Sunday, February 24, 2019

Epiphany 7 - Love Your Enemies

Genesis 45:2-11, 15; Luke 6:27-38

“Love your enemies,” Jesus says. Not once, but twice. And in our first reading we are given the example of Joseph, who loved and forgave his brothers for selling him into slavery. “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, pray for those who abuse you.” As if it as easy as that.
These words come to us as the Pope concludes an emergency summit at the Vatican to address the thousands of cases of priests abusing those in their care, cases that the Catholic Church has worked to erase and forget. They come to us as the same scandal rocks the Southern Baptist Convention, where hundreds of church leaders betrayed the trust of their congregation members and committed acts of sexual and spiritual abuse. In the Catholic Church, in the Baptist Church, in every denomination and every congregation where this happens, even here in the ELCIC, the victims have been told these very words, “love your enemies, do not judge, and you will not be judged, forgive and you will be forgiven.” These words come to me as this year my oldest child, who is gender-fluid, was put in a headlock  at school, and called a “transgender (word that starts with a W and rhymes with floor).” 
Love your enemies. Love your child’s enemies. Do good to those who hate you. Pray for those who abuse you. Forgive.

How can we understand these words, how can we follow these words of Jesus, the one whom we are committed to following, when we stand in solidarity with victims of abuse, when we are abused, when we also believe that God is on the side of the oppressed, when we know that the victims are children of God, made in the image of God? How can we reconcile the tension between Jesus’ words and our conviction that God calls us to protect those who are being abused, especially when those people are children or even ourselves?

Well, the first thing I am going to say, is that I am not going to give you a solution in the next ten minutes. To do that, we would need to talk about the complicated dynamics of power, of what forgiveness means and does, of how God acts in the world in the face of evil, of the relationship between mercy and justice. I’m not sure I could give you a solution in the next ten years. Frankly, I’m not convinced there is a solution this side of the heavenly gates; I don’t think we can ever reconcile this tension until we are fully in the presence of God after we die. 

That being said, there are a few things that might offer us some guidance. The first brings us back to Paul’s words a few weeks ago, in 1 Corinthians 13, when he talks about love. Or, to be more specific, agape. And he said, if we do not have agape, we are nothing. And I had said that agape love is living for the sake of others, for the well-being of others. Now “well-being” is a complex word, but it mainly points to the ways in which life is about more than just living and breathing; it’s about being whole. It’ about physical and emotional and mental and spiritual wholeness. To have agape love for someone is to commit to their wholeness, physically of course, but also to commit to their emotional and spiritual wholeness. And agape is the word Jesus uses when he says, “Love your enemies.” Jesus is telling us to commit ourselves to the well-being, the thriving of our enemies.

But why on earth would we do that? Our enemies are, after all, less than committed to our well-being. In fact, we might define “enemy” as someone who wants to destroy our own well-being, who does not see us as even worthy of life. Our enemy is anyone who sees us as infinitely less than them, and who works to keep it that way. Why on earth would we want to work for their well-being when they don’t care about ours?

Well, because we do not live in isolation. We live in community, we live in relationship. We were created this way, and we thrive this way. My well-being is connected to the well-being of those with whom I am in relationship. Your well-being is connected to the well-being of your community. If your community is not whole, if it suffers emotionally or mentally or spiritually, then so do you. And likewise, if you suffer physically or emotionally or mentally or spiritually, then so does your community.

And it is the same in our relationship with our enemy. Oh yes, we have a relationship with our enemies, and with those who abuse us or abuse those we love, even though it is a destructive one. We are tied to them and they to us; clearly, when a person suffers from fractures in their emotional and mental and spiritual wholeness, then so does the one they lash out against. 

And so Jesus calls us to work for the well-being of our enemy, because as long as our enemy is unwell, so is the community, and so are we. Jesus wants you to be whole and to experience new life, and Jesus wants this for the community, and therefore for our enemies.

