Enough with the Love Already!

We are inundated with the L word these days.  The Beatles sang about it non-stop, artists paint about it, poets wax rhapsodic on it, our scriptures are full of it and even Tom Jackson started his presentation on Friday night with the words “I love you” to the whole crowd.

Seriously?  He loves 500 Athabascans he has never met before? Riiight! That statement was enough to make a few people’s eyes roll, and those who didn’t may have been thinking, “Easy for you to say, but I could never do that.  That’s too hard.”  Or, “I tried that once, but I got hurt,” or “let me tell you about my bosom friend who betrayed me.  That taught me a huge lesson about loving people.”

But somehow he had us all in the palm of his hand.  You could have heard a pin drop when he was talking that night about how he had found his purpose in life, that he learned that one person can make a huge difference in the world.  He learned that he was addicted to helping people get out of their destructive mindsets and look for the positives as a way of battling poverty, depression and suicide.

He was living out Jesus’ command to love one another.  I don’t know if he is Christian or not, but he was living out the gospel in a positive way, sharing his fortune of a Creator-given beautiful voice to Canadians wherever he went.  He was turning what had been a nightmare life into a dream to inspire and heal others.

Sometimes I think we get caught in the ruts of our nightmare lives and we need something to push us out of those ruts.  Sometimes we get stuck in our pity parties, our resentments, our grudges and our fears and can’t see beyond our noses.  Sometimes we are like a heart patient that needs an electrifying jolt to get our hearts started up again.

 “Clear” someone yells, and the emergency staff bring down the paddles and our bodies leap up from the stretcher in the intense energy needed to get our hearts pumping again.

That’s what Peter’s dream is about, I think.  He had watched Jesus eat with all kinds of people, Samaritans, Syrophonecians, tax collectors, prostitutes, drunks, lepers, the works.  He had seen Jesus heal the servants and children even of Roman soldiers, the dreaded enemies.  And yet Peter was stuck in a dangerous rut.  In fact the whole Jesus movement was caught up in the concept that their faith was one more interpretation of Jewish faith.  Jesus was Jewish, followed Jewish laws, quoted Jewish scriptures, followed Jewish traditions, and like all good Jewish men, went to temple to have arguments around Jewish interpretations.  So were Peter, Paul, Mary, Martha and all the other disciples.  Good Jewish people. 

God didn’t want them falling into the same old rut.  Hence the dream Peter has, or more precisely the nightmare.  I can just picture the horror and disgust Peter felt at looking at that banquet spread on the sheet.  Calamari, chocolate-covered ants, lobster, wichety grubs, probably still raw rather than deep-fried and coated in bread crumbs to disguise their appearance.  Just because John the Baptist ate locusts, doesn’t mean that Peter was looking forward to grasshopper pie!

So Peter endures what for him must be a shockingly stomach-churning picture of a heavenly picnic and realizes that this means that he’s going to have to rethink who or what he hobnobs with and since Christianity has so many mentions of heavenly banquets and feeding of 500, socializing with those folks, their kind, was going to take a huge act of, well, guts!

 

This was a deep act of selfless love and acceptance, when you come to think of it, and is actually one of the reasons Christianity spread so far so fast in the early days.  Thomas had to eat Butter Chicken and curry in India, two romans named Cyril and Methodius had to figure out holopchi and perehe, goodness knows what they thought of escargots when they first arrived in France, or even dim sum for that matter.

Somewhere along the way, though, we lost sight of the love part of that heavenly banquet, and instead of enjoying pemmican and bannock, we imposed carrots and Brussel sprouts.  We forgot that Christianity is sitting down with our neighbors and eating what they put out in front of us.  We forgot to watch the Holy Spirit saying, “Shut up Peter, you’ve talked enough, let me get to work in these folks before you mess it up with too many words.”

Imagine what it would be like if Peter hadn’t listened to his dream.  I would probably be a high priestess performing human sacrifice on the solstice while wearing little more than mistletoe.  We wouldn’t have roads or democracy unless we lived on the land of the Iroquois Confederacy.  There would probably be no public schools, health care, employment insurance or shelters for battered women.  But if we had kept the love of Jesus’ example firmly at the forefront of our thoughts, we would have never implemented Residential Schools, we would not use violence as a core tool for disciplining children or spouses, and our environment would probably be a lot healthier.  Peter was shown that God made all the creatures of the world and they were not to be considered unclean.  Would we be in such a position as we are today if we saw polar bears as God’s precious creation?  When we have pictures of turtles who got caught in pop bottle holders and grew around them with a figure eight waist before it killed them, would we see them as God’s precious creation?

