The Power of Love

Deuteronomy 34:1-12

Psalm 90:1-6, 13-17

1 Thessalonians 2:1-8

Matthew 22:34-46

I guess it was about eight years ago that my wife and daughter and I went to a funky hot springs resort up in the Sierras for a few days’ of cheap vacation.  My younger brother met us there and the next morning he made a careless mistake.  I probably should have said something when we arrived, to remind him to be on his guard, because there we were, relaxing on the front porch of the old hotel and making small talk with some of the other guests, when my brother nonchalantly “outed” me as an Episcopal priest.  An awkward silence fell over the group and I braced myself for what might come next.   I didn’t have to wait long, because right away, one of our new acquaintances, a guy of in his mid-fifties with long gray hair in a t-shirt with a Celtic design, started to let me have it.

It turned out he was an ex-Catholic and he wanted to know why “The Church” hadn’t stopped the U.S. from invading Iraq.  And even though it was the last thing in the world I wanted to be doing on my vacation, I tried to respond respectfully to his complaints.  After all, there was something kind of touching about his belief that “The Church” might still have the moral authority, let alone the political power, that he imagined it had.  But the more I talked to him, the clearer it became that he wasn’t really interested in learning anything from me about the real church or the real politics of the nation.  He just kept coming back around to his anger about the war, and his insistence that “The Church” should have prevented it.  Finally, all I could say was, “brother, if you feel so strongly about what The Church should be doing, maybe you ought to go to church.”

Jesus was no stranger to antagonists.  People were forever coming up to him in public and starting arguments, trying to put him on the defensive and paint him into a verbal corner.  And these were high-stakes games, because in those days the Jewish religion wasn’t just a set of private beliefs.   For the Jews, religious life and identity were the heartbeat of their nation and of that nation’s politics.  It had been so since that legendary time when Moses led the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt, and Joshua took them into Canaan, to take possession of the land.  And in Jesus’ time the Jews were in a long and profound religious and political crisis brought on by the domination of Rome. 

That domination allowed them a certain amount of latitude to perform their sacrifices, and celebrate their festivals, and study and teach their scriptures.  But for the Jews the purpose of those sacrifices was to seal their covenant with the one true God, who had chosen them to reveal his glory among the nations.  And their festivals were charged with the stories of God’s mighty acts in history, to deliver them from the oppression of cruel foreign tyrants.  And their scriptures recounted those stories and assured them again and again of the sovereign majesty of their God, and the righteousness of His law, and His coming judgment that would vindicate their cause before all the rulers of the earth.

It’s no wonder, then, that it rankled the Jews to look up from their prayers in the courts of their temple in Jerusalem and see soldiers on the walls of a Roman fortress peering down at them with watchful eyes.     They asked themselves how long it would be before God would act, and when they would be truly free, and what they should do in the meantime.  And they splintered into different sects and parties—Herodians, Sadducees, Pharisees—whose differences of religion were also differences of policy.  Their disputes about how to be faithful were also about how to survive and how to resist. 

The hot spot of these controversies was, of course, Jerusalem and the temple itself, and it is there that Jesus’ mission inevitably leads him.  The Gospels tell how when he gets there each one of these parties sends its best debaters to spar with him, to try to show him up or trick him into saying something that will get him into trouble.   But he parries every attack, and escapes every trap, and so we come to this final encounter with the Pharisees.  One of them asks him which is the greatest of the commandments in the law, and Jesus gives one of his trademark responses, one that doesn’t exactly answer the original question:  “’You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind'” he says, quoting the book of Deuteronomy, “This is the greatest and first commandment.  But this commandment by itself is out of balance, like a picture hanging crooked on the wall, without another commandment that is also first and greatest—the one in the Book of Numbers that says `You shall love your neighbor as yourself.'      

It’s a wonderful answer, and we could stop right there and award Jesus the prize for “best religious teacher.”  But he didn’t go to Jerusalem to win prizes.  The equal and interdependent love of God and neighbor isn’t just a nice idea, and Jesus shows this by turning the tables on the Pharisees and asking them a question.  It’s a question about the Messiah, about what kind of leader God will send to free Israel from her oppressors and establish justice and peace.  It is a question about what kind of power that leader will use to put his enemies under his feet.   Because the time for arguing about interpretations is over— Jesus has come to Jerusalem to act, to display the power that will make the promises of God come true.  It is the power of love, and Jesus will put that power into action on the cross.

