She Became the Face of God

She Became the Face of God

Sermon preached by the Rev. Lowell E. Grisham, Rector

St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Fayetteville, Arkansas

May 25, 2014; 6 Easter, Year A

Episcopal Revised Common Lectionary

(John 14:15-21)  Jesus said to his disciples, "If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever. This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, because he abides with you, and he will be in you.

"I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you. In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me; because I live, you also will live. 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."

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Jesus had just finished giving his disciples the new commandment – “Love one another.” Then tells his friends, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.” So in this tense, dramatic moment, in the evening before his death, when everyone is so anxious, so afraid about what will happen to him – the one they love so much, the one they love more than anyone they’ve ever known, the one who has loved and nurtured and healed them – Jesus tells them simply, “If you love me, …love one another.”

I’m leaving, he tells them. But you will see me, because I live. I will live in the divine love which cannot die. I will send you that love, the Advocate/the Spirit, to abide with you. Abide in the Spirit of love and I will be in you. Keep loving me, and love one another, and you will see God’s Spirit revealed among you.

Lonni Collins Pratt is the author of a fine little book that we’ve used for one of our spiritual formation classes; it’s titled Radical Hospitality: Benedict’s Way of Love. She tells a story of abiding love which revealed God to her in an ominous period in her life. Lonni’s was twenty, and her first child Angie was dying of cancer. At four-and-a-half months little Angela had a tumor on her shoulder. Six months later she was close to death.

In those last days the loving network of friends who helped her found it excruciating to be near little Angie. The child was a “tiny, dark-haired baby with huge eyes and a startling ethereal kind of beauty.” When you saw her, you wanted to be with her, to help. A friend organized a schedule for people to stay with Lonnie and baby Angie in shifts from two hours to overnight.  But, “it was the rare person who lasted the whole night.

“Angela was in terrible pain, pain like someone had dropped an anvil on her arm. She was prescribed pain medication to take every four hours to ease the suffering, and the medication did help – a little. About two hours after the dose she would grow restless and begin whimpering. Walking with her, holding her, singing to her, worked to quiet her and comfort her at this point.

“At about two and a half hours she could not be comforted and did not want to be held. She would lie in her crib and throw her head back and forth, her mouth open, often with no sound coming out, as if the pain could not be expressed.

“At three hours, she started screaming and trying to rock from side to side in the crib while still lying on her back. No caretaker ever made it past three hours before administering more medication…

“If the crying didn’t get you, the tumor did. She was not a large baby. The tumor on her little shoulder was the size of a large man’s fist… Her arm was engorged to the point of being useless, so when you held her, you had to prop her ram on your shoulder or support it for her.

“People avoided her,” Lonnie said. “We don’t deal with the hard realities, such as beautiful children suffering, unless we are forced to… It takes a whole lot of courage to do otherwise.” Lonni writes, “In the last few days of my daughter’s life a courageous stranger came to stay with us.

“I didn’t really know Linda very well. She was the pastor’s wife at a little conservative church one of my friends attended. They were the kind that were rather noisy about their ‘born again’ religion. I used to tell my friend that while she had a personal savior, I had the same one everyone else had and he was enough.” Lonni wasn’t sure about having Linda there with her. “I imagined her leaving religious materials in my bathroom and scolding me for not praying long enough or hard enough.

“But that wasn’t Linda. People are always better than the stereotype we try to stuff them into. She had a son who was only weeks older than Angela. Linda showed up one day and she stayed. She made tea and she cooked beef stew. She washed the sheets on all the beds and she handed [Lonni] a sleeping pill.”

Seared into Lonni’s mind is a picture of Linda one evening, looking out into a warm October night, her silhouette framed by the screen door at the back of the little house, “standing there, trying to make sense of it all, trying to understand what this child’s awful suffering said about the world and the God she loved…” Talking to herself in a shaky voice, Lonni heard Linda say, “I don’t understand why God allows children to suffer like this. I don’t know why this is happening and what it means. But I know this: You can trust a God who bleeds. When you can’t trust anything else, you can trust a God who bleeds.”

Lonni says, “Linda stood beside me during the darkest time of my life. She opened her heart knowing for sure it was going to get broken. Being with us would force her to look right into the face of realities and doubts she had been able to avoid, until she held the dying baby and thought of her own son. In becoming available to us, she paid a high price emotionally and spiritually.

“I don’t know how I would have survived without Linda. She became the face of God to me when God seemed gone. I could not find a way to pray or believe in a good God. I could not get past the anger and doubt, but I could hold on to this woman. I wasn’t sure how to take the next breath, but I could take her love and feel her love. I didn’t have to give back anything. Good thing, because I wasn’t capable of it. I could let her take care of us. I was the hardest time I’ve ever known and during it, God’s name was Linda.” [i]

On the night before his death, Jesus promises his disciples, “I will not leave you orphaned.” The King James Version puts it, “I will not leave you comfortless; I will come to you…” Jesus comes to us in love, the Spirit of love. Jesus comes to us to comfort us in the love we give to one another.

In Jesus, God reveals the divine life as love incarnate, love in human flesh. Whenever we experience love from another person, it is God’s incarnation come to us yet again. The Spirit, the Advocate fulfilling the one divine commandment.

That also means that we too incarnate God on this earth. Whenever you show love another person, you make God present to them. You become the face of God. You become the Spirit and Advocate. We are the Body of Christ, Jesus’ hands and voice and caring.

Whenever you keep Jesus’ commandment, whenever you love another as he has loved us, God’s name is your name. Then and there, you are the face of God.

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[i] Lonni Collins Pratt, Radical Hospitality, Benedict’s Way of Love, Paraclete Press, Brewster, MA, 2011, p. 232-238.