On love…

Tags

care, God, honor, love, relationship, self, share, vastness

Photo credit: http://thoughtcatalog.com/david-cain/2012/12/what-love-is-not/

This week I have been thinking a lot about love.  It started when I discovered a short film called, “Blind Devotion” by the Jubilee Project.  The film opens with a playful, young couple who seem lovingly devoted to one another.  Unexpectedly, the wife starts to lose her vision and her frustration over the situation begins to pull apart the couple.  She refuses help from her husband and insists on finding a way to maintain her independence.  The husband concedes, but finds that he can’t help himself from helping her in ways that she never notices.  He quickly pushes a tomato toward her while she gropes along the countertop for it.  He follows her to work to ensure that no cars sneak up on her in crosswalks.  He sits a few seats away on her bus just to make sure she gets to work safely.  And then he tiptoes away once he realizes she is comfortably situated at work.  He says that he doesn’t ever want his wife to know how much he does for her because that is how he shows her he loves her – because to him, love is more than just a feeling, it is an action.  And for him, love is not about having the recognition for what he does, but just having the privilege of doing the work.  That kind of selflessness in a relationship reminded me of the love that God showed us through the life and death of Jesus.

Later I stumbled across this blog post.  In it, the author writes what she imagines God would say to working moms.  Basically the letter notes all the ways, big and small, that the mom is constantly trying to care for her family while tending to her work.  The letter is full of affirmation, especially for the small successes, and in the face of what often feel like failures.  As a mom who works outside of the home, I especially appreciated the sentiment.  But I imagine God feels that way about all of us, no matter what familial setting we find ourselves in.  I know that my single brothers and sisters as well as my friends who have partners but no children find similar ways of loving others – and God notices.  God notices because that is the kind of love God hopes that we will show – the same love that God extends to us.

Both the film and the fictional letter got me thinking about two things.  First, I found myself thinking about the myriad ways that people love me and I probably never notice.  Some are more obvious, but I don’t actively acknowledge them:  a short note of encouragement, a phone call, an art project by my child, or help around the house by my husband.  But some of the ways I will probably never know:  the people who pray for me on a regular basis, the people who fill in gaps that I had not even considered, the people who love my child when I am not around.  As I considered the vast possibilities, I was aware of how that vastness pales in comparison to the vastness of God’s love for me.  I am humbled beyond words for the ways in which love envelopes me on every side.

The second thing I realized this week is that I could stand to honor the ways in which I show love.  Too often I beat myself up for the ways I have not said, “I love you,” enough or I have not written that note I wanted to write or made that call I planned to make.  But I began to wonder if instead, I might close each day thinking about the ways I showed love today:  tending to the life of the church and the beautiful parishioners I am privileged to pastor; tending to the daily life of my family, even if my temper gets the best of me sometimes (five year olds can be tough!); and tending to the body that God blessed me with, making sure I treat it like the temple that God made it to be.  Perhaps if I could capture an appreciation for the ways that I love and the ways that I am loved, I could let go a sense of unworthiness and grab hold of the deep love that God has for me – and then share it.

Sermon – Philippians 2.1-13, P21, YA, September 28, 2014

Tags

community, ego, humility, Jesus, other, Paul, self, Sermon, spiritual discipline, together

Humility has always been one of the trickiest virtues for me.  I actually see myself as a pretty humble person, mainly because life has deflated my ego enough times that I learned pretty quickly to be humble.  In high school I was at the top of my class, and I remember how my classmates all thought I was pretty smart.  But when I got to college, everyone else had been at the top of their class too – and quite frankly, the workload was crazy hard.  Any ego I had started to build up in high school was immediately brought down to size.  Or, as I like to tell the acolytes, in one of my first Sundays as an ordained priest, I was serving the chalice.  We missed a latecomer, so I grabbed the chalice and rushed around the altar to serve them.  In my rushing, my elbow hit the side of the altar, and the wine splashed all over the stone floor.  The gasp from the choir in the chancel was audible.  For someone who holds the sacredness of liturgy dear, I was mortified; but there was nothing I could do.  So humility has never really been an issue for me.  But the weird thing about humility is owning the virtue.  As soon as you declare, “I am a pretty humble person,” haven’t you just negated your humility by bragging about your humility?