And so Jesus tells us that if your enemy slaps you across the cheek, you should offer the other as well. And this has often been interpreted to mean that if your enemy hits you, you should just let them, and don’t stand up for yourself, and don’t hit them back. Accept the reduction of your humanity because we are all lowly humble sinners anyway.

But that is not what Jesus is saying. You see, when a slave or servant was hit in Jesus’ day, they were expected to take it and slink away. To scurry off and disappear from sight. They were not expected to stand up again, to raise their face to the one in power, and to insist that the one in power recognize that they are still there. To turn the other cheek is to draw attention to the fact that someone was hit in the first place. Instead of going away quietly––instead of disappearing––remaining and turning the other cheek, “making a scene,” as it were, makes visible that something wrong just happened. It makes visible the abuse.

The same applies to Jesus’ words to forgive those who abuse you. You see, implied in these words is that the one being forgiven did something that requires forgiveness. The unspoken first step in all of this is to make plain that a sin was committed, to acknowledge that abuse took place, that a child of God was victimized. To bless those who curse you is to expose that they cursed you in the first place. “Do not judge” implies there is something to be judged. “Do not condemn” implies there is something to be condemned. This is the step too often missed. Jesus does not call us to slink away and accept what has happened, and then to forgive in some quiet corner somewhere. Jesus calls us first to stand up, to speak to what has happened, and only then do we move to forgiveness. Joseph in Egypt did not forget what his brothers did to him, or pretend it never happened. Before he did anything, before he kissed them and wept upon them, he said, “I am your brother whom you sold into Egypt.” Joseph names the abuse, the injustice, the condemnable act that was committed.

Because to allow sin or abuse or violence to go unnamed is to allow it to continue. And to allow it to continue is to allow both those who are victimized and those who victimize others to suffer. Abuse, whether it is physical or emotional or spiritual, damages not just the victim, but also the abuser. It demeans the one who receives the abuse and the one who perpetrates it and all those who are in relationship with these people. Abuse is a sin against the community because it fractures the well-being of the community, a community that includes both you and your enemy. And so, to love, to agape your enemy is to expose the abuse they are committing, because their abuse damages not just their victims but themselves. To do good to those who hate you is not to forget what they did, to erase it or to hide it. That does not lead to their well-being or to their spiritual wholeness because it does not lead to yours. 

Having said all this, it might sound like I am still telling you that Jesus wants you to put the needs of others above your own, to once again put your enemy first. And if this is what it sounds like, then I am sorry, because that is not my intention. That would not be the Good News of the Gospel that gives life to you today. In our Gospel reading, Jesus ends by saying, “the measure you give will be the measure you get back.” It sounds a little bit like divine karma: you get from the world what you put into it. But I think that what Jesus is getting at is we become like those with whom we are in relationship. When we diminish others, we become diminished. When we treat others as less than human, we become less human. On the flip side, when we work for others’ wholeness, we ourselves become whole. When we seek life for others, even that of our enemies, we ourselves receive new life. When we seek to make others our equal, whether by putting them down or by lifting them up, we become equal to them. Working for healing for our enemy is working for healing for ourselves.


But to do that we are first called to be honest about when well-being is threatened, when wholeness is fractured, whether it is our own or someone else’s. This honesty is part of agape, it is part of how Jesus calls us to love our enemies and part of how we protect those who are abused. It is the truth that sets us all free, and it is the gift of new life for us through Christ. Thanks be to God. Amen.

Sunday, February 10, 2019

Epiphany 5 - Imposter Syndrome

Isaiah 6:1-8; 1 Corinthians 15:1-11; Luke 5:1-11

Standing in God’s holy Temple, in the sanctuary, during worship, with, “Holy, holy, holy” ringing in his ears, Isaiah is confronted with the presence of the most Holy God and is so overwhelmed with his worthlessness in the presence of the Almighty that he cries out, “Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips!”

