Participating in Holy Love

The LORD spoke to Moses, saying: Speak to all the congregation of the people of Israel and say to them: You shall be holy, for I the LORD your God am holy. You shall not render an unjust judgment; you shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great: with justice you shall judge your neighbor. You shall not go around as a slanderer among your people, and you shall not profit by the blood of your neighbor: I am the LORD. You shall not hate in your heart anyone of your kin; you shall reprove your neighbor, or you will incur guilt yourself. You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the LORD.

Leviticus 19:1-2, 15-18

This is the Word of God.
Thanks be to God!

By participating in communion with one another, we actually participate in communion with God, because God is not lacking in any regard in being ever oriented in the posture we call Love. As such, God is the source of the Love shown by God's people: the People of God love because God is the LORD: the holy, ever-faithful covenant One who enters into relationship with God's people, making them holy.

The Latin text, Ubi Caritas comes to mind. Here is a beautiful musical setting by Ola Gjeilo, superbly interpreted by Charles Bruffy, conducting the Phoenix Chorale:

Here is the Latin text and an English translation:

Ubi caritas et amor, Deus ibi est.

      Where charity and love are, God is there.

congregavit nos in unum Christi amor.

       The love of Christ has gathered us together.

Exultemos et in ipso juncundemur

        Let us rejoice and be glad in it.

Timeamus et amemus Deum Vivum.

         Let us revere and love the living God.

Et ex corde dilagamus nos sincero.

         And from a sincere heart let us love one another.

Amen.

         Amen.

Perhaps you could read the Latin text as saying that wherever you see expressions of what we call love, then those expressions must be from God. Or whenever we feel attraction to other persons, then however we act on that attraction--what many people call love--is a True expression of Love, is godly, and healthy.

I think this interpretation is faulty. Or at least it falsely equates Love with desire and acting on desire in and of themselves as Love. I think the Truer meaning of the text is that charity and love are the signals of God’s presence, the source of True Charity and Love. Love is not an emotion. God's essence can be described as being Love, and we embody the Love of God as God moves in and through us to Love God and Love each other truly, for the glory of God.

Congregavit nos in unum…

We do not come together to make love, but rather, Christ has called us together—regardless of our differences and misunderstandings—with His love. And we are to rejoice and be glad in this gathering, this Love that is outside ourselves and calls us outside of our selves. And when we rejoice in this true Love, this God, we cannot but revere and love this Love, our Living God, who creates in us a sincere heart from which we can truly participate in the Love of Christ, by the Spirit’s power, one to another, as this Love—bigger than us and bigger than our particular culture and our false definitions of love—gathers us together into God’s Self of Love.

I would ask your forgiveness for my inability to describe someone as ineffable as God, but that would be silly.  Could my writing be better? Yes, absolutely. We'll have to see if any future editing I do of this post actually gets any closer to approximately refering to reality, but until then, I pray I've gotten as close as I can at this moment.

God, draw us into Yourself and for Yourself.
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Amen.

15th Shabbat after Pentecost: Pass the Peace, Please!

May the Peace of Christ be always with you!


Three years ago, I began to worship with a small Episcopal parish church at their said service of Holy Eucharist on a weekly basis. Before long, the Passing of the Peace became a very meaningful moment in the Liturgy for me. It became an object of sincere anticipation, as well a source of joy, which I lived off of, and for, the entire week between Eucharists. I can remember discussing with various people who went with me just how meaningful it was to them as well. It seemed to be a highlight of the service for many of my friends as well as for me. Looking back, I see that I am hooked on the Real Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist, but I think that the Passing of the Peace was what I first latched on to as something that signalled that something Beatiful, Good, and True was going on.

Think about the deep theological, and therefore, Real Life, implications:

after confessing our sin--that which separates us from God and each other--to God, we hear a declaration of the reconciling work of Jesus Christ, and follow it up by exchanging signs of that Peace: handshakes, huggs, kisses of peace. It doesn't matter who you are, or even if you know anyone else present. Christ died for all, Christ has borne all of our sin and suffering and rejection, and our peace is in Christ's Body. Therefore, we show outwardly what is the inward Reality. Because of the size of the small congregation that gathers at the 8:30 service, everyone can pass the peace to everyone. We all know and feel that Christ has reconciled us all to God and each other, before we commune together, before we offer our gifts, and ourselves, with Christ, on the altar.

