First Church in Cambridge, Congregational UCC
23 November 2003
Love Never Ends
Yesterday's anniversary of the Kennedy assassination caught me off guard. Not that I wasn't aware of it—it's been all over the media for weeks, and you could not have missed it if you tried. No, the real surprise was how fresh the grief felt when Walter Cronkite's voice cracked with emotion in the replays of old news footage, how the tears welled up when once again the dark stallion pranced down Constitution Avenue in the cold November light, boots reversed in the stirrups of an empty saddle.
I'd like to be able to say that my sadness was only about that day in Dallas forty years ago, but it wasn't. It was mostly about those forty years and where they have gone. I felt suddenly old, bewildered by it. All week I walked around saying really trite things like, "My! How the years have flown!" And, of course, they have.
Bill Holshouser died of cancer a couple of weeks back. John Hildebidle was a good friend of his, both men being fine poets, and John sent me a sermon Bill preached once upon a time at Old Cambridge Baptist, in which he said all this better than I can:1
It's as if we were born falling, and live our lives falling toward death, the inescapable end... When we learned as children that we were falling to our deaths, we had already been falling for years... Suddenly we realized we were in mid-air, gaining in velocity each day, each year, and we had no idea why we were there or why we had been given life, then sentenced to death... And here we are in mid-fall. Not especially uncomfortable, most of us, but if you put out your hand you can almost feel the wind stream upward past it.We are all falling to a thousand little deaths too, long before our bodies die. A friend moves away, somebody else gets that great job, your last child goes off to college, a parent passes away. You do something that you would give anything to change, but you can't. A terrible thing happens to you, and it changes you, forever. And somewhere along the way, some of your best dreams get stamped, "Never." The years go by. We put our hand out and we can almost feel the wind stream upward past it.
Nothing lasts, neither things we want to hold onto, nor things we are happy to see go. Paul says as much in the last part of the first letter to the Corinthians that we heard today. Don't kid yourselves, he warns that smug and fractious bunch of self-appointed super-Christians. Nothing lasts. Not your vaunted human skills, not your spiritual powers, not your authority or your righteousness, not faith, not hope, not tongues or knowledge or prophecy. It's all partial, contingent, and, in the end, passing.
Don't be fooled, he tells us too. Nothing stays the same, not your cousin's ill-advised marriage, not the Democratic Party, not the Latin Mass, not 'segregation forever,' not Newtonian physics, not a full head of hair, not the President's rationale for war, not even the church itself, not the definition of marriage. Everything changes.
And the only thing that makes this fickle free-fall of ours even bearable is the conviction that in the midst of it, as we slip through air, we are surrounded by a mystery, carried by the fact of love. Love is, Paul says, the only fixed point in the human firmament.
Paul also says that 'love never ends,' so we know he is not talking about romantic love, the most fleeting of all love's forms. He's talking about the divine kind that anticipates, that never gives up, is patient and kind and joyful and full of hope. This is the love we Christians claim to learn from the example of Jesus. It is God's love in the world, a free and inestimable gift, and we have and use it only by this sheer grace, since it does not come naturally to us. It's the love we're commanded to direct at ourselves and to shower on others, even on our enemies.
And it's the love that will meet us, Paul says, when we finally touch down from our falling. It will take full charge of us there, offering us a long loving look in a perfect mirror in which we will finally recognize precisely who we are -- beautiful, precious, wonderfully-made—and precisely who God is --all compassion, God for us. No more fear, self-doubt and loathing, no more secrets, no more pretense and posturing, no more hiding, and no more shame. We will finally comprehend this love that made us, sustains us, covers a multitude of our sins, and will not let us go. We will understand everything, and we will be understood completely.
