St. Paul's Episcopal Church

St. Paul's Episcopal Church
425 Cleveland Ave SW
Canton, Ohio 44702
Phone: 330-455-0286
Fax: 330-455-9818
E-mail: office@stpaulscanton.org

Fifth Sunday of Easter
St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Canton OH
1 John 4:7-21, John 15: 1-8

May 10, 2009
The Rev. Barbara L Bond

The Love Connection

On this day, May 10, one hundred forty years ago, two railroads hitched up in the middle of Utah. It was a flat, desolate territory where the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific railroads met. Each had been laying track, coming from opposite directions, and on May 10, 1869, they came together, joined by a golden spike. Today is the anniversary of this joining together, making travel across the country possible in a one-week train trip. This was a vast improvement over wagon trains. Americans reached out and connected.

That same year, two months earlier, on March 10, a small group of Episcopalians came together here in Canton and founded St. Paul’s. They reached out and connected with each other, and formed a new unit of the Body of Christ, the church where we continue to meet and worship today. The building changed, the people changed, but the Body is still here, still connected.

There are so many images we can conjure up today, Mother’s Day, for connectedness. Mother Love itself is a gift from God and an example of God’s love playing out over generations. This past Tuesday our Guild Hall was filled with mothers and daughters for our Annual Mother-Daughter Banquet. One table had four generations represented.

In today’s Gospel Jesus uses an image from horticulture, and as many of us are working in our gardens, we understand immediately the metaphor of the vine and its branches. This image is perfect for Mother’s Day, as we consider families, their roots, their branches, and their strong attachments to the central vine, the family tree. These biological metaphors – from plants and from families – can help us understand our relationships and connections.

They can also help us to understand our relationship with God. God reaches out to touch us. God wants to be close to us. God wants to connect with us. In a stupendous act that is quite beyond our understanding, God decided to dwell among us, to be one of us. God has loved us forever, from the beginning of time, and has spoken to us through various media, through prophets, through stories of our spiritual ancestors, through events in history. But this one act, this coming into our lives in a physical way, was God’s most amazing act of connection ever. God walked the earth in Jesus of Nazareth, feeling what we feel, connecting with us through talking, healing, touching, eating, listening, loving. God in Jesus felt our love and our joy, our pain and our death. God loves us so much that God wants to keep in touch with us. Our story of this person Jesus of Nazareth is a good way for us to remember the God connection. There are other ways, in reaching out to touch each other, to feel the love of God in our community. You can’t be a Christian all by yourself – you have to be in a group to get the whole picture. Groups may include family, church communities, and gatherings of concerned people coming together for a purpose outside of themselves, something they believe in. God is there in the midst of them.

God reaches out to touch us. We likewise reach out to touch God. In the Epistle reading today, there is a phrase that comes up twice: God is love. God is love. I remember the first time I encountered that phrase, an experience I mentioned to you once before. I was in junior high school making a report to my class about blindness. I showed my classmates what Braille looked like by drawing a series of little dots on the blackboard. Beneath the dots I wrote the words that they spelled, “God is love.” I had found the example in a book. I looked at those little dots, and thought about the phrase. Blind persons cannot see those dots, but in the raised surface of Braille, they can feel them with their fingertips. They can reach out and connect with this profound message, God is love.

We reach out to connect with one another, and we, like branches, are firmly attached to our central vine, the love of God. This connection supplies the surge of love and life that extends to us. This connection bears fruit as we reach out further, beyond ourselves. It informs our choices and our actions – from voting, to contributing food to the post office’s collection for the hungry. It stirs our compassion for those experiencing difficulties in today’s economic climate. It works through our prayers, as we raise to God the names of those in need of healing. The love of God bears fruit in every action taken for another – volunteering for the Children of Promise, serving the hungry at HOT Lunch, teaching children through our strings program or our doll program. It was evident in the kitchen staff for our Mother-Daughter banquet – a group of men who cooked for us, served us, fed us, and honored us.

The love of God bears fruit when we put our talents to the service of others. Look at the beautiful original art of Holly Anderson that graces our Guild Hall gallery, and the cover of our bulletin today. Listen to the musical offerings of our choir and our parish musician, offering their gifts to the glory of God and to enhance your worship experience. This is the love of God in action. May the love of God inspire you to give more of yourself, through action, through contributions of time or money, through acts of kindness and generosity. The love of God empowers us to serve, empowers us to love, empowers us to live in joy.