Scriptures Acts 10:44-48 John 15:9-17
Today, we take a journey. We take the biblical journey from the love of the law ... to the law of love.
Attorneys everywhere: Rest easy!
To our Jewish sisters and brothers everywhere, who have had to endure statements such as, “The Old Testament is about the harshness of the law, and the New Testament is about the compassion of God’s grace”: I’m not going there. It’s not true to say such things – it’s certainly not kind – and I am not about to go there.
This message is about how, in this Easter season of resurrection glory for us all – resurrection, after all, is ours! – Christ calls us to live our lives in the ethos of love … in two ways.
1.
“All
in”: It’s not an option. It’s a mandate.
2.
And
with our “All in”: All are to be invited in. Included, at the table.This message is about, on this Mother’s Day, how the ample biblical testimony of both the maternal and paternal love of God triumphs status, merit, and the greatest feats of human logic. Love we are called to share as God has shared with the world entire: based not on the excellence of our efforts, but on the rigor of our relationships. With God, with others, with self.
If one wishes to be a follower of Jesus: It is mandated. We must be all in. And just who receives that love? It is to be made available by us to all. No exceptions. All are in.
There is no law to fulfill in order for this to happen – except the law of love itself. Christ’s one commandment, shared according to John today at his Last Supper: “that you love one another as I have loved you.”
A man by the name of Bruce Bawer wrote a timely book 15 years ago called Stealing Jesus: How Fundamentalism Betrays Christianity. In that book, Bawer contrasts a Church of Law with a Church of Love – as he terms it, legalistic Protestantism with nonlegalistic Protestantism.
A few of the contrasts he draws:
Legalistic
Protestantism (he writes) sees Jesus’ death on the cross as a transaction by
means of which Jesus paid for the sins of believers and won them eternal life;
nonlegalistic Protestantism sees it as a powerful and mysterious symbol of
God’s infinite love for suffering (hu)mankind, and as the natural culmination
of Jesus’ ministry of love and selflessness.
Legalistic
Protestantism believes Jesus’ chief purpose was to carry out that act of of
atonement; nonlegalistic Protestantism believes Jesus’ chief purpose was to
teach that God loves all people as parents love their children and that all
humankind are one.
Legalistic
Protestantism understands eternal life to mean a heavenly reward …
nonlegalistic Protestantism more often understands it to denote a unity with
God.1
… and so on.
How to be nonlegalistic – as a Church of Love – in our approach to ministry here at Bethesda Presbyterian Church? How to move from the love of the law that has traditionally molded and shaped the history of Presbyterians everywhere, to the law of love that could shape BPC through faithful discipleship?
As you know – and as we can plainly see: We are a small church in a big place. As we note each Sunday now on our bulletin cover, A Place for Healing is our new vision before us. A Place for Healing means taking this true jewel of a facility God has provided us and opening its doors – as we have in big ways with Bethesda Cares and now Del Ray – and proclaiming we are all in with God’s love by proclaiming that all are in who seek that love.
We are a small church in a big building – “all in”, in a place where it seems all can be in. We are small enough that we can now do great things through the law of love without being unduly encumbered by rules and regulations based, for example, on the pastor blessing a particular action, or the Session approving a particular acts of service.
In other words: You – we – are set free! Set free, here more than in larger, more programmatic congregations. Set free to fulfill the mandate Christ has given us all to lovingly serve without waiting for permission. Take the chance – the opportunity! As one devotional near and dear to my heart puts it:
… we may face
indecision. We may not be able to determine which course to take. Here we ask
God for inspiration, an intuitive thought or a decision. We relax and take it
easy. We don’t struggle. We are often surprised how the right answers (to love)
come after we have tried this for a while. What used to be the hunch or the
occasional inspiration gradually becomes a working part of the mind … it is not
probable that we are going to be inspired at all times. We might pay for this
presumption in all sorts of absurd actions and ideas. Nevertheless, we find
that our thinking will, as time passes, be more and more on the plane of
inspiration. We come to rely upon it.2
So it goes with the Holy Spirit. The Spirit that blows where it may. The same Spirit that prompted Peter to say – in so many words – “What law is keeping us from baptizing these unwashed, these Gentiles?!”
None. Only the law of love, present in the Spirit. Reminding Peter – reminding us – that the singular law of love is not a theory. He did not find it by hanging around the right people. He did not find it by being respectable. And he did not find it in a carefully crafted creed. With the Spirit always present, Peter discovered – and so do we – that Christ’s singular mandate to love is not a theory. We have to live it.
It is our Christian mandate. We do not choose to love, because – as Christ says in our scripture today – he has chosen us to do so.
All in. As followers of Christ: We’re all in. Obligating us to love, while paradoxically allowing us the freedom to move and shape our lives to act in the most humane way possible – in any given situation, and at any given time.
All in. We’re all in. Beyond merit. Beyond status. Beyond logic. And my dear Presbyterian sisters and brothers: beyond the love of any regulations that might suggest to us, “Nope: Don’t do that! Your kindness might get us into trouble! Take everything it to Session. Let them act on your behalf – and ours. We can’t have persons running around doing good, creative, loving things out of a Christian heart without a committee to tell him or her what to do … now, can we?”
