I apologize for not having kept up better with posting lectionary notes for each week. I'll try to do better in the future.
For this post, I'm including the text to the message I'll be preaching for the very first service I've ever conducted. I'll probably be making some changes over the next two days, as I have not read the entire message out loud yet, but this is linked to my editorial in tomorrow's issue of catapult, so I've got to get it online before I go to bed.
If you have any comments for me in the next day or so, please feel free to post them since, as I said, I'll be doing some editing yet.
Scripture Texts for October 23, the Twenty-Fourth Sunday after Pentecost
In the film American Beauty, there are two family dinner scenes featuring the Burnham family. The first scene hints at the tension that is building in this seemingly perfect American family. Carolyn, the mother, appears to be the success-driven, image-conscious glue that binds Jane (the rebellious teen-aged daughter), Lester (the defeated middle-aged husband) and herself into a pleasantly dysfunctional family--though no one viewing them from outside of their perfect suburban home would ever suspect there’s an undercurrent of dissatisfaction.
By the time the second dinner scene arrives, however, the dam that was restraining Lester’s rage has broken. Without consulting the family, he’s quit his flatlining job as a writer for a media magazine, blackmailing his boss in the process for a year’s pay. At the table, his newfound sense of empowerment and liberation collides with his wife’s efforts to suppress him with guilt. The inside voices ascend to yelling and the perfect etiquette deteriorates to throwing the asparagus, platter and all, against the tastefully decorated wall.
Later that evening, Carolyn tries to recover perfection by initiating a mother-daughter talk with Jane, who’s retreated to the calm of her bedroom. We, as third parties looking in, can’t help but hope for a revelation in this encounter that will lead to healing. Instead, she relays the following life lesson:
I wish that you hadn’t witnessed that awful scene tonight, but in a way, I’m glad….I’m glad because you’re old enough now to learn the most important lesson in life: You cannot count on anyone except yourself. You cannot count on anyone except yourself. It’s sad, but true, and the sooner you learn it, the better.
She’s not lying or being sarcastic. This is the primary lesson she has learned and is learning and she feels it will bring some comfort and wisdom to her daughter, sparing her the pain of realizing the truth later.
I wanted to set up this situation as a foil to what we’re going to look at today. In the Matthew text, we have the hinges on which the whole Bible hangs. Jesus summarizes centuries of history and myriad books of law with two commandments: Love God and love your neighbor. This is a far cry from Carolyn’s lesson: You cannot count on anyone except yourself. Where Carolyn advocates survival through the restraint of relationship and self-preservation, Jesus tells us that living faithfully requires relationship and self-sacrifice.
Jesus’ words are deceptively simple. While we are created for love by God, the practice of love can be difficult. As we are faced with daily choices, we often don’t even know what the most loving choice might be. Fortunately, our texts today provide us with three distinct examples of people who loved well in different ways and in different times: Moses, Jesus and the founders of the early church. Using their lives as examples, we’ll begin to explore what it means not just to love, but to love well.
To understand the implications of the second and equal commandment to love our neighbors, we must first explore the nature of the greatest commandment: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” Heart and soul and mind imply a desire for complete unity with God, an offering of the whole self, including the emotions, the will and the intellect. While Jesus’ words do not lay out a particular plan of action for loving God, they give us a direction to face. The words affirm acts of worship and devotion as central to the life of the Christian individual and faith community. The words validate study and emotional experience as important ways of knowing God. The words guide us into a foundational right relationship with God that precedes and produces right relationship with others.
Though the Pharisees only ask for the greatest commandment (singular), Jesus exposes their restrictions as being too narrow when he goes on to name the second, which is inextricably tied to the first: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Frederick Dale Bruner writes,
Love for God is the greatest command of all, and it is the first command of all, out of which, as from a fountain, the equally important second command flows….In Jesus’ command, the love of God is the supreme responsibility, but this love’s reality and a large measure of its expression occur only in love of neighbor…. A neighbor-minimizing love of God is as reprehensible to the prophetic Jesus as a God-minimizing love of neighbor is impossible for the pastoral Jesus.
