Sermon: Of Love and Flubber

Texts: Isaiah 65:17-25; John 15:9-16

Date: Feb. 25, 2007

Rev. Dee Eisenhauer, EagleHarbor Congregational Church

On a day

when the wind is perfect,

the sail just needs to open and the world is full of beauty.

Today is such a day.[1]

The Sufi poet Rumi wrote those words.   I wanted to share those words with you today, a wonderful day of baptism and confirmation—a day when joy opens the soul like a rainbow-colored spinnaker to feel the Spirit moving.  Like wind powering a sail, God’s Holy Spirit is a force in the world propelling us forward.  God is continuing to create, continuing to do a new thing in the world, every day, every hour, every moment.  The wind of the Spirit is always blowing somewhere, stirring up newness wherever people’s sails are opened. 

            We recognize this when we call God “Creator,” although we may too often think of Creator as a past-tense name, acknowledging only God’s mighty work at the beginning of time.  Or we may leap to the distant future as we longingly imagine the new heavens and the new earth Revelation promises at the end of time.  But in the text from the Isaiah, the Hebrew word indicates that the creating is a present tense thing.  “Be glad and rejoice forever in what I am creating!” God says through the prophet.  The world is being transformed, old wounds healed, old injustices set right.  Be glad and rejoice!  God is creating!  Making all things new!

            Don’t you find yourself wondering sometimes what is taking so long?  If God is so all-fired Almighty, why haven’t the beautiful promises unfolded by the prophet come true?  There are still infants that live just a few days; 16,000 children die every day from hunger and hunger-related disease.  People are still being displaced; there are more than a million refugees that have fled Iraq, and another 2 million that are internally displaced there.  People who built homes and planted gardens have had to leave them under violent threats in so many places in the world.  God promises that one day people will not labor in vain or bear children for calamity, but there’s more than enough calamity going on.  What is taking God so long?

            You know the answer.  It’s the motley crew of co-creators that is the problem.  It’s the “subs.”  Until a few weeks ago John and I were hosting a couple in an apartment over our garage who thought they’d be there from mid-August to mid-October when their condominium was due to be finished—they finally got into their place in May.  Every month there was a new bulletin from the developer—it will be another month.  What slowed down the project?  It was the subs, the subcontractors, especially the electricians, who were waaaayy behind where they said they’d be.  Well, as far as the ongoing work of creation is concerned, justice and peace and harmony are waaaayyy behind schedule.  There’s been a humungous work slow-down ever since God chose to work with and through flawed human beings, the likes of you and me. 

            It’s a wonder we don’t get fired as co-creators of the beautiful new earth God has in mind.  It’s a wonder our friends’ developer didn’t fire the electricians, but I suppose they had a contract.  Come to think of it, we have a contract, too; we call it a covenant.  God made a covenant long ago with Noah not to extinguish the entire work force through another flood, and God has been reinventing covenants with human beings ever since.  We know the names associated with those covenants as they have been refined over generations: Abraham’s covenant, Moses’ covenant, David’s covenant.  Each covenant reiterated God’s choice to work with and through flawed human beings. 

            In the prophets’ era Jeremiah spoke of a new covenant, one that would be written on people’s hearts.  And in the generation of the new covenant, the New Testament, God delivered to us a way that the covenant would engage the heart in a new way.  God sent Jesus to embody and teach about love.  This love covenant is not a break from earlier expressions of God’s covenants, but a refinement, an uncomplicated way to express what God was after all this time—a people who would understand God’s love for them and for all creation who would then creatively embody that love in the world.

            My college chaplain once explained the need for Jesus’ incarnation to me like this:  He asked me to imagine trying to learn to play baseball by reading a book about it.  You might read all the rules, see diagrams of the diamond, patterns for the uniforms, and all that; but it wouldn’t be nearly as effective as having someone take you to a game in progress and show you how it’s done.  Jesus came, he said, to show us how to play the game. 

Christ came to show us how to love.  How to rest—abide—in the love of God.  How to conduct that love to our neighbors.  Christ came to show us how to open ourselves to the tremendous creative love God is continually blowing through the world to let it empower us and propel us forward.

            Rabia, another Sufi mystic, wrote this about love: “Love is the perfect stillness and the greatest excitement, and most profound act, and the word almost as complete as [God’s] name.”[2]  Her poetry throws light on what I think Jesus meant when he was teaching the disciples what it meant to abide in his and God’s love.  There is a sense of abiding in love that points toward the perfect stillness of being embraced by God and actually being aware of being embraced.  I followed a thread of “abiding” on my favorite websight, textweek.com, and found there a pastor writing about his sabbatical.  When he returned, his friends asked him to name the most important thing he had learned during his time away.  He said in all seriousness that he had learned how to breathe in and breathe out.  He had found a new kind of stillness within, imagining himself leaning up against the shoulder of Jesus in his prayer and meditation, abiding in his love.

            That’s one essential aspect of abiding in love, ceasing from our fretting and fuming long enough to re-connect with God’s love.  That’s one reason we have churches; they are places we can come away from our frantic lives and be reminded that we abide in God’s love.  Breathe in and breathe out; know that you are loved. 

