Have you ever sent someone a long email
– commanding that person’s attention, about something that means a lot to you …
and you received little or no reply?
Instead of sending that
attention-commanding email, have you ever sought that person out to share that
particular passion of yours – and found that a greater communion awaited?
The scripture passage we just heard is
often called the Great Commandment – and why not, both scribal questioner and
Son of Man responder call it that. Although Jesus’ response, a great scholar of
the ancient text once pointed out, would probably not have been as Mark’s
biblical Greek has it: “Love your neighbor as yourself” – as there was no word
for “self” in Jesus’ native Aramaic, as there was no concept of “self” at all. Instead,
Jesus most likely would have said, “Love your neighbor as your kinfolk.”
“Love your
neighbor as your kinfolk.” Understanding that this is what Jesus probably would
have said, we can understand better why the scribe and Jesus both referred to
their discipleship focus as a commandment. Ancients who lived so radically
defined by their communities that there was no idea, much less a word, for individuals
who would then voluntarily respond or not respond. You, the individual, are
defined by your community. Your love is a command: It simply must to be done!
And yet, try today
to command someone to pay attention to a greater common good through an email or
text. Try and command, when there are few if any recognized authorities
defining or framing or even facilitating any common good being forged.
For reasons
noble and ignoble as well, every generation in our country beginning with the
Baby Boom has instinctively questioned all lines of authority. And so hearing
that the Good News of God’s kingdom is forged around a Great Commandment does
not play well … regardless of who it is that has said it.
And so perhaps today we need a phrase other than "Great Commandment" to proclaim this central message of the gospel -- the Good News. Perhaps we, so communally-bereft and command suspicious both ... Perhaps we, so socially mediatized and yet so famished for intimate, interpersonal connection ...
Perhaps, just perhaps, we need to hear Jesus' response to love God and neighbor as self not as fulfilling a Great Commandment to keep a community intact -- the how response -- but as fulfilling a Great Communion as a yes response: "We are called to a communion ... in fact!"
Moving us from a Commandment we believe in order to belong, to a Communion to which we belong in order we might then find belief.
And so perhaps today we need a phrase other than "Great Commandment" to proclaim this central message of the gospel -- the Good News. Perhaps we, so communally-bereft and command suspicious both ... Perhaps we, so socially mediatized and yet so famished for intimate, interpersonal connection ...
Perhaps, just perhaps, we need to hear Jesus' response to love God and neighbor as self not as fulfilling a Great Commandment to keep a community intact -- the how response -- but as fulfilling a Great Communion as a yes response: "We are called to a communion ... in fact!"
Moving us from a Commandment we believe in order to belong, to a Communion to which we belong in order we might then find belief.
This past
Tuesday, the director of our denomination’s Office of Public Witness, the Rev.
Dr. J. Herbert Nelson, shared with a group of guests why he has made it a top
priority of his office to visit as many of the 173 presbyteries he can around
the country – not just through webinars or conference calls, but in person …
on-site … in the flesh. Such site visits were top priority for him, he said,
given the many hostile reactions his D.C. office receives in carrying out General
Assembly actions.
And what’s the
General Assembly? For the many of us who do not speak fluent Presbyterianese: Our
Presbyterian Church (USA) General Assembly is a national gathering of several
hundred elected commissioners, a fresh slate each time of equal part pastors
and lay elders, that gathers for one week every two years to create national
Presbyterian policy. That policy creation includes social witness it then instructs
our Office of Public Witness carry out – such as advocacy for gun violence
prevention we heard about last Sunday from Rev. Atwood, and again will hear
about after Worship today with the Presbyterian film “Trigger”.
And so, for
example, when the Office of Public Witness advocates publicly for gun controls,
individual Presbyterians who may be NRA members – not knowing the General
Assembly’s prior instruction to that office – are apt to deluge the office with
let’s just say difficult emails.
J. Herbert – as
he likes to be called – shared a story of one such email regarding one such
social policy disagreement sent to him by a church elder in South Carolina. J.
