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| SERMONS Sean Gilbert –21/3/10 It is a question that I asked of the Lenten discussion group on Monday evening and one well worth asking again here: Reflecting on your own life and experience, what have been the really significant expressions of love that you have either received or given? Put another way, what stands out in your mind and heart regarding an expression of love (received or given) that has touched you, affected you to the core. Take a few leisurely moments in silence, and then draw from that experience a word or image or phrase not necessarily a detail to share with one or two folk around you. If you’d care not to share, that’s very much ok, we will all respect that. Chances are, (and here I will stand corrected), what affects us deeply in the giving and receiving of love is not necessarily the gift or an action or the intent, but the believing , the honouring, the dignifying, the adoring, the connecting that is communicated in either the reception or the offering. The meeting of human hearts, the celebration of friendship, the life-giving dance of intimacy. For my birthday last year I received a gift like no other. It wasn’t expensive although it had certainly taken time to put together. In some respects it looked plain and simple – some A4 sheets in a plastic folder, some headings, some writing and colour photos. Upon opening it and reading , I was left speechless, if not dumbfounded – here were excerpts of my own sermons, prayers, poems and articles, all written over a number of years, lovingly collated, and formatted together. Admittedly it was kind of the “best of”, but I found myself staring into my own significance, and even my own beauty (hard as it is for an Australian male or female to say that). The giver was saying, “Take a look at yourself Sean, this is what I see and honour. You are significant.” Words and affection all of us need to hear. The gift of perfumed anointing oil and the outrageous daring of Mary, is like a mirror being held up to Jesus, and whilst around him confusion and even the pending threat of betrayal reigns, here is someone in the person of Mary who knows how to love unto death. Tender, believing hands on dusty, dirty and worn feet, wearied by the path already taken, tentative for the fateful path yet to be traversed. John Vanier wonderfully puts it like this out of his long experience of working and living with the physically and mentally handicapped: This is a very different way indeed. It asks much of us, does it not? It invites a movement well beyond the superficial, the functional, the mechanical, the obligatory, the practical and logical even! It is consciously a spirited, a soulful, a vulnerable and searching way into life and love within family, community and world. It does not reduce Christianity to morals and pragmatics and keeping all things very simple; love like this simply gets and embraces the ambiguities of life, the paradoxes and complexities of life, the cruelties and injustices of life, and from that uncertain reality base, it still grows, expresses and flourishes. Love will not, it cannot be swayed from its calling to redeem. It is that bell-ringing shy truth that Michael Leunig writes and prays about. The love of God that finds us wholly loveable and acceptable in our humanness, our absurdities, our contradictions and our lingering doubts. And it’s from that glimpse of overwhelming radiance of our own worth and beauty that the invitation, the call to love others arises. (That place of poverty, nothingness, Vanier suggests) comes so that our mission, our outreach is based and founded upon the Vanier, Jesus and Mary principle of holding up to others a mirror (through our believing, loving eyes) that clearly reflects their beauty, their worth and their potential, knowing something of our own. No gift is greater than this. No such fire of love and goodness can ever be extinguished... Let us take a few moments for our reflection and prayer...
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