Of course, the quest for humility can go to the other extreme as well.  I have a friend who went through a phase of being a pretty fanatical Christian.  At some points I found talking with him to be so frustrating that I avoided him altogether.  He was so obsessed with being a humble Christian that you could never pay him a compliment.  I might say something simple like, “I’m so proud of how well you are doing in school.”  And his immediate retort would be, “Oh, well I had nothing to do with that.  All the credit belongs to God.”  There really is no good response to a retort like that without sounding sarcastic or rude.

But humility is what our epistle lesson today demands.  Paul addresses the community at Philippi with a letter from prison.  Worried that the community of Philippi stay on the right track, Paul tells them, “Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves.  Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interest of others.  Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus.”  In three simple sentences, Paul’s instructions get harder and harder.  First, Paul tells the community not to let their egos get too big.  Paul wants the community to right-size itself by looking at their intentions and attitudes.  Second, Paul tells the community not just to be humble, but to put the needs of others above their own needs.  Here Paul is commanding the community not just to correct their attitudes, but to reorient their actions as well, focusing on others before themselves.  Finally, as if the other two were not hard enough, Paul takes his instructions one step further and tells the community to have the same mind as Christ Jesus.  Paul wants the community to be a humble as the man who sacrificed his own existence for the sake of humanity.  The more I read Paul’s letter this week, the more I wondered whether my fanatical friend had not been rooting his whole life in the mandate presented here by Paul.  Maybe my friend’s annoying, over-the-top humility was actually what Paul was suggesting.

The challenge with trying to take on any spiritual discipline, like taking on the mind of Christ, or becoming more humble, is that we tend to fret so much over the discipline that we get lost in ourselves – which is, in fact, the very opposite of what Paul invites us to do today.  In focusing on our weaknesses or lack of humility, and trying to work our way into a more humble way of being, instead, we find ourselves alone, struggling with God, but separate from others who may actually be able to help us in our quest for humility.  The secret to mastering humility is not by focusing on the self, but instead by focusing on others.  One scholar describes this method by explaining, “One does not ‘self-empty’ by focusing upon oneself.  One is emptied of self to the degree one is overcome by the needs, pains, hopes, and desires of others.  When concern for others takes one utterly beyond self-interest, beyond obsessions with achievements and self-obsessing guilt over failures, beyond self, then one receives the comfort of an Easter ‘yes’ so overwhelming, unconditional, undeniable, and absolute that [the ‘yes’] is experienced as unfailing and forever – a yes more potent and enduring than any imaginable no.”[i]

When I did my year of AmeriCorps service, I arranged to clean and lock up the Episcopal Campus House in exchange for a free room in the back of the house.  Since AmeriCorps volunteers get a very modest living stipend, the free housing was a huge help.  But one day, at the end of a particularly physically grueling day of work, I was talking to one of the clients that the Food Bank served.  He lived in a group home and was trying to transition to independent housing.  We were talking about my housing situation and he marveled, “Man, I wish I could find a situation like that!”  Truthfully, I had taken my housing situation for granted – occasionally I even resented having to clean toilets and mop floors.  But after that conversation, every time I mopped those floors I remembered how incredibly lucky I was.  I needed that client to help me get to a place of humility and gratitude.

That realization is what Paul is hoping the community at Philippi will have as well.  Paul knows that setting aside the self is difficult.  That is why he pushes us to look at the needs of others.  Paul knew that when the community of faith began focusing on others, they would forget about themselves.  They would gain the perspective needed to help them on the journey toward humility.  And as the community turned more and more outward, they would be turning more and more toward the life of Christ – a life always oriented toward the other.  The work of building individual humility and having a mind like Christ only happens in the context of community.  The work cannot be done alone.

In 1974, poet Adrienne Rich was awarded the National Book Award in poetry, having beaten out fellow nominees Audre Lorde and Alice Walker.  When she gave her acceptance speech, she shocked the literary community.  She began, “We, Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, and Alice Walker, together accept this award in the name of all women whose voices have gone and still go unheard in a patriarchal world.”  The three women had sat down together before the event and written the statement.  No matter who won that night, this would be the statement of the winner.  When asked about the statement, they “said they believed that by supporting and giving to each other they could enrich each other’s lives and work more than by competing against each other.”[ii]  What these three poets did was refuse to play by the rules of the game.  Instead of accepting that there must be one winner, they declared that they had all won – despite what the award givers were proclaiming.