Herbert responded only briefly to that email – knowing he was going to visit
the presbytery of that elder in a few weeks. Before visiting, he called the
General Presbyter in that presbytery and was assured he would meet that elder at
the presbytery meeting he, J. Herbert, would be attending.
When he walked
up to the elder at the meeting and introduced himself, J. Herbert said, “I had
him with hello.” For now here was a face in the flesh, and not just an email
from an office. The elder, not knowing in advance that J. Herbert would be at
that meeting, was completely disarmed. A great communion ensued that written
words from outside the Beltway to the inside – and vice versa – could never
begin to forge.
Many of our professional number know quite well what the email and text acronym LDL means: “Let’s Discuss Live.” Oftentimes, LDL is used so as not to leave a paper trail about a sensitive matter. And yet, sometimes LDL is used for the more redemptive purpose of achieving a greater communion when the emailed word could easily sound to the recipient like a great and unwelcomed commandment.
And yet, many important decisions cannot be
thoroughly discussed live, and –even when they can – the convenience of email, text,
and even social media often prove too inviting a personal pulpit to
command.
We inside the Beltway and around it are quite familiar with the
necessity and the perils both of legislation and regulation. As many a
government official whose constituency is much greater than J. Herbert Nelson’s
knows, great commandment is often needed to evoke any communion when love for
one’s neighbor as oneself is not being learned through lived experience. The
peril of such great commandments is always this: Perhaps – just perhaps – the
lived experience of loving one’s neighbor as oneself needs no passing of
legislation or prompting of regulation to effect that greater communion, after
all.
And so when the
inevitable and often necessary Great Commandments from on federal high do not fully
satisfy legislator or legislated,
regulator or regulated – as they
inevitably and necessarily never will, when love reigns not supreme –
We come to
understand the power of Jesus’ words today – the power of the church, the Body
of Christ, to do what no secular body can do. The power to fulfill at this open
Communion table Jesus’ words of Great Communion that far exceeded the pious
“love God” response the scribe had expected … and nothing beyond that.
A Great
Communion we all come to discover – each and every day – if we remain open to
the Holy Spirit in our midst. If we remain open in spite of ourselves, and the
belief-commands we often feel we must follow.
Moving us from a Commandment we believe in order to belong, to a Communion to which we belong in order we might then find belief.
Like many of us, my mother grew up with particular beliefs instilled in her about how to love God with all her heart, soul, mind and strength. Particular beliefs -- commands they seemed to me, growing up -- that limited her understanding, as they do with all of us, in comprehending the generosity and abundance of God's creative heart.
She was taught, e.g., that persons with darker skin were her social inferiors -- and to love them as such. Until, as a YWCA social worker in the 1940s South, assigned to the black teenage girls camp cabin, she listened in -- late at night -- as these girls talked about their day-to-day realities. Teenagers who transformed her command to love to a loving communion she never know possible.
And then came the day when my mom met my good Presbyterian colleague and friend Don.
Don -- who I had known at seminary -- had endeared himself to my mother long before he preached at my pastoral ordination in 1995. The two of them were Southerners of similar cloth. Both Don and Mom, you see, exude that special brand of Southern grace that on my good days I find quite quaint and charming, and on my bad days I find unctuous and a bit over-the-top.
My mom caught up with our friend Don at my seminary graduation in San Francisco. She had flown coast-to-coast on her 70th birthday with my brother Jim to be there.
One day that graduation week, sitting in a car outside my Bay Area apartment, I let slip to my mother something she had not known: that our friend Don was openly gay.
I'll never forget the look on that small town Virginia face of seven decades. It was as if my mother wanted to hear what I had just said, but her processor was overheating and her system needed rebooting. For my mother was discovering what all of us discover, if we remain open to the Spirit of God: that love vouchsafed as a command when certain forms of community remain unimaginable cannot survive the revelation of Christ's greater communion.
About a year later, Mom and I were speaking over the phone -- a casual chat. Abruptly, it seemed, she changed the subject.
"You know," she said, "I've come to accept lesbians and gays as they are" -- we hadn't gotten to the bisexual and transgender part yet, that's another story. "And," she added, "I really think they should serve as ordained leaders in the church."