Jesus wanted his followers to set love as the core of how they chose to interact with each other and those that they would meet in the future.  He wanted compassion as the core value to drive all our choices.  He wanted love to be the compass that we use to guide all our interactions.  Love, not an emotion, but an action.  In the end, it’s not the what’s that are important, the what I do, the what I drive, the what I own, the what I have in the bank account.  It’s the why’s and how’s.  Why I support the Food for Thought, the M&S fund, the prayer shawl ministry, the PRAAC organisation, the AA folks, the people struggling with inadequate housing or poor parenting or suicide or depression.  Why? Because we are creatures of love, made by the Great Love at the center of the universe.  And when we remember that why, our how’s become simple and straightforward, we do it in love.  To everyone, Jew and Greek, Status and immigrant and refugee, gay and straight and alphabet people, rich and poor alike.  By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.  They will know we are Christians, after all, if our why and how are about love.

 

Fire in the Belly

Any time I hear scripture about dancing, I start thinking about my abdomen and how many figures of speech there are about that portion of the anatomy.  Middle age spread, battle of the bulge come to mind for me easily enough, but there’s even more:

I had a good belly laugh about that; no guts no glory; that was stomach-churning; let’s belly up to the bar; and that was gut-wrenching.

The most important phrase I was taught as a teen was “the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach,” which is dreadful advice for surgeons.  I heard that comment so often, I actually wondered if it was in the Bible.  It’s not.  My grandmother had me convinced that men could be manipulated into anything from a new fridge to a marriage proposal with some careful application of a roast beef dinner followed by a generous slab of pie.  Food was a way to get power through manipulation for her.

And if you look at the oldest known works of Christian art, you might wonder if that’s the same religion as we practise today.  There were plenty of pictures of fish, grapes, wine, bread and suppers but no crosses.  Abundance is mentioned or hinted at throughout the gospels, water into wine, the feeding of the five thousand, the parable of the banquet to which everyone is invited.  And several times, Jesus, a carpenter, has the audacity to teach fishermen how to fish.  When they follow his instructions, as usual there is tremendous abundance.  Enough Food for all, freely shared, no strings attached.

One of Saul’s first indications that the Christian community was radically different than anything he had ever known before is that they fed him.  He was a dangerous man; he had a fire in his belly to persecute these blasphemous people, and he breathed out murderous thoughts against them.  He was happy to be famous for hunting them down, and was so notorious that the good folks of Damascus could not believe he meant what he said.  How could someone go from one extreme to another so fast?

It would be like some local businessman who makes his or her reputation on being anti gay, anti muslim, racist and calling organizations like Good Samaritan or the Youth Emergency shelter a bunch of bleeding heart Communist propaganda showing up here and wanting to get baptised.  My jaw would certainly drop and I certainly wouldn’t be the only one to have my stomach in a knot if that happened.

Surprisingly, that flip flop is exactly what happened.  Both Peter and Saul struggled with pride; they thought they knew what was best for the people of God.  They arrogantly assumed they could do anything they liked.  But like a punch to the gut, they came face to face with their vulnerabilities.  Peter betrayed Jesus in the temple while warming himself by a charcoal fire and Saul became blind and completely dependant upon others for his survival where before he had been a healthy and energetic youth.

Life is like that; we get the horrible diagnosis or our life takes an unexpected turn or something happens that we just don’t know how to cope with and suddenly we find ourselves crying tears of gut-wrenching sadness as the very future we dreamed of unravels completely.

Peter was ashamed, Saul was helpless and confused.  Both took risks and opened themselves to a different way of seeing the world.  Peter found not just forgiveness at the charcoal fire on the beach, but a commission to step into the desperately needed role of leadership.  Saul changed his name to Paul and found a community so loving, forgiving, generous and healing that he did his best to set up other communities of generous abundance from Greece to Turkey and back, pouring his restored energy into loving people instead of executing them.

We still have people who would rather live in fear of their neighbor than live with hopeful love.  We still have people here in Canada who think it’s okay to discriminate against people of color because they can get away with it.  There are still people who encourage each other to live lives of suspicion, anger and even hate because of the remote possibility that they will lose all they have to ‘those people’ who are different than them.

But we are also in this story.  We are the Ananias folks who say, ‘really, God? You want me to have a conversation with that person? That angry neighbor, that teenager who spray-painted my garage, that fellow who yells at everyone in the grocery store or on Facebook?’  We are the ones who might just one day be called out of our safe community to feed someone who is hurt and lost and sick.  Someone different than ourselves who is hungry and empty inside and reaches out, as unbelievable as it may seem, to someone like us for help.

Ultimately everyone needs to eat, everyone is hungry.  But everyone, even the stubbornly fearful and angry racists, can find new life in the story of abundant blessing through Jesus who feeds us and shapes us into a radical thing.  A community that believes in the transformative power of love.  May that love that rescued Peter and Paul from lives of fear continue to transform us into friends of Ananias, brave followers of Christ!  May we be gifted with a bellyful of bravery that inspires us to dance that love to all who meet us.  Amen, halleluiah!