            But abiding in love doesn’t stop with that perfect stillness.  Abiding in love is also “the greatest excitement and the most profound act.”  We don’t just absorb love; we reflect it.  Jesus said, “If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love…This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.”  We don’t just soak up the love of Jesus; we practice it on each other.

            I like the way one preacher I read put it: It’s a bit like a ping-pong game.  Jesus Pings love into our lives and we’re supposed to Pong it back and forth amongst ourselves.  That’s another reason we have churches; it’s a place we can ask Jesus to ping a little more love our way and also a beloved community in which to pong it around some.   Of course, when I hear that word “pong” I automatically think of one of the first video games ever made, which was called Pong.  (I’m showing my age.)  Do any of you remember playing it?  It was kind of neat at the time, but really not too exciting—just an electronic ball moving rather stoically between two electronic paddles, bink, bink, bink, bink. 

I’m not too skilled at video games so even in Pong at its tamest I’d miss the return often enough.  And isn’t that the way it is in churches, too, Jesus pings some love at us and rather than ponging it on we try to grasp it as if there’s not enough to go around.  Or somebody at church pongs a little love our way and we miss the return, feeling crabby or suspicious or fatigued or whatever.  Churches can have a lot of love ponging around but they can have a lot of failure to return as well.  Fortunately, abiding in Jesus’ love means an unending supply of Ping; and one of the love-things Jesus showed us and taught us was forgiveness, a kind of re-set, re-serve.  We all need to make liberal use of forgiveness, because each of us will miss the pong once in a while.  When that happens, re-set, re-serve. Ask Jesus to ping some more love your way and pong it back to whomever has failed you, with a generous heart.

            Ping and Pong are rich, deep, complex and poetic metaphors; but they don’t go far enough into the profound excitement of abiding in love and passing it on.  While reflecting on this sermon I came up with—if you can believe it—a metaphor even more rich, deep, complex and poetic than ping and pong.  Are you ready?  Love is like…Flubber.

            Yes, that is my brilliant insight of the week.  Love is like Flubber.  Do you remember Flubber?  It originated as an invention in a 1961 Disney movie titled “The Absent Minded Professor” which was followed by a sequel, “Son of Flubber,” and then a more recent remake starring Robin Williams and some computer-animated green Flubber.  What is Flubber, you wonder, and how, you yearn to know, is it like love?  Well, the genius of Flubber was that every time it bounced, rather than losing strength like regular rubber, it gained strength and energy, so that each bounce was stronger and higher and faster than the last. 

            So I got to thinking, love is like that.  Every time we reflect the love of God, bouncing it on to someone else, the love gains strength and energy.  It’s not dull like the bink, bink, bink of Pong at all.  Love that is sincerely sought and practiced in a community like a church builds and builds and builds until it is crashing around making a racket loud enough for the people outside the church to hear, and then bam! Before you know it, it flies right out the window and starts banging and bouncing around the wide world, expanding compassion, setting things right as those abiding in love energetically tackle the world’s problems. 

            I was following this line of thought like a hound dog after a fox on the internet when I found a great story that convinced me that I was really onto something with this “Love is like Flubber” inspiration.  It seems that Flubber, a silly putty-like glob of rubbery gunk, was one of the first toys to be manufactured after the release of a movie to ride the wave of profit.  A toy company made a lot of little Flubber balls and they sold like hotcakes.  But then it was discovered that a small percentage of the population had an allergic reaction to it in their hair follicles, lawsuits were filed, and the Flubber balls were all recalled. Now the toy company had the problem of disposing of all this Flubber.  First they tried to put the Flubber balls in a landfill, but too many kids were turning up at the dump to fish them out of the garbage.  Next they tried to burn them, but that caused such a black cloud of stinky smoke that a neighboring state complained.  Next they got permission to take the Flubber out to sea and sink it in weighted nets.  You guessed it; thousands of Flubber balls escaped their containers and came bobbing up to the surface, and the toy company had to spend a fortune out at sea rounding them up.  Finally they brought them to the toy company’s property and buried them and paved the spot over with a parking lot.  Guess what?  Even now, 35 years later, on hot days the Flubber comes bubbling up through the cracks in the pavement.   The article on the internet closes with this sentence: “This stuff just never seems to die!”

            Hmmm…Abide in my love…Love one another…I have appointed you to go and bear flubber, I mean fruit, fruit that will last.  Like Jesus Christ himself, the love Christ embodied just never seems to die.  It can’t be hidden, burned, sunk or buried; it just comes rising up to bounce creatively around the world once more.  And you can be a part of it, abiding in love and bouncing it back to your neighbors near and far, rejoicing as you see love doing a new thing.

On a day when the wind is perfect,

the sail just needs to open

and the love starts.

Today is such a day.[3] 

[1] Rumi “On a Day When the Wind is Perfect” Love Poems from God: Twelve Sacred Voices from the East and West Daniel Ladinsky, translator  New York: Penguin Compass, 2002, p.79

[2] Rabia “The Perfect Stillness” Love Poems from God: Twelve Sacred Voices from the East and West Daniel Ladinsky, translator  New York: Penguin Compass, 2002, p. 5

[3] Ibid, Rumi, p. 80