Matthew 25:31-45
April 26, 2009: Second Sunday of Easter
Today is the second in a series I am doing during the Easter Season called “Christ as Verb”. Last week I talked about love being the basis for everything else we do as Christians. And we saw how “love” is more than a feeling, more than an interior state, it is a verb: action. This week we see how love leads to a whole list of verbs in this passage where Jesus is describing to his disciples what the realm of God looks like.
To help his friends understand what the realm of God is like, Jesus has them imagine a day of judgment; a day where the sheep will be separated from the goats. This has, of course, become an infamous passage used by many for separating the Christians from the rest of the heathen world. But that is tragically ironic because in fact this passage is about action being the measure of faith, not belief or religion. The surprise at the end is that we will learn that whenever we acted toward others with love, we were both acting as Christ and serving Christ. Christ is the object, the subject, and the verb all at once.
I have always thought Jesus was trying to be a little bit funny when he talked about separating the sheep and the goats and then exalting the sheep. I mean, the sheep? If I were to choose whether to be a sheep or a goat, I would, hands down, choose goat. Sheep are dumb – goats are smart. Just ask Susan and John McIntyre. Goats can outsmart even the most secure confinement systems, they can outwit other animals and by their intelligence they can cause those that raise them eternal consternation. Just ask Marlene and Ray Peak.
Sheep, on the other hand, use what little intelligence they have – the ability to recognize faces of humans and other sheep – to hone their skills as the best follow-the-leader contestants in the animal kingdom. That’s what they do…they follow. They follow the leader no matter where it will take them. Goats are curious and play and jump; sheep follow.
So, if we are assigning people animal roles, I would like to be a goat, thank you very much. Surely Jesus must have had it backwards…he meant to exalt the witty goat, not the dull, mindless sheep. Except when Jesus was separating the sheep and the goats, it wasn’t their intelligence he judging. It was their eating habits.
Sheep eat in such a way that there is still more to eat after they have had their fill. They graze off the top of the grass. Goats, on the other hand, eat all the way down to the ground and then some. They tear leaves, buds and fruit off trees. And anyone who has ever been to a petting zoo knows, they are happy to eat the contents of your purse or pockets. If a goat is let loose, it will eat what it can, without regard for what will be left for later.
This passage is about eating habits, among other things. Or more precisely, it is about how our habits affect our ability to feed others. Now, in the interest of full disclosure, I have to admit that I am a goat – and I’m not talking about intelligence. There are many people in my life who, upon hearing the description of how and what a goat eats, would think of me. If it is there, I will eat it…and I really can’t stop once I start. Just ask Montie.
I take some comfort in the fact that I am not completely alone in this. I think Americans in general have a very neurotic relationship to food, and being goat-like is just one manifestation of that. But, I find this passage convicting because it draws a direct link between eating like a goat and not caring for people as if they were Christ themselves. And I think I come out as the goat on this one more often than I like to admit.
It’s a theme that runs through the whole of the scriptures: how we ought to eat and how that affects others.
• After the Exodus, when people were wandering in the wilderness, God provided them daily manna – until they began to hoard it out of fear that it wouldn’t be there the next day. When they began to hoard, there wasn’t enough the next day for everyone.
• Torah law insisted that farmers leave part of their field unharvested so that the poor could come and “glean” from its edges.
• There is restraint implied in the Lord’s prayer when we ask God to give us this day our daily bread; Jesus harkening back to the lesson of the manna.
• And of course we have today’s passage that asks us to eat more like sheep who do not consume resources so completely that there is nothing left over.
One of the verbs for this week is feed. Feed others. Jesus was chastising those who couldn’t feed others because they had hoarded all the food for themselves. I can see how this is true for my own life, and I’m sure none of us has difficulty drawing the connection with how food politics work in our world. Some have much, many have little.
And, it’s not hard to extrapolate from the issue of food to all of the other mandates Jesus gives in this passage. Give a drink to someone who is thirsty: When we hoard water, use it all up for our lawns and golf courses, we can’t give a drink to the thirsty. I have a friend who used to work as an environmental engineer in Phoenix, AZ, studying mostly water issues. When I was visiting one time, he took me up on a mountain and showed me exactly where and how the United States was effectively stealing water from Mexico; hoarding it and using it not just so we can drink the water we need, but so we can water our lawns and take our showers.
Welcome the stranger, care for the sick, visit those in prison: Time is a precious recourse too. If we let our time and energy be eaten to the quick by life’s demands, as if a goat were let loose on our schedule, then when we will welcome the stranger or visit the imprisoned? How will we have the strength to care for the sick if we have spent all of our energy just getting through a typical day as we have come to know it; a day that “makes the most” of every minute, not letting one moment of down time infringe on our busy, scheduled lives.
This is not a passage just about charity. It is about that in part. But, it is also about our whole lives and whether they reflect more the habits of sheep or of goats. It is about how much is left over for others after we have had our fill.
