More Than Fuzzy Feelings--October 4, 2024

More Than Fuzzy Feelings--October 4, 2024

"We know love by this, that he laid down his life for us--and we ought to lay down our lives for one another. How does God's love abide in anyone who has the world's goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help?" [1 John 3:16-17]

Lord, have mercy--thirteen-year-old me had it so wrong.

Maybe like all adolescents, eighth-grade me thought of love first and foremost in terms of feelings--or, more honestly, brain chemistry. Thirteen-year-old me would have said that you know "love" by that warm fuzzy feeling in your stomach, either when someone special walks in the room in second period English class, or the people in your family who make you feel good, too. (But of course, since this is junior-high we are talking about, it's not very cool to admit you love your family.)

Teenage me thought love was measurable by emotional highs and lows, like it was a matter of who made you feel extra happy when they lavished attention on you, or made you feel desperately low when they weren't in the room and you were left pining.

The writers of the New Testament (and the Old Testament/Hebrew Scriptures, too, to be honest) don't think or write in those terms. Love, to the biblical writers, isn't quantified in terms of how someone makes you "feel", or even how many milligrams of endorphins can be measured in your bloodstream. Love is about the conscious choice to give yourself away. And being loved is about someone else's conscious choice to give themselves away for your sake, too. Fluctuations in brain chemistry are simply not enough.

And that, dear ones, is why the writer of what we call First John can say that we know love most clearly at the cross, because it is in that event that Jesus "laid down his life for us." Jesus gave himself away fully, completely, and wholly--not holding an ounce back, but all the way to his last breath. And in a very important sense, Jesus had been giving himself away all his life long. The cross, then, isn't the only instance of Jesus laying down his life, but the epitome, the capstone, so to speak. But at every turn, whether sacrificing his religious respectability to hang out with the outcasts, giving up his time and energy when he was weary to his bones, spending his attention on others who needed him, or even in the end giving up his very life, Jesus was giving himself away all along. He didn't have to feel "peppy" about doing it, or have a warm fuzzy feeling about the people he was giving himself away for--I'm sure it wasn't easy, after all, to be praying forgiveness for his murderers. But the brain chemistry and endorphin levels aren't the issue--it is the willingness to put the well-being of others before your own, whether it is fun or easy at the time or not.

Laying down our lives, then, doesn't necessarily require that each of us has to stop breathing in order to truly follow Jesus' example. We don't have to die to lay our lives down--it might just be that we are called to the longer-term vocation of spending our lives for others moment by moment, year by year--in the ways we are dedicated to doing our work well for the sake of the people who benefit from our work, in the ways we give up our time and energy for our families, in the ways we put the well-being of others before our own. And of course, as John envisions it, others are called to do the same for us at the same time. So no one is meant to run dry or go empty--we are all continually emptying ourselves and being refilled by one another.

But notice here how John seamlessly moves from the love we meet at the cross to the love we are called to embody when others around us are in need. John says that we know what love is--what it really and truly is, and not the adolescent hormone-driven definition--in the way Jesus laid his life down for us, and then he immediately connects that with our calling to lay our lives down for others, including sharing our abundance with others. John even goes so far as to suggest that God's love can't really be in us if we encounter someone else in need and are unmoved to share our resources with them. Note here: John doesn't give a mention to how you "feel" about the person in need--he doesn't require feeling guilt, or pity, or condescension, or solidarity. Love is more than an emotional reaction--it is about the choice to give some of yourself away for the sake of someone who needs it.

Honestly, whether we "feel like" caring for others or not is irrelevant. The reason to share my table with another is not because I "feel like it" but because my neighbor is hungry. The reason to give my resources, or make room to welcome others, is not because it makes me "feel good" to do it. It is simply because the neighbor is the person God has sent across my path, and my calling is to give myself away to whomever crosses that path.

Today, the life-laying-down kind of love we know in Jesus also opens our eyes to see a million different opportunities for us to practice love all around us--where are there people before our eyes for whom we can give ourselves away? There is love. Just like at the cross. Today, how can you and I lay down our lives for the sake of others in our places of abundance? And how can we allow others in their abundance to lay down their lives for us as well?

Lord Jesus, let us love like you--really and truly.

