Sunday, October 26, 2014
First
Congregational United Church of Christ – Sermon by Rev. Caela Simmons Wood
This upcoming Friday, many of
us will celebrate Halloween. We’ll get decked out in costumes and head to
parties. Or we’ll dress our kids up and brave whatever kind of weather Kansas
delivers. Or we’ll sit at home and hand out treats to the neighborhood kiddos.
497 years ago on All Hallows
Eve, a Catholic priest and university theologian named Martin Luther wrote a
letter to his bishop. He was frustrated with many things in the Church and
needed to vent. He asked a lot of questions. He proposed some possible
solutions to problems. Legend has it that he walked to the local university
chapel in Wittenberg – the town where he lived and worked – and nailed a copy
of the letter to the door. I guess that was like the equivalent of having one
of his tweets go viral because within a few months people all over Europe were
reading it.
We have often thought of
Martin Luther as the guy who started the Protestant Church but, of course, it’s
more complicated than that. Luther was just one in a long line of reformers who
have existed since the beginning of the Church. You know every organization has
reformers, right? The ones who ask all the hard questions and never quite seem
satisfied with the answers? The ones who fail to have the proper respect for
authority? The ones who are always getting into trouble?
Jesus was a bit like that, I
suppose. He was another in that long line of reformers. Always asking
questions. Always giving answers that didn’t quite make sense. In today’s
passage from Matthew we have Jesus, once again, in deep conversation with the
religious scholars of his day. They ask him for the most important commandment
and he initially answers like a good student. Every Jew would have known that
the correct answer was the Shema – “Hear, O Israel, the Lord is your God, the
Lord is One. And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with
all your soul and with all your might.” Every Jew knew this was the correct
answer and Jesus was no exception.
Never content to pass up an
opportunity to push the envelope a bit, Jesus adds a bit more. He is asked for
the single greatest commandment but can’t let it rest at one, so he notes that
a second commandment flows from the first. “Love your neighbor as yourself,” he
says, “On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” This is
not earth-shattering. In fact, he’s just quoting Leviticus. But he does it in
such a typically Jesus kind of way – always the troublemaker. Ask him for a
single answer and he’ll give you two.
We who are followers of Christ
come from a long line of troublemakers.
Jesus says these two
commandments encapsulate all the law and the prophets. Not just the law – as
you might guess for a great commandment – but the prophets, too. What on earth
does prophecy have to do with love?
I think it has something to do
with the kind of love Jesus is talking about. You may recall there are at least
three Greek words for love – one for passionate, romantic love; a second for
friendly, egalitarian relationships; and a third, agape, which is the one used here. It’s the kind of love that God
has for humanity – unfounded, unbreakable, not contingent on good behavior or
common interests. It’s a covenant word. It’s a word that binds.
God loves unconditionally. Not
because we are getting it right or because we deserve it. But, well…just
because. We are tied up together. We can’t escape each other. So we might as
well do our level best to love each other through thick and thin, right? And
since we have been given this gift of crazy love, we are commanded to do our
best to love right back. And when we love back, we find ourselves tangled up in
this life-altering force that compels to reconsider the ways we love our
neighbors. And who are our neighbors? Well, Jesus was pretty clear about that
in the story of the Good Samaritan. Everyone we encounter is a neighbor. Mr.
Rogers also said it well, “They’re the people that you meet each day.”
I think that when Martin
Luther wrote that strongly-worded letter and tweeted it to the world, he may
not have known exactly what he was getting into. He certainly wasn’t trying to
start a new church. He never did leave the Catholic church – it had to leave
him. He was excommunicated about four years after writing the letter. I think,
actually, he was just trying to love the church that had loved him.
Love, especially the agape variety, isn’t just about flowers
and smiles. Love is sometimes about showing up and speaking a hard truth,
opening up the possibility of a better way. Love like this – prophetic love –
can often get you in a lot of trouble. It can get you imprisoned, excommunicated,
crucified. It’s no walk in the park.
