Sunday, February 10, 2013

Avoiding Freedom, Hiding Glory, and other (Un)Christian Practices



Moses wore a veil.  In case you were wondering, you can always tell who he is in the group photos because he’s the one in the veil.  
Apparently his own frequent run-ins with God caused the skin of his face to literally glow, and it freaked people out. Being thoughtful like that, Moses decided it was good to just cover the offensive thing when he was out in public, and only to let them see the proof of his encounters with God when he was actually delivering messages right from God.  
This both lent a little gravitas to the messages delivered, and also made potlucks a little easier, without his big mug beaming across the table at you while you were trying to eat your hot dish in peace.
But a helpful reminder too, of his differentness, being so close to God and all - (just don’t swear in front of Moses).

We’ve been spending a bit of time with Paul and the Corinthian church – and last week we heard in one of Paul’s letters them about love being the beginning and end of it all- the whole kit and kaboodle.

Well, he has scolded, cajoled, inspired and otherwise addressed these somewhat difficult people, and he’s still at it here. It seems that there is a pretty universal argument whipping around among the  early Christians- almost all of them initially Jews, about whether Gentiles- who are the vast majority of the Roman empire and a growing contingent of believers-  can just be Christians without converting to Torah-abiding Judaism in the process.
It is the position of Paul and Peter that God has called Gentiles - non-Jews- just as they are, and the Holy Spirit is  clearly with them, so they are followers of Jesus by God’s choice, and it isn’t necessary that they also take up Judaism to be part of this thing God is doing.  Even if that creates all kinds of confusion and unknown on the human end of things.

But the conflict continues to brew, and by the time Paul writes this letter, it has reached Corinth.   Some Jewish Christians have arrived with letters of recommendation and the message that Gentiles are not true Christians unless they are also Torah-following converts to Judiasm.

Paul begins this chapter, Are we beginning to commend ourselves again? Surely we do not need, as some do, letters of recommendation to you or from you, do we? You yourselves are our letter, written on our hearts, to be known and read by all; and you show that you are a letter of Christ, prepared by us, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts. (2 Cor. 3;1-3)

He brings it out of the theoretical and back to their relationship - having to see and hear one another.  And he does not shy away from sarcasm or direct insults couched within effusive affection.  (Perhaps a lost art as communication style?)

So here’s the deal: The glory of God is so powerful, so overwhelming, that God did say to Moses that nobody could see the face of God and live, and showed Moses the almighty backside and still Moses’ face glowed.  And it was perhaps too much for the people. 
But Paul is suggesting it might have been too much for Moses too. 

It is easier, maybe, to live with a barrier between us, than to have to be confronted all the time with the honest truth of being chosen by God, in a relationship with the Divine and smudged with inescapable glory.  It made things easier for the people, but it made it easier  for Moses too, maybe, if they didn’t have to be reminded all the time that God is near.

Let’s just keep it how it was when God gave a list of helpful guidelines and the only one who had to bear the shock of meeting the transcendent was one dude, and he would veil up.  In fact, let’s all veil up – just to be safe. We’ll ask the Gentiles to become Jews, and they can veil up too, and then nobody has to deal with the unexpected shock of glory coming through some face we don’t recognize, or God, forbid, through our own faces at one another.  An uncontrollable kind of life that would be – just maybe coming across glory at any turn. Geesh.  It might make us have to talk about it and share in it, and change what we believed about it or be changed by each other, and we’d frankly rather just point helpfully to the list of rules and the guy in charge and keep ourselves safely to ourselves.

My friend Peter, who has spent many years in Africa, shared a story about a wedding he attended in Morongo, Tanzania.  The bride was wearing a veil- one of the many western imports creeping into life there and into the marriage ceremony. 
Now, in that culture, Peter explained, the bride is not to look happy on her wedding day. She is leaving her family, and should be appropriately melancholy.  She is meant to have despondent demeanor, downcast eyes, look generally bummed out enough to show respect to her family who raised her and whom she is now leaving; and all the formal wedding photos reveal a properly sad bride.

But my friend took a picture of the veiled bride on her way down the aisle, and, being that this was some years ago, did what we all did and waited some time before having a the film developed.  When they saw the photo, they discovered that the flash captured through the veil an enormous, joyous grin on the bride’s face as she made her way to her wedding alter.
He said he loves that photo, and that in some beautiful way, the veil over her face allowed her to have a foot in both worlds- to respect and give to her family and people what they needed to see (and needed to not see), but to also be glowing with joy in privacy behind that veil.

Veils, by design, don’t so much keep us from seeing out, they most often keep others from seeing us.  When the veil is removed, people have to see you.  You have to be seen.  For who you are.  For the glory of God that shines out of your ordinary life.  That is not always comfortable.

And what the heck is glory anyway? Honor? Being lifted up? Isn’t it the halo around the saint’s head in the paintings? The glory of the Lord shown around those angels when they sang to the shepherds in the fields keeping watch over their flock by night. 
Like a residue of mystery, power, transcendence, glory is something connected to God, something other than ordinary, something worthy of awe, something clinging on or shining forth or drawing us near. 
And by its very nature glory is NOT inconspicuous or unnoticeable, it’s not a blend-in kind of thing, and it doesn’t spend much time worrying about boat rocking or institution building or rule respecting or people pleasing, because it comes from quite beyond all of that, some kind of intense nearness to or reflection of the Divine, come what may.

