that allowed you to bring 3D movies into focus on the big screen. Do you remember those?
So, we are in the cathedral wearing our own glasses…
And unlike those stained glass windows representing the great faith traditions and philosophies…those understandings of the world and the way the world works that can be inspected, that can be compared and contrasted…because they are at some distance…
We can turn our eyes away, for example, from the Mormon window to a UU window or a Buddhist window…we can shift our gaze…
But unlike the windows, our glasses are harder to inspect because they are so close to us…they are literally in our face… and because they were gifts from those we love…they are very difficult to take off…very difficult to put down.
Our theology is clear. There is a love…holding us. There is a love holding all that we love. The light…the love… is always there…flowing toward us…
But there is still the question of what lenses we have in our glasses…
…and what obstructions…what blockages…those glasses place between that light…and our lives.
How do those family and cultural glasses we have worn since early on…how do they distort that light?
What glasses…what lenses were you given to see the world through and to help understand your place in that world? We all receive them. I certainly did.
After my father died, when I was young, my mother, a single Mom, had to figure out how to raise a bright, black boy-child. I believe it was her unqualified love that allows me today to be a preacher of love.
But…in addition to that unqualified love… she also decided that I needed a male image to look up to. Dad was gone but she could paint a positive picture of him…for me.
“Your father was brilliant. Photographic memory. Spoke 7 languages. Finished law school in two years…at night. And it all came easy to him, Billy. He was so smart, it all came easy to him.”
Can you almost hear the lenses being ground for my glasses?
“In this world, you are going to have to be twice as good as other people…to be successful.” The racial narrative flows in here. “You are going to have to work twice as hard, Billy. You are a smart boy but your father…oh, your father…was brilliant. You have a fine mind but you don’t have his mind.”
She set my father up for me…of yes.
But what I heard was…you are not as good as your father, kid. Maybe…maybe…with really hard work you’ll do alright. But as you are…you are going to need some work.
I spent a lot of my time as a young man being angry at my mother…especially as she slowly revealed some of my father’s imperfections…his professional failures, his gambling addiction, his refusal to let my mother work…he was not a perfect person…none of us are…and he was dealing with a world that was not welcoming to talented Black men…all of that is true.
But as a boy, I put those glasses on…those glasses that told me I was probably not going to be good enough or smart enough…and I wore them for a long time.
Those glasses served me well. I worked hard in school. Got honors galore. Scholarships. Harvard. Rockefeller Fellowship. Early success in the business world.
But, deep inside, I knew I wasn’t that good. Every success felt like I had put something over on the system one more time.
I knew I wasn’t that good. It’s called the “Imposter Syndrome.” Some of you know what I’m talking about. You’ve shared those feelings of inadequacy with me. It is common in most of the helping professions.
For me, race played a central role. But it can be gender or gender expression. It can be height or weight…or who we love…or physical limitation…or combinations of these things.
There are so many ways we can be told and come to believe that we are not good enough…that we are not worthy…that the light doesn’t shine for us.
And when I encountered failure those glasses I wore were deadly. Because it was so easy to see those failures not only as my fault…but as proof that I was not worthy.
When I didn’t have success in the world to hold me up, I lost track of the light…couldn’t see it. Didn’t feel held at all.
The glasses we are given…even for the best of reasons…can distort and discourage and keep us from being free…
One of the most damaging results of those glasses…was that I got the message that I needed to be like the privileged people who seemed to glide through life…I needed to change myself into who they seemed to be…
The message was that salvation and safety lay in pretending to be someone I was not.
The light of love can be and often is distorted by lenses that we are given or create ourselves.
There is one more point I want to make.
I now know that light as a comforting presence. I have experienced being held when I needed it most…held by loving hands…both human and the hands of the spirit…
Love can be a comforting presence.
But love can also trouble the waters of your life.
“To invoke love is to invite a hug from a thunderstorm,” is how our reading put it.
“To invoke love is to take the risk of inviting chaos to visit the spaces you spent so much time making tidy…”
Or, as James Baldwin said:
“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.” Love can disrupt your life.
I’ve spoken about my call to the ministry in my 40’s and deciding to go to seminary, move my young family to California…
I may have given the impression that that decision and that move were easy…
But when love called…and I answered…when I packed up that U-Haul truck…there was no job waiting for my wife or part-time jobs waiting for me. We had a place to live lined up…but we did not know where our income was going to come from and we only had enough money for three months…four at most.
Answering the call of love was the real deal…one of the scariest things I have ever done…
To invoke love can be to invite a hug from a thunderstorm. Amen. It can certainly feel that way.
I hope these stories from my own life have prompted memories and reflections in you about the glasses you were given, the glasses you may still be wearing as you look at the world and your place, your role in it.
Taking off those glasses is no simple task. We come to rely on them to navigate the world. Trying to take them off can be a scary process.
But if there is a role for the church…and I believe that there is…that role is to help us all…get some perspective…and even begin to understand how the glasses we are wearing shape what we see.
It was the Sufi poet Rumi who said: “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against love.”
The process of dismantling…of seeing and changing the patterns of power and the practices of privilege…that we have been taught are the way the world works and should work…
The process of coming to see the light of love more clearly…with less distortion and obstruction…
That is the role of the church…and the role of this congregation.
That and the reassurance that to believe in the light of love at all, to trust that there is that light streaming toward all of us…
The role of the church is to help us all believe that that vision is not just wishful thinking…but that it can be real…
And that we can help love win if we act as if that light shines on us and for us and out from us…out from all of us.
We talk more and more about liberation in this church…and the transition from being just a liberal church to a liberating faith. And it is easy to point our vision of liberation outward…toward a world that still debates whether we should provide kindergarten for all of our children, a world that wants to argue about a woman’s right to control her own body, a world that cannot seem to limit open season on black bodies by those we pay to protect us…or provide housing for all those who need it.
There is much to say about what love calls us to do out in the world and I’ll return to those questions. I promise.
But there is also much work for all of us to do to free ourselves of the narratives…to put down those glasses we have worn for so long…those glasses that limit our sight and hold us in bondage to visions that block our progress toward love.
Because the love…the light is there.
As Angela Herrera writes: (adapted)
You stand at the edge of mystery
…
With the light streaming at you…
Maybe you call your pastor and say
What is this?…
And your pastor comes and stands at the edge with you
And looks over.
…she can’t hide anything either…
Not even the fact that she doesn’t know the answer to
Your question.
She thinks of all the generations who’ve come there before you
And cast words out toward the source of that light,
Wanting to name it.
Somehow…the names stayed tethered to the aging world
And got old
While the light remains timeless and burns without dimming
Meanwhile, the armful of worries you brought
To the edge of mystery
Have fluttered to your feet.
Unobscured by these, you shine back,
Light emanating unto light
You with your broken heart and your seeking
You are the utterance of the timeless word.
The name of the Holy is pronounced
Through your being.
The cathedral…this church…is one of the places where we come to stand at the edge…where we come together to look toward the light…to remember that we are the product and, in ways we cannot quite name, we are tied to the purpose of that love…
We come to this community to remember that our lives can speak a timeless word…and that because we can choose to welcome and to pass on and to magnify that light…
Because that is true…for us…there is reason…for us…to hope.
Topics: Love