We have heard two readings from John. In 1 John, we heard the word “love” (verb or noun) five times. In the gospel, we heard the word “love” nine times. John owns the word “love.” In the gospel he uses the noun six times and the verb a whopping 31 times. That is half again more than the combined use of both noun and verb by Matthew, Mark, and Luke. In John’s three letters, the noun shows up 18 times and the verb 24 times. If John is the disciple that Jesus loved (John 21:20), he radiates that love and all that it stands for through his writing. The emphasis in John’s writing, and in today’s readings particularly, is on God’s love for us and our love for one another.
Last Sunday we looked at the geometry of God’s love – width and length, depth and height – and said that God’s love was infinite in every imaginable direction. Today, let’s look at God’s love – and the love that we have which results from God’s loving us – from a different vantage point: topography.
Harken back to your days in school and those wonderful window-shade pull-down maps. There were political maps showing states or countries. There were maps showing battles in wars. Other maps showed natural resources or population density. And then there were the ones that showed the world in relief. You could see the mammoth Himalayan mountains that shook a couple of weeks ago. You could see the snow on Mt. Kilimanjaro and the Alps. You could see the mighty rivers – Mississippi, Nile, Amazon, Indus, Ganges, Yellow. You could see Death Valley and the Dead Sea, both below sea level. Since our time in school, digital mapping by satellites have mapped the mountains and valleys under the oceans. I don’t know about you, but these were my favorite maps and I would study them at length when I could.
The United States Geological Survey publishes topographical maps of our nation. They are extremely detailed and were the best resource available until space-based mapping and Google Earth came around. There’s a sample on the cover of the bulletin. This is the map that includes Waverly, which is on the center of the left edge. Sorry, Lake White folks, you live on the next map over.
Topography is fun. Bill Bryson wrote A Walk in the Woods to describe his adventures of walking the Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine. It starts out rough for him and his friend at the southern terminus:
“Each time you haul yourself up to what you think must surely be the crest, you find that there is more hill beyond, sloped at an angle that kept it from view before, and that beyond that slope is another and beyond that another. And beyond those more still until it seems impossible that any hill could run on this long. Eventually you reach the height where you can see the top of the topmost trees with nothing but clear sky beyond....Finally, you...realize...that the view is sensational, a boundless vista of wooded mountains, unmarked by human hand, marching off in every direction.”(1)If we think about life, that is an apt description of how much of our living goes – uphill all the way. But we get those brief moments when the vistas of joy are sensational, jaw-dropping and speech-silencing. But they are brief, because the path heads down to get us ready for another arduous uphill climb.
Philip Yancey, in What’s So Amazing About Grace? tells the following:
“Not long ago I received in the mail a postcard from a friend that had on it only six words, ‘I am the one Jesus loves.’ I smiled when I saw the return address, for my strange friend excels at these pious slogans. When I called him, though, he told me the slogan came from the author and speaker Brennan Manning. At a seminar, Manning referred to Jesus’ closest friend on earth, the disciple named John, identified in the Gospels as ‘the one Jesus loved.’ Manning said, ‘If John were to be asked, “What is your primary identity in life?” he would not reply, “I am a disciple, an apostle, an evangelist, an author of one of the four Gospels,” but rather, “I am the one Jesus loves.” ’ ” (2)Manning tells another story.
“An Irish priest who, on a walking tour of a rural parish, sees an old peasant kneeling by the side of the road, praying. Impressed, the priest says to the man, ‘You must be very close to God.’ The peasant looks up from his prayers, thinks a moment, and then smiles, ‘Yes, he’s very fond of me.’ ” (3)Jesus calls us friends, not servants. What does it mean to be a friend of Jesus? What does it mean to have Jesus very fond of us? Yancey notes that sociologists have a theory of the “looking-glass self”: you become what the most important person in your life (wife, father, boss, etc.) thinks you are. Yancey then asks the question, “How would my life change if I truly believed the Bible’s astounding words about God’s love for me, if I looked in the mirror and saw what God sees?” (4)
Jesus said, “You didn’t choose me, but I chose you and appointed you so that you could go and produce fruit.” We can’t produce fruit if we are not connected to Jesus. He is the one who connects us to himself. Jesus further said, “I have said these things to you so that my joy will be in you and your joy will be complete. This is my commandment: love each other just as I have loved you. No one has greater love than to give up one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you.”
Jesus embraces us. Jesus connects with us. Just before today’s reading, Jesus said, “I am the vine, you are the branches....Without me you can’t do anything.” Jesus will go on to talk about the length to which he will go for those whom he claims as his own, calls his friends, and loves: he will die for them.
There is an Irish blessing which says, “May the road rise to meet you.” That means that it touches you, that it is foundational for you, supportive of you, sustaining for you.
Google Earth is wonderful to look at, but we don’t hover over the world like some robotic drone. We are of the earth – that’s what the creation story tells us.
Eighty-three year old Nobel Peace Laureate Mother Teresa addressed the National Prayer Breakfast. Her frail body and thick accent did not blunt her message: America has become a selfish nation, in danger of losing the proper meaning of love: “giving until it hurts.”(5)
Have you ever heard love defined that way? I hadn’t. We talk about love as the warm feelings inside when we are with a special person – or even thinking about that person. We talk about “making love” to refer to sexual activities. We talk about loving a car or some other object, meaning that we really like it, really want it, or spend all our extra time working on it. We often think of love as getting or having someone or something.
However, Mother Teresa says that love is giving – giving until it hurts. That’s what Jesus does. In fact, he not only gives until it hurts; he will continue giving until he dies. That’s how much pain he will suffer on behalf of those he loves. That’s also the lifestyle that Mother Teresa lived.
The “Americans with Disabilities Act” (ADA) provides that as street corners are built and rebuilt, special pads are placed at the crossing points for sight-impaired people to recognize when they have reached the street’s edge. The raised buttons on the embedded pads can be felt through just about any shoe sole except combat boots. You feel them, you feel the topography of the street’s edge.
The topography of love is the same. We feel it. It hurts. It hurts because we are in contact with the world and with each other. The topography of living has the same extremes as the surface of the earth. Mountains and valleys, joys and distresses, vistas and eyesores, rough places and plains, moments of solidarity and moments of conflict.
But Jesus says to each one of us, you are the one I love. You are the friend for whom I am willing to die. I am the one who shapes you into the person you are called to be. I am the one who is closest to you. Whatever the topography of your life, feel me and know my love. Only as you know my love can you love others until it hurts, until you die for them culturally, socially, economically, philosophically, religiously.
Jesus invites you to feel the hills and valleys, the rough and smooth of love. If love has no topography, it is not life as he offers it to us. He gave you these commandments “so that you can love each other.”
May it be so.
(1) Bill Bryson, A Walk in the Woods, (New York: Random House,1998). Transcribed from audio book, compact disc 1.
(2) Philip Yancey, What’s So Amazing About Grace (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1997) 68-69.
(3) Ibid., 69.
(4) Ibid.
(5) Ibid., 244.
Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com.
Copyright © 2015 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.
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