Love Lifts Me

 

Sermon preached by Fr. Antony Hughes on Sunday, May 18, 2025

Hafiz wrote:  I once asked a bird, how is it that you fly in this gravity of darkness. She responded, "Love lifts me."

The Samaritan Woman came to Jacob's Well at noon when the day was hottest and the sun at its zenith, wrapped in a cloak of darkness. She did not want to be seen. And there she WAS seen by someone who we, in our often ungracious minds, might have least expected to pay her any attention. A Jewish man who was by law and religion entitled to ignore her and by ignoring her to condemn her. For the opposite of love is not hate, it is indifference. Our Lord, is never indifferent to his children. This kind Jewish man happened to also be the Messiah. In this moment, Jesus shows us what he is and what we are supposed to be.

Because God's ways are not our ways, we would be wise to lay aside any expectation that the Lord must, for any reason, agree with us unless we, of course, agree with him. Today's Gospel reading demonstrates this beautifully. If we follow Christ, we must be willing to embrace surprise.

The Lord never acts the way we want or expect or believe he must like a performing seal. God is not constrained by anything except the law of unlimited and unconditional love. He would not ever allow any social or religious norm keep him from loving an immoral Samaritan Woman. The wind blows where it wills, as do, he tells Nicodemus, all those who are born of water and the Spirit. Love obeys no law for Love is the law. The Spirit of God is love. Are we flowing with the wind or against it?

When the Woman asked him about the coming Messiah he replied simply, "I am he". And I am the Source of Living Water and I wish to share it with you. And notice, please, that Jesus says nothing about worthiness, only willingness. "Only sinners can taste Christianity in its fulness." (Fr. Nicholas Steinhardt) His undistracted attention and compassion made her worthy. Jesus said it this way in Luke 7:47, "Those who are forgiven little, also love little."

For the light rushes to fill all the empty, dark and lonely places. We only have to open the door at which he gently is knocking. The Light of Christ reveals all of these lonely places to be sacred spaces, gifts to us for our awakening.

Here is a question: but what if we would rather hide from the light like Adam and Eve in the Garden?

Answer: Hell is discovering that there is no place to hide.

Therefore, this hell is also heaven, for if there were no light, we would not be able to see the darkness. It is the luminous darkness, the bright sadness, shadowy Mt. Sinai illumined by divine fire for there is no place he is not. 

Thus we can navigate life with fearlessness and joy whatever it brings. And in our wandering deeper and deeper inwardly, we begin to discover fragments of the life we thought we had lost forever. Glimpses of the Divine image, broken perhaps, but there all the same. Think of the woman and her lost coin.  And the Woman at the Well. And the Pearl of Great Price.

And today we see Jesus helping Photini find the lost coin of her true nature and see the joy that comes when the Shepherd locates the lost one, and the lost sheep hear his Compassionate voice, and the Prodigal Son is embraced on his long journey home by his Father's outrageous love.

Divine Love is eminently unreasonable through the prism of this sad fallen world. But Christ wants to give us new eyes. "Behold, I make all things new," he says, including our perception. The kingdom of heaven makes no sense to eyes clouded by worldly expectations. His ways, I propose, are rarely, if ever our ways.

He who destroyed the illusion that heaven and earth are divorced from each other saying, "The kingdom of heaven is within you", whose death destroyed death and forgave all sin for all time, whose death tore in two the curtain of the temple, split the rocks, and opened the graves, who set free the captives in Sheol, this is the One who saw her and invited her to dialogue with him, to whom he offered the Living Water and shared the mysteries of true worship as if she had never, ever sinned. It was the Messiah who doesn't even remember our sins and on the Cross casts them as far as the east is from the west with his outstretched arms. This is our God. This is he who is coming into the world, and who, at every moment, is coming for us.

I was sitting in Starbucks this past Wednesday where I meet one of my dearest spiritual sons and friends each week to share our lives. We were talking about this Sunday's Gospel reading. All of a sudden a song came over the sound system - a song that conveyed perfectly what we were feeling at that moment and the message Jesus was trying to convey. Carl Jung would call this a synchronicity. We called it an epiphany.

Little darling, it's been a long, cold, lonely winter.
Little darling, it seems like years since it's been here.

Here comes the sun.
Here comes the sun and I say,
It's alright.

We left each other last Wednesday filled with joy as we always do, just like the Samaritan Woman. After Winter always comes the Spring. Let God's love, today and forever, give you wings.