And, it’s about the verbs – feeding, visiting, caring – not about the afterlife, as has often been presumed. It is true that Jesus frames this all in terms of what will happen when Christ comes again, but that is a paradox. What Jesus says is that when that day comes, we will be surprised to learn that what matters is what we are doing now, not what we think will happen in the future. It is about building the realm of God in our midst today, not about living in it after we die. And it is about what we are doing now – not believing. This passage is so verb-fillled it could be a Bruce Willis action movie. Feed, give drink, welcome, clothe, visit. There is no confession of faith. Those hearing this for the first time were probably surprised to hear that in the end, their religion is not what matters, and that the after life isn’t that important. When talking about the judgment day, Jesus points relentlessly back to the present and forces us to find meaning and purpose in the daily living, not in a far away heaven or hell.
Of course, it’s one thing to say all this. But this is not about words, it’s about action – and action tends to be the hard part. And it’s hard not just because we don’t always have enough to give, but because sometimes that giving can be less than gratifying.
As a pastor, I have had occasion to, on behalf of our church, give money to people in need of food. I have had the occasion over the last couple of years to visit a woman in prison. And of course, as pastor I have had occasion to visit the sick. And I would love to say I felt great in every situation…like I was doing the Lord’s work. I would love to say that I always experience Christ in the other. I can’t. There are times that this is true. But there are times when the best I can do is try and trust that Christ is present in and around each person even though I don’t feel it or even quite believe it. I would love to say that I always feel like Christ is acting through me when I feed others, and visit them in prison. But I know too well that instead I often get in the way of Christ – judgment takes hold. Confusion sets in. Despair and discouragement cloud my love.
Some people I help just keep coming back without a plan to change their lives. One person I have visited in prison is running from the law. Sick people who I visit and pray for often stay sick, no matter how earnest my prayer or how careful my care is. Given the outcome of many of these experiences, it is hard – VERY hard – to believe these verbs do any good at all.
But when I look again at this passage, I realize that efficacy doesn’t seem to be the point. At least not the results-based, outcome focused efficacy we are used to in our culture. It isn’t about success or failure – it is about the verbs: feed, give drink, care for, visit. The verbs are what define the relationship between human beings and Christ. To be fully human we must be the body of Christ. And to be fully human we have to treat every person as if they were Christ. When we don’t – regardless of whether what we do produces results – we begin to lose our humanity and the body of Christ begins to fall apart.
Remember Jesus was talking about building the realm of God, and in the realm of God, it is as much about how living as the body of Christ affects us as it is about how it affects others. In 1845, runaway slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass used today's Gospel to argue that injustice damages the perpetrator as well as the victim, a message he hoped would compel his mostly white northern audience to agitate for the end of slavery for the good of white slaveowners as well as black slaves, all of whom were brothers and sisters in Christ. In the process, Douglass shows that when we do justice for "the least of these," we do it for the sake of the whole Body of Christ, because injustice dehumanizes the oppressor and the passively complicit bystander as well as the oppressed.
In his autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, he tells the story of his Baltimore slave mistress, Mrs. Sophia Auld, a woman who had earned her own living until she married and who had never had a slave until Frederick came to live in her household as a young man. When he first meets her, she is the Christian ideal. She prefers that he look her in the face, a bodily representation of equality that was a punishable offense in the slavery South. She begins to teach him the alphabet until her husband forbids her to, warning her that teaching a slave to read is against the law and will only give him ideas that will render him unfit for the life of unquestioning service before him. Following the nineteenth-century womanly ideal of submission, she obeys her husband, and Douglass portrays this move, this first step in treating him as less than fully human, as the beginning of her descent from Christianity into hell.
Acts of injustice do not occur in a vacuum, and even a single decision to treat others as less than human -- to stop teaching a slave how to read, for example -- leads slowly but inevitably to other acts of inhumanity. Before we know it, we have also neglected to clothe and feed the poor, and have ceased to comfort the mourning. It is the overall character of our life – whether we look more like sheep or goats – that affects our ability to do each action we are called to do. When we let our lives look more like the eating habits of goats, we not only have less resources to share, we become less human and less inclined to change our ways.
I don't know if everything I do is effective. But, then Jesus did not say anything about effectiveness. He only asked, "Did you feed the hungry?" "Did you clothe the naked?" "When I was in prison did you come to me?" It is good to know that, whether or not you can change the world, you can still be faithful. It’s easy to ask, "What difference does what I do make?" But Jesus does not ask this question. Jesus only asks us to be faithful. Amen.
-----------------
Bibliography
Bruer, Sarah Dylan Bruer: From commentary on Matthew 25: http://www.sarahlaughed.net/lectionary/2005/11/christ_the_king.html
Keely, Karen A. Justice for "the Least of These," Salvation for All: from commentary on passage; Nov, 13 2006
Robinson, Tony: “At the Clothing Bank”, Christian Century Nov. 3, 1993
Hareuveni, Nogah: “The Goat As Armed Robber in the Ancient Land of Israel”; Jewish Heritage Online Monthly.
