GOD'S LOVE TRANSCENDS ALL CATEGORIES

GOD'S LOVE TRANSCENDS ALL CATEGORIES

Dina M. Zingaro (MDiv/JD ‘26)

(Dina is a student in my Preaching class at Holy Cross and offered this sermon Saint Constantine and Helen Church in Webster, MA this past Sunday)

Once on Mt. Athos, there was a monk who got drunk every day, thereby scandalizing all of the pilgrims. Eventually the monk died and this relieved some of the faithful who went on to tell Elder Paisios that they were delighted this huge problem was finally solved. Father Paisios told them that he knew about the monk’s death after seeing the battalion of angels who came to collect his soul. The faithful were amazed; some protested and tried to clarify with Father Paisios who they were all talking about. 

But Elder Paisios explained that this particular monk was born in Asia Minor right before the Turkish invasion when the Turks gathered all the boys. The monk’s parents, to prevent their child from being taken from them, would take him to the fields where they worked and so he wouldn’t cry, they put a little raki, which is a liquor, into his milk in order for him to sleep. The monk grew up an alcoholic.

One day, when the man found an elder and told him he was an alcoholic, the elder told him to do prostrations and prayers every night and to ask the Panagia to help him reduce his drinking by one glass. After a year of struggle and repentance, he reduced the number of glasses from 20 to 19, and years later, he averaged two to three glasses, which would still get him drunk.

The world, for years, saw an alcoholic monk who scandalized the pilgrims. But God saw a fighter who fought a long struggle to reduce his passion. Without knowing what each is trying to do, what right do we have to judge his effort?

Mt. Athos is nearly 5,000 miles away, but this story is a story for right here and right now. The world may see us only to the extent that we fit into its categories: white or Black; Democrat or Republican; straight or LGBTQ; immigrant or citizen; addict or sober. But God sees each of us as a person–a completely unique signature of God that cannot be placed into this box or that box. 

So when we journey with Christ as this monk did, Christ works within us according to our own uniqueness. We do not know how Christ will transform us or how Christ will transform anybody else. As theologian Eve Tibbs says, “there is ‘no one size fits all’ in Orthodoxy.” 

In today’s Epistle, St. Paul too resists describing life in Christ as a matter of categories. He writes to the Galatians about their disputes over whether to be circumcised. Paul tells them: “For neither circumcision nor uncircumcision is anything; but a new creation is everything.” Paul should boast only about the cross of Christ and “bear on [their] body the marks of Jesus.” These “marks” of Jesus are the stigmata, the wounds and scars on Jesus’s body from the nails and thorns of his Crucifixion. How do we then bear the marks of Jesus? 

I think one answer may be in the “new” commandment Jesus gives: “As I have loved you, so you must love one another. If you love one another, everyone will know that you are my disciple” (John 13:34). We will be known by how we love. To bear the marks of Jesus is to “clothe [ourselves] with love” (Col. 3:14). When our bodies participate in God’s love through our words and deeds, “Christ is formed in” us (Galatians 4:19). We are transformed by God's love.

God's love transcends categories, customs, or regulations. St. Maria of Paris said, “We must not allow Christ to be overshadowed by any regulations, any customs, any traditions, any aesthetic considerations, or even any piety.” So she asked, “Piety, piety, but where is the love that moves mountains?” Perhaps to bear the marks of Jesus is to love in a way that moves mountains.

To move a mountain seems an impossible thing. But as Christ says in today’s Gospel, “What is impossible with [humankind] is possible with God.” God’s love cannot be contained. It is boundless—it “reaches to the heavens” (Ps. 36:5-6)…it is “unsearchable” (Ps. 145:3)…and “beyond measure” (Ps. 147:5). Christ reminds us time and time again that to love as God loves exceeds our imaginations.

In today’s Gospel, a ruler assures Christ that he has followed all of the commandments not to kill or steal or commit adultery. But Jesus tells him that to inherit eternal life, the man must do much more than check off these boxes—he must “[s]ell all that [he has] and distribute it to the poor.”

Piety, piety, but where is the love that moves mountains?

It makes sense that God’s love cannot be fully contained in checklists or categories because God, as we worship in Liturgy, is “ineffable, incomprehensible, inconceivable.” We don’t pretend to fully comprehend God. As theologian Fr. Andrew Louth says, “[o]ur worship is a response to the unfathomable mystery” of God. We don’t reduce God to a category.

In Genesis, many of us have learned that God only appears when God says “let there be light” and orders the universe into seemingly neat categories: night and day, heavens and earth, male and female. But there are two verses that come before that and God is there: “…the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters” (Gen. 1:2). What’s beautiful is that the word for “darkness” is used elsewhere in the Bible (Deut 4:11; 5:23; Ps 18:12) to describe God’s lifegiving presence. God is present already in the formless and uncategorized.

Binary categories do not fully encapsulate God, God’s love, or God’s creation. If we say God is seen, we also say God is unseen. God is one, but God is also three. As Fr. Andrew Louth explains, “The centrality of prayer and worship in Orthodoxy prevents us from narrowing down our faith to some human construction.”

God created “day” and “night,” but did God not also create dusk, dawn, and twilight, even if it isn’t in the text? When we say God is the Alpha and the Omega, are we saying that God is only the first and the last? Or are we saying that God is everything from the first to the last? Perhaps, when God created humanity male and female, God similarly created everything in between.  

God, God’s love, and God’s creation do not fit neatly into categories. Where is the love that moves mountains?

Each of us, I imagine, checks our credit scores. Why not take a moment and take stock of how you love. Do you love according to categories, whether a person fits this box or that one? Or do you love everything in between?

Christ’s love did not reside in the boxes set by social norms and expectations. Lepers were socially isolated because of their skin disease–they were expected to yell “Unclean! Unclean!” to warn others of their presence. Jesus, however, reached out and touched lepers to cleanse them–upsetting the traditional categories of clean and unclean.

On another occasion, when the disciples urged Jesus to send away the Canaanite woman because Canaanites were Israel’s enemy, Jesus finds great faith within the woman and heals her daughter.  

Christ also welcomed eunuchs into the kingdom of heaven. Eunuchs, men who did not have typical male sexual anatomy, were the best-known sexual and gender minority of Jesus’s day. But Jesus said: “For there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by others, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Let anyone accept this who can.” (Matthew 19:12).

After Pentecost, one of the first people to be baptized is an Ethiopian eunuch. An angel of God leads Philip to encounter the eunuch who asks Philip to explain a passage from Isaiah that foretells Jesus who “in his humiliation justice was denied him.” When the eunuch and Philip later pass by water together, the eunuch asks why he cannot be baptized, and Philip baptizes him without hesitation. One way to read this story is that it is Philip who is transformed by his encounter with the Ethiopian eunuch.

Where is the love that moves mountains? Take stock of how you love. Are you willing to let God’s love transform you? Are you willing to give up ways of knowing that you are accustomed to? Are you willing to love beyond the world’s categories?

Piety, piety, but where is the love that moves mountains? May we move through today and every day with a love that moves mountains.