Readings: Psalm 15, and Luke 10:25-37

Who is my neighbour? A familiar question from a familiar and well-loved parable. Most of us know that this would have been shocking to the hearers of those days as the Samaritans were considered an enemy of the Jewish people. Jesus is radically transforming our vision, He is breaking open the outward appearance, or the surface by which a thing becomes known in itself, and challenging us to sense what is right inwardly with our hearts. Jesus challenges us to recognise souls, to understand the essence of what it means to be human, to belong together from the ground of our being and beyond the borders of ourselves.

‘For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek; the same Lord is Lord of all and is generous to all who call on Him. For, ‘Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.’ Romans 10:12-13. 

Last night I attended the confirmation service here at the Cathedral with the joy of witnessing over fifty people being adopted into the Church family. One body, one spirit, one baptism, one faith, one Lord – yet even as Christians we remain divided and so often excluding one another from belonging in our hearts, in our words and physically in our Church. We must ask how can we possibly break cycles of division in the world if we continue to perpetuate them ourselves? We cannot pull together by judgement, punishment or pity, but we can by love which is manifest by the recognition of that which unites us being greater than that which divides us, and by our love actively working together for each other.

What if we were never meant to think we could find meaning in that which exists except by the relationship of one thing to another? That all contradictions are resolved in walking the shared path of love, because it is love itself that gives us all meaning? But life and love are bound by a nature that is born and dies, love and death therefore are held together as all possibility and all impossibility of meaning because we do not know when either will arrive, both are uncertainties in time whilst being inevitable in place.

As a former mountaineer of all seasons, all weathers day and at night, the mountain still inhabits a place within me as a place that felt like home – somewhere all choices were reduced to the simplicity of survival. Is there a home within ourselves for ourselves, a place of our mortality to inhabit in the struggle against the storms or snows? Walking against the winds or in the darkness, was a naturally thrilling place of being and belonging to that which was greater than myself. A glimpse perhaps of the engine that drives the explorers into the hostile places that test the limits of human endurance, but what is the mountain outside of us except lifeless stone? Do the mountains remember us?

I suppose it was inevitable that real mountains were not the place we were created to stay, and the journey of life is of the treasure we find within us and carry into every place that we are. The ancient meeting point between God and man is ultimately every place we move out of ourselves. The ‘I am’ who is in the world cannot exist apart from it. Whichever line of transcendence we take, up towards the sky or across the earth to the other, is ultimately a bridge across time, and a movement through life to death.

Participation in the space between us becomes the place of opening up the mysterious depths of our being, the revealing of ourselves through our movement, and speaking. The bridge that place of discovering who we are in relation to the other. By permitting another’s gaze to penetrate into the depths of our soul, we allow for the possibility of a spark to ignite a flame in their eyes. To be loved and known through them as they are known and loved through us.

The book of Revelation tells us that the heavenly warrior’s eyes are like a blazing fire, and on His head are many crowns, yet He has a name written on Him that no one knows but He Himself – His white robe dipped in blood and His name is the Word of God (Revelation 19:12-13). ‘He has a name no one knows but He Himself’ – let us ask ourselves, what if that name is Love? For God is Love, and the word ‘love’ is that smallest of words with the largest of all possible meanings which belongs to all dimensions of our being, for it embraces all in all (1 Corinthians 15:28).

How do we love? How can there be an opening of ourselves without surrender? Intimacy must be vulnerable, an unknowing of what might be, or what we believe ought to be, and by the submission to the mystery concealed within the other, we learn to dance and co-create within a new space. An unframing of all that was to rest in an unfolding. So, rest is in our creativity and the rhythms we create between us and all that is other.

In bringing forth creativity from us to the world we, in essence, become a work of art, a movement of spirit, of being and becoming, a mirror of creation itself. We as the Creator’s art become creators ourselves through that interplay of opening and revealing and returning to the potential within. Being seen by another as both our actuality and potentiality is what it means to be known and loved; to be held within another’s mind and heart as whole and particular.

Do you think that’s why music resonates in our souls when we sing and worship together? So that we can tell the difference between Being as love or a dancing with desire? The latter needing satisfaction yet love pausing because love seeks to know the other not for the end of pleasure in itself.

People are not objects, yet love, gentle and patient, is like an open house, where we are safe to be or become who we are. So, when Rainer Maria Rilke, in his Letters to a Young Poet said ‘each protects the solitude of the other’ did not mean the keeping of distance or separation, but that place of safety to be whoever we are.

The Psalm of David says the righteous speak truth from the heart, honour those who fear the Lord, keep an oath even when it hurts and seek no reward from helping those in need. And the letter of St James tells us religion that God our Father accepts as pure looks after the orphan and widows in their distress (James 1:27). So, who is a neighbour? The one who shows mercy, and Jesus tells us to “Go and do likewise.”

Therefore, we love not for what we ever hope the other to be in relation to ourselves, the essence of enframing, but love because of the unconcealment of their own particularity. A revelation of love in their freedom. So Being as love, is perhaps an image of the Creator Himself, something beyond our grasp like death and time.

Love therefore never possesses, for we can take nothing with us, so the freedom to be and move within the other is a coming of heaven to earth, a gathering of creation through two lines of transcendence; earth to sky, and in Jesus fully human fully Divine we move towards His image in the other.

‘For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’ (Matthew 25:35-36).

The suffering servant on the cross is that meeting point of Love and death held together, the beginning and the end brought to the now. The veil between the two realms is removed, and the home within us, a new home without a boundary between that which is from above and that from below existing alongside the world, interdependent, and at the same time set apart to live differently. We are set free to live with the perfect freedom to choose; between the mere appearance of things or by the seeking of truth, for the heart is not transformed by what it ‘has’ to do but by its desire to do.

Yet, the bleakness of death is what makes it so hard to truly love, because intuitively we seek comfort and desire to avoid pain. But fear itself is an emptiness, and therefore not something we can take away – it has to be filled. And so, we must love the other, our brothers and sisters in Christ and in the world more than simply having the courage to face our ultimate destiny alone. The tipping point then is the finding of that other, the pearl of great price that we would endure the pain of death with and for. For love is as strong as death, and worth more than all possible futures alone. Jesus said that other was humankind, for God so loved the world He sent His only Son – and that includes everyone, including you and me.

Amen.