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Christ as Verb: Love
1 John 4:7-21; Matthew 22:34-40
April 19, 2009: Second Sunday of Easter
It is Easter! Christ is risen and we celebrate the resurrection. But what is the resurrection? Well, if you are wanting a one word answer, you will be disappointed. For that matter, if you are looking for a definitive answer at all, you will be disappointed. But, if you want to explore during this Easter season what the resurrection might mean for how we live our lives, then you have come to the right place. You see, the resurrection is better lived than articulated.
In the resurrection, the human Jesus becomes the living Christ. And Christ is not a person somewhere, or even an idea. Christ is action…Christ is a verb. Christ is what we are doing when we are living out our faith in accordance with God’s call and commandments. Together, we are Christ in this world, moving about, loving, healing, sharing, eating with sinners, daring, stirring things up. Each of these is Christ…each of us is a part of this Christ.
Each week in the Easter season, we will look at a verb that defines what it means to be Christ in this world; verbs like sharing, feeding, forgiving. But this week we start with the verb Jesus calls the greatest commandment: Love.
Surely this is the basis for all other Christian actions. Love. There are many Churches and Christians who attempt to express the message of the gospel in specific, particular rules and behaviors, creeds and doctrines. In the interchange between Jesus and the lawyer in the gospel of Matthew, Jesus is given the opportunity to do just that; to name specific laws that require particular behavior. But he refuses. “Love Yahweh with all your heart, soul and mind and love your neighbor as yourself”. Love of God and love of others – on this hangs everything else. In Jesus’ time, everything else could be found in the law and the prophets. Love of God and love of others leads to the kind of world and community supported by the laws of the Torah and the visions of the prophets.
The greatest commandment cannot be found in one of the detailed 613 laws in the Torah. The greatest commandment is one that transcends these particularities. Notice, Jesus does not say that these love commandments replace the torah or the prophets. Instead, he indicates that when we love God and love our neighbor, we simply will be faithful to God’s laws and led to just behaviors. Love is the key; love is the starting point; everything else flows from that.
The author of 1 John points to love as the key as well. He elevates love as the highest purpose. He actually names God “love”; equates God with love. He doesn’t say that love is one of many attributes of God. Rather love is the very essence and being of God. They are one and the same thing.
So, if love is the key – the highest purpose upon which everything else hangs, what is it? What is love? That may seem like a silly question. Of course we know what love is. We say it all the time: “I love you.” We feel it toward our spouses, children, family, friends. But, it’s this “all the time” aspect that I think actually diminishes our understanding of what Jesus and the author of 1 John mean when they say “love”. In our use – or rather overuse – of the word love, we have watered it down to a sentiment, a feeling. We toss it about as if it is easy to love someone or to live out love in general. I don’t think that fits with the gospel message of love.
The Onion is a satirical newspaper that, through fake and humorous news stories offers parodies of our lives. It’s incredibly popular – and I have to admit that I am a fan. They wrote an article this week titled “Concerts Held to Wish Poor Good Luck”. “More than 40 artists,” the article says, “performed at six simultaneous concerts across the globe as part of a new benefit show to wish the world’s desperately impoverished the best of luck.” It goes on to quote Al Gore as saying, “I hope you will join me in extending a hand of friendship to the have-nots, shaking their hand once and then walking away.” I think the best articles in the Onion are both funny and have a twinge of painful truth to them. Too often we think the sentiment is what counts when it comes to love. But if this is true, then wishing someone good luck could be the same as love.
There is a common assumption in our churches and culture that spirituality, and Christianity in particular, is primarily about interiority -- about feeling a certain way about God, about other people, and about one's self. Our texts point out the lie in that. In the first-century Mediterranean world, "love" was not a vague warm feeling toward someone, but a pattern of action -- attachment to a person backed up with behavior. Interior emotional states just weren't a focus of the first followers of Jesus. One early Christian wrote about this in a letter to his fellow believers:
“If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill’, and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that?” This comes from the New Testament book of James, but I think if the author of this passage lived today, they could be a staff writer for the Onion.
Another early Christian, the author of 1 John, was writing in response to a division that had arisen within his Christian community. What began as a unified movement founded by the beloved disciple in the gospel of John had become a church with deep rifts and disagreements about what it meant to be Christian. As always, in our bible we only have one side of the disagreement and have to infer what was going on, but it is safe to say these two groups had different interpretations of what the Christian life looked like. It was not merely a doctrinal dispute – although that was there too. It was a dispute about what those doctrines implied.
The author of our passage was concerned that part of the Christian community believed it was ultimately the sentiment that counted. He said the Christian doctrine of love always implied action. There was no such thing as just a feeling of love. If all you have is a feeling, but don’t act in love toward others, you really don’t understand love and you really don’t know God – the very definition of Love.
So love is an action. That is clear. But it doesn’t stop there; it is even more than that. It is more than a feeling and it is more than just acting kindly toward others.
I have heard many people say – both to me personally and in the media and popular culture – that Christianity can be summed up in the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. And it is certainly a great starting point and a concept Jesus embraces: Love your neighbor as yourself. But it is not the same thing as the love Jesus was talking about here. He is quick to relate this Golden Rule to the law and the prophets. And the law and the prophets were about justice – about community and how we care for the most vulnerable among us. The Golden Rule gets at love as action, but it does not necessarily include justice: the goal of all the law and the prophets.
