sermon preached at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Bellingham, WA
by the Rev. Josh Hosler
The Twentieth Sunday after
Pentecost, October
26, 2014
"Love God. Love your neighbor. Change
the world." Last month as students returned to Western Washington
University, the members of EpiC, that is, Episcopal Campus Fellowship,
superimposed this slogan over an image of a solar eclipse and had little
buttons made to hand out at the school's annual Info Fair. "Love God. Love
your neighbor. Change the world." This is a paraphrase of Jesus’ words
from today's gospel, words which came from two places in the Jewish law:
Deuteronomy, and Leviticus. We gave our buttons away to students who stopped by
our booth, but also to the other religious groups whose booths surrounded ours.
We gave buttons to the Christians, and since Jesus was quoting the Torah here,
we also gave buttons to the two Jewish groups. It was epic.
Jesus presents these two great
commandments to those who are listening to him teach in Jerusalem. Over the
past few Sundays, we've been hearing a number of stories that take place during
this time, after his triumphal procession into the city, but before his arrest.
The atmosphere is tense, with those in positions of power continually trying to
knock Jesus off his high horse.
But Jesus isn't on a high horse; he
prefers a humble donkey. Every time they try to trap Jesus in his own words,
the leaders of the Pharisees and Sadducees find themselves exposed and
vulnerable instead. With unassailable authority, Jesus has ranked tax
collectors and prostitutes ahead of the holiest keepers of the law. He has
taught emphatically that the kingdom of God will be taken away from those who
think they have it all together and given to people who know how much mercy
they need. He has sidelined the mighty Roman Empire as irrelevant to God's
agenda, since God is all-powerful, even over Caesar. And now, in tying these
two old commandments together in a new way, Jesus seeks to clarify the
priorities of God’s chosen people. Love, he says ... just love. Do this, all
the rest of those old rules will make sense to you in a new way. Pour every decision
you make through the funnel of love.
Well, OK. The words are clear, but how
do you and I go about them, loving God and loving our neighbors as ourselves?
Obviously, loving God is an important thing to do, but it seems like a rather
abstract directive. Is it simply an exercise of will, or of memory -- remembering
to say "I love you, God" every now and then? Loving our neighbors is
the commandment that helps us, because it gives us a field in which to practice
loving God. We cannot love God without loving what God loves: human beings, and
the world God is creating out of love. God loves even our enemies, and when we
hate them, we are failing to love those whom God loves. So if you want to start
loving God right now, begin by loving your neighbor, whoever he or she may be.
Encountering people in the flesh and acting towards them out of love is an
undeniably concrete way to go.
Here at St. Paul's, we are always
trying to engage, on some level, these two commandments to love. People come to
us with all different kinds of experiences of God at work in their lives, seen
through the lens of a huge variety of life experiences. People come here
because the news headlines are devastating and scary. They come here to heal
from deep pain and confusion. They come from other churches where they may have
felt that the pieces didn't quite fit together. Many come seeking concrete
answers to very big questions. If you're in this camp, allow me to confess
something to you. In the Episcopal church, we're not all that big on hard and
fast answers, because above all, we don't want to offer a simplistic answer. We
have answers, to be sure, but more often than not they come with a footnote
that leads to some other entry, or even to an opposing point of view. Sometimes,
as the Indigo Girls once put it, “There’s more than one answer to these
questions, pointing me in a crooked line.”
Maybe you’re sitting here today
thinking, “OK, I believe in God, or at least, I believe in something." Well,
great—then let’s just begin with that. Where does this belief come from? Is it a
gut feeling that we are not merely a temporary grouping of random molecules? Or
does it run deeper? Is there emotion in it? Is there trust in it? Does it lead
you towards any particular action? Could it be that love is somewhere in the
mix?
Maybe despite being here today, you're
saying, "I don't need a church. I'd rather follow my heart and do it my
own way." Well, there's nothing wrong with having a one-on-one with God on
a mountaintop--in fact, this is a great thing to do, especially around here!
