When I awakened early this morning to “put the finishing touches” on this homily (ahem), and while I was taking those first sips of coffee I decided to first update my status on Facebook by quoting one line from the homily on love which is today’s second reading. I quoted verse 11 from 1 John 4: Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another. And then I simply added the words, “end of sermon.” Within a minute or two of posting that update, two seasoned church musician friends of mine instantly indicated their pleasure. “Larry likes this.” “Mark likes this.”  And I know of at least one other inhabitor-of-the-bench who, if she had the opportunity to register her approval to such brevity, would indeed do so!

After all, what more can be said than to us has been given in I John chapter 4 as we gather on this 5th Sunday in the 50-day season of Eastertide, as well as on this day upon which we reflect upon the nurturing love of the maternal in our lives?  Turn to those words from the second reading and let’s savor them together again for a moment.  But this time, let’s read them through the lenses of the maternal. In the spirit of the day, let’s adjust the words ever-so-slightly so we hear them through the filter of the feminine.

Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love. God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent her only Son into the world so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we loved God but that she loved us and sent her Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and her love is perfected in us. By this we know that we abide in her and she in us, because she has given us of her Spirit.

And we have seen and do testify that the Mother has sent her Son as the Savior of the world. God abides in those who confess that Jesus is the Son of God, and they abide in God. So we have known and believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.

Love has been perfected among us in this: that we may have boldness on the day of judgment, because as she is, so are we in this world. There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love. We love because she first loved us. Those who say, “I love God,” and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen. The commandment we have from her is this: those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also.

Once our deeply paternalized, hierarchical and patriarchal ears adjust, and we begin to relax into the reality of holy metaphor, and the realization that all our language for the divine is simply us “finite-types” groping for words to describe the infinite, we are ushered into the world of wideness and deepness and expansiveness in terms of our relationship to God, our words about God (theology), and our words to God (prayer).

Jesus himself uses metaphor and expansive language both for God and himself in today’s gospel text when he says, “I am the vine, and my Father in the vinegrower; you are the branches.” The people of Israel were accustomed through their prophets to hear of themselves as being the vine and sometimes as the vineyard. But with these words Jesus shakes up their world of metaphor, too, and as he is saying farewell to his followers he teaches them about abiding: abiding in the vine of himself. I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing.

“Abide” is really a great word. The Greek root is “meno” which means to remain, to linger, to stay connected, and in a sense, to “hang in there.” Upon first glance, one might think it’s a pretty passive thing, this idea of abiding.  After all, remaining, lingering, staying connected, and hanging-in-there don’t necessarily sound all that pro-active. Maybe kind of like sending off that Mother’s Day card and calling it “staying connected.” But that’s just too easy!  Jesus’ idea of abiding, on the other hand, entails more than that. It’s like being a branch of a fruit tree that is bearing fruit left and right, so much so that every once in a while it needs to get pruned back in order that the branch won’t break and can continue to blossom and grow in new directions.

So if Christ is the vine, and we are the branches, and those who abide in Christ and Christ in them bear much fruit, what kind of metaphoric apples and oranges are we talking about here? In one of his letters, St. Paul writes to the church in Galatia that the fruits of the Spirit are “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control” which, with marshmallows and Cool Whip would make a wonderful fruit salad. Love, joy, peace…

The second reading for today concentrates on that first fruit of the Spirit: love. It spells out for us how abiding in Christ, the mother vine, ought to look. “God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.” You see, this abiding thing is really a two-way street.  “We love because God first loved us,” we read.  In other words, abiding begins and ends with God — who remains with you, who lingers with you, who stays connected with you, who hangs in there with you, without fail, without condition, and without anything you ever did to deserve it, even without loving in return.

Now if that doesn’t sound like a mother’s love, or at least like the kind of mother’s love we would all describe as the ideal, I don’t know what does. It’s the kind of love that begets more love. In other words, when you are loved in this way and you know you are being loved in this way, you can’t help but bear that fruit in your own life and with those who, like you and me, can sometimes be unloving or forgetful of the love.

It’s actually the kind of love that motivated Philip, in today’s first reading. When he got the message from God to “get up and go” to Gaza, he literally “got up and went” to Gaza. To this day, the road to Gaza is not a pleasure trip by any stretch of the imagination, and the destination remains one of poverty and prejudice, of injustice and exclusion as Palestinians are denied the dignity of basic human rights. But right there, on the road to Gaza, Philip meets the Ethiopian eunuch who waaay beyond the comfort zones of anyone in the early church. He was a stranger to Philip geographically, being from Ethiopia (perhaps from what we would today call Sudan); he was a stranger racially, being a black-skinned African from the region of the Upper Nile; and he was a stranger sexually, being a eunuch which means, bluntly, a castrated male whose sexual status, it was thought, made him more trustworthy over the queen, her ladies in waiting, and her treasury.

It’s a wonderful story of bearing the fruit of love, a love in which there was no fear of differences, no fear of otherness, no fear of the strangeness of the stranger for, as this morning’s second reading reminds us, “perfect love casts out fear.”  For Philip, abiding meant being open to the voice of God telling him to “get up and go”; it meant engaging a stranger in conversation on the stranger’s turf (that is, in his chariot!), and it meant not withholding, not waiting, not wondering if whether or not the time was right but trusting that the God whose voice called him to go, led him to this strangest of strangers: an Ethiopian eunuch, parked on the side of the road to Gaza, reading scripture, and ready for baptism.

Today the voice of the Mother Vine is calling out to her branches: Abide in me as I abide in you. I am love, and those who abide in love abide in me, and I abide in them. Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another.

Sisters and brothers, the love of God is so very wide and so very deep. Let us abide in its width and depth, and let us so love. Amen.