Paul Tillich was a theologian in the middle to late 20th century. He was struggling against a liberal tide that wanted to reduce the gospel to just being kind toward others. A message not unlike what the mainline churches espouse today. In a sermon he gave, Tillich said, “The great commandment as Jesus repeats it and the tremendous assertion by John that God is love infinitely transcend the Golden Rule. The measure of what we do to [others] cannot be our wishes about what they do to us. For our wishes,” he writes, “express not only our [best selves] but also our [worst selves], and our foolishness more than our wisdom. This is the limit of the Golden Rule.”
We might, for example, forgive something prematurely out of our own interest in being forgiven ourselves before we have been held truly accountable. Think about the news this week. President Obama released the infamous “torture memos”. At the same time, he promised that no CIA operatives would be prosecuted if they tortured people under the legal guidance of these memos. “Let’s not dwell in the past,” Obama said. This is not love. It may be the golden rule: forgive those who were only following orders just as we would want to be forgiven in the same situation. But it is not just and love without justice is not love.
You see, the Golden Rule is about me and my wishes, whereas the love of Christ is about the vulnerable. Love in the bible is action, but it is also preferential. The Golden Rule does not include the preferential nature of Christian love. We are to love those who are victimized and poor, those who are outcast and oppressed. That is love that includes justice. When we love God with all our hearts, souls and minds – when we worship the God that is love itself, our love of neighbor will include justice for the vulnerable.
One writer put it this way: “Where does one get the idea that worship is unnecessary and that faith is an easy matter of being kind and believing in God? I fear that the progressive Christian church is suffering from …a kind of lawless love.” This author acknowledges that there is a huge problem with only seeing faith as a list of rules and creeds. That is a loveless law. But too often our reaction to this is to forget that the law has a loving purpose when it is properly understood not as a prescriptive list, but rather as the system that orders a just community that loves the vulnerable first and acts to protect the stranger, the orphan and the widow.
As we explore the nature of Christ as verb, the nature of Christ as love, and contemplate what that means for us as the body of Christ acting in this world, we will see how Jesus practiced love. We will see that Jesus loved the least and sought to reorder the world in terms of justice and righteousness.
I often wonder why we have to be told to love? Why is it that often we don’t love God and neighbor with our whole hearts, souls and minds, living toward others out of a love that leads to faithfulness and justice? Well, first, it’s really hard, and it’s certainly complicated. As we have seen, it is not the same thing as being nice, as much as we would like to think it is. This kind of love is about courage and standing with those that others despise and ignore. This kind of love, this preferential, active love, means taking sides when it is unpopular to do so. It means doing things, not just feeling things. And for most of us – at least I know it is true for me – when we realize this, we get afraid. I am afraid of the risk involved in taking sides, I am afraid of the judgment of others, I am afraid of being wrong, I am afraid of what it will cost me, I am afraid I won’t have the energy or the time, I am afraid I won’t be good enough. Fear. And this fear is the barrier to living love.
It is a barrier because fear prevents God’s love from penetrating our souls and our beings. We love – we are able to love – only because God loves us first. This is what John is talking about. We have to receive before we can give. God’s love will cast out the fear if we let it. God’s love will give us the energy and courage and wisdom if we let it. God’s love will enable us to stand with the very people Jesus chose to stand with. God’s love will change us. Cut off from God’s love, we actually can’t love.
Without God’s love, we act out of obligation to the law, and out of fear of the condemnation of the prophets. This is what Jesus frees us from in his commandment. Love is first and primary. Love does not happen because we do what we are told by God – certainly not in fearful obedience. While love does not replace the law and the prophets, it is the only way to really understand the law and the prophets and to embrace them with joy; not live in fear of them.
God loves us first. If we are cut off from this, we will tire out and burn out and be drained to our core. Jesus says love God with all your heart soul and mind and your neighbor as yourself. John says this is only possible because God first loves us.
Love is not just a feeling and it is not just the Golden Rule. It is active and it is preferential. And it can only be lived out because God first loves the world in this way. If we let our lives be filled with the love of God – the love that casts out all fear – we will be love. Or, to put it in resurrection terms, we will be the resurrected body of Christ: a community of verbs living out Christ in our world. Amen.
April 19, 2009: Second Sunday of Easter
It is Easter! Christ is risen and we celebrate the resurrection. But what is the resurrection? Well, if you are wanting a one word answer, you will be disappointed. For that matter, if you are looking for a definitive answer at all, you will be disappointed. But, if you want to explore during this Easter season what the resurrection might mean for how we live our lives, then you have come to the right place. You see, the resurrection is better lived than articulated.
In the resurrection, the human Jesus becomes the living Christ. And Christ is not a person somewhere, or even an idea. Christ is action…Christ is a verb. Christ is what we are doing when we are living out our faith in accordance with God’s call and commandments. Together, we are Christ in this world, moving about, loving, healing, sharing, eating with sinners, daring, stirring things up. Each of these is Christ…each of us is a part of this Christ.