What Makes Us Stand Out--October 3, 2024

What Makes Us Stand Out--October 3, 2024

"Do not be astonished, brothers and sisters, that the world hates you. We know that we have passed from death to life because we love one another. Whoever does not love abides in death. All who hate a brother or sister are murderers, and you know that murderers do not have eternal life abiding in them." [1 John 3:13-15]

We cannot change what the world thinks about us--at least not directly. That is not in our power.

But we do have remarkable power that comes from being free from fussing about whether we are liked or disliked, received or rejected, cheered or mocked, by anybody else. There is great power in being free simply to say, "I am not ruled by your impressions of me. I do not depend on being judged successful or great or impressive by anybody else." That frees us simply to love. Always to love.

For starters here, John seems to think that maybe it's not so bad a thing to be hated by the world, if "the world" is John's way of naming all the forces and systems that are turned away from God and bent in on themselves. Maybe in that case, it's something of a compliment to be hated by "the world." In any case, we cannot change how the world perceives and receives us Christians--we can only affect ourselves and how we act and react in such a world. We can only answer the question, "Are we practicing love toward others or not?" Whether the world approves or disapproves of our commitment to a radical, self-giving love for all or not, we are give the power to keep on loving, and the freedom to do it whether the systems, empires, and powers of the day like it or not.

In other words, if "the world" is bent on hating us, we can only make sure that it is an unrequited hate--a hate that will go unanswered with more of the same. We can only commit ourselves not to play by the rules the world sets if it is determined to put us in its sights. Whether the world likes it or not, we will not respond to hostility with hatred or violence. John reminds us that we have passed from those things, and that we are now called to be a community that responds to outward hostility and hatred with suffering love.

But maybe we need to back up for a moment and ask why the world would hate us in the first place--or at least, why would "the world" have hated Christians 2,000 years ago? The New Testament has a habit of assuming that Christians should be ready to meet with hostility from the world. But we live in a country and in an age where many Christians blend right in--where, aside from where they happen to be on some Sunday mornings, there is very little that makes them stand out enough for the world to be able to identify them at all. It's sad to say, but church folks can be just as bigoted, hateful, apathetic, and power-hungry as anybody else, such that it seems like our faith makes no difference in our lives or witness.

And on the other hand, sometimes it seems that some Christians go out of their way to be different, or to stand out in the world, but they do it in ways that don't seem particularly Christ-like--when there is resentful anger, boastful entitlement, bitter resentment, and Respectable Religious smugness, for example.

We live in an age, then, when some Christians seem only to hear the part about being different from the world that they miss being different in ways that are like Jesus; and we also live in a time when some Christians are so sure they don't want to be labeled as fanatics that they back away from anything that makes them even the slightest bit different from their neighbors--who don't want to stand out, speak up, question their priorities, or risk losing "likes" or "friends" on social media for stepping out in the love of Jesus for those it is easy to ignore. We seem to have crowing Christians who just squawk angry squawks, and chameleon Christians who blend in with the wallpaper. In other words, it seems we have plenty of Christians who couldn't be hated by the world because the world can't tell the different between them and itself, and some Christians who might well be hated by the world--but it's hard to tell if the world hates them for being Christians or for being jerks about it. And that's a problem: either of those, the crow or the chameleon approach, is still allowing the world to set the rules and living under the world's supposed power.

Remember, it's an ambiguous thing to be hated by the world--as much as "the world" often is opposed to the Reign of God, there are times when the world isn't all that far off the mark. It took a while, but the world came to learn to reject Nazism and apartheid and segregation, for example. The vast majority of the world's governments have all agreed to ban torture or the targeting of civilians; we are united against disease like malaria, cancer, or AIDS, and have widespread support to help all people get access to drinkable water. The world's legal codes almost all uniformly reject murder and rape and theft. These are all positive things for the world at large to engage in. Just because "the world" rejects something, then, doesn't make it a good thing.

So that leaves us with two questions: if there doesn't seem to be much hostility between you and the world, why is that, and should there actually be more tension there between the way you live your life and the way the world expects us to fall in line? And then second, if there is hostility between you and the world, what is the reason? Are we faithfully living out the Good News and stirring up trouble because the world can't stand the news of radically free grace in Jesus Christ apart from our earning or deserving it--or are we hated by "the world" because we are acting like pompous, self-righteous jerks who use their religion like a weapon to beat other people with, or like a cover for their own self-serving ends?

