Proper 9C The Violence of Love

 

The Violence of Love

“The Violence we preach is not

            the violence of the sword,

            the violence of hatred.

 It is the violence of love,

            of brotherhood,

 the violence that wills to beat weapons

            into sickles for work.” 

– Archbishop Oscar Romero, November 27, 1977

 These words from the martyred Bishop of El Salvador, Oscar Romero, “The Violence of Love,” are meant to shock us into waking up! How will love and brotherhood beat weapons into sickles for work? Isaiah, some 2600 years before the Archbishop imagined a world in which we will “beat swords into ploughshares, and spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation; neither shall they learn war anymore.”[i] It’s a vision of a world that becomes God’s kingdom, or, God’s dream – “a friendly world of friendly folk beneath a friendly sky.”[ii] It’s a dream of Shalom, Peace – justice and peace for all people, where everyone respects the dignity of every human being – beings created in the image of God.

 

Jesus has set his face toward Jerusalem. Jesus shares this dream of God’s. He sends 70 of his followers to the towns he plans to visit to announce that we can all live in the world of God’s dream here, and now.[iii] As has always been the case, a lot of folks are just not friendly – living out of visions of fear and scarcity. Jesus instructs his advance teams to offer God’s Shalom wherever they go. If others accept the news, God’s Shalom will remain with them. If not, eat whatever they offer you, and when you leave remind them that nevertheless, the dream of God’s Shalom is at hand. It is near. Just reach out and you can touch it, feel it, see it.

 

Some verses have been left out. For those who reject the news, Jesus says, it will be better for Sodom than it will be for them. The Sodomites who would not open their homes in a spirit of hospitality and shalom for all, which had been the custom of our people all the way back to when the ancestors were nomads, wanderers, sojourners in foreign lands. You were once strangers in an inhospitable Egypt, unwelcome except to be worked to the bone. The Sodomites are described by a first century historian as, “overweeningly proud of their numbers and the extent of their wealth, insolent to men and to God, not remembering they had received from God, they hated foreigners…so God resolved to chastise them.”[iv] The Talmud describes them this way: “Since bread comes forth from our earth, and it has gold dust, why should we suffer wayfarers, who come to us only to deplete our wealth? Come, let us abolish the practice of traveling in our land.”[v] As the prophet Ezekiel succinctly summarizes their guilt: “This was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy.” [vi]

 

We are to welcome wayfarers and sojourners in the land, of course, because it is not our land, it is God’s, and God’s dream is one of sharing with others as they have need. This is the very heart of the command to love God and love neighbor. Because we were once poor and needy and God offered us a helping hand. Madeliene L’Engle, in The Wind in the Door, writes, “This is what love is: Love is not a feeling, it is what you do. To which God would add, “for others.” Love is what you do for others.

 

Evidently the advance teams are hospitable to the people they meet, because they return joyfully proclaiming, "Lord, in your name even the demons submit to us!" Jesus at first is pleased to hear the news of their success, but then must remind them that much like his own authority, their success points beyond them to God as the source of all they were able to do, all authority, and indeed life itself.[vii] The real source for their success is God working through them.

 

The lesson in Luke Chapter 10: welcome strangers, welcome sojourners in the land, as Abraham had entertained strangers, as our people has welcomed and met the needs of any and all who travel through our land – all that is, except the Sodomites, who paid the price for lacking hospitality with fire and brimstone. Hospitality is at the heart of the Dream of God!

 

This begs the question: when it comes to hospitality and love for strangers, who is the Host? It is God in Christ Jesus. We are sent out as his representatives. His ambassadors. The advance teams carrying out God’s dream of a friendly world of friendly folk beneath a friendly sky. Sure, the work is hard – Archbishop Romero was assassinated for proclaiming God’s love - and our work never seems to end. But when we forget our appointed work as those who welcome strangers, the results are tragic, as they were just this past week at our southern border: 53 wayfarers left to die in an abandoned and locked truck in San Antonio, Texas.

