Preached 13 February 2011 at Union, UMC, Boston by Cassie Helms
Please don't reuse without permission
Scripture: 1 Corinthians 3:1-9
There are over 6.8 billion people in the world today – and there's probably not a one of them out there who sees eye to eye on every little detail with you. This leads to some questions that are pretty hard to think about, but I've got to ask some of these questions today. When I was first writing this sermon, I was struggling – a lot – because I didn't think the text was speaking to me, but about halfway through this week, I realized that the point isn't just solving the problem. It's also acknowledging the problem.
There's a
picture that's been going around the internet recently, on Facebook in particular. It shows Coptic Christians in Egypt forming a protective ring around Muslim countrymen and women, providing sanctuary for their prayer. Now, it's being reported that the Muslim community shared mass with the Christians. What is it about these images that strikes us so, that inspires us to share them. They represent a unity, a solidarity, and a love between two communities with a history of struggle. They represent the first signs of reconciliation in a place torn apart by hate and oppression. They represent God's love.
*
Way back in the early Christian Church, when the question was still whether Christians were Jews and whether the Romans would tolerate them, there were divisions and arguments and misunderstandings – and you don't even have to leave the Bible to find these. We know Corinth as Paul's territory because of his two biblical letters to the Corinthians, but Peter was also there, Apollos was there, and sometimes the locals even decided to do their own thing. Paul alone wouldn't have been perfect; he never met Jesus the man, his own beliefs changed over time, and his personality was, perhaps, not the most agreeable.
But how many of us come from different backgrounds, religious and otherwise? We have different heroes, we've heard different sermons – perhaps we even know different religious texts or have been raised with entirely different ideas of God. We've listened to different music, celebrated different life events, voted for different politicians. We've loved differently, lived differently, and shared God's Word differently.
In this passage from Corinthians, it's almost like Paul's saying to get over it already. Does it really matter if you converted to Christianity because of Paul, or because of Apollos? Does it really matter if you grew up listening to Billy Graham, or to Jesse Jackson? Paul's bottom line, at least in this passage, is that we're all Christians, and we're all growing in God's kingdom. Of course, I already said Paul wasn't perfect. In other times and places, he's busy exerting his own authority in the church, claiming his own right knowledge.
So let's take it a step further. What are Methodists without our good man John Wesley? Paul focuses a lot on how to be a good Christian – and there's no denying that it's important to live the Gospel – but Wesley brings in one crucial point. He says that religion is not “orthodoxy” or “right opinions”, but “righteousness, and peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost.” And what these amount to are love – Christian love. We love God, because God loves us, and love of God implies that we be filled with love for others.
*
Wesley had something of a passion for Christian love, and in good Methodist fashion, I'm the same way, but we, as a society, have kind of forgotten what love really is. Valentine's Day is coming up. If you haven't turned your TV on, or haven't been inside your local drug store or grocery store, you might have been able to escape that fact. The heart balloons and red roses and boxes full of chocolate – and commercials for fancy diamond jewelry – are at their peak right now, and love – a certain kind of love – is in the air. Maybe you've been with your special someone for fifty years, or maybe you're experiencing the heady rush of your first crush. Maybe it's time to take that risk, tell someone you love them.
The notion of epic romantic love has existed for ages, of course; for example: “O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?” or “What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” Romeo and Juliet was hardly the first epic romance, and definitely didn't have a happy ending, but it set down the track for our modern obsession. So often now, we want to see the next Jennifer Aniston or Will Smith movie with a few tears in the middle, a good laugh track, and a happy, romantic ending. What is it about these tales, and Valentine's Day itself, that draw us in – that bring in the big bucks at the box office, that make Hallmark billions of dollars each year? What do we love so much about love?
There's a movie that came out seven or eight years ago, Love, Actually, that has one of my favorite quotations. It's a slice of life type movie, where you get little snippets of people's lives dealing with, of course, 'love'. One of the main characters says this: “Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world, I think about the arrivals gate at Heathrow Airport. General opinion's starting to make out that we live in a world of hatred and greed, but I don't see that. It seems to me that love is everywhere. Often it's not particularly dignified or newsworthy, but it's always there - fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, old friends. When the planes hit the Twin Towers, as far as I know none of the phone calls from the people on board were messages of hate or revenge - they were all messages of love. If you look for it, I've got a sneaky feeling you'll find that love actually is all around.”
*
Is this where it stops, though? As that quotation lays out, with our relatives, our significant others, our friends? I think most of us can agree that love is happiness, and joy, and sharing, and living the life God wants us to live, even in hard times. Love is unconditional, but not the Hollywood romantic kind. The love we've received from God, and the love we're supposed to feel for each other, is ever growing, never ending. That doesn't mean we don't have to live up to it – it just means that God loves us enough to grant us salvation despite our tendency to mess up pretty badly.
So how do we live up to it? How do we share this love with everyone? I said I was going to ask some hard questions today, and this is where they start – and I can promise you I don't have the good answers. How do you love the neighbor you talk to once a year when out doing yard work? What about the cousin who's lost contact with most of the family? What about the coworker who keeps stealing pens? Better – or worse – yet: what about the homeless man outside Dunkin' Donuts? What about the house down the street where you know domestic violence is happening? What about the teenager who's selling drugs to other kids? The rapist? The murderer? What if you're the bystander; what if you're a witness, or a victim?
It doesn't just stop with what's personal, because love is large scale, too. What about, as the UMC moves towards its next General Conference, the people standing on the other side of the table, arguing against the things most important to you? What about when you take a step outside your own denomination and come face to face with someone who's going to argue against your understanding of the Bible? What about politics, and religion, and crime on the larger scale? Can you love not only the victims, but also the people who gave the orders and the pilots who flew the planes into the Twin Towers? Can you love the people at the head of the oppression in Egypt – or the genocide in Sudan?
We can hate the sin – by all means, hate the sin – but we aren't exempt from loving these people because of what they do – or don't do. Maybe our church founders didn't take this far enough for us. Because we have to think about how hard it's going to be to love these people we'd rather hate. We have to think about what it means to love them, how we can love them.
*
These are hard questions. Like I said, I don't have all the answers. I think there's hope, though. I have another quote for you – this one from Long Walk to Freedom, Nelson Mandela's autobiography. Pause for a minute and think about what has made Mandela great. Was it his fight to free the oppressed majority in South Africa? Was it his ability to overcome so much hardship to be president of that country, and to lead it into a new era? Like Paul, he isn't perfect - his temper is well documented. But perhaps Mandela's greatest trait has been his desire for peace, unity, and reconciliation.
The quote, one great among many, goes like this: “No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.” If the questions I've raised have given you a sense of dis-ease, I hope that gives you hope.
So let's love those that society sees as undesirable. Let's love those that scare us, and those that would hurt us. Let's help other Christians who are afraid to love, and let's spread God's love by sharing it.