No one ever had more to give to his neighbors than Jesus.  His unsurpassed spiritual enlightenment, his wisdom that communicated the tangible closeness of God, his uncanny ability to perceive the inner thoughts and motivations of others, his extraordinary power to heal and even to raise the dead: you would have to say his potential to do good in the world was second to none.  And so, if he really loved his neighbor as himself, you would think he would have done everything he could to live as long as possible.  He would have used his gifts to political advantage and gained as much worldly influence as he could.  He certainly would not have thrown his life away as if it were of no value, as if he were a common criminal or a rebellious slave.

But that is what he did, and from the human point of view, it made him a total failure.  It only makes sense as an act of love for God.   For the love of God, love with all his heart, and soul, and mind, Jesus was willing to surrender all that he had, all those extraordinary gifts that he used to such good effect on behalf of his neighbor.  And it was this total giving of himself that made his unparalleled giftedness complete.  Anything less, and the story could never have taken its next turn.  Jesus might have been remembered in history as a great religious reformer, or a national hero and a righteous king, but he never would have become the Christ of God.  

And this is where the love of Jesus for God circles back around to his neighbor.  On the cross Jesus emptied himself, and so left open a space for us—for our gifts, our faith, and hope, and love.  In his resurrection God filled that space with power, so that through people like us, the love of God in Christ has reached more people, and done more good, than any merely human love could ever have done.   The power of the gospel is God the Spirit working through human love, human prayers, human acts, and, yes, human institutions.  That is its limitation, but also its invincible strength. 

And when we give some portion of our own lives to the Gospel, we are humbly staking our claim to a share of its power.  We are trusting that what we surrender for love, God will use, and multiply abundantly through the gifts of our neighbor.  This is the creative law of the universe, and the power of its health and salvation.  And there is one place I know of where that law has a name and a story, where it has honor, and they study and teach it and hope for its future; one place in the world where, however imperfectly, they know they have no other purpose than to make it the basis of everything they do—a place called “The Church.” 

  

Sitting at the lower place

Jeremiah 2:4-13
Psalm 81:1, 10-16
Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16
Luke 14:1, 7-14

Every year the seminary that I went to gives out a prize for the best preacher in the graduating class.  And by the time I was a senior there, I thought maybe that prize would be mine. I’d given sermons at my home parish in San Francisco before I even went to seminary, and many more at and my field education site once I got there, and the responses I received gave me confidence that this was something I was good at.  It’s a tradition at the seminary that on Tuesdays throughout the year, one of the seniors gives the sermon at the mid-day Eucharist.  And from what I’d seen and heard there, I thought I measured up well against the competition.  I was proud of my own senior sermon, and when the call went out later in the year for a student volunteer to fill an open date on the preaching calendar, I jumped at the chance to give another. 

So I liked my chances to win the prize; and as our class was lining up for the commencement ceremony, and bishops and rectors of cardinal parishes of the church were coming down the line, giving us their congratulations, I couldn’t help fantasizing about that moment when I would hear my name called and, in front of my classmates, and the faculty, and all those distinguished guests, I would walk up to the podium to claim my reward.  And when the ceremony began, and we’d marched in, and were in our seats, and the big moment was drawing near, my heart was racing.  Finally, the Homiletics Professor and Dean of the seminary went to the microphone and announced that the winner of the Rt. Rev. Richard Millard Prize for Excellence in Preaching for the class of 2005 was…Katherine Kelley. 

I was stunned.  I didn’t know until that moment just how much I had wanted that award, and how certain I had been that they would give it to me.  As I struggled with my emotions, I thought I saw some of my classmates stealing glances at me, as if they knew that I’d been expecting to win, and I imagined that the color of my face betrayed my disappointment, and I was ashamed.  Suddenly I was no longer paying attention to what was happening around me.  The ceremony kept moving along toward the moment when I also would be called up to the podium, to receive that diploma that I’d worked so hard to get, that only a few years earlier seemed forever out of my reach, but I was stuck back there, thinking of the honor I had been denied: “Kathy Kelley?  The one with the voice like a rusty hinge?  How is this possible?”

