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Wednesday, February 10, 2016
book study begins- come journey through season of Lent with Keystone UCC
Saturday, February 6, 2016
Sermon: Troubling Love
A Reading
13:1 If I speak in the
tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a
clanging cymbal.13:2 And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.
13:3 If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.
13:4 Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant
13:5 or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful;
13:6 it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth.
13:7 It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
13:8 Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end.
13:9 For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part;
13:10 but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end.
13:11 When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways.
13:12 For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.
13:13 And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.
The Gospel reading is Luke 4:21-30
4:21 Then he began to say
to them, "Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing."4:22 All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth. They said, "Is not this Joseph's son?"
4:23 He said to them, "Doubtless you will quote to me this proverb, 'Doctor, cure yourself!' And you will say, 'Do here also in your hometown the things that we have heard you did at
4:24 And he said, "Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in the prophet's hometown.
4:25 But the truth is, there were many widows in Israel in the time of Elijah, when the heaven was shut up three years and six months, and there was a severe famine over all the land;
4:26 yet Elijah was sent to none of them except to a widow at Zarephath in
4:27 There were also many lepers in
4:28 When they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with rage.
4:29 They got up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff.
4:30 But he passed through the midst of them and went on his way.
Epiphany 4 Year C 013116
1 Corinthians 13:1-13
Luke 4:21-30
Troubling Love
By Rich Gamble
At first hearing it is
difficult to think of why these two scriptures are linked in our lectionary. It
turns out that the link is essential.
There are three kinds of
love. Unfortunately, English has only the one word, love. That’s why I like
Greek, at least in this one instance. Greek has three words and I use these to
stand for the three kinds of love. One is eros, which is about acquisition. I
eros you means that I desire you. Eros is really about what I want. I may give
you things and be thoughtful, people are often kind to their treasured
possessions. But eros is energy is about possession. It is inward flowing.
Philia is about mutuality. I
love you and therefore I will go with you to your dopey chick flick but then I
expect that someday you will go with me to my action movie.
The third word is agape.
Agape is all about giving and not at all about getting back in return. I think
of these forms of love as directional eros is all coming in philia is back and
forth and agape is all going out. Eros and Philia often use the word “my”. My
spouse, my family, my nation, my faith when we hook the word “my” to the word
love it is a signal that we probably are not talking about agape. Agape
recognizes no distinctions between those loved.
In this passage from Paul’s
letter to the Corinthian
Church
Eros and Philia do not necessarily
conflict with systems of domination. Indeed they can be the glue which binds
people to such systems. Desire for comforts for ourselves and our loved
ones can make people willing participants in systems of exploitation and greed.
People who are willing to kill or harm another for the sake of a lover, friend,
family, nation or religion are not acting out of agape.
When we hear Paul’s poetry
about agape, it sounds soft and wise and gentle. So what does all this have to
do with today’s story about Jesus? Today’s Gospel reading shows Agape as embodied
by Jesus. At first Jesus says things that impress his hometown audience. They
find it hard to believe that the carpenter has turned into prophet but there is
no denying the way the man speaks of his faith with authority.
Jesus read from book of
Isaiah, and had he read a bit farther he would have read assurances from Isaiah
that God was on the side of the people of Israel
But Jesus said just the
opposite, he told the people that they didn’t have a lock on God. Jesus wanted
this passive and polite audience to awaken to the startling revelation that
God’s work was calling out to them and they were missing the call. Beyond that
Jesus’ sermon told the hometown crowd that God could easily work with other people
if those who called themselves the people of God were not going to act
faithfully.
What does this have to do
with love? Everything. Agape is about giving of ourselves to help others become
givers. At the very least Agape wants people stop passively harming others by
staying silent about suffering inflicted upon others. Remember that there is no
“my” in agape. Whoever suffers draws agape’s concern. Jesus could have been
polite to his audience and left them basking in their own self-approval but it
wasn’t about making his audience feel good, it was about what he could do to
move his audience to awaken to their calling to embody agape.
Kate and I used to do a lot
of camping in British Columbia
The people in Jesus’ hometown
wanted to kill him because he shined the light of God’s agape into their eyes,
and their eyes were accustomed to the darkness of the system of exploitation of
the Roman Empire of which Israel
Christians have come to
confuse agape with niceness, with being polite, with following the rules. Agape
is about helping people transform into the likeness of the ultimate good which
is agape and sometimes we do that by making others uncomfortable or even angry
so that that can see past the blinders of the system of domination that
surrounds them so that they can see the path of agape.
Martin Luther King
experienced this in his work in the South. While sitting in jail in Birmingham
“I must make two honest confessions to you, my
Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few
years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost
reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in
his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux
Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than
to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a
positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I
agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of
direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable
for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who
constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season."
Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than
absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much
more bewildering than outright rejection.”
Agape isn’t about being nice
it is about transforming the world into the image of agape. Injustice is a sign
of the absence of agape in a social setting. In order to remedy the situation
King had to stir things up, make people uncomfortable with the status quo, make
the violence that already existed but had become so common place that it was
invisible, become visible through non-violent direct action. He had to shine a
light in the darkness.
In December Americans were
polled as to whether the United
States Middle East . That is a horrifying level
of comfort with pointless violence.
The One Night Count this week
showed a nineteen percent increase in unsheltered homeless people. This is
economic violence to which we’ve grown accustomed or as Peter Marcuse said: “Homelessness
exists not because the system isn't working but because this is the way it
works.”
Jesus could have just left
his hometown crowd complacently perpetuating injustice by passively
participating in an exploitative system, but that would not have been the
loving thing to do.
The God of agape calls us to
active engagement in making the world a mirror of God’s self-giving love. The
God of agape is continually beckoning us all to embody that love. That is why we
would like to try an idea came from Levi, Eliza’s husband. We would like to try
adding a time in worship each week for members of the congregation to share how
they have shared the love of God in acts of compassion or justice. We will open
up a time in worship for people to briefly (and I want to emphasize the “briefly”
part) share some act of Agape they’ve done during the past week. We don’t need
to hear the whole story, just a sentence or two about your action. Call or
write a political leader or participate in a march for justice, make food for
the hungry, talk to your neighbor about global warming, make a phone call to
someone who could use a kind word. How is what we talk about on Sunday being
carried into the world throughout the week? Let’s share those as part of our
offertory time. You can say a few words out loud or write it down and put it
into the offering plate. Let’s inspire each other by the things we are doing.
What was true for Jesus is
true for us. If we follow the God of Agape then we will inevitably come into
conflict with those who use the love of their nation, their families, their
religion as a reason to ignore the call to love strangers and enemies. We will
come in conflict with those who proclaim a violent god of judgment or an
apathetic universe. We will come in conflict with those who want to justify
their luxury. And we will come in conflict with nice people who just want to be
left alone to do their own thing while they ignore (and thereby perpetuate) the
suffering all around them. The people of Jesus’ hometown tried to kill him for
what he believed. Why should we think embodying Agape is free of conflict?
The God of Christ calls on us
to carry God’s outrageous, uncompromising, undeterred agape love to the world and
we celebrate that as good news.
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