Each week in the Easter season, we will look at a verb that defines what it means to be Christ in this world; verbs like sharing, feeding, forgiving. But this week we start with the verb Jesus calls the greatest commandment: Love.
Surely this is the basis for all other Christian actions. Love. There are many Churches and Christians who attempt to express the message of the gospel in specific, particular rules and behaviors, creeds and doctrines. In the interchange between Jesus and the lawyer in the gospel of Matthew, Jesus is given the opportunity to do just that; to name specific laws that require particular behavior. But he refuses. “Love Yahweh with all your heart, soul and mind and love your neighbor as yourself”. Love of God and love of others – on this hangs everything else. In Jesus’ time, everything else could be found in the law and the prophets. Love of God and love of others leads to the kind of world and community supported by the laws of the Torah and the visions of the prophets.
The greatest commandment cannot be found in one of the detailed 613 laws in the Torah. The greatest commandment is one that transcends these particularities. Notice, Jesus does not say that these love commandments replace the torah or the prophets. Instead, he indicates that when we love God and love our neighbor, we simply will be faithful to God’s laws and led to just behaviors. Love is the key; love is the starting point; everything else flows from that.
The author of 1 John points to love as the key as well. He elevates love as the highest purpose. He actually names God “love”; equates God with love. He doesn’t say that love is one of many attributes of God. Rather love is the very essence and being of God. They are one and the same thing.
So, if love is the key – the highest purpose upon which everything else hangs, what is it? What is love? That may seem like a silly question. Of course we know what love is. We say it all the time: “I love you.” We feel it toward our spouses, children, family, friends. But, it’s this “all the time” aspect that I think actually diminishes our understanding of what Jesus and the author of 1 John mean when they say “love”. In our use – or rather overuse – of the word love, we have watered it down to a sentiment, a feeling. We toss it about as if it is easy to love someone or to live out love in general. I don’t think that fits with the gospel message of love.
The Onion is a satirical newspaper that, through fake and humorous news stories offers parodies of our lives. It’s incredibly popular – and I have to admit that I am a fan. They wrote an article this week titled “Concerts Held to Wish Poor Good Luck”. “More than 40 artists,” the article says, “performed at six simultaneous concerts across the globe as part of a new benefit show to wish the world’s desperately impoverished the best of luck.” It goes on to quote Al Gore as saying, “I hope you will join me in extending a hand of friendship to the have-nots, shaking their hand once and then walking away.” I think the best articles in the Onion are both funny and have a twinge of painful truth to them. Too often we think the sentiment is what counts when it comes to love. But if this is true, then wishing someone good luck could be the same as love.
There is a common assumption in our churches and culture that spirituality, and Christianity in particular, is primarily about interiority -- about feeling a certain way about God, about other people, and about one's self. Our texts point out the lie in that. In the first-century Mediterranean world, "love" was not a vague warm feeling toward someone, but a pattern of action -- attachment to a person backed up with behavior. Interior emotional states just weren't a focus of the first followers of Jesus. One early Christian wrote about this in a letter to his fellow believers:
“If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill’, and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that?” This comes from the New Testament book of James, but I think if the author of this passage lived today, they could be a staff writer for the Onion.
Another early Christian, the author of 1 John, was writing in response to a division that had arisen within his Christian community. What began as a unified movement founded by the beloved disciple in the gospel of John had become a church with deep rifts and disagreements about what it meant to be Christian. As always, in our bible we only have one side of the disagreement and have to infer what was going on, but it is safe to say these two groups had different interpretations of what the Christian life looked like. It was not merely a doctrinal dispute – although that was there too. It was a dispute about what those doctrines implied.
The author of our passage was concerned that part of the Christian community believed it was ultimately the sentiment that counted. He said the Christian doctrine of love always implied action. There was no such thing as just a feeling of love. If all you have is a feeling, but don’t act in love toward others, you really don’t understand love and you really don’t know God – the very definition of Love.
So love is an action. That is clear. But it doesn’t stop there; it is even more than that. It is more than a feeling and it is more than just acting kindly toward others.
I have heard many people say – both to me personally and in the media and popular culture – that Christianity can be summed up in the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. And it is certainly a great starting point and a concept Jesus embraces: Love your neighbor as yourself. But it is not the same thing as the love Jesus was talking about here. He is quick to relate this Golden Rule to the law and the prophets. And the law and the prophets were about justice – about community and how we care for the most vulnerable among us. The Golden Rule gets at love as action, but it does not necessarily include justice: the goal of all the law and the prophets.
Paul Tillich was a theologian in the middle to late 20th century. He was struggling against a liberal tide that wanted to reduce the gospel to just being kind toward others. A message not unlike what the mainline churches espouse today. In a sermon he gave, Tillich said, “The great commandment as Jesus repeats it and the tremendous assertion by John that God is love infinitely transcend the Golden Rule. The measure of what we do to [others] cannot be our wishes about what they do to us. For our wishes,” he writes, “express not only our [best selves] but also our [worst selves], and our foolishness more than our wisdom. This is the limit of the Golden Rule.”