Finally, I pulled myself together.  I recalled that I had missed Kathy Kelley’s senior sermon, and that for all I knew she was an outstanding preacher.  As the commencement exercises ended, and I looked for her in the crowd to congratulate her, I remembered the Baccalaureate dinner a couple of nights before.  After dessert, the seniors had the opportunity to get up and make some farewell remarks to the seminary community.  Mine were pretty lame—your basic “I want to thank everyone who made this moment possible” kind of speech.  But Kathy Kelley’s was oratory, a wise and heartfelt tribute to the lay people at Trinity, Sacramento who had nurtured her faith and her call to ministry.  She ended by admonishing us all to honor the laity of the church, and lead them and serve them with humility and love.  When she was finished the room was completely silent for a long moment, and then burst into applause.

Academic prizes are only one way our society singles people out for honor.  The cultural code that assigns us our places in the pecking order is extremely complex, and it depends on everything from the brands we display on our clothes and our cars, to the neighborhoods where we live and the places where we work and the schools where we send our children, from how we spend our vacations to where we sit when we go to the ball park.  But in Jesus’ day the code was simpler.  There weren’t that many ways to stake a claim to prestige.  And one of the main places it was done was at wedding feasts and dinner parties.  Who could hold the most lavish banquet, and who would be invited, and who would not, and who would accept the invitation, and where they would sit when they came—these were the things that mattered in the high-stakes game of social standing. 

And that is why the documents of the New Testament contain so many passages about wedding feasts and social banquets.  That is why the Gospel of Luke remembers Jesus’ remarks to supper guests in the house of a leader of the Pharisees.  Because in this passage Jesus isn’t giving advice about banquet etiquette—he’s pointing out the senselessness of fighting with your friends over rank.  It’s all just based on someone else’s opinion, and honor can turn to shame in an instant, and starting out at the bottom is just as promising a strategy as starting out at the top.   This is also why it is so radical for Jesus to tell his host that he’d be better off inviting the kind of guests to his party who don’t get invited to the better sort of affairs and can do nothing to burnish his reputation.  Because the only reputation that matters in the end is the one we have in the eyes of God, and God’s idea of who is honorable, and who is not, is not like ours.   

There was a time, not so very long ago, when attending a church like St. John’s was one way to lay claim to social prestige.  If you wanted to establish your credentials as a solid citizen and a moral person, someone of good character, whose acquaintance would reflect well on others, it paid to belong to a church.  And I would guess that this church gave its members that extra touch of distinction that some of the others did not.  Now I’m not saying that there weren’t a lot of genuinely devout and faithful people here, at every stage of the 167-year history of St. John’s.  But I do think it’s safe to say that there were also some of the other kind.  And somewhere along the line those folks stopped coming here, because it was paying diminishing social returns.

Today going to church is no guarantee of respect.  Indeed, there are some circles where it marks one out as a bigot, or a credulous fool.  There are others for whom church is still valuable for social climbing, but they tend to prefer places a little more fashionable than ours.  And we, who used to sit at the highest place at the table, now find ourselves nearer to the lowest.  But I think that if we’re truthful to the wisdom of our tradition, we’d have to say that it’s a better place to be.   At the low place it’s easier to remember that social status is an idol, a cracked cistern that holds no water. It’s easier to remember that honor is just shame that hasn’t shown up at the party yet.  At the low place it’s easier to remember what it is like to be uninvited, to be on wrong side of the codes of social acceptance.  In the low place it’s easier to remember how treating others on the basis of what they can do for our social standing is an affront to God.

It’s also a place where it’s easier to remember Jesus, and the dinner parties that he had, where he ate and drank and celebrated the Kingdom of God with tax-collectors and prostitutes.  It’s easier to remember how he sat at table with the one who would betray him, and the ones who would desert him, and said, “this is my Body, given for you.”  From the low place we keep the feast that he commanded, holding in highest honor the last meal of a condemned man.  Everyone is invited to this feast, where we come not for distinction, but forgiveness, where we belong, not to an exclusive social set, but to the eternal kingdom of the love of the one creator of us all.