But when we bring our holy experiences alongside those of others, we find
untold opportunities to learn even deeper wisdom, to see God in a clearer
light. Individuality is very important, but individuality paired with community
is far stronger. In a community, people can bring their personal, individual
experiences of God, who cannot be understood in the same way by everybody, and
we can have a conversation.
Perhaps your gripe is that the Bible
is so full of rules, and you wonder whether joining a church means committing
to the whole shebang. Well, we've just heard Jesus set all those old rules into
their proper context. Rules arise out of culture and situation, and they do
change over time. But the great commandments of love do not change. Christianity
is an art form, not a rule book. Many people fall into the trap of thinking
that being a Christian is a matter of giving intellectual assent to a list of
propositions, while checking off a list of commandments not broken today ... but
this couldn’t be further from the truth. Christianity is, instead, a venue for
holy conversation, and it is a road we make by walking it. Christianity is a
journey that seeks wisdom too grand and too elusive ever to be fully understood
by the human mind, wisdom that is about being loved and loving and serving others.
Those of us in the church have come to believe that this wisdom is worth
pursuing just for the sheer joy of pursuing it. Many of us can't imagine living
our lives any other way.
So you can't be a Christian in a
vacuum, and you can't fully understand Christianity looking from the outside in.
Our hope at St. Paul’s is that everyone who walks through these doors will feel
welcomed and will be able to connect with us in some way. Perhaps God has led
you here today through some mysterious process. Indeed, God will always meet us
where we are. But God loves us too much to let us stay there. We won't to tell
you what to think, because your life is your journey, and it is simply our
pleasure to walk alongside you. And so we welcome you to a well of wisdom that we
have been keeping here for centuries, and we invite you to drink deeply.
Furthermore, you are absolutely
welcome to hover around the edges for as long as you want, but know that this
is also a place where you can make a commitment for life. Baptism is that
commitment: it is what makes one a Christian. We baptize infants and children
because we are eager to hold out before them a specific path to wisdom. Then
they make their road by walking, and we walk alongside them. We also baptize
adults, and we invite adults who were baptized as children to make an adult
proclamation of their faith and to take on their baptismal vows for themselves.
And we do all these things in community, not in private. Christianity is for
people who want a way to walk alongside others, and who have found that the way
that makes the most sense includes the story of the creator joining forces with
the created. Jesus walks with us on this way, having gone on ahead and come
back to assure us that there is nothing to fear.
Here at St. Paul's, we've been
journeying together in a very concrete way in the little community of people
that has formed on Wednesday nights over the past month. We offer a Eucharist
on Wednesday evenings at 5:30, followed by a community supper prepared in turns
by those who come. Following supper are our classes--with simultaneous childcare!
And we've just finished our first four-week series. The next set will begin
this coming Wednesday night at 6:45. If you wonder what it might mean to live
in the tension between doubt and faith, come join Ben Amundgaard and the Rev.
Armand Larive for their four-week class on that topic. If you wonder about the
Bible, what’s in it, what it’s for, and how you might approach it, I myself
will be teaching that class. And Father Jonathan’s class on prayer will be a
great way to engage that first commandment: “Love God.”
In January, these Wednesday night
classes will flow naturally into a process we call Journey, a process by which
you can come to be baptized or to make an adult affirmation of the baptismal
vows that were made for you in childhood. Journey is the St. Paul's version of
the process by which the earliest Christians came to be baptized: through
prayer and learning, through fellowship and theological reflection. Journey
will meet on Wednesdays from January through May, culminating at the Great
Vigil of Easter when we will baptize new Christians. You can be a part of
Journey even if you don't want to make any particular affirmation of faith. Journey
is also just a great way to join this holy conversation.
And so we invite you, whoever you are
and wherever you find yourself on this journey of faith, to Journey with us
towards ever deeper wisdom. The church isn't here just to sustain itself, but
to help God transform people's lives from fear into faith, hope, and love. As
Paul wrote to the Thessalonians, "So deeply do we care for you that we are
determined to share with you not only the gospel of God but also our own
selves, because you have become very dear to us." Amen.