We might, for example, forgive something prematurely out of our own interest in being forgiven ourselves before we have been held truly accountable. Think about the news this week. President Obama released the infamous “torture memos”. At the same time, he promised that no CIA operatives would be prosecuted if they tortured people under the legal guidance of these memos. “Let’s not dwell in the past,” Obama said. This is not love. It may be the golden rule: forgive those who were only following orders just as we would want to be forgiven in the same situation. But it is not just and love without justice is not love.
You see, the Golden Rule is about me and my wishes, whereas the love of Christ is about the vulnerable. Love in the bible is action, but it is also preferential. The Golden Rule does not include the preferential nature of Christian love. We are to love those who are victimized and poor, those who are outcast and oppressed. That is love that includes justice. When we love God with all our hearts, souls and minds – when we worship the God that is love itself, our love of neighbor will include justice for the vulnerable.
One writer put it this way: “Where does one get the idea that worship is unnecessary and that faith is an easy matter of being kind and believing in God? I fear that the progressive Christian church is suffering from …a kind of lawless love.” This author acknowledges that there is a huge problem with only seeing faith as a list of rules and creeds. That is a loveless law. But too often our reaction to this is to forget that the law has a loving purpose when it is properly understood not as a prescriptive list, but rather as the system that orders a just community that loves the vulnerable first and acts to protect the stranger, the orphan and the widow.
As we explore the nature of Christ as verb, the nature of Christ as love, and contemplate what that means for us as the body of Christ acting in this world, we will see how Jesus practiced love. We will see that Jesus loved the least and sought to reorder the world in terms of justice and righteousness.
I often wonder why we have to be told to love? Why is it that often we don’t love God and neighbor with our whole hearts, souls and minds, living toward others out of a love that leads to faithfulness and justice? Well, first, it’s really hard, and it’s certainly complicated. As we have seen, it is not the same thing as being nice, as much as we would like to think it is. This kind of love is about courage and standing with those that others despise and ignore. This kind of love, this preferential, active love, means taking sides when it is unpopular to do so. It means doing things, not just feeling things. And for most of us – at least I know it is true for me – when we realize this, we get afraid. I am afraid of the risk involved in taking sides, I am afraid of the judgment of others, I am afraid of being wrong, I am afraid of what it will cost me, I am afraid I won’t have the energy or the time, I am afraid I won’t be good enough. Fear. And this fear is the barrier to living love.
It is a barrier because fear prevents God’s love from penetrating our souls and our beings. We love – we are able to love – only because God loves us first. This is what John is talking about. We have to receive before we can give. God’s love will cast out the fear if we let it. God’s love will give us the energy and courage and wisdom if we let it. God’s love will enable us to stand with the very people Jesus chose to stand with. God’s love will change us. Cut off from God’s love, we actually can’t love.
Without God’s love, we act out of obligation to the law, and out of fear of the condemnation of the prophets. This is what Jesus frees us from in his commandment. Love is first and primary. Love does not happen because we do what we are told by God – certainly not in fearful obedience. While love does not replace the law and the prophets, it is the only way to really understand the law and the prophets and to embrace them with joy; not live in fear of them.
God loves us first. If we are cut off from this, we will tire out and burn out and be drained to our core. Jesus says love God with all your heart soul and mind and your neighbor as yourself. John says this is only possible because God first loves us.
Love is not just a feeling and it is not just the Golden Rule. It is active and it is preferential. And it can only be lived out because God first loves the world in this way. If we let our lives be filled with the love of God – the love that casts out all fear – we will be love. Or, to put it in resurrection terms, we will be the resurrected body of Christ: a community of verbs living out Christ in our world. Amen.
Friday, April 10, 2009
Come and Flood our Hearts
Isaiah 25:6-9; Mark 16:1-8
Easter Sunday: April 12, 2009
Throughout Lent, we have been examining the reasons why Jesus was tortured and killed on a cross. Under God’s light, we have squirmed a bit as we confronted our own complicity in violent systems and governments; systems and governments much like the ones that arrested and killed Jesus. During Lent, we walked to the cross with Jesus both as his disciples and as his executioners. In the midst of this, the cross stands as a painful symbol – until…
We remember and experience the truth of resurrection. God does not save us – make us whole and free - through the violence of the cross. In the resurrection we see that God brings us wholeness and forgiveness in the midst of violence by offering new possibilities – a new way found in the life of Jesus. We know Jesus lived in a violent world, but he chose otherwise. He was killed, but his nonviolent way of life was vindicated in resurrection which affirmed that even his own death could not kill the power of the life he lived.
Fully forgiven, we realize that God’s light is no longer painful, but rather illuminates the path for us as disciples of the risen Christ. And on that path we will find the freedom we so desperately seek – freedom from what keeps us locked in habits and ways of life that are destructive to us and others. We are freed to a new way of life – but not just as individuals. In the resurrection we are joined together as the body of Christ, the gathered community of people who carry on the ministry of Jesus.
It is as if when Jesus exits the tomb, his very being pours out on to all of humanity – floods hearts with love and infuses us with his very spirit that we might now be the body of Christ. It defies logic and in our faith tradition we give our lives over to a truth that can never be fully articulated; only experienced and lived.