The apostle Paul, facing up to his history of persecution of non-Jewish Christians, when thinking about Christ appearing to the holy disciples and finally to him, thinks of himself as unfit even to be called an apostle or follower of Christ. He describes himself as one “untimely born,” meaning a fetus born too early even to survive––in his mind, consigned to the garbage.

And Simon Peter, the fisherman who can’t catch a fish all night, experiences the abundance of Jesus and the miracles that God works through him, and feels so worthless that he begs Jesus to leave him alone, “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!”

It would seem that there is a long tradition of feeling worthless in the eyes of God. Or maybe just worthless in general. You might have heard about “Imposter Syndrome,” which is this feeling that while it looks to the outside world that you’re successful in life, and doing great, and holding it all together, inside you feel like a total fraud. An imposter, constantly anxious that one day soon the front will fall and everyone will see how disorganized you are, scrambling to keep it together, and then they’ll know the truth and the jig will be up. Of course, nobody admits to having Imposter Syndrome, because that alone would start things falling. Instead, we hide our feelings of worthlessness, from the world, from our friends, from our colleagues, from our family, even from ourselves.

We even hide these feelings from one another, here in church, the one place where we should be able to share them. We make sure we wear our nice clothes to church, not our comfy slouching-around-the-house clothes, with the hole in the armpit or the elastic that’s going at the waist. Someone asks us how we are, and we say, “Oh, I’m doing great,” even though maybe we’re in the middle of a long-standing argument with a family member, or we’re doing a terrible job at self-care, or we’re stressed because even though we have a job we still can’t manage to pay off the entire credit card balance. Instead, we smile and shake hands and do our best to look organized and with it and worthy.

Even congregations can suffer from Imposter Syndrome. We have this idea that we have to look good on Sunday morning, or people might question whether we are worth belonging to, or might even question our dedication to God. In church, Imposter Syndrome can look like anxiety over how guests will perceive us, whether they will want to come back, whether we are keeping the youth, whether our music is enough to keep the children interested, whether the service flows perfectly smoothly without any mistakes. We worry, even in this place, that we are worthless and so we try our hardest to make sure things are as perfect as possible.

The problem is that even though we pretend we are more-than-worthy, deep down we feel different, and this feeling seeps out in unhealthy ways. Because when we feel worthless, we try to get rid of that feeling by transferring it to someone or something else. Maybe you’ve heard about the kick-the-dog effect? Your boss comes down hard on you for something, and you go home and snap at your spouse, who then snaps at the kids, who then go and kick the dog. But what do you want to bet that it didn’t start with your boss? That when they were at home, maybe their spouse snapped at them, and they went in to work and snapped at you. And their spouse in turn was snapped at by the cranky neighbour. It goes round and round, this feeling of worthlessness, from one person to the next. There is something about the way in which our worthless feelings about ourselves spills out of us, without us even realizing it, and the solution we have––dumping it on someone else––certainly doesn’t make the feelings go away.

Now I can tell you that you are not worthless, and that in the eyes of God, you are oh-so-worthy. And I will tell you that, but at the same time, I don’t know if you’re going to actually believe it. You see, holding on to the feeling that we are worthless is familiar. It’s safe. If we are worthless, if we are small, we can just live small lives. We can say no when God calls us to the big things, like Moses saying to God, “No, I can’t be your spokesperson in Egypt, I have a terrible speaking voice.” Or like Job saying, “No, I can’t go to Nineveh to be your prophet, I’m not strong enough to go that far.” We see from the Bible what happens when people do accept that they have been made worthy before God, when they put aside their feelings of worthlessness and accept God’s call. Isaiah proclaimed terrible truths to Israel and the Talmud (historical Jewish commentary on the Bible) says that he died by being sawn in half. Paul said yes to God’s call to proclaim Christ to Gentiles, and he got thrown in jail and persecuted by the Roman Empire. Peter said yes to being a disciple of Christ and ends up being crucified in Rome by Emperor Nero. I suspect that on some level, each of them wished that God had just passed them by.