In our culture of opposing factions, of a deeply-seated divide between liberals and conservatives, Republicans and Democrats, old and young, the Church of Jesus Christ proclaims the Gospel: God saves us from our sin--all that is wrong and hurtful that separates us from God and each other--through the reconciling work of Jesus Christ and the enabling power of the Holy Spirit to live into our own forgivness and to forgive others as we have been forgiven.

I have a question for Christian communities which do not currently include a Passing of the Peace in their Sunday morning ritual, or order of worship, etc.:

 Might a meaningful, intentional practice of confession, a proclamation of forgiveness, and a passing of Christ's peace be a way forward through the mire of lies our culture feeds us: that we have irreconcileable differences, that the other "just doesn't understand", that we deserve to hold others at arm's length because they have hurt us?

I think it might.

Shabbat Shalom:  may the whole Peace of which the Sabbath serves as a sign and prophecy for those who choose to remember and observe it, the Peace of the Messiah, always be with you!


For a discussion of the implications of remaining faithful to a proclamation of Jesus' reconciling work in the midst of the culture war of our times, see Christ the Reconciler: A Theology for Opposites, Differences, and Enemies, by Peter Schmiechen. And for a history of ideas that has led, in part, to the seemingly irreconileable nature of today's cultural discourse, see Alisdair MacInyre's After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory.

Christmastide 2011-2012: Clueless Righteousness

This is the manuscript to a "Spoken Meditation" I shared with my church, First Baptist-Morganton, NC, on the first Sunday after Christmas, which also happened to be New Year's Day, as well as the celebration of The Circumcision and Holy Name of Jesus, The Holy Family, as well as the Solemnity of Mary, God-Bearer.

The Scipture lessons for the service that morning were:
Isaiah 61:10-62:3
Revelation 21:1-6a
Matthew 25:31-46

O God, you make us glad by the yearly festival of the birth of your only Son Jesus Christ. Grant that we, who joyfully receive him as our Redeemer, may with sure confidence behold him when he comes to be our Judge; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen. (from The Book of Common Prayer, a collect for Christmas)

As I was listening to the passage from the Gospel of Matthew yesterday, something caught my attention that has never caught my attention before. Not only did it change the direction of this homily slightly, but it also changed the way I understand, or do not understand, this story.

“What? There’s nothing puzzling about this story!”, one might say. “You feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, welcome the stranger, clothe the naked, care for the sick, and visit those in prison. If you do, you get to be called ‘righteous’ and are sent to eternal life. If you don’t, well, you just get sent to ‘eternal punishment.’”

I do not think this assessment shows evidence of a fair hearing of this story. That summary might be what we expect to hear. It is a pretty popular image: the sheep and goats divided at the end of time when the Son of man comes in glory, the righteous and unrighteous dealt out their just, eternal rewards. And of course, we are the righteous ones in the story.

Now, what I had planned to do was try to drive home the point that we are failing to live up to the standards Jesus speaks of: feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, welcoming the stranger, clothing the naked, caring for the sick, visiting those in prison. Because of course, we all—or at least most of us—fall short. We fail to do the most basic of things that this story tell us Jesus will be checking off his list at the end of time. And I was going to try to encourage us to recommit ourselves to doing those most basic of things, looking to the baby in the manger as the perfect example of how Jesus really was God’s self made into a vulnerable, hungry, thirsty, alien, naked, frail, outcast of a human being: “the least of these.” The least of all.

So hopefully, we would have gone out from this place ready to seek out those in need of ministry and minister to them as ministering to Christ. Seeing Jesus in every full, hydrated, welcomed, clothed, cared for, visited person to whom we ministered.

But the funny thing is, (and this is what I realized yesterday) if we would do exactly that: go out--strategically, intentionally “on mission,”—serving Jesus in the least of these, all of a sudden, we are nowhere to be seen in this story.