We stand in awe before the grandness of the resurrection; and we are often are struck silent by its mystery. Something rings true for us, but putting that truth into words eludes us much of the time. Did it happen? Is it real? Is it only symbolic? Can death ever be “swallowed up forever,” as Isaiah hopes? Such questions are important, essential even, to ask even though we suspect we will never have complete answers. But even standing in between the question and the resolution, something about the resurrection resonates deep in our souls. It is the same truth that resonates with creation itself in its own cycles of death and life.
The mystery is so great, that in the end, silence is often the only way we can articulate the truth of the resurrection. I read once that, “silence is the language of faith, and action is its interpretation”. While we may not have the exact words, we are changed in the resurrection and our actions reflect the mystery of a love that has flooded our hearts and will not let us go. With our hearts flooded with the love of God, and our souls transformed by the truth of new life in the most unexpected places, we leave here to translate that to the world in our actions. Amen.
Why Did Jesus Die?
Mark 11:1-11
April 5, 2009: Palm Sunday
(A special thank you to Daniel Migliore for his thoughts in the book, "Faith Seeking Understanding". His writing about the life and death of Jesus served as a jumping off point for me. However, I'm sure he would want it to be clear that this sermon does not reflect his own beliefs.)
Over the last five weeks, I have been talking a lot about what Jesus’ death means – or rather what it didn’t mean. I have said that Jesus was not sent by God in order to die for our sins. I have rejected this notion because I do not believe God would demand violence in any form in order to save us. To claim that God intended for Jesus to be tortured and killed for our sakes is to concede that sometimes violence is necessary in service of a greater good. To me, this sounds too much like the way large, powerful empires think…we know what is best, and we will use all our strength and military might to protect what we believe in. Democracy, capitalism, free trade, even peace are all used as greater goods to justify violent means. We have killed others to avoid being killed. We have tortured others to gain information that will ultimately protect us. We have justified all manner of violent behavior in the name of preserving our way of life and our values.
This is how we do things. I do not believe it is how God works – and I believe this because we know God best in the life of Jesus, and he refused to use violence to accomplish anything – including our salvation.
Today is Palm Sunday. Today we turn our eyes to the cross and we confront the fact that while it might be easy to celebrate and walk with Jesus while he heals, liberates, feeds and forgives, when we realize the cost of doing that in a world that violently suppresses the way of God’s love, we are hesitant to follow Jesus to the cross.
Certainly we are not going to follow Jesus all the way to the cross unless we believe there is value in meaning in the life and death of Jesus.
So today, this week, we contemplate what we think Jesus’ death was all about and why it matters to us. We walk this holy week with the disciples and friends of Jesus. Today we stand with them as Jesus prepares to enter
So if we are going to stay the course, follow Jesus all the way, we must ask ourselves; “Who is Jesus and how does his life and death help us?” These are the questions that have traditionally been discussed in theology under the headings “Christology” and “soteriology”. Christology is the study of the person of Jesus Christ and soteriology is the study of how he saves us.
In answering these questions, we have to deal with some challenges we face in doing so. First is the problem that there is a remarkable variety of pictures of Jesus in the New Testament. Asking “Who is Jesus?”, then turning to the bible for answers teaches us that the truth about who Jesus was and is is somehow imbedded in a mosaic of pictures of his life and the meaning of his life. Paul and the gospel writers all have a particular slant on who Jesus was and how his life affects ours.
And it’s not just that they emphasize different things – like Mark not having a birth narrative or Paul ignoring most historical aspects of Jesus’ life altogether. They also have divergent understandings of how we are saved through Jesus. Mark focuses on salvation coming through discipleship – following Jesus to the bitter end. John believes we are saved because Jesus died in our place as the ultimate sacrificial lamb. Paul believes we are saved through the resurrection, an event of God’s limitless grace. Matthew believes Jesus is the messiah predicted by the Hebrew Scriptures and triumphant in death. Add to these multiple scriptural understandings of who Jesus was the practically limitless interpretations of Jesus in the history of Christian theology and in Western culture in general.
This is a challenge, but it is not ultimately a problem. We realize that the diversity in interpretations today and throughout history is not something to be feared, since it has its basis in the New Testament witness itself. We realize that every situation calls for new confessions of Christ. Each moment in history demands an examination of what the life, death and resurrection of Jesus says in that particular context, and the diversity of contexts throughout history leads to immense diversity in what God in Jesus has to say to the human condition.
In fact, we are always engaged in such interpretation, whether we know it or not. Often, however, the interpretation we make of Jesus’ life is handed to us from times past, and we accept it unexamined as universal truth. Doing this, sadly, makes the message of Jesus lose its relevance, and leaves many of us with a thin faith that fails to speak to the very real, very difficult issues of our day. I thought it might be helpful, then, to look at a couple of interpretations we have inherited from the past and look at why they are ultimately inadequate for us today.
