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"I give you a new commandment," Jesus told his disciples at their last meal together. "As I have loved you, so are you to love one another." And earlier: "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength, and your neighbor as yourself. Everything boils down to this," says Jesus. But how? How is one to love both God and neighbor, love as Jesus loves, with all your heart and soul and mind and strength? A disciple of St. Francis de Sales once asked his master this same question. "Sir," he said, "you speak so much about the love of God, but you never tell us how to achieve it. Won't you tell me how one comes to love God, and to love his neighbor?" And St. Francis replied, "There is only one way, and that is to love." "But you don't understand my question," insisted the disciple. "What I asked was, 'How do you engender this love for God and neighbor?'" And St. Francis said, "By loving them." Once again the pupil came back with the same question, "But what steps do you take? Just what do you do in order to come into the possession of this love?" And St. Francis said, "You begin by loving, and you go on loving, and loving teaches you how to love, and the more you love, the more you learn to love." In other words, you just do it. As Jesus did it. Joe McMordie was an accomplished wood carver. A student of his was trying to carve a little dog one day, and he asked, "Joe, how do you do this? What's the secret of carving?" And Joe said, "It's easy. You pick up a piece of wood, and then you just cut off everything that doesn't look like a dog." Just so says St. Paul, if you want to love, you just peel away from you're life what doesn't look like love. In his praise of love in the thirteenth chapter of his First Letter to the Christians in Corinth, Paul suggest that we begin with envy. Love is not envious, so you carve envy out of your life and discard it. And then, one by one, you carve away boastfulness and arrogance and rudeness and anger and resentment, and you carve away that practice you have of keeping score of all the wrongs done to you, and you peel away self-righteousness. You just do it. And then you begin to expose, in the block of wood which is your life, all the things that do look like love: things like patience and kindness and forbearance and endurance and mercy and trust and the desire to place the good of others before your own. Love, in the end, is always something you do. Like carving. Emil Brunner, a theologian of the past century, once said, "Love is identification with the other person. Love does not 'resist evil.' Instead, love takes evil upon herself, allowing herself to be wronged for the sake of the other with whom love identifies." The prophet Ezekiel points us in the same direction. Ezekiel was carried by the Spirit to Tel-abib by the River Kebar, sent by God to those in exile in distant Babylon. "And there," he says, "I sat where they sat, overwhelmed." And when, at Christmas, God sent Jesus to us who had been exiled from the Garden, Jesus was carried by the Spirit to the River Jordan. And there, like Ezekiel, Jesus sat where we sit, overwhelmed. This is how Paul expresses it: "Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of all compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any troubles with the same comfort we ourselves have received from God." (2 Corinthians 1:3) The Greek word here translated into English as "comfort" is parakalein. Literally, it means to be called to the side of, or to walk beside, and so to strengthen. In other words, it means to sit where they sit, to identify with, so we might profitably understand that what Paul is saying is this: "Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of all compassion and the God of all walking-besidedness, who walks beside us and identifies with us in our troubles, so that we can walk beside and identify with those in any troubles with the same walking-besidedness with which God has walked beside us." That has been the way of God from the beginning. That's how you do it. That's how you love one another as Jesus has loved you. By doing it the way Jesus does it, the way the prophet Ezekiel did it before him, the way St. Paul recommends, the way God has done it all along - by walking beside the beloved, and by sitting where they sit, to encourage and to strengthen. Not all exiles reside in strange and distant lands. Some are in exile closer to home: the lost, the disreputable, the mentally ill, the grieving, the different, those on the margins of society, the anxious, the lonely. How are we to love them as Jesus has loved us? Is there a way we can do it? If you're looking for a way to obey Jesus' new commandment, then perhaps Stephen Ministry or the Care or Outreach Commissions can point a way for you. For that's what they all seek to do; they seek to sit where others sit, to walk beside those who are hurting or anxious or grieving. Perhaps that's for you, if you've ever asked yourself this morning's question: How do you do it? How do you keep Jesus' new commandment? How do you love as Jesus loves you? You just do it, and in doing it learn how to do it. G. K. Chesterton observed that "every heresy has been an attempt to narrow the church." Every heresy, in other words, has been an attempt, as Becky Pippert puts it, to circle the wagons into "holy huddles" of the righteous or like-minded, and to exclude all others. How different from the way of Jesus, who sits where we sit and eats where we eat with whoever is at the table: with the poor, with tax collectors and sinners, with the outcasts of society or those who live on the margins, with the lost, the mentally ill and desperate, the disreputable, the disenfranchised, the hurting - for their sake, not his own. That may be why it is easier, as Jesus says, for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven, because, if one enters heaven through the door of Jesus' love, it has to be by sitting where Jesus sits and walking where he walks, the way of grace. Opportunities to do love are, of course, as nearby as your own home. Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen tells the story of woman named Louisa, who is a highly skilled physician who treats patients with AIDS. Dr. Louisa keeps a picture of her grandmother in her home. Every morning, she says, she sits quietly before her grandmother's picture, recalling an important event from her childhood. When Louisa was a small girl, her kitten was killed in an accident. It was her first experience of death, and she was devastated. Her mom and dad assured her that her kitten was now in heaven with God, so she shouldn't be sad. But Louisa found little comfort in that. She prayed, asking God to give her kitten back. But God did not answer. In her anguish, she turned to her grandmother. "Why?" she asked. Her grandmother lifted her into her lap and held her close. She did not tell Louisa that her kitten was with God. Instead, she reminded her of the time when Grandpa died. She didn't know why either. She prayed, but God did not bring Grandpa back. Louisa turned into the soft warmth of her grandmother's shoulder and sobbed, and when at one point she turned her head, she saw that her grandmother was crying, too. "My grandmother was a lap," Dr. Louisa remembers, "a place of refuge. I know a great deal about AIDS, but what I really want to be for my patients is a lap, a place from which they can face what they have to face and not be alone." (from My Grandfather's Blessings by Rachel Naomi Remen) Opportunities to do love also reach to the ends of the earth, to the seats of power and to those whom power exploits. In Saints and Villains, her novel based on the life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Denise Giardina tells how the young Pastor Bonhoeffer attempted at a church conference in Berlin to get his fellow pastors to stand with the Jews in the 1940s, to sit where they sat in the prisons and concentration camps of the Nazis. "How dare you, young man," replied an older pastor. "Some of us may disagree with Hitler's tactics, Bonhoeffer, but we still love Germany." "Yes," replied Bonhoeffer, "but do you love Jesus?" Which would have been an impertinent question for a young pastor to ask, except that he confirmed the depth of his own love by standing with the Jews and walking with Jesus all the way to the Nazi gallows. To love as Jesus loved is a form of slumming. It is done, not because the slum itself is wonderful or because life in the slums is so great, but because, if another person is ever to experience the love you have for him, he has got to experience you as identifying with him as he is. To learn to love as Jesus loved is to walk, not as the righteous with wagons circled against the world, not as God in some distant heaven, but as God incarnate, as God in flesh and blood who comes to sit with sinners in our exile here on earth, east of Eden. It is by Jesus' sitting where we sit that we have come to know the love he has for us. Jesus does that because his own righteousness is less important to him than ours! "God made him who had no sin to be sin for us," as St. Paul says, "so that in him we might become the righteousness of God." On his way to Calvary, Jesus did what St. Francis de Sales commends. He put one foot in front of the other, walking his way to the Cross. And on the Cross, he sat where we sit, outside the camp, outside the city gates, outside the circle of righteousness, east of Eden, identifying with us because He loves us, becoming sin for us at the cost of his own righteousness so that we might know and do the same love for each other. So how? How do we love as Jesus loves us? By doing it! By putting one foot in front of the other. By sitting with those we are called to love, by sitting where they sit - in pain as well as in joy, in loneliness as well as in loveliness, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, in adversity as well as prosperity, in the lostness of grief as well as in the fellowship of peace. It's something anybody can do. All it takes is the willingness to do it, and the grace to accept the willingness. It all boils down to this - to the willingness to do it and to the grace to accept the willingness - which is, as St. James reminds us, the only religion worth practicing, precisely because it's no religion at all, but simply the love of God made manifest in the reality of flesh and blood. Here's a parable. It's a true story, factual, but a parable all the same. It's Becky Pippert's wonderful story, her story about how she met a student at Stanford University named Bill when she was part of a campus ministry there. It's her story about how for months she had invited Bill to be part of the worship and fellowship of her Presbyterian church across the street. And about how, one Sunday morning, after months of reluctance, Bill came. Bill, she says, was one of the strange ones of the campus, a seeker who lived outside fashionable circles, uncertain of himself. Becky was sure, she says, that Bill had worn the same pair of blue jeans every day since she had met him, and that they had never been washed. His tee shirts were those with all sorts of politically incorrect messages, and with bangles and beads and odds and ends hanging from them. And you could never mistake Bill for someone else; you could identify him easily by his hair, which was blue and long on one side and orange and short on the other. And just so was Bill adorned on that Sunday morning. Becky was already in church, sitting near the back, when Bill came in. It was a most proper church, Becky says, a fashionable church. And we know what that means, because there is no church more proper and fashionable than a proper Presbyterian church. Unless it's a proper Episcopal church. Well, Bill was late when he arrived, and the church was packed. And there weren't any seats available in the back pews. As it turned out, there weren't any seats in any pew. So just as the pastor was about the begin his sermon, Bill strolled slowly down the aisle, and a deep hush fell over the congregation. Not out of anticipation of what the pastor was about to say, but in astonishment at Bill, as he continued his slow pace down the aisle, pausing to peer into each pew along the way to see if there was a place for him. And there wasn't. So Bill continued on alone, with everyone staring at him, until he reached the front. And, finding no seat in a pew, he sat down on the floor, right under the pulpit. The pastor was waiting, and everyone was watching, for what seemed an eternity. And then everyone gradually became aware that one of the ushers, an elder of the church, was making his way down the aisle behind Bill. He was one of the 'pillars' of the church, the usher, a charter member, an elderly retired banker wearing the three-piece suit he always wore to church. And although he was walking with difficulty because of his arthritis, he was most decidedly and steadily making his way forward to where Bill sat, sprawled on the carpet and peering up at the pastor, jeans and tee shirt and hair and all. And Becky Pippert confesses that all the while she was thinking to herself, "Oh, my! Well, you really can't blame the usher for what he's about to do. He and Bill live in such different worlds; they share almost nothing in common. It's his job to seat people in the appropriate way, and he's an elder, after all. He can't be blamed for being upset. Anyone can understand what he's about to do." And the silence deepened as the elderly man continued his arthritic way down the aisle until he reached Bill. And then, slowly and painfully, he lowered himself to sit beside Bill on the floor. The Good News of today's Gospel reading is: Who, in that church that day, would you say loved Bill as Jesus does? And I know that some of you, who have heard this story several times now, might want to ask me another question after church today: When, Dayle, are you going to stop telling a story you've told so many times before, and preach a different sermon? And the answer is...? In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. |