 

The Apostle Paul writes to the church in Galatia, “So let us not grow weary in doing what is right, for we will reap at harvest-time, if we do not give up. So then, whenever we have an opportunity, let us work for the good of all, and especially for those of the family of faith.”[viii]

 

We must never forget, we are here by the grace of the God of mercy, forgiveness and steadfast love. God is the Host, now and always. We work on God’s behalf, not that of the kingdoms of this world. We are not guardians of God’s table, but servants at his table. We are not gatekeepers, but rather those who fling wide the gates to one and all. We are those people who have promised to seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving our neighbor as ourself.

 

All of this is what Archbishop Oscar Romero means by “The Violence of Love” – A love that welcomes all others to share in the Dream of God. A love of justice and peace for all people. A love that offers hospitality to others – all others -to share all that we have and all that we are: God’s people, sojourners in God’s world who seek to sustain the vision of God’s Dream such that all that we say and all that we do proclaims that the promise of God’s Shalom is near, at hand, here in this place, now and forever and ever. Amen.

---

[i] Isaiah 2:4

[ii] Howard Thurman, quoted in Verna Dozier’s, The Dream of God (Cowley Publications, Cambridge,MA:1991) p.31.

[iii] Luke 10:1-11, 16-20

[iv] Josephus, Antiquities 1:194-95

[v] Babylonian Talmud, tractate Sanhedrin 109a

[vi] Ezekiel 16:49

[vii] Ring, Sharon, Luke (Westminster John Knox Press, Louisville, KY: 1995) p.154

[viii] Galatians 6:9-10

Love Our Enemies? Proper 8C

 

The Primacy of Love: Love Our Enemies?

“When the days drew near for Jesus to be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem.”[i] He sets off with purpose and intention. Unlike the rest of his countrymen, he decides to go through Samaria as the most direct route to get to what he knows will be a showdown with both the religious authorities and civil authorities in Jerusalem – literally, “City of Shalom, City of Peace.” Jesus sends messengers ahead, but they did not “receive him, because his face was set toward Jerusalem.”

 

Although the Jews and Samaritans worshipped the One God and shared a common ancestry, they had been divided for centuries over where one is to worship the One God. Jesus could have gone around the Samaritan region, but chooses to give it a chance. Nevertheless, his presence is rebuffed, rebuked. His messengers, James and John, “the sons of Thunder,” want to rain down fire and destruction on the inhospitable Samaritans. Jesus rebukes them. “But,” say the brothers, “they are the ones rebuking you! Why are your rebuking us? It’s what Elijah would do – what he did do to the prophets of Baal.”

 

Jesus tells them to look at their wrist bands – “Take off those WWED – what would Elijah do – wrist bands. Put on this WWJRD – What Would Jesus Really Do – wrist band and remember that I said we are to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us! It’s time for love, not fire and destruction! I have an appointment to make in Jerusalem. Let’s keep going forward. And, repeat after me, “We are Sons of Love, not Sons of Thunder!”

 

Seriously, I ask myself, this is the Lesson we are given after a week like we have just been through? I am always amazed at how the Revised Common Lectionary so often does this at just the right moment.

 

As Mike Royko, a columnist in Chicago when I was growing up, used to say, “I may be wrong, but I doubt it.” If we thought the country was divided a week ago, consider: two more bombshell hearings of the January 6 commission, the Supreme Court decides all people should have the right to conceal carry  deadly weapons, and then turns around and demolishes the rights that have been in place for nearly 50 years striking down Roe v Wade. It is a week that makes the Hatfield and McCoy-like dispute between Jerusalem and Samaria look pretty tame.

 

Our texts as they confront us this week seem to be asking: are we going to be reflexive, retributive and reactionary like the Sons of Thunder? Or, are we going to take Jesus seriously and love our enemies and keep going forward, one day and one step at a time? Is it time for fire and destruction? Or, is it time for the mercy, forgiveness and steadfast love of the Lord God and our neighbors? All neighbors, enemies included.

