January 24, 2010: Epiphany 4
Loving someone seems to be a rather easy proposition. Be patient, kind, generous, yes, we can do that. But as we probe deeper into what love calls us to, we find it gets much murkier. Loving someone is actually very hard, possibly the most difficult thing we do as creatures. Our own needs, our selfishness, the very fact that we can only think for ourselves all work against us being able to fully love another. And even harder, sometimes we need to tell the truth to our beloved, even if it hurts. Loving someone is not easy.
We can however catch glimpses of what a greater love is like. This past Friday morning I joined with a large throng of people to witness and celebrate the installation of Bishop Shannon Sherwood Johnston as the 13th bishop of the diocese of Virginia. The service was fittingly full of pomp and heraldry, with extra choral pieces and solos, ringing of bells, a grand procession in and out of the bishops and large altar party, and a gospel read in two languages, and a sermon from our Presiding Bishop Katherine Jefferts Shori. St. Paul’s, Richmond was appropriately packed full of people for the service. Some faces I recognized, but by in large the faces held no special memory or even recognition for me. I was surrounded mostly by strangers.
Like most, I think, I felt a bit anxious surrounded by so many unknown folk. To combat this discomfort and the tinge of fear in my chest I sometimes remember to try an interesting mental and spiritual exercise. I let my eyes wander around the gathered throng. Into the eyes and faces I glance, trying to stretch my imagination in order to add more to the story of these gathered friendly strangers. Nothing fanciful or salacious, just letting my mind consider that each of these people has the same amount and variety of life story that I and those I know well have, lives full of twists and turns, wisdom learned from successes and failures, stresses and worries about loved ones and security, all just like me. Instead of trying to ignore them and the anxiety caused by their strangeness I tried to see them and imagine if only for a brief glimpse the importance and love that the common thread of all creation sees in them. I am told that this is a wonderful exercise of prayer and praise, to not focus on our human relationships, but to instead imagine in our minds eye the faint glimpse of how God sees each beloved child in his beautiful creation.
As in the past it was a warm fuzzy moment for me. How lovely they must be to the one who truly, deeply knows and loves them! And what a demonstration of my limitations, that if only because I will never get to meet them and dedicate the precious mental circuits in my brain to learning about them and remembering them, I cannot even come close to beholding these precious creatures the way God does. A love unlike any other pours out of God’s heart to each and every one of his beloved children, and we can barely see it, let alone understand it.
That love, the love God has for each of us, is an undergirding theme in today’s lessons. Surely Paul’s words to the Corinthians, that often used wedding text, is all about love. And with a little stretch God’s call to Jeremiah is about Love, with its stirring reminder that in creating him, Jeremiah was built for his mission. God is with him (and us) every moment, a loving presence if only evident in the fact of our existence.
This love of God for each of his creatures, a love ever present in the mind of God, may sound out of place when describing today’s gospel passage, though. God is able, with scathing words, to incite an angry mob with his witness. This does not seem to be the act of one who loves the gathered group.
Jesus enters the synagogue and as we heard last week plainly tells the gathered attendees that their hopes and prayers, hopes and prayers that they have held for centuries, are now fulfilled in him. But because they know Jesus so well, they have trouble believing Jesus, expressing their confusion by suggesting that Jesus is not being the good son of Joseph that they expect him to be. The crowd thinks they know Jesus, know him deep enough to doubt that he could be what he says he is. So Jesus rubs it in their face that two of their most beloved prophets had at times not favored them, but instead had favored foreigners. Incensed by this insult to their long held hopes, hopes held by parents and grandparents and great-grandparents, hopes held for generations, the gathered folk become incensed. They drag Jesus out to a cliff, and if it wasn’t for Jesus’ divine power, we would be celebrating a rocky gulch and cliff face instead of a wooden Cross. These days a congregation would probably just get up and leave, not drag the good preacher out in the street and try to kill him (at least I hope!).
Jesus’ words and actions are not petty or puerile, they are not some attempt to insult his family and friends. Jesus’ words are urgent words for his beloved community. Wake up, Jesus says! Even your so called beloved prophets abandoned you at times. I am with you now! This is God’s love poured out for you. Even the great prophets were not able to display God’s love like this. And yet, unable to accept this love, the crowd, insulted and afraid, turns on Jesus. This rejection mirrors the greater rejection coming at the other end of the Gospel story. The same rejection of the greater love of God, played out on a larger stage than Jesus’ hometown.
Our reaction to God’s love is why loving is so hard for us. This is why the lovely words of Paul in his letter to Corinthians makes a not so good reading for a wedding! The love Paul writes about, full of patience and kindness and generosity, is not so evident in God’s children. Paul is describing the love that only God can have. Paul, like Jesus, has had his share of beatings and death sentences passed on him. Paul knows the shallowness of human hearts as he writes his letter to the struggling church in Corinth, whose factions based on custom and social standing were tearing apart the fragile community. Get over it, Paul yells at his distant flock, there is a greater love for us to worship. A love willing to tell you the truth and love you all the way to his own death.
It is precisely this love that we are sent forth to testify to. That Jesus is willing to enter in and if necessary tell us that all of our hopes, based on story or human relationship or tradition, is worthless. The only love that brings justice and peace is the love held in the heart of God, a love so evident in the life of Jesus his Son.
For us, telling the truth in love to this world means telling the truth about what love really means. That we are woefully inadequate at loving each other, but we are not without a love that rescues us from our own shortsightedness. The best voice to hear that from is from a friend, a neighbor, a relative, just like Jesus speaking in his home town. We may have to risk some, probably not a trip to a local cliff, but perhaps incredulous looks, uncomfortable moments in conversations, and maybe even someone being angry that we would bring up this love, that we place our faith in a love that outshines our own.
And it is from this greater love that we minister. If we open our hearts and wallets to help in the world, yet do it because we love, then we fall short. We have ample evidence of how we are unable to love, how our hearts are riven with faults. Our actions as Christians are based not on our petty human love but on the greater, more substantial love of the one who is willing to tell us the truth. We help in Haiti, in Mississippi and New Orleans, in Fairfax, in Washington, D.C., even amongst ourselves not out of our own woefully selfish love, but out of the love of Jesus Christ. It is his love that leads us, his love that directs us, his love that welcomes us when we stretch our minds and hearts to consider, even for one instant, what love really means.
In his name, we find that love active and vibrant in the world. This is the love that our friends and neighbors are missing when they do not join us here at God’s table and as we extend God’s hands into the world. This is the love missing when in anger and fear we protect ourselves. This is the love that we catch pale glimpses of when we dare to imagine seeing the world not through our own eyes, but through God’s. Loving is hard, in large part because we need to turn ourselves over to the only one who can truly love. Letting our hearts beat not for ourselves but for God is the hard work of loving we are called and led to through Jesus Christ.