We are being transformed, people.  From one glory to the next. From the glory of an immortal, invisible God only wise, in light inaccessible hid from our eyes, to the glory of God-with-us right there in the very opposite of glory – muck, filth, ordinariness, shame, boredom and mundane. 
Is there glory in a dozen dirty diapers and a day in sweats with a shower nowhere on the horizon? 
Is there glory in a daily drudge commute and a cubicle with little satisfaction and no chance for advancement?
Does glory have anything to do with the questions, Does my life even matter? Am I even important?
 Or the crises and losses that knocks us on our backs and makes us think we’ve got nothing to get up for? 
Because the God of glory came into those places, the real places, the veil-less, see-it-for-what-it-is-places.  Right there, in the least likely of places and shining off the least likely of faces, is the glory of God.  And it messes up all we think we know about how this faith thing, or church thing, or following God thing, is supposed to work. 

In Christ, Paul says, the veil is removed, in the Lord, the veil is set aside.  God has broken through and encounter with the Divine happens all the time, the transcendent has invaded the ordinary and our lives are part of that glory.  The Spirit of the Lord sets us free. As a friend said this week, ‘You’re free now, SUCKERS!”   Now you have to go and be free!
In Christ, your self-protection is stripped away.  Your comfort in answers and control over who’s in and who’s out, who’s right and who’s wrong, and how much you personally have to invest or reveal – it’s all been removed – you have been set free for the terrifying task of living as free people, free for loving God and one another, come what may.  
We are being transformed.  Being changed by this glory of God, this radiance, this I-can’t-help-but-project-the-message-of-grace kind of living. My face just shows it, my life just leaks it out - Loved, loving.  Even in all our unglorious mess, the glory of God shines forth.

But not if we hide.  Not if we cover our true selves and our inspiring, vulnerable, places where God has met us, because we’re sure it would make others uncomfortable to be around such things.  Not if we drape over our own struggling humanity, our failures and doubts, or hang a curtain between ourselves and others whom we don’t understand, because we’ve decided God’s glory can’t possibly be present there. 

I’m not an easy person to love. And frankly, neither are most of you.  And if it were our own glory we were working at revealing, we’d be in trouble.
But it’s not about what we’ve earned or done or how shiny we try to make our lives, this is God’s glory, shining off our faces, right into the faces of others.  Shining from our lives right into the lives of others.  And it’s inconvenient and makes us uncomfortable sometimes.  And we’d like to hide so as not to offend.

But instead, since we have such hope, let’s act with great boldness, Paul says. Since it is by God’s mercy that we are engaged in this ministry, that we are called to love and reach out and draw near, we have hope, and we do not lose heart.
Let’s live bravely.  Let’s not cover up that we are people being transformed by the Spirit of God, part of God’s glorious love. 
Amen.


Sunday, February 3, 2013

Love Impossible




If I am the most eloquent of preachers, a poet and a speaker that moves people to tears, but don’t have love, I might as well be an annoying ringing alarm clock, and we should all stay home and save ourselves the trouble. 
If I am the most generous giver, on all the committees, the first to volunteer and the last to go home, but don’t have love, I may as well not even be here, all that I do is so utterly pointless.
If I know the bible, and have faith that inspires people, and I diligently pray, and always fight the right fights, and stand up for the oppressed, and speak out for the voiceless, and share all I have with the poor, but don’t have love, it means absolutely nothing – and my life has no real lasting impact.
 Dramatic stuff.

And what is love exactly?
Well I will tell you, Paul says.  Then he goes on to describe love in very straightforward and descriptive ways.  It is this, it does this, it is not this, and never this.  He is talking in the same way that he describes the Body of Christ just before this, You ARE the body of Christ, not IF you do this or that you are, just your ARE, connected whether you like it or not, diverse and different from each other and also unified into one body, different gifts, same Spirit, one body, that’s the way God made it to be.  So here, Paul is telling them about love.  This is the way it is.
Not we hope it is this way, or we should aim for it to be, but this is how it is. It is the thing THE only thing, or one of three, that last forever.  And without it, whatever else we do is pointless.

But as we heard from Lisa a couple weeks ago- he isn’t writing this to perfect people. They are in trouble. In fact, they are currently all the things he says love isn’t – arrogant, proud, comparing themselves to each other, keeping a list of wrongdoing, envious, jealous, insisting on their own way, celebrating each other’s failures, name-calling, bragging, you name it, and actually, Paul does.  And he says, love – which is everything, is none of these things.

He says you all have a place in this body, all of your gifts are important and are necessary.  But the lifeblood of the thing is love. Without that, nothing else works, nothing else matters. The only thing that sticks around is love. The beginning and end of all things.  Faith and hope and love are not temporary or fleeting, they are absolutely eternal.