For soon we may discover, that with such a by-the-book attitude, there are no persons running around doing good, creative, loving things at all… because they – you – have not felt the permission to go ahead and do so. Because the best ideas of being a creative and loving church don’t come to us always sitting over a Session or committee table. In fact: They hardly ever do.
All in. Each of us. It’s our one mandate: the law of love. An obligation fulfilled in freedom: to act in the name of Christ when each of us senses the Spirit afoot.
Again, I share that favorite devotional of mine: “We are often surprised how the right answers (to love) come after we have (asked God for inspiration, an intuitive thought or decision) for a while. What used to be the hunch or the occasional inspiration gradually becomes a working part of the mind … We come to rely upon it.” Quite a biblical understanding, really, of how love really works in our lives!
And with our “All in” to love – asking God, then responding to God, to love: All are in. All are invited and included to serve and be served.
I have seen that all-in, law-of-love in action at Bethesda Presbyterian when hungry men are occasionally turned away at Saturday lunch at the door of our fellowship hall because they have been deemed to pose a disturbance for the whole. I have witnessed in those situations a couple of our number scramble together a plate of food and carry it to the individual in the parking lot. For the love of the law in that situation may say, you cannot eat here because of your behavior – and let it be so! But the law of love says, “Feed anyone who seeks it and needs it.”
And so it goes. And so it occurs. And so it happens. Not because our church member asked permission to take that person food. But because the Holy Spirit said to that member, “Do it! It’s your law to love that person. Do it!”
Friends: The Spirit’s movement to effect Christ’s commandment to love does not come from the outside-in – not generally. It comes, instead, from the inside-out.
Which is why it’s often so daring. And which is why it’s often so risky. This is not a spectator sport; as Barbara Brown Taylor has suggested, we should be wearing crash helmets in the pews! For freely exercising the law of love needs not the external permission we generally think it needs – as long as forgiveness is available at the other end of a presumption.
With our “all-in” to love – asking God, then responding to God, to love: All are in. All are invited and included, to serve and be served.
This past week, civil rights for same-gender couples has certainly been in the news – in opposite directions. First came the passing of Amendment One in North Carolina making constitutional there the exclusion of any domestic legal union that is not heterosexual marriage. The very next day, the President came out of the closet, supporting same-sex marriage.
What does the love of law tell us here? I think it tells us that if we are “all in” with our commitment to fulfill Christ’s one commandment of us, then all are in as equal recipients of that love. Including lesbian and gay persons.
Two days after Amendment One’s passage and the day after Obama’s affirmation, a dear intellectual mentor of mine stormed the pearly gates. Walter Wink was a theological game-changer for me – radicalizing my faith to the core of my being, making me proud to be a loving resister of anything violent in this world.
Hear what Wink, a New Testament scholar, wrote way back in 1979 in a now-classic pamphlet, “Homosexuality and the Bible.” Hear in Wink’s words the profound connection he makes between being all-in with Christ’s command to love and affirming that all must be in when we practice that command:
Where the Bible mentions homosexual behavior at all, it
clearly condemns it. I freely grant all that. The issue is precisely whether
that Biblical judgment is correct. The Bible sanctioned slavery as well, and
nowhere attacks it as unjust. Are we prepared to argue that slavery today is
biblically justified? One hundred and fifty years ago when the debate over
slavery was raging, the bible seemed to be clearly on the slave holders' side.
Abolitionists were hard pressed to justify their opposition to slavery on biblical
grounds. Yet today, if you were to ask Christians in the South whether the
Bible sanctions slavery, virtually everyone would agree that it does not. How
do we account for such a monumental shift?
What happened is that the churches were finally driven
to penetrate beyond the legal tenor of Scripture to an even deeper tenor,
articulated by Israel out of the experience of the Exodus and the prophets and
brought to sublime embodiment in Jesus' identification with harlots, tax
collectors, the diseased and maimed and outcast and poor. It is that God
suffers with the suffering and groans toward the reconciliation of all things.
Therefore, Jesus went out of his way … to reintegrate into society in all
details, those who were identified as "sinners" by virtue of the
accidents of birth, or biology, or economic desperation …
… What Jesus gives us is a critique of domination in all
its forms, a critique that can be can be turned on the Bible itself. The Bible
thus contains the principles of its own correction. We are freed from
bibliolatry, the worship of the Bible. It is restored to its proper place as
witness to the Word of God. And that word is a Person, not a book.3
“That word is a Person … not a book.” So goes it with Christ. So goes it with us.
Be that person. Strike out – in this small church, and in this big, healing place. You have the permission; you have the opportunity. You have the room to roam here. Be that law of love.
For in the end: The love of the Presbyterian law will never, ever provide the last word.
Not anymore. Not that it ever has been.
Whoever
has ears to hear … let them hear.
1NYC: Crown
Publishers, 1997, pp. 6-7.
2Alcoholics
Anonymous (NYC: AA World Services, Inc., 2001 – fourth edition),
pp. 86-87.