Because when Jesus tells the righteous—the sheep—that they have indeed been ministering to him when they minister to the least-of-these, their response is one of cluelessness: “Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food?” They are just as clueless as the ones who failed to minister to the least-of-these, who say: “Lord, when was it that we did not take care of you?”

They are all clueless. And that’s what I realized yesterday.

So I also realized that I could not encourage us all to make our lists of what to do, entitled ‘how to serve Jesus in the least-of-these’, and then go about strategically building the Kingdom of God. At least not on the basis of the scriptures we have read this morning. So. What do we do with this Gospel reading?

***

About those other scriptures.

In Isaiah, the prophet exults, rejoices in God and in God’s promises of hope. Even though the fulfillment is not here yet. In fact, he admits that things are not yet what they should be, but also says that he will not keep quiet, he will not rest, until things are made right and salvation shines like a burning torch.

And if you go back and look at that prophecy, the righteousness and praise are not manufactured or performed out of duty by the faithful. Rather, they organically spring up…like a garden causes the seeds planted to spring up. You also see evangelism in this text: all the nations see the righteousness and praise of God. There is also clothing going on in the Isaiah text. But this time, it is God who is clothing God’s people with righteousness. Isaiah doesn’t make his own robe of righteousness. He also doesn’t lose hope because God’s promises haven’t all been fulfilled yet. Rather, he rejoices in the hope that consummation is coming…

That’s what I see in the Revelation passage: the consummation of God’s promises. Jesus, Alpha and Omega, beginning and end, of the Father’s love begotten, brings what was started in the manger and on the cross to completion. No tears, no death, no mourning, crying, nor pain, “for the first things have passed away.”

But we’re not there yet. We’re somewhere in the middle: between Isaiah and Revelation. We’re here with this story from the Gospel of Matthew. I think this story is telling us, among other things, how God is inviting us to be involved as God moves all of Creation from Isaiah’s prophecy to Revelation’s fulfillment. Point A to point B. But the text is more descriptive than prescriptive. It doesn’t really tell us how to get from point A to point B. It tells us that at the end, there are those called “righteous” who enter into eternal life, and those who are not, who enter into eternal punishment. But it also tells us that the righteous (just as much as the unrighteous) were clueless about the fact that in serving the least, they were serving Jesus Christ. They were clueless to the fact that they were being righteous.

So, what are we supposed to do with that? How do we minister to the least-of-these, and in so doing, serve Jesus, all the while without knowing it?

I don’t think I have an exact answer.

But I guess what I’ve learned by meditating on these Scriptures is that I don’t think you can treat the Gospel and the life inside God’s kingdom like a system where you check off your list and certain things happen. The Christian life is not a business, not a system to be governed by a board…of any kind.

I guess Mary figured something like that out too…that with God, you can’t expect the expected…sometimes you have to let the Spirit overshadow you and say “yes” to what God is doing inside of you.

It’s a good thing that our spiritual life doesn’t end when we walk out these doors. Because I think we all need to be wrestling with what these Scriptures call us to do, and who these Scriptures call us to be. And just maybe, while we’re wrestling with these Scriptures, celebrating the inconceivable mystery of the Incarnation, and the Holy Spirit is shaping us to be people who love God and love our neighbors as ourselves, just maybe, we will end up being righteous…and we won’t even know it.

Amen.


Come dearest Child into our hearts and leave your crib behind you.
Let this be where the new Life starts for all who seek and find you.
To you be honor, thanks, and praise for all your gifts this time of grace!
Come conquer and deliver this world and us forever! Amen!
-Fred Pratt Green, 1986

Ninth Tuesday after Pentecost

For the first time in a long while, I set my alarm clock to play the radio to wake me up instead of the usual fog-horn that greets me each morning. This morning, I woke up to the strains of some contemporary Christian song with which I am absolutely unfamiliar.

I don't remember the exact wording of the song, much less the title, so all I'm working with is this paraphrased idea that has stuck in my memory.

Here come the questions. What is this song trying to convey? I think it seeks two things simutaneously, those two being 1) to compare the modern day Christian experience with that of the first disciples whom Jesus called to leave everything and "follow" him, and 2) to imply that it is our love alone that causes us to follow Christ.

