This morning’s gospel continues what we heard last week and expands upon Jesus’ words of abiding within his followers. In the same display of circularity, John equates abiding in Jesus as abiding in Jesus’ love; to abide in Jesus’ love is to keep the Father’s commandments, which means that those who keep them will abide in the Father’s love, too. And all this keeping and abiding results in experiencing God’s love — thereby making the followers’ joy complete.
Added is the discussion of servanthood that, through abiding in God’s love and commandments, transforms itself into friendship. Such a shift was radical, for sure, that a teacher call his disciples friends and speak of laying down his life for his friends, but that is what Jesus did. Yet it makes sense — how could he talk about all this abiding in each other, if there was an inequality? Just as Jesus and the Father are one, and therefore, the Holy Spirit, too, just as there is no hierarchy in the Trinity, Jesus’ understanding of being in relationship with the disciples meant sharing with them everything he knew. And what he knew was to give them ‘these commandments so that you may love one another.’
The indwelling of God’s grace is only manifest to us if we keep God’s commandments. And what are they? To understand that oneness in God is to abide in love. Love of God and love of neighbour and love of oneself. To love one another as Christ has loved us. (And the rest is commentary, midrash.) The command to love is what Jesus leaves for the in-between time in which we dwell — between the first resurrection and the second. If we love Jesus, it should be easier to keep that commandment because we abide in him and he in us.
John Winthrop, the first governor of Massachusetts, made this connection in an address or sermon given to pilgrims in Salem harbor just before landing on these shores in 1630 said, ‘We must delight in each other, make others’ conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes that we are a community — members of the same body.’ (1)
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Part of our loving God and neighbour, of making others’ conditions our own, rejoicing together, labouring and suffering together, and remembering that we are a community, members of the same body, is to care for the earth which God has entrusted to us.
This Sunday is Rogation Sunday, the Sunday on which we pray to God that our efforts at planting, sowing and creating gardens might be blessed. We offer prayers of gratitude to the God who has made the world and all that it is in it, who made it into a vast garden of beauty and of things to satisfy our basic needs, that we, who constantly receive good things from God’s loving hand, might return the favor, and give back good things to this sacred earth, and to one another.
When I was teaching in the Diocesan Study Program I had an email back-and-forth with a student who wanted to know the best translation for the famous verse in Genesis that speaks of humanity having ‘dominion’ over the earth. This question set me hunting and I came up with the Hebrew root, radad, which means ‘to beat down, subdue.’ Its derivative, mirda, meaning ‘dominion,’ occurs in Gen 1.28. The second meaning, ‘to rule,’ is used 22 times in the Hebrew Scriptures, the initial usage in Gen 1.28. Generally rada is limited to human rule, rather than divine dominion. That would imply that we do have a certain measure of superiority over the rest of creation. If that is the case, part of our loving God and neighbour is to use that authority and superiority carefully. (2)
We are called to be stewards of this earth, to care for it as best we can, to think of future generations, our children’s children’s children’s, life here. As a culture, I think it is hard for us to think that far ahead, but we must. In order to do that forward thinking, we must contemplate the present and understand what treasures there are around us right now, treasures that we want to preserve.
I would hazard, though, that many people have lost touch with creation, and are so disconnected from it that even thinking about their participation in sustaining or degrading creation is out of their minds.
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During a layover in Newark airport a month ago, I wandered into a bookstore to buy something to entertain me on my five-hour flight to California. I ended up with Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Nature History of Four Meals (also author of The Botany of Desire and In Defense of Food). Pollan traces the food chains that sustain us and the route of how we get what we eat, be it meat, poultry or vegetables. The book is an eye-opener and it has gotten me thinking about the choices I make when I go to the market, and how I might try to eat more locally (summer time is great because I can plant a vegetable garden but even if that does not work out this year, there are local food coops into which I can buy).
Pollan states, ‘As a culture we seem to have arrived at a place where whatever native wisdom we may once have possessed about eating has been replaced by confusion and anxiety.… Humans take part in a food chain, and our place in that food chain, or web, determines to a considerable extent what kind of creature we are. The fact of our omnivorousness has done much to shape our nature, both body… and soul.’ (3)
You may be saying by now that the mention of this book has absolutely no connection to the readings this morning. Perhaps. But think about our connection to the earth, one another and God over the centuries.
Years ago a friend spent time with Quiche people of Guatemala, the descendents of the Maya. Their sense of the earth’s sacredness is so strong that they ask forgiveness of the earth, of the Great Mother, before digging a furrow, tearing open the earth. My friend learned from them the need, from time to time, to take off his shoes and walk barefoot through the sacred fields, those holy places known to our forebears, to feel the earth and his connectedness with it. I always enjoyed walking barefoot in the garden as I was planting things, to feel the warm, moist, rich earth between my toes. Try it sometime.
The Mayan peoples of Central America call Earth the Big House. Mountains and rivers, air and wind, light and darkness, animals and plants, humans and spirits… all are part of this Big House. Can you and I find ways to share this Big House so it will still be there for our children’s children? Can we understand that by loving Earth, we love God and neighbour? Can we remember that we are a community — members of the same body? Can we see that by remembering all these things, we will find God abiding in us as we in God? I pray so, lest it be too late.
END NOTES
(1) Prayers for the Common Good, Ed. A. Jean Lesher (Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press, 1998), 3-4.
(2) R. Laird Harris, ed. Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament, Vol 2 (Chicago, IL: Moody Press, 1980), 833.
(3) New York, New York: Penguin Books, 2007, 1, 6.
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