 

No matter where one stands on all of these issues, it is time to find out what the love of God and love of neighbor really truly must look like. Jesus recognizes that standing off against one another does not help us to encourage light and life for all persons. Does not help us to strive for justice and peace for all persons. Does not help us to respect the dignity of every single human being.

Paul reminds us that to walk with Christ is freedom.  True freedom. Not to do whatever I want to do, but to do what Christ does, and greater things than these. This will lead us to serve others as he always does.[ii]

 

At times like this I find myself recalling Pastor Martin Niemoller who spent seven years in concentration camps for publicly opposing Adolph Hitler. When the war was over, he said this:

 

First, they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.

 

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a trade unionist.

 

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.

 

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

 

In every era one can insert the names of groups being threatened and Neimoller’s challenge remains the same. It seems it is always time to set one’s face to go to Jerusalem.

 

May God the Father, Jesus his Son and the Holy Spirit help us and guide us to learn what it means to love our neighbor, including our enemies. The future of the Republic depends on our walking with Jesus on His Way to Jerusalem, The Way toward Resurrection and New Life for all. Amen.

 

---

[i] Luke 9:51-62

[ii] Galatians 5:1,13-25

Proper 7C I Don't Have a Home in This World Anymore

 

I don’t have a home in this world anymore….

Thursday, June 16, 2022 began like any other day for the people of St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church, Vestavia Hills, Birmingham, Alabama: a parish group of pilgrims led by their rector, The Reverend John Buruss, began walking in the footsteps of Paul in Athens and Corinth, Greece; The Reverend Katherine Harper led a Live-Stream of Morning Prayer; others, no doubt, were preparing for the evening’s upcoming pot-luck supper. Later that evening, at St. Stephen’s, and for many throughout the country, life was changed by a senseless act of violence that took the lives of three people at the supper. In the words of rector John Buruss+, “hearts are broken…and I cannot begin to fathom how painful this is for our entire church, and the larger community.” I once attended a luncheon in a church basement where the guest speaker observed that wherever there is pain somewhere in the Church, we all hurt. It is safe to say this is true in the world, not just the Church. With each mass-shooting event, there are thousands, if not millions for whom the pain and grief is present, almost as if they were there.

 

Having been through a similar event ten years ago at St Peter’s Ellicott City, the seemingly never- ending onslaught of such mass-shooting events means the triggers that result from the trauma of such an event fire-off: immediately sometimes, and in delay other times. Lately, given Buffalo, Uvalde, and now St. Stephen’s, those triggers have no time to reset. In 2022 alone there have been more than one mass-shooting event per day. Every day. After hearing about St. Stephen’s, I reached out to a friend who is from Birmingham and who was also at St. Peter’s when a man walked into our office, shot and killed my two closest colleagues in ministry: Brenda Brewington and The Reverend Mary-Marguerite Kohn. She knows people at St. Stephen’s. After we talked, I proceeded to swim laps in the pool to work off some of the anxiety that was building up in me – PTSD can be a whole-body, mind and soul experience. I then pushed myself to post a Live-Stream Prayer Service for St. Stephen’s, with prayers and a Psalm from the Book of Common Prayer. It was an act of self-care as much as an outreach to others who might need a few words of strength to continue their own day upon hearing the news.

 

A diocesan official texted to see how I was doing, who also knows people at St. Stephen’s. Someone else called to check in. Then I did what I most often do at such times: I picked up my guitar and began to play My Heart with Filled with Love by Joyce Andersen, Mercy Now by Mary Gauthier, and I Ain’t Got No Home in This World Anymore by Woody Guthrie. It can feel like that for survivors of these mass-shooting events. The reality is, we are all survivors. I was recently asked if survivor’s guilt is a real thing. It is.