Bruner emphasizes the balance that these two paired commandments bring to the faithful life: Love is lived in both worship and service. One without the other can constitute idolatry, either of social or evangelical causes.
If the love of God finds its expression, at least in part, in the love of our neighbor, what does a rooted love of neighbor look like? To find some insight into the practical means of loving our neighbors as ourselves, we can turn to the Word as it comes to us today from both Deuteronomy and Thessalonians. One of the major threads in these accounts is the sacrifice of self, which plays out in several ways. A first principle of loving well that we learn from the founders of the early Church is that of holding loosely to comfort, security and home.
Paul writes the first letter to the Thessalonians from Corinth, where he is the benefactor of Priscilla and Aquila’s hospitality. This transience for the sake of love is one that very few Christians practice today. In fact, to encounter such a wandering evangelist, many of us would assume him an addict or a fanatic or a professional con-man. But Paul and the early church founders choose this way of life for the sake of love. Paul writes,
So deeply do we care for you that we are determined to share with you not only the gospel of God but also our own selves, because you have become very dear to us.
Does love of neighbor necessarily imply this kind of wandering homelessness? Not for everyone, I believe, but love does require openness to such a call. Jean Vanier, the founder of The Arch communities for disabled people, explains the necessity of this openness, saying,
We who are rich are often demanding and difficult. We shut ourselves up in our apartments and may even use a watchdog to defend our property. Poor people, of course, have nothing to defend and often share the little they have.
When people have all the material things they need, they seem not to need each other. They are self-sufficient. There is no interdependence. There is no love. In a poor community, however, there is often a lot of mutual help and sharing of goods, as well as help from outside. Poverty can even become a cement of unity.
We who “have” must serve others in need, just as those who have need depend on those who are willing to share--within this circle of giving and receiving lives the love of neighbor. Let us not deceive ourselves by
In addition to holding loosely to our tangible possessions, loving well also involves holding loosely to intangible possessions: namely, our desire for measured success and our self-centered reservations. Moses, as someone who lived and died for a goal he never personally saw realized, is a primary example of one who loved his neighbors well. Through plagues and disappointments and wandering, Moses lived for God’s promise of redemption for the Israelites. An “unequaled” prophet, he died not of old age or illness, but “at the Lord’s command,” after having a glimpse of that which he worked for, but would not see achieved.
Another prophet who is closer to our own time, Archbishop Oscar Romero, mirrored the selflessness of Moses in his willingness to live and die for the vision of justice for Salvadoran peasants. In his poem “A future not our own,” Romero writes,
We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction of
the magnificent enterprise that is God's work.
Nothing we do is complete,
which is another way of saying
that the kingdom always lies beyond us....
This is what we are about:
We plant seeds that one day will grow.
We water seeds already planted, knowing that they hold future
promise.
We lay foundations that will need further development.
We provide yeast that produces effects beyond our capabilities....
We may never see the end results,
but that is the difference between the master builder and the worker.
We are workers, not master builders,
ministers, not messiahs.
We are prophets of a future not our own.
He recognized that a right view of ourselves as small, but significant players in an eternal story would lead to the sort of self-forgetfulness that allows us, in humility, to serve others effectively--or to love others well--within our time and place. Reversing that principle, when we exhaust ourselves in the attempt to achieve a defined goal, when we live with a sense that we will have failed unless we “achieve” something quantifiable before we die, we make idols out of our particular time and place. In essence, we make idols of ourselves by refusing to acknowledge the value of what lies beyond our own experience. However, loving our neighbors with self-abandon means responding moment by moment to the voice of an eternal Spirit who may command the end of this life before the realization of the Promised Land.
The story of Moses also exemplified self-sacrifice in the surrender of self-centered reservations. The man who claimed God needed a more eloquent agent of redemption became the greatest prophet Israel has ever known.