What these women did is what Paul was hoping the Church community would do.  By working together, these women resisted the temptation to lose their humility.  If any of them alone had won, they could have become puffed up with pride.  Conversely, if any of them alone had lost, they could have spiraled into the depths of self-doubt.  But together, they were able to claim a humble acknowledgement that God was working through each of them to do great things.  That is the true nature of humility – one found and expressed through community.  We are blessed to already have in place the kind of community that can support and encourage one another in the development of humility.  Our invitation is to trust this community enough to uplift us, to challenge us, and to help us grow.  We cannot face the journey alone; but luckily, we are not alone in the midst of this community.  Amen.

[i] William Greenway, “Theological Perspective,” Feasting on the Word, Year A, Vol. 4 (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2011), 114.

[ii] Entire story told by Mike Grave, “Homiletical Perspective,” Feasting on the Word, Year A, Vol. 4 (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2011), 113.

Sermon – Matthew 18.21-35, P19, YA, September 14, 2014

Tags

domestic violence, forgiveness, free, gift, hurt, Jesus, love, obligation, Peter, self, Sermon, terrorism

This week has been a bit rough.  We started the week talking about Ray Rice and the NFL’s handling of the physical abuse of Rice’s then-fiancée.  The incident raised all sorts of questions about domestic violence:  how genuine the NFL’s stance on domestic violence is, why people stay in abusive relationships, and what domestic violence really looks like.  And then, just days later, we honored the anniversary of September 11^th.  We made space for those who are still mourning deaths, we remembered our own experiences of that day, and we reflected on how much our world has changed in the shadow of that event.

Needless to say, when pondering the horrors of domestic violence and terrorism, the absolute last thing I wanted to do this week was to pray on our gospel lesson from Matthew.  The scene is familiar.  Jesus has just told the disciples about how to resolve conflict within the community of faith, and Peter appears with a question.  “Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive?  As many as seven times?”  In other words, Peter basically comes to Jesus asking the question that we all want ask, “Okay, so I know you want us to be a community that honors God, even when we fight.  But how many times, exactly, do we really have to forgive someone?  I mean, surely there are limits to how many times we have to keep forgiving someone?”  I give Peter credit.  Peter manages to come off sounding pretty generous.  I mean, how many of us would propose forgiving someone seven times before cutting them off completely?  Instead, our most common colloquialism is “Fool me once, shame on you.  Fool me twice, shame on me.”  In our culture, we will forgive someone once and clear the slate.  But if people cross us twice, we believe we would be foolish to stay in a relationship with them because they have proven that they cannot be trusted.

But Jesus does not concede to our modern sensibilities about forgiveness.  Jesus’ response to Peter is shocking, “Not seven times, but I tell you, seventy-seven times.”  Now seventy-seven times is way more leeway with which most of us feels comfortable.  And that is not even taking into account that some translations translate Jesus’ instructions not as seventy-seven times but seventy times seven.[i]  Regardless, the point is that Jesus is basically saying that there is not true end to forgiveness.  “There can be no limit on forgiveness, because [forgiveness] is a never-ending practice that is essential to the life of the church.”[ii]

What ultimately makes us feel uncomfortable about Jesus’ words is that when we begin to talk about forgiveness, most of us have some pretty distorted beliefs about forgiveness.  Some of us believe that forgiveness means excusing or overlooking the harm that has been done to us and saying that everything is okay.  For those who hold that belief, forgiveness can be equated with stuffing our feelings down deep inside or downright lying in order to keep the peace.  Others of us believe that forgiveness means allowing those who have hurt us to persist in their behavior.  For those who hold this belief, forgiveness is so important, that we become recurring victims of offenses.  Still others believe that forgiving means forgetting what happened.  For those who hold this belief, forgiveness is pretending an old hurt does not still hurt.  Finally, others see forgiveness as something that we can do at will, and always all at once.  For those who hold this belief, forgiveness must be immediate and offered quickly.  The problem with all these models of forgiveness – of overlooking the harm, saying everything is okay, of allowing recurring behavior, of trying to forget, or forgiving once and for all – is that these models of forgiveness fall apart when we run into extreme situations like the ones from this week with Ray Rice or September 11^th.