 

For Sunday, I was planning to pick up on the theme of “Going Home” at the end of this week’s gospel, Luke 8:26-39. Jesus invites the crowd of disciples traveling with him to visit a man in Gentile territory so possessed by demons who had been chained with no clothes in a tomb far away from his home town. Jesus restores him to his right mind. When his neighbors see him now clothed and in his right mind we are told, “they were afraid.” More afraid than when he was possessed and they removed him from town. Understandably, the man wants to travel with Jesus and his companions, but Jesus says to him, "Return to your home, and declare how much God has done for you." We all need to return home.  It is Augustine who reminds us, “Lord God, our hearts are restless until we find our home in thee.”

 

Whether or not I am in my right mind is open to interpretation, but it is this instruction that leads me to share all of this with all who care to listen. The implications of an event like that at St. Stephen’s or St. Peter’s, or Buffalo and Uvalde and, and and, is far reaching. Each event, of which there have been more than one for each day of this year, triggers a crisis of faith and of feelings and a sense of déjà vu for countless numbers of people throughout our church and throughout our country. To quote a friend of Woody’s, “when will it ever end, when will it ever end.” [Pete Seeger] By which I mean, when will we stop the tsunami of guns, including weapons of warfare, into our society?

 

I write. I sing. I run. I swim. And I am fortunate there are those who know my survivor-story that call or text or email to see how I am doing each time. Checking in on one another is God’s way of making a difference. This is how I have learned to cope over the past decade. I invite you to sing along, or listen, or call your congress person or senator, or call someone you know is hurting today, or whatever helps you to sleep after each time we re-live one mass-shooting event after another. We are all of us survivors over and over again. As the old spiritual says, “I sing, because I’m happy/ and I sing because I’m free/ his eye is on the sparrow/ and I know he’s watching over me….” Sing for St. Stephen’s and everyone everywhere who carries the burden of the endless carnage that ravishes our good land. We are all looking for home in the steadfast love of God and one another. This is what God has done for me. Share with others what God in Christ as done for you. It will make you and all of us whole once again. Which is what healing is all about: wholeness and love. As it is for the man in the story – there is a home for us in this world when we walk together as children of God.

You Are Home

 

Be unbound

Go back to your home

 

You are free

You are whole

You are loved

You are home once again

You are home

 

Be made whole

You are no longer alone

 

You are free

You are whole

You are loved

You are home once again

You are home

You are home

You are home, once again

 

Copyright Sounds Divine

Kirk Kubicek

You Are Home Once Again

Pentecost 2022 - The Primacy of Love

 

Pentecost 2022-The Primacy of Love

The essence of Pentecost and the Good News of Jesus is: We come from Love – We return to Love – We belong to Love – Love is All Around! God is Love. We belong to Love!

 

The feast of Pentecost was an Israelite spring harvest festival that also celebrated a renewal of the peoples’ Covenant with the God of the Passover-Exodus event. As a group of 120 frightened men and women from Galilee were hiding from the Jerusalem and Roman authorities, the Spirt arrives with a sound “like wind,” and something “like fire.” This recalls that the Spirit descended upon Jesus at his baptism “like a dove.” There was no dove, no wind or fire, and no words to describe what it was like that day in Jerusalem. Jesus’s baptism and Pentecost were such mighty and mysterious events that there are no words to adequately describe them! Storyteller Luke must resort to figures of speech that can only suggest the arrival of the Spirit is “like” wind, fire and a dove.

 

We also note that these events were not personal inner experiences – but rather an outpouring of God’s energy that touches everyone present! All those visitors from all those other countries were astonished!  Someone who attends our Noonday Prayer likened it all as “an astonishing miracle of overwhelming grace!” Like the crowd in Jerusalem at 9:00am that morning of Pentecost, we ask ourselves, “What does this mean?”