Our reservations, like Moses’ reservations, often come in the form of self-doubt. In false humility, we claim not to have the appropriate gifts or skills to approach the task that has been place in our path. Our reservations can also consist of unbelief or of excessive concern for right belief. Dr. Vincent Harding, a contemporary and co-worker of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., illuminates this possibility by revealing how right theology can be a barrier to the practical work of loving our neighbors. A simple principle by which he lives is that when love and theology conflict, love always comes first. Should we offer rides home to an alcoholic friend? Should we knowingly share communion with someone who abuses her children? Should we attend the commitment celebration of our homosexual neighbors? These are complex questions for which I do not suggest easy answers, but for which I do suggest that love and theology may have conflicting arguments.
Any of these reservations--about our preparedness, about our lack of belief, about the superiority of our theology--can inhibit our ability to love our neighbors and reduce an inclination to serve others to a need to nurture our own fears and flaws. Thich Nhat Hanh, a Buddhist monk from Vietnam, instructs on the relationship between love and self-surrender, saying,
Let go, and respond to the immediate needs around you. Don't get caught in some false perception of yourself. There will always be another person more gifted than you. And don't perceive your position as important, but be ready to serve at any moment. If you can let go of who you think you are, you will become free--ready to love others. If you learn to see your impermanence, you will be able to live for the moment and not miss opportunities to love by pushing things into the future.
His words echo Stephen Mitchell’s adaptation of this morning’s Psalm:
You return our bodies to the dust and snuff out our lives like a candleflame.
You hurry us away; we vanish as suddenly as the grass:
In the morning, it shoots up and flourishes, in the evening it wilts and dies…
Show us how precious each day is; teach us to be fully here.
And let the work of our hands prosper, for our little while.
The inclination to surrender preservation of self in this way is not popular in an age characterized by a spirit of individualism. A natural question might be: If we are to sacrifice ourselves in order to love, what is our hope for being filled?
God, in grace, allows our love to be carried out in community. Moses not only carried out his work in community with the people of God, he was one of the few ever to have known the Lord “face to face.” Jesus broke bread and ministered in the company of followers whom he called friends. Paul and his partners in ministry knew fellowship with one another as well as with believers throughout their region. Indeed, we’d be hard-pressed to find anyone throughout history who has been a model of loving God and loving neighbor who has not had the benefit of being rooted in a distinct community of fellow believers. Catholic social activist Dorothy Day writes,
We cannot love God unless we love each other. We know him in the breaking of bread, and we know each other in the breaking of bread, and we are not alone anymore. Heaven is a banquet, and life is a banquet too--even with a crust--where there is companionship. We have all known loneliness, and we have learned that the only solution is love, and that love comes with community.
In other words, our knowledge of love is in direct relationship with our capacity to experience true community (or communion) with God and with others.
This is the vision that Christ reveals for God’s people: loving the God who loved us first and loving our neighbors who may or may not love us back. In the shadow of the present, our self-sacrifice will involve suffering. But we can look with gratitude to a God who saw fit to show us in the person of Jesus Christ the way through suffering to eternal life.
For the ideal of love that we strive toward exists in perfection in the limitless God, whom we have the freedom to imagine and welcome. Imagine a faith community in which each individual, for the love of God, was actively loving his or her neighbors, within the faith community, within the neighborhood and within the world. What happens when we do the math? Rather than each individual serving him or herself in a one-to-one ratio, each individual is serving and being served by countless others. These others, in their love, will be the ones to give the individual permission for retreat when service has gone too long or become too difficult. These others will be the ones to provide food and pay the gas bill when financial resources are few. These others will be the hands and feet of God to strangers in their conscious choices to live with justice.
In the community we envision, let no one claim to have learned the lesson from experience that “you cannot count on anyone except yourself.” Let them instead learn to count on everyone around them in mutual expressions of faithful love. But we should not wait for our communities to match the overflow of our hearts--the act of love begins with ourselves as soon as we are able, even for a moment, to forget ourselves. May God shape our hearts, our souls and our minds to fulfill the greatest commandments without fear. AMEN