The thing is, holding on to our feelings of worthlessness when God has proclaimed us worthy is, ironically, a denial of God. We talk a lot about the sin of pride and arrogance, but there is an opposite sin, which is that of false humility and of allowing our own feelings of worthlessness to become more important than what God is telling us. God makes us holy, God makes us worthy, and to cling to the self-image that we are not is to refuse to allow God to use us in the world.

Indeed, we see this with Isaiah. He laments, rightfully, that he is unworthy to proclaim God’s word to the people. But God uses a seraph, an angelic being, to purify Isaiah with sacred fire, a coal on his lips, so that the words that pass through his lips are pure and holy. And then Isaiah goes to the kings and the people of the time and proclaims God’s Word. God makes Isaiah worthy, Isaiah doesn’t do it himself, and Isaiah can no longer refuse to utter God’s words, because that would be refusing to believe that God had purified him.

And it’s the same with the apostle Paul. “For I am the last of the apostles, unfit to be an apostle,” he says, “But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me has not been in vain.” Through the actions of Christ, Paul is forgiven his persecutions of non-Jewish Christians, and grace makes him worthy to proclaim the Good News. If Paul had continued to wallow in his past, and continued to say that his unworthiness made him incapable of doing God’s work, then God’s grace would have been in vain. Paul would have been denying the power of God’s grace to make us worthy.
And then there’s Simon Peter. Jesus Christ chose him, of all people, to spread the Gospel and later to take care of Jesus’ sheep, not because Peter was worthy in and of himself, but because Christ made him worthy for the job. And if Peter had refused to follow Jesus, he would have been refusing to believe that God had made him worthy for it.

To witness to the power of God, to live our lives as faithful Christians, is to believe and trust that God has made us worthy to do so. Not to trust in our own worthiness, but to trust that God knows what God is doing when God invites us to follow Christ. It is, in a way, to live as if we are worthy despite knowing that we are not, because we live trusting that the power of God to make us worthy is stronger than our own worthlessness.

This is a different way of living. It is living in God’s grace, instead of our own. Living in God’s grace means, for one thing, living more authentically - it means accepting that we so often feel like imposters and that we don’t have it all together, and being honest about that. It means believing that “the truth will set you free,” because keeping up appearances just imprisons us in a lie. It’s saying, “Yeah, I had a crummy week and it’s hard to be here today,” when someone at church asks, “How are you?!?” It’s realizing that there’s no point in pretending that we’re doing great with this whole life thing or even this whole church thing, because a) we’re all in the same boat and b) it’s not about our attempts at worthiness anyway. 

Because living in God’s grace also means accepting that the truth that, because of God’s work in Christ, we actually are worthy after all. We are filled with the worthiness of God. We can follow Christ, we can carry out the work of Christ, because God is at work through us. It means giving up our feelings of inadequacy, of incompetence, of failure. God has transformed you - you have been made worthy and now you are so. No matter what is going on in your life, no matter what you have together or what you don’t, God has chosen you and has made you worthy to stand in the presence of our most holy God, to bear the image of God to the world, and to embody God’s love to all.


When we start being honest about our own feelings of unworthiness, and simultaneously accept that God makes us worthy nonetheless, life gets easier. We don’t spend so much energy pretending everything’s perfect. We stop kicking the dog. We have compassion for others when they mess up. We live in the confidence of what God has done for us, even as we grasp our complete unworthiness in the presence of God. We say, “Here am I,” we say, “by the grace of God I am what I am,” and we follow Jesus. Thanks be to God. Amen.