I sometimes wonder if God
feels exhausted just loving us all of the time. I sort of suppose God doesn’t
because things that are really hard for me are surely easier for her, right?
But, still, it must be an awful lot of work, being permanently bound to
humanity and all of the messes we find ourselves in. It must get awfully old
watching us make the same mistakes and forgetting the core of who we are
supposed to be over and over again. On the flip side, there is almost nothing
more beautiful than watching a human being get something really, really right.
Love is hard. Love is messy.
For better or for worse, though, we seem to be stuck with God and he seems to
be stuck with us. Thank God for that, right?
There are times, of course,
when I don’t feel much like loving God. Or my neighbors. Or myself. This love
stuff is really just a lot of work.
I am reminded of this powerful
short story by Glennon Melton. Ms. Melton is a writer. She is also a recovering
alcoholic and bulimic, a person who struggles with mental illness, a shameless
truth-teller, and one heck of a theologian. She also happens to be a member of
the United Church of Christ. This piece is called Unwind and it’s about a marriage, but I think the truths contained
within it can translate to any relationship – perhaps especially our
relationship with The Holy. I’ve edited the story to shorten it a bit and
remove some words that might not be suitable in this setting.
“There was a couple who’d been
married for twelve years. The first years were good, happy even . . . but then
the kids came and work got hard and money got tight and the shine wore off of
each of them. They stopped taking care of each other because
they each decided they needed to look out for themselves.
And the distances between them
grew longer and deeper until it felt impossible to touch even when they were in
the same room. And one day she said to her girlfriend. . . I just don’t love
him anymore. And he said to his buddy . . . I don’t know if I
ever loved her. And their friends said what about counseling but
it all seemed tangled up too tight to try to unwind.
She got home from work one
evening and fed the kids and put them to bed and she was tired to the bone. And
he was late again. Late again. And even though he was late and
the house was a mess, she knew that he would walk in the door, pour his glass
of wine, and sit down at the kitchen table and relax. He’d sit and relax.
She couldn’t even remember what relaxing felt like.
She stared at his bottle of
wine on the counter. Then her eyes wandered over to their wedding photo on the
wall. Clueless, she thought. We were clueless. But
happy. God, please help us, she said silently.
Then she walked over to the
counter and poured a glass of wine for him. She put it next to his book on the
kitchen table, the place he loved to sit and relax, and she went upstairs to
sleep.
He tiptoed into the house
fifteen minutes later. He knew he’d missed the kids’ bedtime again, he knew his
wife would be angry again, and he prepared himself for her steely
silence. He walked into the kitchen. He saw his glass of wine, and his book,
and his chair pulled out for him. He stood and stared for a moment, trying to
understand.
It felt like she was speaking
directly to him for the first time in a long, long while.
He sat down and drank his
wine. But instead of reading, he thought about her. He felt grateful. He
finished his wine and then walked over to the coffee maker. He filled it up and
set the automatic timer. 5:30 am. It would be ready when she came downstairs.
He placed her favorite mug on the counter.
The next morning she woke up
and stumbled downstairs, exhausted, to the kitchen. She stopped when she heard
the coffee maker brewing and stared at it for a few moments, trying to
understand.
It felt like he was speaking
directly to her for the first time in a very, very long while. She felt
grateful.
That evening, she stayed up
until he got home. And she allowed her arm to brush his as they prepared dinner
together. And after the kids went to bed and they assumed their TV viewing
positions on the couch . . . he reached out for her hand. It was hard, but he
did it.
And things started to unwind.
A little teeny bit.
Look. I know it’s all so hard
and confusing and complicated and things get wound up so tight you can’t even
find the ends sometimes.
All I’m saying is that somebody’s got
to pour that first glass of wine. Because love is not something for which to
search or wait or hope or dream. It’s simply something to do.”[1]
[1] You should
read the full text here: http://momastery.com/blog/2012/01/09/766/
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