My mother grew up on a wheat farm in
northwestern Oklahoma. It’s the flattest
land you can imagine. If you flew over
it in a crop-duster plane, you would see below you a patchwork quilt made up of wheat and
alfalfa fields in colors of green and gold, dotted with small white farmhouses, and
roads forming the seams, running arrow-straight along the dividing lines
between sections, half-sections and quarter-sections – measures of acreage in
Oklahoma. There, the roads run so
straight that every now and then, you might be driving north, and suddenly the
road jogs to the west for a few hundred yards, then turns north again. That’s what they call a correction line – it's intended to make up for the curvature of the earth. They’re serious about keeping the roads
running straight around there.
In that part of the country, everyone has a
long memory. So my mother recently
inherited a quarter section of land called the “Strange Place.” It’s called that not because it’s weird or
unusual, but because in the first Oklahoma land rush, it was settled by a
family named Strange – and though my Grandfather bought it in the 1950s, it’s
still called the Strange Place.
In a place like that, things don’t change very
fast, and there are traditions. My
mother grew up there, the way girls are supposed to, raising lambs for 4H Club
and taking Home Economics in high school.
But when she married my father, she became a city girl and a world
traveler. It wasn’t till many years
later, after I was grown up, that she found something in those Oklahoma farm roots
to make her own.
She began watching her own mother making
beautiful quilts – hand-piecing the colors together, all cut from material that
used to be Grandpa’s work shirts or Grandma’s Sunday dresses, repurposed
memories of days gone by. My mother
realized that this quilting was an art form that went back for generations – mothers,
grandmothers, great-grandmothers all cutting up the remnants of old memories to
make beautiful, practical covers for their beds, creating more memories, a patchwork
collage of memories for their families.
Each quilt made carries deep within its seams
the love of woman who made it and the memories of the family whose lives are
sewn into it, and my mother has followed her own mother, grandmother,
great-grandmother, a whole line of women stretching back to the old countries
they came from, in making beautiful hand-sewn quilts and other artwork, created
with love.
This is why I have the privilege of wearing
such beautiful vestments each week: all
my vestments were made by my mother. Often
people tell me how beautiful they are, and tell me that my mother should go
into business to make clergy vestments. And
my answer is always the same: she isn’t
interested in doing it for money. She
only does it for love. It never occurs
to me to wonder whether my mother loves me – I can tell she loves me by the
things she makes and does – they are love, lovingly put into tangible form.
I think love is like a patchwork quilt for all
of us – a life full of patchwork memories, lovingly created out of pieces of events,
small things from our beloved past. Relationships
with anyone we love are formed out of many small moments: midnight feedings, evenings doing homework,
laughter at the dinner table, things said and things left unsaid: the love that
is lived out in carpools, shopping trips, meals together, late nights staying
up and talking about the things that are important.
For every relationship that is important to
us, I think we create it not out of whole cloth, not out of a beautiful story
with a magical plot like Cinderella, but rather out of a patchwork of these
kinds of small moments, all pieced together in our minds to make up a picture
of love. By the love of those who first
loved us, our mothers, fathers, other strong role models if we didn’t grow up
in a traditional family, we learned how to love. It is a basic truth of both psychology and
Christianity: we learn to love because
we were first loved – before we were worthy, before we were deserving, before
we had achievements to our credit and praises to our names, someone loved us,
taught us what love is, and pieced us together out of love.
I think for most of us, learning about love is
a patchwork quilt composed of many small events; all those small actions add up
to a lifelong education about love. Learning
to love means abiding in love, living in the same house with love, loving and
being loved day in and day out, through the most ordinary of activities,
learning to love by letting love form us, transform us, piece us together.
The apostle John in 1 John today continues
teaching us about what love is. Last
week he said you can tell if someone loves God, because they love other people. This week he turns around and makes the same
claim in reverse: You can tell that
someone loves other people, because they love God. By this he means they believe in Christ, and
do what Christ has commanded. And what
has Christ commanded? What we see in today’s gospel: to love one another as he
has loved us.
It may seem like a circular argument: God
loves us, we love God, God loves Christ, Christ loves us, we love other people,
and all of those things are evidence of all the others; yet it is not
circular. It describes the truth of life
and of Christianity, that our love for God is inextricably bound up with our
love for other people.
And the best picture we can find of what that
love means is the life of Jesus. John’s
whole gospel has described Jesus lovingly patching together a quilt, through
signs, events, relationships, that create a picture of God’s love. The disciples who watched Jesus came to
believe that Jesus was the truest manifestation of God; that to understand God,
you only have to look at Jesus. And when
they looked at Jesus, they saw love. Not
love spelled out in beautiful poetry or happily-ever-after fairy tales, but
love displayed in the patchwork ministry of healing the sick, helping the poor,
forgiving the fallen, inspiring the hopeless, giving life to the dying, and
giving his own life for us.
John makes two audacious claims in this
gospel, and the first is this: that God is
love, that the reason anyone loves is because God has first poured God’s love
into us. God loves us before we deserve
to be loved, just as a mother loves an infant, and by loving us God makes us
worthy of love; the love itself transforms us, pieces us together into a
beautiful new, beloved creation. Don’t
underestimate how revolutionary this claim is: you only have to look at Greek
gods and their jealousies and spats and manipulation of humans to serve their
own ends, to understand that Christians believed something revolutionary in the
ancient world: that God is love.
How do we know God is love? Not by thinking up
abstract philosophies about love; we learn to love by watching love in action. We don’t have to guess what God is like. We can see God’s love in Jesus. And as we abide in Jesus through our worship
and prayer, as we live in the same house with Jesus, let Jesus pour his love
into us through the ordinary everyday activities of our lives, Jesus’ love
begins to transform us, and we become capable of letting that love of God flow
through us and transform others around us into God’s beautiful patchwork quilts
of love.
Which is the second important point John wants
us to understand. Because God loves us,
we are called to love others; again, this is a revolutionary claim, especially
in our individualistic world. Christianity
is fundamentally a religion lived in community: people can say, I can worship
God on the golf course, or I can pray on my own, and these things are true, as
far as they go: but the most fundamental truth of our faith is that God loved
us, and therefore – therefore – God
calls us to love each other. Christianity
is not a religion whose sole focus is developing our inner spiritual wisdom or
gaining personal enlightenment or cultivating calm in a chaotic world or living
the virtuous life – these things are important and good. But Christianity is a practical, realistic
faith that is lived out in a community, where we have the opportunity to learn
to love each other through good times and bad times, and where we form
ourselves into a multi-colored, many-faceted, patchwork community that reaches
out in love to the world.
And if we are truly doing what Jesus
commanded, people should be able to see that picture of God’s love in our
lives. Someone asked Mother
Theresa: how can anyone love all the
people in the world? Mother Theresa
answered: you can’t love everyone in the
world, but you can love the person standing right in front of you.
Love is not an idea: it is something you can
see, and touch, and feel. And the
fundamental truth of our Christian faith is that we worship a God of love, best
seen in Jesus, and therefore – therefore
– we must be a people of love.
How do others know that God is love? They know because they have seen that love carefully
pieced together in our lives, in the many small moments that display who we
are, and they can see through us to the life of Jesus. And through us, God’s love pieces together
out of the worn-out, discarded, unloved remnants of our world, a new community
of love.