So again, back to the question of why the first Christians were hated. They didn't have the power, position, or money to launch a public-relations campaign or to advocate for certain candidates for office--remember, they lived under the rule of an empire, not a democracy. The early Christians did not expect the empire to make room for them to teach their faith in schools (both because there was no public education system as we know it, and because Christians didn't assume that the empire would their work for them). And they did not protest when they didn't get special treatment from the empire--they simply gave their witness to whoever would listen. So many of the things that publicly known Christians in our country and our day are vocal about simply wouldn't have made any sense to the early Christians at all. The early Christians didn't ask for the right to pray in schools from the government--they simply prayed and wore their faith on their sleeve whether the empire liked it or not, because they believed they had a power the empire knew nothing about. And they were perfectly willing to be thrown in jail for it--but they would not react with hatred or violence back. The early Christians walked around the streets of the empire like they were really the subjects of another King--which, of course, they were--and as though they didn't expect the empire to understand their differing allegiances. That was their freedom, and that was their power--they simply didn't have to abide by the acceptance or rejection of the powers of the day. They were not in bed with Caesar, and that allowed them the freedom and the power to speak up against Rome when necessary, to support the systems of the day when appropriate, and in all things to go on living in radical love regardless of whether it was popular or not, and regardless of whether the empire approved.

That, in the end, is what made the "world" of the early Christians so hostile to them--it was like the whole Christian community was willing to say that the emperor was wearing no clothes--that the world didn't really have authority over them, and that the empire wasn't really in charge of granting them rights: God was. The early Christians earned the hatred of the Roman Empire in those first centuries because they called the empire's bluff and in effect said, "You don't have real power over us--not over our hearts, our souls, and our allegiances. And even if you kill us, you don't even really have power over us then, because our Lord can and does raise the dead. And we will show love in the mean time anyway." The Romans didn't know what to do with that. 

Angry enemy hordes? The Romans could kill those with armies, and they could feel good about it because they believed the angry enemy hordes were clearly disturbers of the peace and threats to the rule of law. Submissive, defeated slaves?  They could keep them under their thumbs, too, and feel good about it because they felt they were preserving the system that kept the Pax Romana going. But Christians? They wouldn't pick up swords to fight the centurions, but they would not let the Romans intimidate them either. "The world" of those ancient Christians just didn't know what to make of them--except to know that they were different in a threatening kind of way (threatening in the same way that the boy in the story is a threat to the dignity of the empire when he announces that the emperor is naked), and because the empire feared that difference, it came to hate the early Christians.

Flashing forward back to our day, then, the question for us is not, "How can we make the world like us more?" but neither is it, "How can we get the world to hate us more?" Instead, the question is, How can we live in the freedom, power, and love of Jesus? Or to put it differently, How can we come to take the Reign of God that Jesus has shown us so seriously that we are no longer driven by concerns about what other people think about us? If I am completely captivated by the love of Jesus, I won't care who knows about it, and I won't care about whether that kind of love for all will get me in trouble. That is a power and a freedom the systems and empires of the world will not understand. I belong to a different Lord, one who trumps the authority of every empire, and even of death. Today, then, these words from John both give us the courage to risk standing out from the world's ways once again to live as an alternative, and give us a picture of how we are supposed to stand out--by being a community that loves. Love will make us stand out, in the end, and whether the world likes it or not, we will love the way we have been loved first, by Jesus our Lord.

Lord Jesus, give us such confident faith in your Reign that we are no longer swayed by fears of what others will think of us. And give us such deep love that the ways we stand out will be witnesses to your kingdom rather than angry squawking.

The Unsolicited Second--October 2, 2024

The Unsolicited Second--October 2, 2024

"When the Pharisees heard that [Jesus] had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. 'Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?' He said to him, 'You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets." [Matthew 22:34-40]

They never ask Jesus for his "Top Two," just for the Number One.  But Jesus answers, as he always does, in his own way. He is asked for The One Top Commandment, and he offers an unsolicited second.  Pay attention to that.

Chances are, you've heard this story or one of its parallels in the other gospels before.  The set-up could be heard as a trick question or a genuine interest in what Rabbi Jesus thinks about the Torah, but the punch-line is always the same.  Jesus, having been asked to weigh in on what the "greatest" commandment is in all of God's Law, offers a two-part answer, refusing to conform even in the format of his answer to the expectations of the ones asking him.  They ask him to boil it all down to a single commandment, and instead Jesus' answer is something like, "Well, instead, I'll give you the two that go together inseparably, and you can make of that what you will."

