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You are going to hear a lot about love in the next several weeks.
Here at church we are trying to blanket the world with love.
Out there in the world, Valentine’s Day is coming.
Love, love, love.
Today, our scriptures ask us to think about holy love.
In a new book called Ghost Boy, Martin Pistorius communicates how for a decade no one thought he could hear or see what was going on around him. At 12, he was struck with a mysterious disease that made him withdraw from the world, and eventually look like he was in a coma. But after some years, he woke up, and was not able to tell anyone! He says “I was completely entombed. At first I wanted to fight my fate by leaving some tiny sign to guide people back to me, like the crumbs Hansel and Gretel left to help find their way out of the woods. But my efforts were never enough…I was invisible—the ghost boy. ” (quoted in Daily Mail, Jan. 14, 2015) Until one day, Virna, a relief carer at the day center where Martin spent time each day, noticed that he was responding to her. Noticed…
In our Bible Study discussion this week about Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians we ended saying that the only way to get to know people, the only way to love people, is to be eyeball to eyeball with them. To notice them!
And so, as I looked at our gospel lesson for this morning, I saw that only Jesus seems to see the man who is possessed by demons. The scribes and all those present at Jesus’ first act of ministry in Mark are focused on abstract questions.
What just happened?
Is this something new?
Who is this?
And where does his power come from?
No one, except Jesus, seems to be truly seeing the man at the center of it all, the one who has been possessed and is no longer! Even the gospel writer seems to forget all about him in the rush to other things.
Jesus, when confronted by this “unclean” man, doesn’t see
“a problem needing to be dealt with,”
or “a nuisance disrupting my sermon,”
or even “something that is going to get me in trouble with the authorities,”
or “a cosmic fight with the powers of darkness,”—
I think Jesus sees the man trapped in uncleanness, the man behind the façade. And Jesus dispels the unclean spirit so THAT man can be in prominence again. Holy love.
Holy love requires we think of ourselves not as totally separate individuals, but as a community, as a WE. That is the point of the creedal question we professed today. (And as a point of gratitude to the workings of the Spirit, I had finished the bulletin with that question long before I wrote this sermon!). We are made to be in relationship—we were made in the image of a relational God. And that means, we must always be thinking about how what we do might affect others.
Our focus passage from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians might seem at first glance a trivial passage. Who cares whether you eat meat sacrificed to idols or not? (In Paul’s time in Corinth all meat was dedicated to the various gods before it was butchered and then sold) But Paul uses it as a teaching point.
First of all, he says, on a strictly abstract theological basis—we know that there is only one God, so meat “sacrificed” to other supposed gods is really not a problem. “Great,” I can hear them saying, “where’s the steak sauce!”
“NOW WAIT,” Paul says. I can hear the groans. ‘Remember, as I said before, “All things are permitted but not all things are beneficial”’ (I Cor. 6:12).
And this is where the concept of holy love comes in. This is where being eyeball to eyeball is so important. Paul says, we have the knowledge; we know there is only one God, but there are others who do not have that knowledge. It doesn’t make a difference to us, one way or the other—we are not better off eating meat (and thumbing our nose in the face of the establishment) and we are not worse off if we don’t eat meat (taking the higher moral ground). I’m sure that there were people in each of these camps arguing that was exactly what EVERYONE should do (eat or not eat).
Paul says, “But take care that this liberty of yours does not become a stumbling block to the weak.” In other words, look around you. Are there those who might not understand what you are doing, and misinterpret it? Even make wrong assumptions? If so, I, Paul, will choose, voluntarily, proudly, not to do something I very well could do.
And lest we think there are no decisions like this to be made in our time, I will only lift up the decisions to make “The Interview,” a supposed comic movie about killing the real-life North Korean dictator; or to push it even further, the continuing decisions to enflame the Islamic world by creating images (and particularly disrespectful images) of Muhammad. We proudly hold to the right of free speech in this country, and aspire for it to be a right everywhere. But just because you have a right, does not mean you should always exercise it.
Holy love: Seeing those around us, as well as ourselves, as we are and as we truly could be.
Holy love: Making choices based on community obligations instead of insular personal ones.
Holy love:
A life-work.
A mission that has and will keep the church
busy for eons.
A good benchmark against which to judge ourselves as we look at what we have done in 2014
and what we dream to do in the future.
Holy Love is what we were created to be and do,
in the image of God—
the God who St. Augustine named
Lover, Beloved, and Love.
May we be called to such a life,
And may we grow in such a love
Alleluia. Amen.
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