When we come to worship, we feel a lot of things, depending on the day or who we are. We might feel happy, or sad. We might feel anxious. We might be bothered by doubts we don’t want to admit. We might be carrying pain that is too deep to share.
Whatever you are feeling, know that this is a place of love. There is a lot of love in this place. If you aren’t feeling it, if you aren’t feeling the love in your life right now, that’s OK, because one thing I’ve learned is that there is plenty of love to go around. And if you can’t show love today, that’s OK; your neighbor can show love for you. And if your neighbor can’t show love today, that’s OK, because the love of God is overflowing, and that’s good enough for all of us.
The Christian way is rooted in love. The Christian way is rooted in faith and hope and love.
I know this is obvious to many of you, but it needs to be said, because (I hate to tell you) many Christians have forgotten.
The Christian way is rooted in faith. and hope. and love.
And the greatest of these is love.
This is a truth that we must hold on to. We must protect this truth. We must boldly proclaim this truth.
Faith. Hope. And love...
God is love. The way of Jesus is the way of love.
And in that love there is peace. There is wholeness. There is comfort. There is freedom. There is welcome. There is joy.
Everything good, and wholesome, and life-giving.
It’s all there in the love that comes from God.
That love is the life-giving stream that Jeremiah talked about, the stream that waters the tree. God’s love flows just like the water in the stream.
And the tree is the body of Christ.
And when we, the church, send our roots down deep, we drink upon that truth, that love, and we are nourished, and we grow tall, and our leaves are green, and our fruit is plentiful.
Because we are rooted in God’s love, we need not fear when love seems to be in short supply. In the world, when we see fear replacing hope, and our anxiety starts to grow, we remember our roots. We remember that our roots are deep. They reach all the way down to the stream of God’s love, and God’s love never runs dry.
We know that the weather changes from day to day, and even from year to year. Some years, like this current year, have abundant rainfall, but other years see very little rain.
Likewise, the mood of the world shifts back and forth. For a while the world may be filled with hope and optimism and love. But then, the world plunges into fear and despair. Utopian visions become dystopian nightmares.
Our progress as a society has its ups and downs. For awhile it seems we are making great progress toward justice and equality, moving toward love, moving toward the type of world God desires, what scripture calls the kingdom of God.
But then we start moving backward. Fear takes over. Prejudice takes over. Hate takes over.
We become divided from one another. We circle the wagons, build walls ... and focus more on ourselves and less on the neighbors around us.
Martin Luther King, Jr. talked about the moral arc of the universe, about how it is long, but it bends toward justice.
This is a helpful image, but like all metaphors, it has its limitations. The moral arc of the universe makes me think of a long, smooth, graceful curve, stretching out like a rainbow through space, or like the majestic curve of the Gateway Arch in Saint Louis.
But that moral arc is not a smooth, graceful curve. As we move toward justice and equality and wholeness in our world, the line we follow has lots of ups and downs.
There are times of abundant rainfall, and times of drought. There are times of hope and times of despair. There are times of progress, and times of backsliding. There are times when love is prominent, and times when hate appears to gain an upper hand.
The challenge for us is to keep our roots deep, drawing water from the stream, even in the midst of a terrible drought.
The challenge for us is to stay rooted in love, even in the midst of a rise in hate.
The challenge for us is to stay rooted in hope, even in the midst of despair.
Because there is a line that follows that moral arc, but it’s not straight and smooth. It’s a squiggly line. It has ups and downs, periods of progress and periods of retreat…
But even though it is a squiggly line… it still gets there. We may not be moving in a straight line, but when we stray from that arc, we will eventually move back toward it. And though we stray from it for awhile, we will return, and we will continue moving toward what is right.
We will continue moving toward justice. We will continue moving toward equality. We will continue moving toward love... We will continue moving toward wholeness and shalom and the kingdom of God.
As long as we don’t forget that we are rooted in the love of God.
Too many good people forget that they are rooted in God’s love. They see the world’s hate, and they respond out of fear. They see the world’s anger, and they respond with anger.
They forget that they themselves are rooted in love, and capable of responding in love.
Today, faith and hope and love are being tested. We are definitely in one of those times when the squiggly line has taken a dip down. This makes it difficult to hold on to faith, hope, and love. The dip of the line into anger, fear, and hate tries to drag us down with it.
Both liberals and conservatives give in to the climate of fear and anger. In our current social climate, it seems that one can’t be taken seriously unless one manifests a sense of outrage. In a world in which personal attacks are far too common, people are trying to outdo one another in showing how quick to anger they can be.
There is no room for thoughtful reflection. There is no time to draw upon that everflowing stream of love before responding.
The executive branch of our government governs by fear and intimidation. It plays upon people’s prejudices, and it constantly threatens the justice and equality that we long for.
Those who support justice and equality are right to challenge the administration, and call for greater justice and equality in our government and in society. They are right to be angry about these threats.
But too many forget to root their anger in love. And too many feel they must get angry about everything.
I see people on twitter who are so quick to get angry about anything. They are looking for something to get angry about. They yell and scream and throw a fit, but I ask you: what good has that accomplished? Has anyone ever been won over to the side of love because someone kicked and screamed and threw a fit?
The only way to win someone over to the side of love is to be rooted and grounded in the way of love. If your roots aren’t drawing daily from that everflowing stream of love, then the fruit you produce won’t be good.
As the body of Christ, we need to move people toward love, toward justice, toward wholeness for this fragmented world…. We can’t do that if we ourselves are not grounded in God’s love. If the only thing motivating us is anger and fear, we will never succeed. As I heard Van Jones say on YouTube: You’re never going to win the championship game if all you do is criticize and complain about the other side.
In the book Catalyst, Sasha Allenby writes: “It can feel so good to be consistently angry after a lifetime of oppression, but if you get stuck there, you will be back in the sphere of generating rage without the ability to move yourself, or your audience, through it productively or create impact in the world.”
A lot of people today are talking about resistance, and I’m OK with that. In fact, Jesus’s ministry was, in part, a ministry of resistance against the oppression of the Roman Empire.… but what is that resistance rooted in? From where does that resistance draw its energy?
For Christians, the answer is clear: we draw our energy from God’s love.
That’s what Jeremiah did. Jeremiah did not live in an easy time. Leaders were unjust. People lived in oppression. The poor were being taken advantage of.
It was a lot like today. Even worse, actually.
Jeremiah had a lot to be angry about. There was a famine in the land - not a famine of food, but a famine of love. Love was in short supply. It had been replaced by greed.
Jeremiah was a successful prophet because he remained rooted in God’s love. Jeremiah’s goal wasn’t just to prove other people wrong; Jeremiah’s goal wasn’t to find the worst insult or the biggest burn that could be heaped upon the heads of the powerful and the corrupt.
Jeremiah’s goal was to draw people back to the way of God. To reconnect them with the God’s love. To have them drink once again from that everflowing stream.
Because only love has the power to change the world.
And the way of Jesus, as I said earlier, is the way of love. That is what compels us to follow him. So that we can incorporate that love into our lives, and let it guide our every thought, our every word, our every action.
By acting in love, we bring wholeness to this fragmented world.
By acting in love, we allow the image of God to be seen in us.
By acting in love, we move society just a little further in the right direction on that great moral arc.
No comments:
Post a Comment