 

It means that all people from all over the world, from every nation, every tribe, every family, are people of the Spirit – the Spirit of Love! At his baptism, Jesus hears a voice declare, “You are my Beloved – I am well pleased with you!” I have long believed that when we are baptized, there are Seraphim and Cherubim whispering in our ears, “You are God’s Beloved! God is well pleased with you!” We are God’s Beloved! God is well pleased with us! This is the Good News! Every day we wake up we are forgiven, we are loved and can begin again – renewed, revived to return to God’s way of Love as described in our Covenant promises to seek and serve Christ in all persons, and to strive for justice and peace for all persons. All persons are worthy of God’s love.

 

Martyr and Saint, Archbishop Oscar Romero once said it like this: "Each of us has an individual greatness. God would not be our author if we were something worthless. 

You and I and all of us are worth very much, because we are creatures of God, 

and God has prodigally given his wonderful gifts to every person."

- Archbishop Oscar Romero, September 4, 1977

 

As we join Isabelle and Kaitlyn who are being baptized today and renew our own Baptismal Covenant, let us know that the essence of it all is that God loves us, and calls us to love one another – including strangers, enemies and people from all over the world. For all people and all creatures on earth come from Love, will return to love, and are sustained by the love that surrounds us on all sides! We belong to Love. For God is Love. We are God’s Beloved. God is well pleased with us. All of us are worth very much, because we are creatures of God! Amen.

Ascension 2022 - The Valley of Pain

 Ascension 2022 – The Valley of Pain

With little time to process the targeted killing of 10 people in a Buffalo, NY supermarket, suddenly we are immersed in the killing of 19 young elementary school children and two adults in Uvalde, TX. In both cases, the shooters purchased AR-15 style automatic weapons legally at age 18 from Federally licensed dealers. A photo from what looks like a church or school yard in Macedonia, OH shows 21 chairs lined up outside in front of the building: 19 child-size chairs, with an adult-size chair on either end – a photo summarizing more than 1,000 words of pain, grief, anger and sorrow. Meanwhile, we are reminded with horrendous images from the eastern Ukraine Donbas region almost daily where at least 4,000 non-combatant citizens have been killed by the Russian invaders.

 

One afternoon in May of 2012, I returned to St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, Ellicott City, MD, to find that my two closest colleagues in ministry, Brenda Brewington and The Reverend Mary Marguerite Kohn, had been shot execution style in the church office by a young man with a gun who took his own life in the woods nearby. Each time one of these mass shooting events takes place, there are countless numbers of people throughout the country and throughout the world who have memories of similar events in their own lives brought back as if it were happening again, over and over again. Right here. Right now.

 

It's easy to overlook what lies at the heart of storyteller Luke’s two versions of what the church remembers as The Ascension of our Lord Jesus Christ. In his two-volume work, Luke-Acts, beginning with the events of what we call Holy Week, the 120 men and women Luke tells us who were in Jerusalem with Jesus had witnessed the brutality of the Roman Empire’s use of crucifixion not only of their Lord and companion, but of others, all others, whom the Empire considered a threat to what the Empire deemed law and order of its authoritarian regime. Both Luke and John describe the 120 as hiding in fear of who among them may be next. Children and teachers throughout these United States know this kind of fear as they practice “active shooter” drills just to be able to go to school each day.

 

A colleague I have never met reminds us that Richard Rohr, a Franciscan friar and priest, has said, “All great spirituality is about what we do with our pain. If we do not transform our pain, we will transmit it to those around us.” [i]

 

All week at our Live-Stream Noonday Prayer I have been reminded that the Ascension, which Luke describes twice, once at the end of the gospel and again at the opening of the Book of the Acts of the Apostles,[ii] is not really about Jesus finally, forty days after Easter, forty days having returned from the tomb to appear among his followers, finally returning from whence we all come and to where we will all one day return. It is about us, the survivors, and what we are to do, as Jesus modeled over and over again - what we need to do to transform our pain, our grief, our anger and what often feels like paralyzing, numbing sorrow.

