Grace to you and
peace from God our Father and our Risen Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen
“This is my commandment, that you love one
another as I have loved you.”
Jesus words. Simple.
Straight Forward.
In the Old
Testament, the Prophet Micah has similar words:
He has told you, O mortal, what is good;
and what does the Lord require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness,
and to walk humbly with your God?
Could God have been
clearer?
Is it really so
hard to understand?
Love one another
as he has first loved us.
How do we do
that?
No one has greater love than this, to lay
down one’s life for one’s friends.
Do Justice.
Love kindness.
And walk humbly with your God.
This is what God
commands us to do.
Here at Peace we
put it this way:
“God’s purpose
for our congregation is to welcome, love and serve all in our local and global
community.”
To welcome.
To Love.
To Serve.
All ways that we
love as God first loved us.
One of the most
important words of our purpose statement is one that is quite easy simply to
pass over without thinking about it:
“All”.
In John 3:16
Jesus says, "For God so loved the world. . .”
“All”.
It would be
easier to welcome, love, and serve, if we said “some”, not all.
You know the old
adage: “You can please some of the
people all of the time, all of the people some of the time, but you cannot
please all of the people all of the time.”
We could rephrase
that to read: “You can love some of the
people all of the time, all of the people some of the time, but you cannot love
all of the people all of the time.”
Unless, of
course, you are God.
And the command
is that we love as Jesus loved, which means to love all the people, all of the
time.
This is difficult
for us.
Too often what we
practice, and what we have experienced in the church is nastiness, not love.
Mean and
spiteful.
Unpleasant,
disagreeable, and offensive behavior.
I have
experienced both in the Church. Love and Nastiness.
And if I’m
honest, there have been times when I’ve been loving, and other times when
perhaps I was guilty of being “nasty”.
And when I think
of those times when I have been “nasty” to others, one thing stands out.
There have been
times that I have felt so convinced in my own heart that I was right, and
others were wrong, that I felt entirely justified in being “nasty”, in pushing
hard for my point of view, and in short, simply not being very loving or kind.
It’s why the
prophet Micah links humility with loving kindness.
I’d suggest to
you that it is most difficult to love when we are not humble. And perhaps the only way to love is through
humility.
I’m going to
spare you a long confession of all the ways I’ve been “nasty”.
I mean, you’re
going to vote later on whether I should be your pastor. Today’s not the day to confess my ‘nastiness’. But just bear in mind that I am human, and I
can be as nasty as the next person.
Nastiness.
Often nastiness
is combined with pettiness in the church.
One of my
favorite examples was shared by a friend, Connie, long before I went to
seminary.
Connie was a
pastor’s wife, and at the time they were in St. Louis serving a parish. She attended the monthly meeting of the womens’
group and two of the women got into a long dragged out fight. They went back and forth after each other, and
neither would back down.
The issue?
The women wanted
to buy a new measuring cup for the church kitchen, and the women were debating
whether it should be one of those Pyrex ones, or a plastic one.
Nastiness.
I remember
another member, now gone, who confessed to me that her greatest gift was also
her biggest weakness.
“Witty sarcasm” is
what she considered to be one of her traits, her gifts, but she acknowledged
that too often her sarcastic humor had hurt people, even though she had not
intended to.
Nastiness.
Another
example: There was a woman in my last
parish that was so concerned that the Church was being properly cleaned by the
custodian, that she constantly watched over his shoulder.
One time she
decided to hide post it notes, with nasty messages, throughout the church just
to test whether the custodian was actually cleaning everything. The result was that the custodian and his
wife spent an entire evening searching for each and every note. Oh, and by the way, it was behavior like this
that resulted in their leaving our congregation.
Nastiness.
Love as I have
first loved you.
One is Godly and
Divine. The other isn’t.
By contrast, I
could go on and on about the loving things people have devoted themselves to
over the course of my ministry.
For example, that
woman who confessed to hurting people with her ‘witty sarcasm’ was also one of
the most generous people I have met. She
was the largest contributor to our congregation on a month to month basis, but
it went beyond that.
One of the most
joyful things she ever asked me to do, was to take a thousand dollars that she
gave, and give it to someone who needed it.
A
gracious loving act.
Or I’m reminded
of Elsie.
She was the
matriarch of our first congregation, one of the founding members. She went out of her way to love us and care
for me as her pastor and for my family.
She became the
adopted grandmother for our children.
She’d have us
over for dinner.
Her husband would
take me fishing.
And she made sure
the congregation took care of us during years that were particularly difficult
financially.
Loving
kindness.
I think of
Francis Crabtree.
Francis was
nearing a hundred years old, but she still loved.
She spent her
days sewing quilt tops for the ladies to tie for Lutheran World Relief, as our
own sewing group does. It was almost comical;
the effort it took to put her quilts together, because toward the end she
simply couldn’t sew a straight line.
But
the people who received her quilts, people around the world who were victims of
natural disasters, or refugees, or simply impoverished, didn’t care. They were warm. And that’s all Francis cared about.
And then there
was George.
George was a
retired, full bird, colonel, a pilot in the Air Force.
He was also one
of the most conservative people I have ever met, and used to joke that he was a
“Little to the right of Attila the Hun”.
There were times when George’s nastiness came out, and he was accused
more than once of being an outright bigot, which perhaps he was.
But he was also
compassionate.
Even though
George, as a conservative, opposed government programs like welfare, he was the
first to support the homeless shelter, or to offer me money to distribute to
the needy.
And though he
would rant about the sinfulness in our world, he would also absolutely maintain
“that if anyone asks our forgiveness, we must forgive them, we have no other
choice, because Jesus requires that of us.”
Loving kindness.
Many people. Faithful servants of God.
Bishops and
pastors. Lay people. Family members.
Gentle souls.
If we’re lucky,
we’ve all experienced the love and grace of such people. Likely, that’s why we are part of the
Church.
And yes, love is
much more powerful than the petty nastiness that too often creeps in.
Love as you have
first been loved.
Sometimes I would
like to shout to the mountain tops “Jesus wasn’t nasty”, because based on the
behavior of many Christian you might think he was.
Thankfully,
though, in the end it has been the love people have offered in the name of Christ
that has endured.
Over the years,
what I have found is that when people have been their nastiest, God has sent
others who have shown the most loving kindness imaginable. God is like that.
That is the
challenge for us in the Church.
Can we respond to
the nastiness in this world by being a force of love?
There is no
greater witness to the love of God, than the love we share with one another.
Sometimes we
think that being a faithful Christian mean obeying the law, and requiring
others to do likewise. And that’s where
some of our nastiness comes in.
But faithfulness to
Jesus Christ is about loving.
As Paul writes in
Romans, chapter 13:
“Love does no wrong to a neighbor;
therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law.”
God’s purpose
for our congregation is to welcome, love and serve all in our local and global
community.
That’s why we are
here, folks, that’s why we are here.
No comments:
Post a Comment