Listen to this poem by St. John of the
Cross:
I am
not moved, my God, to love
you
By the heaven you have promised
me.
Neither does hell, so feared, move
me
To keep me from offending you.
You
move me, Lord, I am moved
seeing you
Scoffed at and nailed on a cross.
I am moved seeing your body so
wounded.
Your injuries and your death move
me.
It
is your love that moves me, and
in such a way
That even though there were no
heaven,
I would love you;
And even though there were no
hell,
I
would fear you.
You do not have to give me
anything
So that I love you,
For even if I didn’t hope for what
I hope,
As I love you now, so would I love
you.
St. John
looks upon Christ in his utmost vulnerability and sorrow and he finds
in that
moment the secret of the Christian Gospel.
We are not saved by making ourselves secure (which cannot
be done), but
by loving one another in the midst of life’s constant,
uncertain, bewildering,
scary insecurity. The
crowd that
gathered for Doris’ funeral, the group that took Carol Kohl
for brunch, the
Briscoe Women in their ministrations during Doris’ final
days, those who give
up time to work for Gaithersburg Help or McKenna’s Wagon, my
wife’s ministry of
note cards, the folks who give rides to people who need to go to the
doctor,
the teens who help out Dave, and countless other
examples—these are the acts of
love, flowing from Jesus on the cross, that move us out of sadness and
into
affirmation of life.
The radicality
of Christianity is the Cross. I said this
last month. I’ll probably say it next month. Even if I
don’t use the actual
word, everything I do and say tries to be cruciform. Invulnerability
and
security cannot save us. Oliver Wendell Holmes—wrong about so
many things, in
my estimation—was right when he said that the need to be
certain and secure has
proven itself to be a bloody need, responsible for so much prejudice,
intolerance, persecution. No, we are saved by vulnerability, by
becoming
vulnerable for each other. In my weakness, you are there; in your
weakness, I
am there. That’s the formula.
I hope 2006
will be less traumatic for us (and for the
world) than recent years have been. We could use a breather. But it
would only
be a breather. Life’s pain will be back and back again. In
that pain, what we
will have is the love of Christ, mediated now by each other. The gift
Christ
gives us is each other.
Yours
in Christ,
—Pastor Bastien