The tremendously good news this week is that all of these understandings about forgiveness would have been foreign to Jesus.  I was reading one of my favorite authors this week on her thoughts about forgiveness.  Jan Richardson says of forgiveness, “The heart of forgiveness is not to be found in excusing harm or allowing [the harm] to go unchecked.  [Forgiveness] is to be found, rather, in choosing to say that although our wounds will change us, we will not allow them to forever define us.  Forgiveness does not ask us to forget the wrong done to us but instead to resist the ways [the wrong] seeks to get its poisonous hooks in us.  Forgiveness asks us to acknowledge and reckon with the damage so that we will not live forever in [the damage’s] grip.”[iii]

That is why Jesus tells the hyperbolic parable about the servant and the forgiving king.  The forgiveness by the king of ten thousand talents (or the equivalent of 150,000 years of labor)[iv] is almost ludicrous in its generosity.  The servant would never have been able to pay that amount back.  But then again, the forgiveness we receive from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ is also ludicrous – ludicrously abundant, underserved, and more than we could ever earn.  And yet, the times we struggle to forgive will be like when the unforgiving servant cannot forgive the hundred denarii owed by another servant (or the equivalent of a hundred days of labor) – a much less egregious amount to owe.  In order to be a people who live under Jesus’ excessive forgiveness, we must be a people who are also willing to work on the art of forgiveness.  But we do not do that work out of obligation – instead we do that work as a gift to ourselves.

There once was a woman who went to see her Rabbi.  The woman was a divorced single mom who was working to support herself and her three children.  She explained to the Rabbi that since her husband walked out on them, every month she struggled to pay the bills.  Though she and the kids could not afford everyday treats like going to the movies, her ex-husband was living it up with his new wife.  The Rabbi suggested that the woman forgive her ex-husband and she was indignant.  “How can you tell me to forgive him,” she demanded.  The Rabbi responded, “I’m not asking you to forgive him because what he did was acceptable.  What he did was not acceptable – it was mean and selfish.  I am asking you to forgive him because he does not deserve the power to live in your head and turn you into a bitter angry woman.  I would like to see him out of your life emotionally as completely as he is out of your life physically, but you keep holding on to him.  Know this:  you are not hurting him by holding on to that resentment.  You are only hurting yourself.”[v]

Jesus does not propose that we forgive seventy-seven or seventy times seven times because Jesus is a sadist.  Jesus knows forgiving is hard.  But Jesus also knows that the worst part about forgiveness is not that the work is hard.  The worst part about forgiveness is that when we do not forgive, we only hurt ourselves.  And Jesus does not want us to be locked in a prison of resentment and anger.  Jesus wants us to be free.  One of the reasons Jesus asks us to forgive so many times is because Jesus knows this work does not happen overnight.  Forgiveness is not a once-and-for-all event.  Forgiveness requires us to keep going, to keep trying, because only in the practice of trying – in fact trying until our earthly lives are over – will we ever come close to the profound forgiveness that we receive through the life, death, and resurrection of Christ Jesus our Lord.  Our work on mastering the art of forgiveness is not a gift that we give to others.  Our work on mastering the art of forgiveness is the gift that we give to ourselves.  We work on the art of forgiveness because we are working on loving ourselves as much as Jesus loves us.  Amen.

[i] Lewis R. Donelson, “Exegetical Perspective,” Feasting on the Word, Year A, Vol. 4 (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2011), 69.

[ii] Charles Campbell, “Homiletical Perspective,” Feasting on the Word, Year A, Vol. 4 (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2011), 69.

[iii] Jan Richardson, “The Hardest Blessing,” Sept. 9, 2014, as found at http://paintedprayerbook.com/2014/09/09/the-hardest-blessing/#.VBOogcKwKi0.

[iv] David Lose, “Pentecost 14A: Forgiveness and Freedom,” Sept. 7, 2014, as found at http://www.davidlose.net/ 2014/09/ pentecost-14-a/.

[v] Paraphrased story by Harold S. Kushner, quoted by Charlotte Dudley Cleghorn, “Pastoral Perspective,” Feasting on the Word, Year A, Vol. 4 (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2011), 72.