I can understand the first "thing" well enough: Jesus calls us to follow him, to step out on faith when we can't exactly see what our foot is going to land on next (much like Indiana Jone's experience on his quest to find the holy grail as he steps out across the chasm immediately preceding his discovery of the room housing the grail). Many times as I read a Gospel passage, I believe Christ is present, speaking the Words he once spoke over again, to me and to those with whom I am reading, if there are any others present (the necesity of the public reading of Scripture is another post). Christ's call is real and lays hold to our modern day lives, regardless of the gadgets and entrapments we have devised that dehumanize our daily experience.

I stop completely understanding, much less believing, when we arrive to the second "thing:"

2) it is our love alone that causes us to follow Christ.

I might be heretical in what I'm about to say, but here goes, regardless.
You may very well can hold thing #2. But I think it is nearly impossible to hold both things #1 and #2 simutaneously. For though it very well may be that some people who claim Christ today also claim that it is "love" that impels them to follow him, I sorely miss this "mark" of discipleship when I read the Gospel accounts of Christ calling the first disciples. Images of Matthew leaving the tax-collecting booth, Peter leaving the fishing-nets and boat, and various others telling siblings about the One from Nazareth and their personal experience with him, followed by a comitment from those with whom they were sharing fill my head.

Yes, there are images of love and devotion, like the woman washing Jesus' feet with her tears and drying them with her hair, and John resting his head against Christ's breast at the Last Supper, but these come later. These come after personal experience with the One whom they have chosen to follow and who has changed their life. Ironically, it is a kiss-a sign of love, right?-that promts these words from Jesus: "You would betray the Son of Man with a kiss?"

Don't get me wrong; I'm not claiming that love has nothing to do with the Christian life, I'm questioning whether or not it is in fact the case that "all we need is love." Actually, I'm positing that it is, in fact, not the case that "all we need is love." God is love, and God is a bunch of other stuff, too. I believe it has been said that people can better say that "God is not..." than "God is..." Because when we say "God is..." our conclusion always ends up being deficient in our attempt to describe the indescribable.

I think many today are attempting to do just that: describe the indescribable. And when they fall short, they fall away. Maybe that's why God left it open ended when Moses asked him who, in fact, God was. God responded "I AM." Or something like that. God is (not conclusively) the source of love, and God is also the source of truth, and justice, and mercy, and righteousness. Maybe if we saw God as more than love, we would see our commitment to him as being more than a loving response. When Christ called Levi-Matthew from the tax-collecting booth, Levi-Matthew didn't say: "I love you, Jesus." He got up and followed.

So back to the song. And thing #1, and thing #2.

For me, it's a non-issue whether I have enough love to follow Jesus. He has called, and I'm gonna get up and do my best to follow. My efforts won't measure up, and I don't expect them to. Jesus doesn't either. He loves me, and over time, I will grow to love him more and more.

At this point in time, I would say that the initial decision to follow Jesus is a whole lot more about faith and action, acceptance of grace and the works that follow suit, and commitment, than the emotional high which our society has come to label love.

Hmm, maybe that's where the problem lies. Love is not an emotional high. In fact, love is not an emotion. Love is not a feeling. Jesus said that you can tell who loves him; they will do what he says.

So maybe thing #1 and thing #2 are related, but just not in the way this particular song, or our culture, would have them to be.

A far cry from a well-thought out argument, this post is simply a record of me questioning what I see as a popularly held, mistaken belief. If by reading this, you come to question our culture as well, then this post will have achieved my purpose.

May the God of hope steel you for the coming trials to come,
that you may find the love of Christ made evident even in horrible, terrible situations,
and may you be made able by God's Holy Spirit to "give thanks in all things" and follow in the Way of Christ regardless of circumstance or emotion. Amen.

*I do need to give credit where credit is due. The use of the word "steel" as a verb has come to me via the Book of Common Prayer, or the liturgy book for the Episcopal Church in the United States. The specific prayer that uses this phrase is located after the Psalter, in the "Prayers and Thanksgivings" section, entitled, "For Sunday..." or something like that.