"The Sincerest Form"--July 4, 2019

"The Sincerest Form..."--July 4, 2019

"And you became imitators of us and of the Lord, for in spite of persecution you received the word with joy by the Holy Spirit..." [1 Thessalonians 1:6]

You know what they say: imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. At least our mothers used to say it to keep us from getting too upset at younger siblings when they were going through a copycat phase. And with marginal success, it pacified us as children to think that young Jonny or Mary was imitating you because he or liked you so well and was trying to win your approval.

For the Christian community, however, imitation isn't ever supposed to be about flattering anybody--it is about training spiritual muscles to move in a certain way. It is about learning how to walk the Christian walk--learning how to live the strange new life that Jesus was pioneering, a life of generosity, hospitality, courage, patience, and love.  It is about letting Christ be seen in you... and in me, when other see us, and when we look in the mirror.

See, for us Christians, rules have never really done the trick. And truth be told, that's not a Christians-only thing--it's really more of a human thing. You can bark all the rules you want at us, but we have a hard time really keeping them. Sometimes, that's because we're little stinkers who look for loopholes or deliberately cross the line. But sometimes it's because we don't really know what a certain commandment or rule really means. Take "Love your neighbor," for example. Is that a command to feel a certain way toward other people? How big is the radius extending out from me to tell me who counts as my neighbor (we have a particularly hard time with that one, and we seem to keep wanting to re-ask it, because we never like how broad his answer is)? What kind of actions count as "love"--do I actually have to do something for my neighbor, or is it enough just to not actively seek to harm my neighbor? And what about when "loving" is not the same as "being nice"--like when love means confronting a neighbor? How do I know what love really means? You can see pretty quickly with even a seemingly simple, no-brainer kind of commandment that it can hard to know what a rule really means, or how anybody should actually apply a vague principle like "you should always do the most loving thing." Who gets to say what "the most loving thing" is?

The earliest followers of Jesus knew this all too well, and so we have never relied all that heavily on "rules" for our revolution. We have always learned the particular steps of our walk by walking with others and imitating--copying, to be honest--the kinds of moves and actions we've seen in other faithful saints. The same way you learn to play basketball, not by merely reading the rule book and learning that you're not supposed to run with the ball, for example, but by actually practicing the skills of dribbling, shooting, and blocking, Christians learn to become who we are by practicing alongside other disciples. We watch how they hold the ball. We learn to put our hands in the positions they use. We train our bodies to move the way theirs do. We imitate them, in other words.  And as we imitate others who imitate Christ, we just might catch a glimpse of Christ in our own reflection, too.

So when we starting asking questions like, "What does it really mean to love my neighbor?" we find the answer in the real-life examples of Jesus, of Paul, of Mary, of disciples over the ages like Francis of Assisi, or Saint Lucia, or Dietrich Bonhoeffer, or Corrie ten Boom, or Harriet Tubman, or Mother Theresa. Even more to the point, we see the answer in the lives of people we actually have met and seen with our own eyes, like your father, or my favorite Sunday School teacher, or the people you know whose faith and love are just so compelling that you can't help but keep an eye on them. We imitate those fellow followers, past and present, whose actions have been informed by the disciples who went before them, going back in a chain of imitation all the way back to Jesus and his first band of followers. We learn what it looks like love our neighbor by watching and trying it ourselves--seeing how the saints of 1930s Europe practiced real hospitality by hiding Jewish families from the Gestapo, as well as how people welcome strangers and practice mercy in 2019 America. We learn what love looks like when we hear the story of Jesus washing his disciples' feet, and when we see saints around us giving up their time and energy to serve at the food pantry or picking up trash. 

We know the cold sterility of rules alone cannot make us into the kind of people we are meant to be--but we can have our spiritual muscles trained and toned as we imitate the motions we have seen in faithful disciples before us. That is how our revolution keeps its momentum--we don't handout rule books to memorize while you're toweling off at the font after baptism and say, "Go for it. See you in heaven if you can figure these out." We keep learning from each other, letting the actions of faithful saints before us and around us teach our arms and legs and hearts how to move.

Today, think of those faithful followers of Jesus you have known--those whose generosity, or humility, or extravagant love, or deep courage have captivated you--and let them be guides along the way as we get another chance today to live deeper into reflecting Christ for the world.

Lord Jesus, train my arms, my legs, my hands, my feet, and my heart--and use the lives of others around me as guides and mentors, training my whole self in the ways of your movement.