May 3, 2009: FOOD IS LOVE
Acts 4:5-12, 1 John 4:7-21, Psalm 23
Eileen Parfrey -- Springwater Presbyterian Church
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In my family, we sometimes use a person’s name as a verb. For instance, “to Gordon” is to, like my father, over-answer a question. Today I am going “to Gordon” you. I figure it’s appropriately scriptural today, given that this is what Peter and John do when the Sanhedrin asks “who says you can” about their miracle of helping a beggar who can’t walk. Instead of simply answering, “Jesus said,” Peter steps up on his soapbox and carries on about who Jesus is, their role in his death and resurrection, and the theology of universal salvation. Totally Gordon-y. I can only hope you don’t get all Betsy on me—named for my teenaged niece. Think, Parental Unit’s announcement that Saturday is Happy Housecleaning Day and will involve more than her bedroom. [sigh, rolled eyes] “What else?” The 1 John passage tells us the what else of how to be like Jesus—besides the simple answer, “Love!”
If you Betsy me in this case, that would be a fair response. We promise to try to be like Jesus when we get baptized, and we really do get the part about serving one another—we are generous with our money and food, we go out of our way to give our time and talent, we pray for each other. What else is there to do? To read 1 John, the “what else” is either dead or poured out completely or empty-pocketed. “Because Jesus laid down his life for us, we ought to lay down our lives for each other.” That’s OK in Biblish, but awfully hard language when you try to balance it with kids to feed, rising health concerns, waning resources, and a calendar that just won’t quit. Here is a metaphor that might work better. Most of us have either done it ourselves or know someone who has: The reality of breast feeding is a daily pouring out one’s own substance to sustain another person. It is loving surrender to another’s rhythms and needs, so thoroughly food for another that, to even think of the other, results in a physical reaction. That is the kind of love Jesus has for us, the kind John urges us to have for each other.
That kind of self-giving love is not one-way. I just came back from a retreat in which I was mentor to a group of newly-ordained pastors. We talked about the realities of clergy “burn out”—the exhaustion of giving, giving, giving so there’s nothing left of the pastor. This is not how Jesus loved. The Johaninne term for reciprocity of love is “abide.” Unpacking that word is another sermon entirely, so please take my word and that of the scholars I consulted, that when we “abide” in God and Christian community, when we experience and demonstrate to each other the kind of love Jesus has for us, we also are sustained, challenged, and loved into being like Christ. By each other.
Karl Barth said “There is no such thing as an individual Christian.” Even hermits like Thomas Merton and Francis of Assisi were part of a faith community—in which they were sustained, challenged, and loved into being like Jesus. So the deal is, because we want to be in relationship with Christ, we have to let our faith community both hold us and challenge us, subjecting our personal agendas to the life and well-being of the faith community from which our identity derives. In other words, claims about Jesus and his identity are also claims about us and claims on us. Richard Rohr writes that when we sign on to this gig, we agree to carry and love what God loves, both the good and the bad, and to pay the price for its reconciliation within ourselves. This is where “trying to be like Jesus” gets to be for the good of the world. God’s intention is to use us to transform the world, and to do it in this way—by the hard work of reconciliation. The person who is more famous than any other for the work of reconciliation is South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who is in town this week at the invitation of Ecumenical Ministries of Oregon. The Oregonian ran a promotional article yesterday, with something Archbishop Tutu said in 1995 as South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission was beginning and apartheid was being dismantled. Tutu is quoted as saying, “True reconciliation is never cheap. It is based on forgiveness, which is costly. Forgiveness in turn depends on repentance, which has to be based on an acknowledgement of what was done wrong, and therefore on disclosure of the truth. You cannot forgive what you do not know.”
That is the heart of the matter for the community to whom 1 John was written. A split in that community kept individuals from fully living their baptismal vows. Being reconciled to each other is at the heart of the community’s job to “sustain and challenge and love one another” into the very image of Christ. As I wrote in my May newsletter article, the power to forgive is the Church’s greatest power. I just read Richard Rohr’s daily online meditation, and he defines forgiveness as “when God breaks God’s own rules.” There is nothing more shocking or offensive—that by our human forgiveness of others, we set free both them and ourselves. It makes a difference, this forgiveness/reconciliation thing. Archbishop Tutu’s experience in South Africa is both clear example and promise that, when the Church leads in reconciliation and forgiveness, the whole culture changes. It’s not just within the church that we need to forgive. But it’s a start, for the love of Christ.