Sunday, February 03, 2019

The Purpose of a Church - Epiphany 5

1 Corinthians 13:1-13

Every congregation, from the one in Corinth almost 2,000 years ago to those just starting out today, wants to know what God’s purpose is for it. We have an idea that God wants us to do something with our life together, and so congregations spend time doing 360 degree evaluations, doing listening circles, and developing vision statements. We come up with five-year mission plans, and when we’re done, we go through the list of things we were supposed to do, and the criteria for success, and we check off what was achieved and what wasn’t, and then we do the whole thing again. Because we want to fulfill God’s purpose for our congregation. I know––this is one of the first things I did in my first congregation.

But when it comes to figuring out what God’s purpose for a church is, sometimes we end up confusing the means for fulfilling God’s purpose for us with the end, or the actual purpose. And by ‘we’ I mean Christians in general. Congregations get confused into thinking that our programs and our filled pews and our overflowing bank accounts are the purpose of the church. Congregations can spend hundreds, if not thousands of dollars on church programs, and church consultants, and growth initiatives that are meant to bring people in the door. The purpose of the church becomes one of self-growth and of sustaining the congregation. And then, over time, we start thinking that God’s purpose for our life as a congregation is to keep the momentum going. We start celebrating anniversaries like 50 years, or 75 years, or even 100 years. And then, over time, as resources dwindle, we start thinking that God’s purpose for congregations––for Christian communities––is that we simply exist. That merely surviving is fulfilling God’s purpose for us. That managing to meet the budget every year is fulfilling. That simply gathering to worship on Sundays is fulfilling God’s purpose for us. Advent isn’t there yet, but one day, it will be.

But these programs and budgets and Sunday School and youth groups are all meant to be tools to help the church to fulfill its actual purpose, which is clearly laid out for us in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. The purpose of the Christian community is to love. As Paul says, “If I do not have love, I am nothing.” If we do not have love, we are nothing. We may have flashy programs and filled pews, and balanced budgets, and we maybe be able to carry on for the next fifty years, but if we do not have love, we have nothing.

Now “love” is a pretty loaded word. It’s a shame that in English we only have one word for love, because there are lots of different kinds. The love you have for your spouse is different than the love you have for your children, which is different than the love you have for your country, or the love you have for chocolate, and definitely different than the love you have for God. So which kind of love is Paul talking about in this passage? Which kind of love is it that fulfills us and gives purpose to our lives?

Well, we’re lucky that Greek has different words for love. There’s philos, which means a brotherly or sisterly kind of love––the love you have between equals––your siblings or cousins or very close friends. There’s eros, which we often use to describe erotic love, but we can also use it to describe the kind of love that borders on covetousness. When you love someone or something so much it consumes your life and you, in turn, try to consume it. Like, if you’ve ever seen a tiny baby and said, “Oh, I just want to eat you up!”, that’s an example of eros love. Eros is more than what we describe as erotic love––it’s any love that is possessive––where we want to grab the object of our love and just hold it tight. If we love the idea of our church so much that we want to grab it and make it ours and keep it that way forever, that’s eros. If you love chocolate so much that you can’t stop eating it if it’s in front of you, that’s eros. When you fall in love, that starts as eros. It’s not a bad kind of love––the Song of Solomon is full of this love, toddlers and small children have this kind of love for their parents when they demand, “Hug me, kiss me, play with me!”––It’s not bad, but it can certainly become very unhealthy, destructive even, because, in the end, it is love for the sake of the one who is loving, and not for the sake of the one who is loved. 

Then, of course, there’s agape love. Agape is entirely centered on the one that we love. It is, in a way, the opposite of eros. While eros is a love where the lover wants to consume the object of love, agape is a love where the lover gives her- or himself up completely for the sake of the loved. In agape, we give up everything––our selves, our time, and our possessions, we might say––for the sake of the one we love. Agape is the love parents have for their children when they encourage them to leave so they can grow and mature and have their own lives, even if it breaks our own hearts. Agape is the love that says, “I’m going to walk to the store instead of driving because it’s better for the environment.” (Although maybe not this morning.) Agape is the love that says, “I will let the other person take credit for that job because they need it more.” Agape, as Paul says in our reading, “does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful. Agape is patient; agape is kind; Agape is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude.” That is actually what it says. The “love” in 1 Corinthians is agape love, not eros love. It is a love that puts aside all thought of what I or we want, in order to make room for the other, as hard as that is. It is a completely selfless love, and it is the most difficult and painful love of all, because it runs completely contrary to our evolutionary self-preservation instincts.