Jesus' famous answer to, "What is the ONE greatest commandment?" begins with, "Love God," before immediately proceeding to the unexpected second half of his answer, "Love your neighbor."  Jesus doesn't seem to think that love of neighbor is a second-tier kind of instruction, but rather it is of the same quality, urgency, and necessity as the first: "The second," he says, "is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself."  They are two sides of the same coin. Like a magnet cannot have a north pole without also having a south pole, you cannot, according to Jesus, have the commandment to love God without also having the commandment to love neighbor.  Or, to get super-nerdy for a moment, like the physicists who discovered that light behaves like both a particle and a wave, Jesus says that the one Great Commandment is to love, and it is expressed both toward God and toward other people, all the time.

And as we saw yesterday in the passage from Leviticus, ancient Israel was always meant to understand that commandment about loving "neighbors" as inclusive of strangers, outsiders, foreigners, and aliens, not just your best friend from down the street.  Jesus took that same understanding for granted and then told his questioner here that loving ALL those other people is the second-half of what it really means to love God.  Or, as Dorothy Day put it once so compellingly, "I really only love God as much as I love the person I love the least."  You cannot separate one from the other, at least not without doing significant damage and causing major distortions to God's intention.

Part of the trouble, unfortunately, is that for so much of human history, Respectable Religious People have been bent on trying to perform a neighbor-ectomy on the Great Commandment and sever the connection between the way we love God and the ways we love others.  But Jesus won't have it.  Over and over again, the prophets spoke out against the ways people would try and buy God off with their prayers, their sacrifices, their songs of praise, or their shows of devotion, and then think it gave them permission to cheat their neighbors, ignore the needy, or baptize their apathy and greed.  And over and over again, God would say in response, "If you're going to keep doing that, then I won't listen to your songs, and I won't accept your sacrifices, because what I have always wanted was for you to treat one another rightly--with decency, with kindness, and with justice."  God has never let us off the hook with thinking we could just lob up a few prayers or give our offerings as an alternative to caring for the people around us.  Love of God and love of neighbor have always been two sides of the same coin.

What boggles my mind, even two thousand years after Jesus' words here should have put this question to rest, is how often I still hear modern-day Respectable Religious Leaders try and wedge a crowbar between the commandments to love God and to love neighbor.  In recent weeks, as news stories circulated about the needs of migrants from Haiti and the additional harassment they were facing after false reports about them went viral, I was shocked to see a number of pastors, pundits, and social media voices, all of whom professed faith in Jesus, saying that the commandment to "love your neighbor" was irrelevant to the situation.   I heard and read people insisting that "loving God" rightly (that is, according to their particular theological traditions or political leanings) meant that they were under no obligation to care about or come to the aid of Haitians or anybody else living in their communities, state, or country.  And it just left me flabbergasted, because Jesus himself certainly seems to make it clear that these are two poles of the same magnet.  

We can discuss what measures are feasible to help this or that group of newcomers or refugees, to be sure.  And we can debate about how to strike a balance between what is financially responsible and what is needed by those who are in need of a hand up.  All of those kinds of nuts-and-bolts conversations are good and necessary, since we live in the real world with real limits.  But what is not up for debate is whether Jesus gives us permission to separate our love for God and our love for neighbor.  We might have hoped, along with the Pharisees and Sadducees who approached Jesus in the gospels, for a simple and easy One Rule to follow that would earn us acceptance with God, but Jesus insists that we cannot love God without loving our neighbor... and that our neighbor includes everyone whom God sends along our path.  We might not have asked for it, but Jesus is determined to give us an unsolicited second half of the Great Commandment that binds our love of God to our love for other people.   

If we are going to take Jesus seriously (and I'm pretty sure that's a bare-minimum requirement for Christianity) then we are going to have to accept his unapologetic tethering together of love for God and love for neighbor.  That means we can never pat ourselves on the back for being "good little boys and girls" if we haven't asked, "How am I attending to the needs of people around me?" And it also means that others around us cannot separate their worship of God from their care and concern for us, too.  Like it or not, Jesus is going to keep compelling us to see God in the face of our neighbor, and to see our love of others as the often most-visible way we love God.  We might as well get used to it--it might just change our lives forever.

Lord Jesus, enable us today to love you by loving the people you have put in our path.