So just love each other, ok? Amen.
That’s where we often leave it.
 But I, for one, come up against the impossibility of the text really quickly.  And frankly, anyone who hears this at their wedding ought to be quaking in their fancy shoes because this is one darn frightening list of attributes; and anyone who is remotely self aware and really listening when the preacher rattles it off should be dismayed and worried if this is what is expected of them because the selfless perfection of this list is downright intimidating and completely impossible.

And to make things even more complicated and hopeless we’ve made love into a feeling. I can fall into it our out of it on a whim.  I can feel it for chocolate and coffee and my car and it is somehow personal and self-guided and not at all communal and shared.  Perhaps we’ve made love capricious and fanciful, because we try to avoid that what it really means is suffering.  Love means getting so tangled up in each other, so committed that you have to watch them suffer and let them see you suffer too, that you have to feel their pain and their losses like your own.  And, bonus, you will most likely cause some of the suffering as well!

So if I don’t love you, all the better, really.
I can’t just go around loving everyone, can I? How dangerous and exhausting would that be?  If we all loved all the time?  Frankly, it is far easier to make my following Jesus into a different kind of list, one that has to do with justice and equality, or with prayer and scripture memorization, or with pitching in and helping out.  Anything to make it concrete and manageable instead of this risky and barely graspable, and completely vulnerable “love” thing.

But Paul is saying something different about love. He is saying it is something that exists outside of us, something we receive. It is a gift – like all these other gifts he just got finished talking about-  a gift from the God of Love who Loved so much as to join us fully in life and death.  Love belongs to God, and God shares it with us. 

This means that it isn’t about our ability to continue feeling all loving towards each other. Or even our ability to have pure motives all of the time, to keep arrogance out of the picture, or stay clear of irritability and resentment.   It isn’t about being people without a single self-righteous thought in our head or petty frustrations in our interactions.  And it isn’t about quietly striving to bear all things and forgive all things and endure all things until we are all used up and dried out and nothing at all.  We can’t conjure love, or achieve love or work hard enough to produce it.

And even though I will fail, still I love, because God loves, because there IS love, and we are part of it even if we don’t see or feel like it. 
When I keep a record of wrongs, when I am arrogant or filled with envy – that very fact drives me towards love, which tells me, promises me, that these things fade away and love remains.  

Our imperfect love doesn’t mean love isn’t real – instead it shows how real love is. So dimly we see, so faintly we taste – but it is enough to tell us there is so much more, enough to make us want more and feel acutely the inability to grasp or hang onto it.

The faith is that love endures, the hope is that love remains – that we can say I love, forgive me my selfishness, I love, pardon my envy and my arrogance, I love, heal me of my hatred and my jealousy. I love, I love, I love. 
These things have no place in love and yet love has a place in me, claims me, clings to me, and I love, even with these things staring me in the face, I love.  I can love because I am loved- I can love, can dip my toe in and dive in with all my unlove because there is love, because it doesn’t depend on me or come from me; it holds me and fills me.

And because love is forgiving I can forgive, 
because love is kind I can risk kindness, 
because love is patient I can stop and see you and take a breath and be patient with myself. 
  I am imperfect, but perfect love lives in me and claims me, so I have nothing to fear. 
I can live honestly –and love even with my imperfection and it is not hypocrisy, it is a testimony of hope, of what is coming, it is a chance to share and spread something that I did not create, it is a chance to sink together with each other into the reality of all.

 Love is a gift from God, who is love and the source of all love.  Which means we can’t wreck it or lose it, we can’t just fall in or out of it; we can’t tarnish or ruin it.  Love endures beyond anything else we can say or think or do, beyond all that is said or done to us, before and after every other thing, love remains. 
And when we love, we are sharing in the eternal, our words or actions step outside the normal flow of things that seem always to go from life to death, new to old, shiny to decay, joy to disappointment. Instead, in the language of love our lives speak of the real reality, God’s itinerary, where things go from death to life, old to new, decay to redemption, sadness to joy.  Love is an eternal reality that reaches backward into time and fills us with faith and hope, guides us with promise that in the end love wins.

So it isn’t about trying to love, making yourself love, or feeling badly for how badly you love. It is about loosening your grip a little, opening your heart to be loved and to share love, to participate, to join in what God is already doing and can do specifically through you in a unique and special way – love.

But know this: love will change you. It will make you realize that you may not know it all. It will make you humble. It will show you how capable you are of hurting another, how easily we are lost from one another, how painful it can be to disappoint this one you love. Love will make you do things that are uncomfortable and inconvenient. It will make you give up things you like to let others have things they like.  It will make you compromise and sacrifice, and cry. 
Love will make you cry.
Love will make you see people, really see them and not just as the background to your own life, in fact they will be so woven into your life that you can’t be you without them being them. Even those you disagree with, those you don’t understand, those who misunderstand you.  Even those far away or easily forgotten, you will see even them with love’s lenses and heart open. 

Because love means your life is not your own, you belong to God, love is your origin and your destiny, fearless, selfless, believes all, hopes all, endures all love.

And now these three remain, faith hope and love, but the greatest of these is love.

Amen

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