Proper 25A-11
It’s been years since I attended school. But I remember words I encountered at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago written on the wall of the men’s room. It was a three line logical argument to unmask God’s true identity. The first proposition was that 1) God is love. 2) Love is blind. Therefore, 3) Ray Charles is God. The first thing I thought was—now this is the sort of graffiti you can only find at a high priced Divinity School—two propositions and no phone numbers! Besides being a good joke, it makes a good point about how easy it is to reason toward false conclusions even when we start with good information.
Some how or other we humans always make things more complicated than they need to be, and then we fight about it. Church history is filled with good examples.
In the year 1054, all Christendom split over whether the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, or from the Father only. The bishop of Rome excommunicated the bishop of Constantinople and the whole Eastern Church, and the bishop of Constantinople excommunicated the pope and the whole Western Church. Now Jesus never talked about the Holy Trinity. In fact, you won’t find the word Trinity in the bible. So, how on earth could anyone ever know what the answer is? (Marcus Borg, “What’s Christianity All About?”, Day1.org, 2/6/11)
Another one, Lutherans and Catholics fought over the meaning of grace. Today, five hundred years later, the two churches signed a Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification (celebrated here in Immanuel’s sanctuary). It says essentially…oops, no actually, we agree on grace. Lutherans and Methodists fought over sanctification –now, not so much. Just over one hundred years ago, many congregations argued over whether to install indoor plumbing. Is it really permissible for Christians to do that in the House of God? The first congregation I served fought about when to extinguish the candles after worship.
Christians will have disagreements, and even many important ones. This is natural and to some extent necessary to discern God’s will. But we must never forget to be humble. Today’s gospel is a reminder that the true test of our theology, our prized religious traditions, our worship and our congregation is how well all these usher us past themselves and into deeper relationship with God born out in faithful lives and deeds rather than pious ideas and words.
Many congregations become confused and divided. Is the church a building or is it a community? Is it believing the right things or putting trust in Jesus? In today’s gospel, Jesus offers up a bracing cup of clarity. The church is people, stupid. To be a true Christian is to love God and your neighbor.
Somehow, as traditions develop, institutions mature, and religious leaders become more educated, they naturally tend to make faith more complicated. But Jesus makes it simple. Being a Christian is about loving what God loves. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind…and love your neighbor as yourself” (Matthew 22:37). These words of Jesus are often called the Great Commandment. It’s an ingenious summary of the Ten Commandments. The first three Commandments instruct believers to love God. The remaining seven offer instruction about loving our neighbor.
Jesus says, ‘to love God is to love your neighbor’ (NIB, Matthew, p. 426). To love one is to love the other, to neglect one is to lose them both—or as theologian Dorothy Day once put it, “[You] really only love God as much as [you] love the person [you] love the least.”
“For God so loved the world that he sent his only Son” (John 3:16). Literally, the bible says that God so loved the cosmos –in the biblical language of John’s gospel this is not meant to include all the stars and planets of outer space, but the God-hating world, everything and everyone opposed to God—that’s who God loves and for whom God sent his only Son.
It doesn’t take long to realize that the love Jesus is talking about here goes beyond human comprehension. God’s kind of love is not like human love. It is not an exclusive romantic love. It is not love such as friends have who share important things in common. God’s love is unconditional, total, without reserve, without end, and all the way down. It’s that simple. It’s that amazing.
All God requires of us is to love God, and love our neighbor. But there’s a problem. We can’t get there from here. Such love as God has is not possible for us. It’s not possible, unless we walk in the Way of the cross, passing through death, and are resurrected with Christ into the life of abundance God has prepared for us and for all people. It’s impossible for a fish to live out of water, unless they are caught up in the proclamation of the gospel. Impossible, unless we become part and parcel of one another as living members of Christ’s body alive and at work in the world. Impossible!—for us to love one another as God loves us except that God provides this unconditional love to us so freely in every moment, so we have it to exchange with one another.
To most people, today’s gospel is summed up by that old commercial for Coca-cola: “I’d like to teach the world to sing, in perfect harmony…” Or perhaps, in the words of Rodney King, “Can’t we all just get along?” I’d say most everyone I meet today, inside and outside the church agrees it’s important to be a good person in order to have a good life and be happy. Yet, how tragic it is when once we begin to realize, we can’t get there from here. The command to love one another is an empty sentiment without God. The Coke commercial is crap without the cross!
Despite this, the Christian gospel is constantly being co-opted, re-packaged and handed back to us by the dominant culture in ways that serve narrow commercial interests rather than God’s. Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter are now holidays more than they are holy days.
For evidence, look no farther than your own living room. Having older siblings means our youngest child Leah bypassed all the sweet children’s programming on T.V. and went straight to the hard stuff— she’s not into Dora the Explorer, Thomas the Tank Engine, Clifford the Big Red Dog, or even Arthur like our boys were when they were her age. Instead, it’s iCarly, Spongebob and Victorious.
To be fair, the message in these shows does seem to be that it’s important to care about people –at least if they’re your friends. But certainly no transformation is required. Just be yourself. There’s no church in Bikini bottom, iCarly or Victorious. In fact, there are no parents operating in these kid’s lives that don’t seem stupid or silly. They are extremely privileged and affluent. Victoria fronts her own rock band even at high school. Carly has her own high-tech web-cast studio on the third floor of her apartment in downtown Seattle.
Such extreme income inequality is a cancer that eats away at our national wellbeing. Yet even as the Occupy Wall Street movement raises the question: Why is the net worth of the wealthiest 400 families in the United States greater than the combined net worth of the bottom 150 million Americans? (America’s ‘Primal Scream’, NYT, By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF, 10/15/11)– my daughter, at home in our family room, is learning to sing Victorious’ new hit single. Her music video plays two or three times every hour. She sings, “All I want is everything, everything. Too much is not enough.”
As we approach the holiday season, it’s a good time to ask ourselves, how will we make this year different? What ways will we prioritize the gospel rather than the culture this year –how will you honor yourself, your friends and family as children of God, rather than as mere consumers? At Immanuel, we’re attempting to recognize the full twelve days of Christmas in order to reclaim the tradition, and distinguish the Christian holy days from the commercial holidays that is oppressively omnipresent on television, radio, in shops and billboards today.
Being Christian is about becoming the kind of person who can love God and love what God loves. This is not possible without transformation or resurrection –of the kind that can only happen as we live in community. The process of growing up does not incline us to that deep love of God and that deep love of what God loves. The growing up process in our culture today inclines us to be concerned about ourselves. (Marcus Borg)
Transformation into the image of the loving God happens in a community of transformation. It happens at the Table and the Font. It happens as we gather around the gospel in prayer and with each other in Christ’s name. The church, despite its historical failures and shortcomings, is a place to be re-socialized so our sense of identity and our values is shaped by the Christian gospel. Through encounter with the gospel and each other in the name of Christ, little by little, and all at once, we are surprised and inspired to find God’s great love working in us and through us.
God’s love is beyond human love, but this does not mean it lacks feeling.
Scholar Marcus Borg says being Christian is “about participating in God’s passion. This is what we are called to. So, ultimately, being Christian is about loving God and changing the world. It’s as simple and challenging as that, and it is the way of life.” (Marcus Borg)
A prayer of the North African bishop, St. Augustine, some 1,600 years ago is appropriate for us today:
“O God, from whom to be turned is to fall, to whom to be turned is to rise, and in whom to stand is to abide forever. Grant us in all our duties your help, in all our perplexities your guidance, in all our dangers your protection, and in all our sorrows your peace. Through Jesus Christ our Lord, our Body, and our Blood, our Life and our Nourishment. Amen