And yet it is the love that God calls us to, and the love God has made us for. As Paul says so clearly, if we do not have agape, we are nothing. It’s so strange––agape is a love that calls us to give up everything we are, and yet if we do not love that way, if we hold on to everything we are, then we are nothing. God, in this funny, paradoxical twist, has made us so that we are most fulfilled, we most have life, when we live contrary to our biological imperative for self-preservation. God has made humans so that our supreme purpose in life, our moment of ultimate fulfillment comes not from securing our own life, or ensuring our own survival, but from ensuring it for those outside of ourselves. Our greatest purpose in life, our greatest meaning, comes from love––from  agape.

So what does this mean for the congregation of Advent? Well, the same thing that it means for every congregation, actually. Paul’s words, you see, are to the congregation in Corinth. They weren’t written to an individual, even though they’re often used that way. The original audience of Paul’s words about agape were to a church community––his words are meant first for congregations. And so Paul is saying that if the community does not have agape, it is nothing. If the community or congregation designs programs meant to bring others into itself, and focuses on budgets that support only itself, and plans worship to bring people in only for itself, then the love the congregation has for the world is an eros love––a love that wants to bring others in and consume them for its own sake. The congregation does not have agape. The congregation is nothing. No matter how great the programs, how attractive the worship service, how packed the Sunday School rooms are, if it is all for itself, it is nothing. It may be a great place to be, and lively, and a wonderful social support, but it is not fulfilling its purpose as the body of Christ––it is not church. It’s not bad, it’s just not church.

Church is different because church is agape. God’s purpose for every church is that it live for the sake of others. And you know, as an interesting aside, this has implications for interfaith relations. This week happens to be the United Nations Week for Interfaith Harmony, and one of the statements that was passed at the ELCIC’s National Convention a few years ago was the adoption of the United Nation’s “Welcoming the Stranger” Statement. [https://www.lutheranworld.org/content/resource-welcoming-stranger and http://elcic.ca/Documents/documents/EncounteringPeopleOfOtherFaiths-InterfaithGuidelines.pdf] And one of the profound things in this statement is that it says, specifically: “I will respect the right of the stranger to practice his or her own faith freely. I will seek to create space where he or she can freely worship.”

Isn’t that amazing? That we, as people of the Christian faith, are called to create space where strangers of a different faith can freely worship? “And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.” Above our hope in Christ, above our faith in the God of Israel through Christ, the greatest thing we are called to is to love the way Christ does, which is agape love, which serves others, regardless of their faith and their hopes.

For Christians, agape is embodied most fully for us in Christ. And this is how we find our purpose and our fulfillment both because God made us to be this way and because this is how God loves us. We love because God first loves us. God does not love us with an eros love, hoping to consume us. God loves us with an agape love, giving up God’s honour and power and glory in order to take on a human body and then giving that body up for death. God emptied God’s self for us, God gave us everything, God gave us God’s own self in Jesus Christ for our sake. That is agape. Living for the sake of others. Dying for the sake of others. So that we might experience the blessing and fulfillment of living in agape. So that we, too, might have the joy and satisfaction of giving ourselves, in turn, for others.


So. What is God’s purpose for Advent? It is the same purpose given to every congregation, from the beginning of the Christian church under Paul until the very last day. To love. Not to survive, not even to thrive, but to love. Surviving is nothing. Thriving is nothing. All that there is is love. “And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.” For the agape God has for us, and in which we find our true purpose, we say, Thanks be to God. Amen.