Arguably the most influential understanding of what Jesus’ death means was articulated best by Anselm, a theologian living in the 11th century. His understanding was related to the societal realities in which he lived. In his interpretation, God and humans are related like feudal lords and their surfs. An act of disobedience by a surf dishonors the lord, and when that happens, satisfaction must be given; a debt of honor is accrued and that debt must be repaid. Further, Anselm believed the satisfaction that is due to God beacuse of human sin is infinite – unsatifiable. And while humanity must provide this satisfaction, only God can provide it. Therefore God has become human in Christ. In his perfect obedience even to the point of death, the debt is paid, justice is done, and God’s honor is restored. As a result, our sins are forgiven; we are saved.
The problem with this theory for us today is that it seems to set God in contradiction to God’s self. It makes the act of forgiveness something of a problem for God. Grace is made conditional on repayment of a debt. And not only is grace conditional on this repayment, but it is violence that accomplishes this repayment. God’s grace demands violent death. That doesn’t reflect what we know of God in Jesus.
Another common understanding of how Jesus accomplishes our salvation is called the moral influence theory. Christ reconciles humanity not through some kind of legal transaction but by showing God’s love to us in such a compelling way that we are constrained to respond in wonder and gratitude – we can do nothing other than follow Jesus. God is revealed in Jesus’ compassionate life, not in his violent death. And God does not need our response to restore God’s honor – God yearns for our response because God loves us.
The problem with this theory – while it avoids any notion that God demanded the violence of Jesus death – is that it ignores the importance of Jesus death and what that death says to us and our world today. While I question the idea that God needed Jesus to die, I also believe the death is extremely important and does help us understand what it means to be faithful in our world. We can’t pretend it didn’t happen, as much as we might like to skip from Palm Sunday to Easter. Jesus was violently killed on the cross.
Both of these past interpretations of the death of Jesus can help us, but they both fall short in their ability to speak to our context today. We are still left with the question: What can we say in our time and place about the meaning of Jesus’ death?
Ours is a world of violence. Wives are battered and parents abuse their children. In the social and economic spheres competition is glorified even if it means advancing one’s own fortune at the expense of others. Wars are fought believing they are holy or at least necessary. In other words, violence is a structural element of our social and domestic life. And we are situated in that world as citizens of the
This is our context. When we understand our context and then return to the biblical witnesses to Jesus’ life and death, we can affirm that God in Jesus enters a world saturated with violence, a world in which people are victimized again and again – the poor neglected, women beaten and raped, children abused, the earth plundered, prophets murdered and people tortured. That is the order of our society and we do everything thing we can so that our world order may not be disturbed. When Jesus does disturb that order – by announcing God’s forgiveness of sinners, promising the future to the poor, welcoming outcasts and strangers, calling all to repentance and a new way of life characterized by love of God, neighbor and enemy – when Jesus does this in a world built from its foundation upon violence, then the truth is Jesus must suffer – not because God demands it to set the moral ledger right, but because the boundless love of God inevitably clashes with a world built on hostility and violence.
Affirming this, we can now ask, how that inevitable death helps us. Let me suggest three ways in which the death of Jesus has meaning for us today: First, Jesus died in order to expose our world of violence. When we consider the role of violence in our faith, we have to understand that we are the Empire – in our context we are like
Second, in his death Jesus enters into solidarity with all victims of violence, and in the resurrection, there is ultimate forgiveness for all perpetrators of violence. And in reality, each of us is likely both victim and perpetrator to some extent. When Jesus dies on the cross as God, we can rest assured that God knows the suffering of all victims – feels it as if it were God’s own suffering. When any of us feels deeply the suffering of another person, we are moved to alleviate that suffering out of great compassion. God, then, out of great compassion wants nothing more than an end to suffering. At the same time, when it is we who are responsible for the suffering of others, we can see in Jesus’ death the injustice of our own action and in the very next breath we see in the resurrection that God always urges us to start again; to repent and be forgiven and freed to a new way.
Finally, by choosing nonviolence- even to the point of death – Jesus opens a new future for a new humanity in the midst of our violent world. Jesus shows us that it is more important to live with integrity to the laws of God’s realm than to protect our earthly lives. And Jesus’ way gives us the hope we need to believe a new world is possible and the courage to live lives that become the seeds of that new world in our time and place – even when that might demand of us great sacrifice.
Jesus’ death was not required by God for our salvation – yet in the way Jesus both lived and died, we find a path to follow that can bring about a new world order.
Jesus died because he chose a certain way of living – and it is a way we are meant to follow. And today, Palm Sunday, we place ourselves in the story as we stand with that path before us. As Jesus mounts this colt, he is announcing to both his friends and enemies that he is the new ruler and that his kingdom is the
This is not a choice we can make lightly, and as imperfect human beings, we really can’t make it once and for all. But knowing how Holy Week ends – looking toward the truth of the resurrection, we can at times follow Jesus even to the cross.
God raised the crucified Jesus and made him the chief cornerstone of a new humanity that no longer espouses the way of violence, that no longer needs scapegoats, that no longer wills to live at the expense of victims, that no longer imagines or worships a bloodthirsty God, that is no longer interested in legitimations of violence. This new humanity is the Realm of God here on earth. Praise be to God and praise God for sending Jesus to show us the way. Amen.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)