Sermon Notes for October 26, 2008

by Rev. Cathy Campbell
Oct 26a: Deut 34:1-12; Ps 90: 1-6, 13-17; 1Thess 2:1-8; Mt 22:34-36

What a gift it is to share worship with you, and to share ministry with you in this corner of the kingdom. You are a gift to us. Thank you. Nicely, our scriptures this morning point to the essence of the journey of faith in community.

We start with Moses, the great law-giver and prophet of the people, victor over the armies of Egypt, teacher/leader of the people in the wilderness, dying on top of Mount Pisgah, in conversation with God immersed in the vision of the promised land. Then Jesus, the Messiah, the Christ, who is of the line of David, but more than that, not defined by that genealogy, is tested by a lawyer, an expert in the law, that legacy of Moses’ conversations with God on mountain tops.

“Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?”

Jesus doesn’t choose to engage the intricate complexities of the written and oral legal structure that had grown up to govern the people’s life and faith. Rather Jesus goes underneath the question and points to the reality that under-girds all of our lives in faith, then and now:

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”

Even Paul, who I imagine almost as fierce and rugged as Donald Jackson’s picture of Moses, [although perhaps more intellectually argumentative than Moses,] even Paul, describes his work in Thesselonica this way:

though we might have made demands as apostles of Christ… we were gentle among you, like a nurse tenderly caring for her own children. 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.

So what is this love, this tender caring, that lies at the very centre of the law; that is the fuel, compass, and non-negotiable of our lives in faith, our lives in God, in the heart and wisdom of our universe? What is this love that is the currency of the kingdom, of God’s economy in creation?

This summer, at the start of one of the bible studies in our vacation bible school with the Sudanese girls, our camp leader said the theme for the day was love. One of the little ones [maybe 5 or 6] in the front row, said loudly and clearly: “Oh, Yuk!” And we all laughed, but if your image of ‘love’ or ‘loving’ is what you see on TV or in the movies or read in harlequin romance novels or encounter in all sorts of artifacts of our culture, I too would say: “Oh, Yuk!” That loving is such a distant and distorted relative of the ‘love’ at the heart of our faith that it almost needs a new word. So, if we disregard popular culture’s reduction of ‘love’ to a transitory emotional event like ‘falling in love’ or ‘being in love’, most people begin to catch a glimpse of a sturdier, deeper understanding of ‘love’ through experiences of love as a child, parent, partner, friend; as lover and beloved. Yet even those experiences at their best, are always only partial. The love our faith speaks to and calls us to, the love of God, is a love that comes from a bottomless aquifer. It is love inseparably intermingled with infinite wisdom. It is love that embraces enemies and can absorb evil without return. It is, therefore, not simply a matter of affection, temperament, or emotion. It is rather a deep disposition of the heart: “a commitment that shapes our ways of seeing, understanding, and acting” [quoting Roberta Bondi.] It is a commitment to the wellbeing of others in which we cultivate “the same mind that was in Christ Jesus.”(Phil 2:5) “It is a way of seeing and responding to the real, separate, individual needs of each of the people we encounter in our lives every day.” We come to this disposition, this habit, or shaping of our hearts and minds “as a result of God’s grace and our own choices and commitments lived out over a very long period of time.” It is not something we achieve or possess once and for all. It is something that is cultivated. We are constantly growing into it, everyday, as the full fruits of the Spirit continue to unfold and deepen in our lives.

Much has been made of the tripartite nature of this love: love of God, neighbour and self. I think that the analogy of Dorotheus of Gaza, one of the early desert fathers, is an accurate description of the interconnectedness of all loving – the economy of loving if you like. He wrote:

Suppose we were to take a compass and insert the point and draw the outline of a circle. The center point is the same distance from any point on the circumference. … Let us suppose that this circle is the world, that God… is the center, and the straight lines drawn from the circumference to the center are the lives of human beings. … Let us assume for the sake of the analogy that to move toward God, human beings move from the circumference along the various radii of the circle to the center. So at the same time, the closer they are to God, the closer they become to one another; and the closer they are to one another, the closer they become to God.

And, the inverse is also true: “as we move away from God we move away from other people, and as we move away from people, we also move away from God.” But you might ask, what of the “as we love ourselves part.” Observers of human relationships have noted that there are those whose inner sense of themselves is so filled with shame and hurt that they cannot enter into loving dynamic because they don’t or can’t love themselves. Yet, even there, maybe especially there, healing – the true liberation of the gospel, happens as the selfless love of God touches that deep wounded place either directely as an experience of grace or indirectly through the love and care of others. As Richard Wagamese, abused and abandoned as a young child, writes in his memoir: "One Native Life"; “Sometimes life turns us upside down and backwards. It’s caring that gets us back on our feet again and pointed in the right direction.” In time the tears of our wounding melt our steep protective walls and allow us to receive care and enter into this economy of love that gives life. The death economy is based on self interest. It is driven by care-lessness, what Gretel Erhlich calls the “driving, drying force of our world;” our failure to care.

Let me briefly mention two challenges to what some have called this “Golden Rule Christianity.”
One challenge is heard in the derogatory tone of those who critique our caring or acts of compassion as dependency creating charity. It is true that our caring is not always for our brothers and sisters in Christ, but is sometimes for “those poor unfortunates.” It comes not from a place of radical equality and kinship but serves only to reinforce the differences in power and privilege amongst us. Indeed, just as our caring must come out of a hunger for justice, so our struggle for justice must always come coupled with caring.

The other challenge comes from the proponents of the marketplace logic of competitive individualism. In contrast, our faith asserts [in Volf’s words] that “true humanity is realized only when people live with one another in such a way that they do not live against one another or simply next to one another but for one another.” Some in the face of this challenge of life lived ‘for’ one another, turn away with integrity from faith. They appreciate the demand of a love ethos and choose the logic of the marketplace with their eyes open. Others compartmentalize their lives and use the logic of faith for their private lives with friends, family and church; and use the logic of the marketplace in their public work lives - in the political, economic, educational spheres of life. Others accept the challenge of life lived ‘for’ one another and seek with prayer, the guidance of the Spirit and all the gifts God has given, to live the logic of the gospel in all of their lives.

Is this Golden Rule Christianity deeply challenging, some would even say, revolutionary? Absolutely. How is it possible in real time and place, in real lives? It’s possible, I think, only as we draw into the centre, as we root ourselves deeply in the love of God: in prayer, in scripture, at the table, in concrete relationships with all those God introduces us to. The challenges are significant and never-ending and so we pray with our psalmist today:

Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love, Lord…

Satisfy us, fill us each morning so your love might flow through us to all we meet, might structure all our decisions, inform all our choices, and prosper the work of our hands. God’s love, seen most fully in Christ, is indeed the currency of the kingdom economy - the path of abundant life for all – even God’s beleaguered and beloved creation. “On these commandments [love of God and love of neighbour as ourselves] hang all the law and the prophets.”