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Sixth Sunday of Easter
May 21, 2006
Delivered by Dora Odarenko, Seminarian
Psalm 33.1-8, 18-22
Acts 11.19-30
1 John 4.7-21
John 15.9-17
Please pray with me and for me: Let the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable to you, O Lord, our rock and our redeemer. AMEN
From today's Gospel: Inasmuch as the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love.
Only two Mondays ago-and for the first time-I entered the atrium or open courtyard of the shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe in central Mexico. Although I knew of her importance for the people of Mexico, as a religious symbol and a symbol of political identity, I was not prepared for what I myself would experience there. The crowd and the colors in the courtyard suggested a holiday, but as I looked around-- at indigenous women wrapped in stripped rebosas; the elderly lighting candles set out in stalls; young couples with tiny babies whose diapers they were often changing on the steps of the basilica-it was clear that these were people who were not only at home, but people who felt that they had come home to a place that was secure and precious, and very much their own.
The image of the Lady they had all come to see--and whose presence makes the entire space sacred--is high on a wall behind the main altar in the New Basilica. There I saw a man who had passed in front of her but did not leave for quite a while. I would guess him to be a farmer, probably from the south. Standing to one side, with a garland of green leaves on his head, he held a basket from which he took a frond of leaves with an orange flower in the center. This he held high and waved gently and silently in the direction of His Lady. Surrounded as he was by other worshippers, these gestures seemed to be liturgical actions of a pilgrim in deep and wordless prayer.
In greeting the Virgin of Guadalupe in this way, he was, perhaps consciously, reenacting the miracle of her first appearance.1 The bare bones of the story, as many of you know, are that in December of 1531, a peasant named Juan Diego was graced by a number of apparitions of Mary. The priests to whom he went did not believe him, but Mary told him to spread wide his cloak in front of them. When he did so, to everyone's amazement, the cloak was overflowing with roses. In another account, the cloak had Mary's image imprinted on it.
Legend or true vision? Who is to know? But for many, including the man whom I saw, the love and tenderness of the mother of Jesus Christ could be offered and then responded to in gestures that transcend words. Surely the need for such love and tenderness was great among the indigenous people of Mexico, who only ten years before had been brutally conquered by Cortez and had been told that they now must worship an entirely new--and white-God.
Yes, I can hear my good Protestant head saying: This Virgin and this miraculous story are important for Mexicans and especially for the very poor. But my good Protestant heart answers that we have more in common than I might have thought, those people at the shrine and I. They long to transcend what is ordinary and everyday. To do so is to enter into mystery and much that cannot be understood, but there will also be a loving relationship with a tender mother in whom they can trust. They draw near to what promises that as one holds out one's hands to a warming fire. They gather around it and don't want to leave. And so they remain in what is their own courtyard, and bring their babies, and sometimes sing and dance in respect and joy.
I understand such longings. Maybe you do as well. As the theologian Miroslav Volf reminds us, we North Americans and Europeans are so apt to try to have our God "both ways. We believe that we can stand on our own two feet, independent of God."2 We think we can figure out what's going on pretty well, all on our own. And yet when it is time to pray or we want some help from God, we admit that we are not so independent. After all, we depend upon Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer for every breath we take. And yet we waffle back and forth, unable to hold up our prayers in humility before the mystery that is our God.
Here is where Jesus' words from the Gospel this morning, can be like Juan Diego's cloak, filled with sweetness and the promise of love. Remember that our passage comes from the Farewell Discourse, Jesus' last chance to talk with his disciples before he is cruelly snatched from them by the crucifixion. Jesus tells them-and therefore us-- that his love for them is as strong as that of God's love for him. This assertion is no light thing for people raised on the Hebrew notion of hesed, of the loving-kindness of God, that loving-kindness of which our Psalm 33 this morning sings.
And now there is a new situation since Jesus has chosen them and, through them, us to love. But we can remain in that loving bond of oneness with him and the Father only through a deep and full trust in the Father as the source of that love and through a commitment to love as Jesus has showed us. That is why Jesus uses the word "abide" over and over again in this chapter. He wants us to abide in his love and he charges us to follow his commandments so that we may do so.
What follows is both wonderful and challenging. Jesus insists that in following his commandments we are not servants or slaves. His model of abiding love is friendship: with us and from us, and then from us to others. But as Jesus speaks, the disciples can't fully understand that in his friendship for them he will die like a common criminal. Nor do they know what in the future will be required of them.
For each of us, friendship-even with God-- will move us to places we didn't expect. And then abiding may not be simple. To a certain extent, any friend will sometimes be that strange "other" whom one can't understand or touch, but to whom one still reaches in love. After all, God's love continues despite our failings and shows us God's longing for mutuality and reciprocity.
We take risks in so many areas of our lives. How do we begin to take risks with our friendship with and for God? I don't know. I do know that the images of all of those people, nurtured in their sacred space of the Lady of Guadalupe, has remained with me. What also remains is the figure of that leaf-wreathed farmer, lost in devotion before what was for him an object of deepest veneration. What better response can we offer than to linger in God's presence wherever we find it and use whatever transformation it creates as the basis of a loving abiding with others-and thus with our infinitely loving God.
AMEN
1 My understanding of what I saw was greatly furthered by a conversation with Lorenzo Candelaria, Visiting Assistant Professor in Ethnomusicology at the Institute of Sacred Music and Assistant Professor of Musicology, The University of Texas at Austin.
2 Miroslav Volf, Free of Charge: Giving and Forgiving in a Culture Stripped of Grace (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2005), 35.
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