 

Both accounts of the Ascension in Luke-Acts depict Jesus’s departure as a teachable moment. Jesus is giving instructions that must have sounded dangerous if not outright insane: remain in the city, stay in Jerusalem as “my witnesses” – witnesses as to how we are to live even in the midst of the terror and pain of our present circumstances as an occupied people. Like those 120 men and women disciples, we are to remember that Christ is already Lord of a Kingdom like none we have ever seen or experienced in human history. A Kingdom, a world, in which spears are to be turned into pruning hooks, and guns melted down to become gardening tools.[iii]

 

As the 120 men and women gaze up into the sky at the departing Christ, two men in white robes suddenly appear nearby. We have seen them before. The women immediately recognize them as the two men robed in white who greeted them at the empty tomb.[iv] “Why do you stand looking up into heaven?’ they now say. Translation: Did you not hear the man? You are to be his witnesses back in the city of Jerusalem, and in Samaria, and to the ends of the Earth! You have been called by him to live God’s peaceful tomorrow today! Get going! He has promised to send his Spirit, his Power, his Love, his Compassion to clothe you from on high as his witnesses, his ambassadors to all the peoples of the world. Get back to the city. Get to work! There is much work to be done to transform the pain, grief, anger and sorrows of the world into a joyful and peaceful tomorrow today!

 

Yet, the deeper truth of the Ascension is that Jesus never really leaves us. Whenever we gather to share the bread and the wine, his body, his blood, he is here. Whenever we reach out to feed the hungry, heal those in dis-ease, welcome the stranger, care for the poor, the discarded, the outsiders, he is here. Whenever we sing the glory of these Great Fifty Days of Easter, and pray the Psalms, he is here. Whenever we pray the final words of Holy Scripture, “Come, Lord Jesus, come,” he is here. He is with us in our pain, in our grief, in our anger and in our sorrow. Alleluia, alleluia he is here! Reminding us to stop gazing into heaven and get to work living God’s peaceful tomorrow today! Amen.

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[i] Tim Seitz-Brown on Facebook

[ii] Luke 24:44-53,  Acts 1:1-11

[iii] Ibid Seitz-Brown

[iv] Luke 24:1-12

Rogation Sunday 2022 Easter 6C

 

Healing the Earth / Healing Ourselves

“Let your ways be known upon earth, your saving health among all nations.” Psalm 67:2

            I was listening to Robin Wall Kimmerer, a botanist and a First Nations member of the Civil Potawatomie Nation as she combines science with the wisdom of her elders as to our relationship with the Earth. In her nation’s native language there is no word for “it,” our much used indefinite pronoun. As a result, one does not think of, let alone address, a plant, or an animal, or even rocks, rivers and streams as “it,” anymore than anyone of us would refer to dear old Aunt Grace as “it.” Science does objectify such things, whereas Kimmerer’s nation treats everything that is of the Earth as living beings.

            “I can’t think of a single scientific study in the last few decades,” she offers, “that has demonstrated that plants or animals are dumber than we think. It’s always the opposite, right? What we’re revealing is the fact that they have a capacity to learn, to have memory. And we’re at the edge of a wonderful revolution in really understanding the sentience of other beings.”[i]

            Psalm 67 reminds us that since the very beginning of creation, we were put on this fragile Earth our island home to know the Creator’s ways, and that there are ways to walk upon this planet as participants in the health of all nations – which ultimately, clearing all the other obstacles of religion, politics and national identities aside, depends on our stewardship, our caretaking, of all living things around us.

            The problem with a worldview infected by the Enlightenment and science objectifying everything around us is that we tend to carry on a one-way relationship with the things of nature and see this world as objects to be consumed and exploited with little or no concern for the needs of plants and animals and rocks, rivers and streams, and the earth itself, let alone any concern for the future not only of our planet, but of our children and grandchildren. Ironically, Kimmerer suggests we need to retreat to a child-like way of knowing, which is actually a worldly-wise way of knowing – a deep kind of attention that we pay as children can be a “doorway to gratitude, the doorway to wonder, the doorway to reciprocity. And it worries me greatly, she says, that today’s children can recognize 100 corporate logos and fewer than 10 plants.”[ii]

            Listening to this conversation, I was already approaching our lessons in Revelation 21:10, 22-22:5, and John 5:1-9, asking myself, Just what does Jesus healing a man on the Sabbath and John exiled on the isle of Patmos’s vision of a new Earth, a new Jerusalem, have to do with Rogation Sunday? With no need for a cultic center like The Temple, all the rules of sacrifice and healing are out the window. Instead, there is a “river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city. On either side of the river is the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.” It’s all there.