I checked my land line for trouble. After closing my office door and then my jaw, I asked my mom, "What changed your mind? Was it this article I sent you, or that debate we had? Or perhaps it was that book I commanded that you read?"
Many of you can probably guess what my mom then said: "It's when you told me that Don was gay."
As many of you know, as of last year, our Presbyterian Church (USA) has officially commanded church doors fly open to the leadership gifts of all persons, regardless of sexual orientation. With witnesses such as our own church's with Pat and Fred, a gay couple active among us for three years with their children, our national church's new command just does not seem so commanding to us.
For the Great Commandment to love has become for us a Great Communion to love.
A Great Commandment to love becoming a Great Communion of love ...
A Great Commandment we believe becoming a Great Communion to belong.
Moving from the violence of "I command" to the nonviolence of "Let's commune" ...
This is what the Body of Christ is all about. For believe it or not:
Here is our table of Communion before us.
Here is where we find we already belong.
Here is where we then find what we really believe.
(Communion begins ...)
Moving us from a Commandment we believe in order to belong, to a Communion to which we belong in order we might then find belief.
Like many of us, my mother grew up with particular beliefs instilled in her about how to love God with all her heart, soul, mind and strength. Particular beliefs -- commands they seemed to me, growing up -- that limited her understanding, as they do with all of us, in comprehending the generosity and abundance of God's creative heart.
She was taught, e.g., that persons with darker skin were her social inferiors -- and to love them as such. Until, as a YWCA social worker in the 1940s South, assigned to the black teenage girls camp cabin, she listened in -- late at night -- as these girls talked about their day-to-day realities. Teenagers who transformed her command to love to a loving communion she never know possible.
And then came the day when my mom met my good Presbyterian colleague and friend Don.
Don -- who I had known at seminary -- had endeared himself to my mother long before he preached at my pastoral ordination in 1995. The two of them were Southerners of similar cloth. Both Don and Mom, you see, exude that special brand of Southern grace that on my good days I find quite quaint and charming, and on my bad days I find unctuous and a bit over-the-top.
My mom caught up with our friend Don at my seminary graduation in San Francisco. She had flown coast-to-coast on her 70th birthday with my brother Jim to be there.
One day that graduation week, sitting in a car outside my Bay Area apartment, I let slip to my mother something she had not known: that our friend Don was openly gay.
I'll never forget the look on that small town Virginia face of seven decades. It was as if my mother wanted to hear what I had just said, but her processor was overheating and her system needed rebooting. For my mother was discovering what all of us discover, if we remain open to the Spirit of God: that love vouchsafed as a command when certain forms of community remain unimaginable cannot survive the revelation of Christ's greater communion.
About a year later, Mom and I were speaking over the phone -- a casual chat. Abruptly, it seemed, she changed the subject.
"You know," she said, "I've come to accept lesbians and gays as they are" -- we hadn't gotten to the bisexual and transgender part yet, that's another story. "And," she added, "I really think they should serve as ordained leaders in the church."
I checked my land line for trouble. After closing my office door and then my jaw, I asked my mom, "What changed your mind? Was it this article I sent you, or that debate we had? Or perhaps it was that book I commanded that you read?"
Many of you can probably guess what my mom then said: "It's when you told me that Don was gay."
As many of you know, as of last year, our Presbyterian Church (USA) has officially commanded church doors fly open to the leadership gifts of all persons, regardless of sexual orientation. With witnesses such as our own church's with Pat and Fred, a gay couple active among us for three years with their children, our national church's new command just does not seem so commanding to us.
For the Great Commandment to love has become for us a Great Communion to love.
A Great Commandment to love becoming a Great Communion of love ...
A Great Commandment we believe becoming a Great Communion to belong.
Moving from the violence of "I command" to the nonviolence of "Let's commune" ...
This is what the Body of Christ is all about. For believe it or not:
Here is our table of Communion before us.
Here is where we find we already belong.
Here is where we then find what we really believe.
(Communion begins ...)