Now, that would be a rather nice outcome after all our flailing around in mid-air, wouldn't it? To know as we are known, to grasp the great mystery of God, finally and fully? Theologians tell us that this is what we were all created for, what we all hunger for down deep—eternal face-time with God. I believe that, but I also know that a great many people would also like it a lot better if "touching down" also meant having eternal face-time with their deceased spouses and siblings, their favorite teachers, their old pastors, their dogs, parakeets and gerbils. They are hoping for reunions; for them "love never ends" had better also mean that the many different loves that got started 'down here' continue in eternity.
I am not in a position to know for certain whether this will be the case. As much as anyone else and more, I want it to be so, and I preach with conviction that it will be so. But since we must all remain agnostic in the face of the "Exactly what will it be like in heaven?" question, here's something to believe in in the meanwhile, something you can actually put to a kind of test.
If we are brave enough to stop pretending that we are not falling, that we have no ultimate control over our lives; if we can find the courage to put out our hands to take stock of the breeze created by our fall; if we are able to own this mortality of our and to acknowledge everybody else's (and that's the thing, isn't it? To know that we are all falling together, that we are all alike, and that therein lies the secret of solidarity, strong communities and relationships, and the foundation of human justice); if we can stop denying our deaths in all the amazingly creative ways we have of evading death's enveloping presence and find a way to rely on God's love and each other's; if we can simply let the falling-thing be, then the reality of our actual safety, the reality of being held by love, will take on startling new dimensions in this life too. We will not need to wait until touch down to begin seeing it for the first time. If we fall with our eyes wide open, our hearts wide open, our hands wide open, then a far greater breadth and depth of love human and divine will disclose itself to us than if we were to keep falling frightened and closed up and drawn into ourselves, our eyes securely shut.
In an address given at a Williams College commencement ceremony some years ago, Richard Sewall, then Professor of English at Yale University, told of his wife's struggle with cancer. He ended his address with the last letter she wrote. It was to a close friend whose husband had died the year before.2
What, indeed, surrounded by such love?Dear Holly:
The problem of dealing with this fellow Death has been interesting...In the first place, when I saw him come striding up to my house ... I wasn't in the least spooked. I opened the door and we had a nice little chat. Subsequent chats have been reassuring... I'm sure you have a nodding acquaintance with him, so you have the same feelings.
Then there's Love. I feel I'd never have known its endless horizons had I lived out my full span. Somehow, in a smooth life we take each other for granted, but now, even with someone like Richard, new little vistas open up—and with casual acquaintances, whole worlds.
My plumber, Tommy Citerella, stopped in to see me after he'd attended to our various drips and leaks. He sat down and looked out at the view I have from my bed: a valley, a mill house, a waterfall, a lake... 'Missus,' he said, 'You have to have faith. You have to pray. God's never failed me. He's saved me three times.'
'Tommy,' I said, 'I don't know where to aim my prayers. God is such a mystery.'
'Missus,' he said, 'don't worry. I'll take over all the praying.' And he took my two hands and leaned down and kissed me on the brow. So now—what do I have to worry about?
Love,
Til
Sisters and brothers, you don't have to know you are dying in quite that way to watch love unfold its fullest mysteries. We are all on our way, and you just have to say out loud that it is so, and then live into the falling with a certain honest grace. It is really not as fearful as it sounds. Ask God to teach you, and on this All Saints Day, when we celebrate the lives and example of all the citizens of heaven who have already touched down, may God grant that we citizens of earth may have the gift of graceful falling, the grace to keep on falling in love, to our deaths, into our lives, and into God's hands that hold the love that never ends.
1My hunch is that Bill's central sermon image was inspired by Rilke's poem, "Autumn" (courtesy of Kate Layzer).
Autumn
The leaves are falling, falling as from far,
as though above were withering farthest gardens;
they fall with a denying attitude.
And night by night, down into solitude,
the heavy earth falls far from every star.
We are all falling. This hand's falling too,
all have this falling-sickness none withstands.
And yet there's One whose gently-holding hands
this universal falling can't fall through.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
2 This story is cited by another preacher who found a copy of the speech someplace, but does not supply the reference.
© 2003, J. Mary Luti