            We need to allow this vision to reside in our hearts, not our minds. When we do, we begin to see that all we need for health and healing, even the healing of nations, has been given. In all that is alive all around us is all that we need to go beyond simply finding ways to sustain life on this planet, which is to treat creation as something we sustain only to be able to consume more and more. The vision invites us to go beyond sustaining and to open the door to reciprocity – “recognizing that we humans do have gifts that we can give in return for all that has been given to us, is … a really generative and creative way to be a human in the world. And some of our oldest teachings ask what does it mean to be an educated person? It means that you know what your gift is and how to give it, on behalf of the land and of the people, just like every single species has its own gift. And if one of those species and the gifts that it carries is missing in biodiversity, the ecosystem is … too simple. It doesn’t work as well when that gift is missing.”[iii]

            Jesus knows this reciprocity as he abandons rules that suggest you cannot heal on the Sabbath. He knows that the man waiting near the pool inside the Sheep Gate of Jerusalem ought not have to compete with others to get to the healing waters at just the moment the water is stirred. It turns out that survival does not depend on who wins and who loses, or who is the fittest – it depends on the kind of reciprocity, the giving and sharing of gifts, throughout the entire ecosystem. Jesus gives away his gift of healing. We say we know this, and yet the allure of greed and conspicuous consumption of resources tempts us to ignore what even more ancient civilizations have long known. Every plant, every ant, every drop of water, every molecule of breathable air is essential to the earth and to one another.

            Four times a year we renew our Baptismal Covenant to shape our knowing God’s ways upon earth, ways meant to lead to healing a fragile Earth as well as the healing of relationships with one another, including, says Jesus, our enemies and nations. Perhaps we need to regularly renew a covenant of reciprocity with Creation itself. Kimmerer suggests such a covenant might look like this: “We are all bound by a covenant of reciprocity. Plant breath for animal breath, winter and summer, predator and prey, grass and fire, night and day, living and dying. Our elders say that ceremony is the way we can remember to remember. In the dance of the giveaway, remember that the earth is a gift we must pass on just as it came to us. When we forget, the dances we’ll need will be for mourning, for the passing of polar bears, the silence of cranes, for the death of rivers, and the memory of snow.”[iv]

            The elders of the Civil Potawatomie Nation remind us that life is a dance if we remember that the Earth is a gift we must pass on just as it came to us. Our ceremonies must always help us to remember, all our dances will be dances of grief and mourning should we forget to regularly join in the Dance of the Giveaway, the Dance of Reciprocity, that our hearts and eyes may be opened to see all of Creation as living, and true, and ready to give back to us the wisdom of healing that is to be for all peoples, for all nations, for all time. May the Creator’s ways be known upon earth. Amen.

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[i] The Intelligence of Plants, Robin Wall Kimmerer with Krista Tippett, On Being, May 12, 2022 for this and all further references to their conversation, https://onbeing.org/programs/robin-wall-kimmerer-the-intelligence-of-plants-2022/

[ii] Ibid.

[iii] Ibid

[iv] Ibid

The Primacy of Love : Part VI

 

The Primacy of Love: Part VI

The first words I saw online Saturday morning were, “God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a strong mind.” A friend from my days in the gym, Armando Ortiz had posted them on Facebook. I was immediately reminded of an afternoon when I was alone in a large church in Rochester, walking up the aisle, and saw these words from 2 Timothy 1:7 in stained glass. Directly across the aisle was another window with these words from 2 Corinthians 13:11, “The God of Love shall be with you.” I remember standing there in that church and repeating these two verses over and over to myself. Love and a Sound Mind.