Wonderful witnesses

I’ve been thinking about witnesses recently.  The news has been full of them, from interviews in Brussels, to the women who testified against Jian Gomeshi in Toronto.  We have the Reverend Gretta Vosper declaring that the sooner the United Church starts to be a church of atheists, the better off we will all be, because a faith in God only produces fanatics who use violence to get their ways.  

And again we have witnesses referred to in our scriptures this morning.  Luke’s gospel has the women going to the tomb, and their story discounted by the disciples.  It seemed ‘an idle tale’, to be dismissed and disbelieved.  Paul wrote that without our hope in something beyond our own limited lives we are indeed quite foolish.  Our time is wasted and we have nothing that gives meaning to our lives.  Who should we believe?  How do we know we can trust the witnesses we hear from?

I found a few interesting witnesses this week who talked about atheism in surprising ways.  There was an ancient historian named Celsus who denounced Christianity as a new form of atheism.  He disliked it not because of the miracles or the virgin birth or even the resurrection, as gods coming back from the dead were quite common, like Orpheus, Hercules and Osiris.  No, Celsus’ biggest problem with Christianity was that Christians weren’t snobbishly elitist and would socialize with anyone.  And they were atheists because they challenged the idea that the Gods existed.  It wasn’t just that they didn’t like Jupiter or Apollo or Athena, they had the crazy idea that only one god existed and that one God, even though God was a Three in One, was the only one to be worshiped.  In Celsus’ books, that was atheism, and it was a stupid fad that would never last!  Boy was he wrong.

Then there was Frank Schaeffer, who wrote a book with the title, “Why I am an Atheist Who Believes in GOD”. 

You can imagine that as a recovering, former atheist myself, I found that very intriguing!  Another thing that I read was that most atheists fall into one of two camps.  They either see life as a gift or a burden.  If they see it as a gift, they try to pack as much as possible into it, as life is short and one never knows when their number will come up.  This can lead to a hectic lifestyle packed with exhausting activities, endless shopping trips and vacations in search of one thrilling experience after another. If they see it as a burden, they will sigh and say, “What’s the point of doing anything?”  Both groups are struggling with death.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer said that death forces those who place their faith in the grave to either ‘frantically affirm’ life or to hold life in ‘indifferent contempt’.  Their lives witness to the sense of helpless hopelessness that so many modern families find themselves trapped in.

The Easter story is witness to a mysterious way of living, a mystery of purposefulness, a mystery of joy and hope and courage and peace.  I trust these witnesses, not because they have all their details exactly the same, for that smacks of collusion and conspiracy, but because they have details a little different from each other, like each witness saw some part of the story from their unique point of view and remembered that bit instead of the other bit.  Like a family get together when we reminisce about the time we went fishing.  But the biggest reason I trust these witnesses is because of the way it impacted their lives.

Peter went from shamefully denying Jesus to becoming an outstanding leader, willing to face everything the Roman Empire could throw at him.  Paul had his life completely changed from an arrogant status-quo type, to someone who preached love with great humbleness. Francis of Assisi went from being a spoiled rich playboy like Paris Hilton to a beloved saint who inspired the establishment of animal shelters.  And there’s so many more that it would take months on Wikipedia to research them all.

In some mysterious way this crazy story that Romans hated, atheists scoff at, scientists challenge, and philosophers question, is still inspiring witnesses today to talk about how their lives are being changed.

That deep sense of mystery is still at work right here, right now. Every Sunday I see people who are being transformed by that Mystery, that Someone or Something, from fearful, depressed, helpless individuals into energetic, compassionate folks who love their neighbors no matter what. I see 'God' in joyful, free lives of compassion all around me. I watch grandmas and babies alike being marinated in a grace that gives the older folks courage to face down discrimination and injustice, and bathes the babies in love and trust. I see grandpas and five year olds being inspired to make a difference in the world. I see people energized by a Healing Spirit finding the courage and the patience to face cancer or family dysfunction with honesty. I see women walking away from abusive relationships because they finally get it in their bones that they are loved. I see hungry children being fed and angry men learning to be peaceful.

 I've been an atheist and those were some of the saddest, depressing years of my life. However, Jesus made a difference in my life and continues to transform me, thanks to people who witnessed to me. We make a difference when we articulate what we believe, why we believe and how we act because of our beliefs. Remember the witness of Christians over the centuries who heard that still small voice encouraging them to make a difference; their inspired witness reminds me to confidently say, "Halleluiah, the tomb is empty, Christ is risen, Christ is risen indeed!"