 

We tend to think of a sound mind in terms of knowledge, and a sort of unspoken assumption that more knowledge will lead us to greater success – both personal success and success in solving this world’s great problems and crises. Whereas, Ilia Delio reminds us that Bernard of Clairvaux realized that love itself is a kind of knowledge possessed of its own kind of logic. “The knowledge of love is not of the intellect alone but of the heart, an integrative knowing in the field of awareness. Knowledge through love is performative, for the one who sees the truth of things becomes a revealer of the truth through the actions of love. True knowledge is never an end in itself but always a step toward and ever deeper, richer transforming union.”[i]

 

This is what Jesus is talking about in John chapter 10, “I and the Father, we are one.” The Judeans who are questioning his identity, “Are you or are you not the one we are waiting for, the Christos, the Anointed, the Messiah?” A question for which they have preconceived and prefabricated answers – characteristics or certain minimum requirements to qualify as God’s anointed Christ or messiah.

 

Whereas, Jesus points away from himself to the performative actions of love which he does on behalf of Abba, God, Father – turning water into wine, healing those in need, feeding those who hunger and thirst for even a small sign that God is their protective shepherd as well as literal, aching hunger for a scrap of a meal shared with others – five thousand others on one occasion alone.

 

“The Father and I are one,” he says, in our love, our mercy, our forgiveness and compassion for all people. The Father and I are united through our actions of love and mercy. The sheep or our pasture know this and join us in the unfolding of a world of justice, peace and love for all persons. We are artisans of the future. God’s future. For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a strong mind. Join us, and know that the God of Love shall be with you.

 

In the very next verse, his questioners pick up rocks to stone him. They try to arrest him. They accuse him of blasphemy, profaning the very name of their God – as if God is some sort of possession that needs defending. They are afraid of such perfect love that cares more for others than for themselves. This is madness, they must think. And of course, madness it is! It is a Holy Madness to empty oneself on behalf of others – others you do not even know. Cannot possibly know. Where outside of Facebook can anyone truly ‘know’ five thousand people! And yet, he gives away all that he has so that they may be fed – which goes far beyond a morsel of bread and fish, but simply a sign that someone, anyone, cares about us and our need for love, and care, and wholeness. So that our fears may be set aside and eclipsed by the source and energy of all life and the entire universe – love.[ii]

 

Before we ever met, Armando would see me at the gym, flailing at the various punching bags until one day he walked over, and almost gently, demonstrated how one can strike each of the various bags in a manner that can enhance your speed, your strength and your attentiveness, your focus. For Armando it was a small gesture of what we used to call brotherly love born out of a deep faithfulness to the life of his shepherd, the Good Shepherd, who leads us beside still waters. For me it made all the difference not only in learning the mechanics of the “manly art,” but was evidence that when we walk together as children of God the Father we don’t ever have to worry. Through this world of trouble, we have to love one another. Even in the very smallest of things, in the smallest of gestures of care for one another. For it is even in the smallest gestures of love that we and the Father are one.

 

Elsewhere, our Bible reads in 1 John 4:18, “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love.”

 

We are surrounded by much fear every day. We are encouraged by bad shepherds every day to fear one another. We are told outright that it is dangerous to love one another. That ‘the Other’ is not to be trusted. Influenced by such bad shepherds we feel a need to pick up stones and throw them at one another. Or, worse. Much, much worse.

 

May we begin each morning, as my friend Armando started my day, reminding ourselves, “God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a strong mind.” That, “The God of love shall be with you.” That through the eyes of love, we see the face of God. Yesterday, today and tomorrow. There is no fear in love, for the God of love shall be with you.

Amen.

 

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[i] Delio, Ilia, The Primacy of Love (Fortress Press, Minneapolis: 2022) p. 80-81)

[ii] Ibid p.82