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All You Need Is LoveJanuary 28, 2007 Fourth Sunday after Epiphany If I asked you, “What on earth is preaching for?,” how would you answer? Every Sunday we take up about fifteen or twenty minutes in the middle of the service with this rather formalized chat, and I’m wondering why you think we do that? I mean, besides expecting it as a function of Protestant Christian worship, what’s its purpose, its function? Most of you are aware that many megachurch preachers have opted for a much more visual approach with powerpoint presentations, film clips and dramatic insertions. Among the reasons that are proffered for this development include our culture’s drift from an audio/literate focus to a visual focus. So, platforms are set up much like TV talk shows, and these are encased within church buildings that resemble shopping malls complete with coffee and donut kiosks. You know all about that, how popular preachers wear Hawaiian print shirts and so on. Practitioners say this is in service of making people feel at home and welcome. Walking into a religious space ought to be as easy as walking into a mall and the experience ought to capture the attention of people much the way our various entertainments do today. They say anything that smacks of religious symbolism is a turnoff and they want to turn people on to the story and power of the gospel. I suppose that motivation is hard to argue with in principle. And, many churches are opting for these emerging styles. Though not opposed to technological and other innovations, we opt for a different approach, believing that, oddly enough, despite, or maybe even because of, the ancient trappings, we’re on to something that’s a bit counter-cultural to the experience of many today, and that serves a useful and holy purpose. But whether new style or old style, my question remains: Just what is the point of preaching? Is it entertainment with a moral twist? Is it primarily teaching? Or inspiration? Is it meant to comfort? Should it make the gathered feel really good about themselves? Maybe you’d say, well, anything but boring, please. Boring won’t work. Boring is the great sin of our time, I think. Anything but boring, Steve. It was not very clear in our Gospel reading today, but Jesus is back in his hometown of Nazareth, starting out his mission and he’s been invited to preach at the local synagogue. And he starts out very well according to Luke’s report, who writes, “All spoke well of [Jesus] and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth.” In other words, he lived up to their hometown expectations; he spoke with grace and eloquence and won the favor of the gathered. Whoever mentored him in preaching was no doubt very pleased with his prize pupil at this point. Way to go, Jesus, you’ve got them eating out of the palm of your hand. The collection will be way up today. But then something goes terribly wrong. Jesus takes their good will and turns it against them. At the end of his message Luke reports, “all in the synagogue were filled with rage. They got up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill so that they might hurl him of the cliff.” Wow! I mean, he must have said something that really ticked them off. And this was his hometown crowd – friends, family. I have a hard time imagining that scenario today, say, here, on the corner of Park and 60th in 2007. I’m wondering what I could say to you that would cause you to rise up and drag me over to the 59th Street bridge to hurl me off. The truth is, to a great degree I’m in church-building mode, not ‘tick-everyone-off’ mode. On the other hand, I believe I’m a purveyor of the truth first and foremost. I mean, in one regard, just having chosen this profession in the current cultural environment is a bit of an off-kilter choice, something of a risk in its own right, given the current state of the church in America, not to say New York City specifically. And it occurs to me that, given the New York urban scene, all of you have made your own off-kilter choice in showing up here and for the most part I’m thinking we need each other. But, from time to time, I have indeed upset some folks over my years here by things I’ve said. Although never has everyone gotten up en masse and stormed out, or worse, taken me by the scruff of the neck and thrown me out. By and large, I’m wanting to help build up a loving community a lá Paul’s magnificent hymn Derek read for us earlier – that famous paean to love – the more excellent way. Love is patient and kind; never arrogant or rude, irritable or resentful. I bet if I asked for a show of hands of those who have heard those words at a wedding we’d see a sea of raised arms. We sentimentalize and romanticize it to a fare-thee-well, but its beauty and power are never diminished by time or place. For most thoughtful people, love does indeed seem to be the heart of the matter. Years ago, the popular photo journal, Life magazine, asked 173 famous and infamous, people of the day this question: “What is the meaning of life?” Surprisingly, I thought then, there was great agreement among the respondents. From the Dalai Lama to Rosa Parks, Richard Nixon to George Lucas, John Updike to Desmond Tutu, Timothy Leary to Maya Angelou – all spoke of love as the fount and foundation of meaning. Professor Martin Marty, a scholar of contemporary Christianity and American culture summed it up: “Three italicized words from 1st Corinthians 13 line up in this game of life: ‘So faith, hope, love abide, these three: but the greatest of these is love.’ Hence, the meaning of life. Or at least the first hint of a whisper of a clue of finding it.” As recently as a couple of months ago, I heard evolutionary biologist and vocal atheist, Richard Dawkins, claim the same thing – despite his vigorous anti-religious tirades, he still claimed that somehow love was the point of it all. I’m not certain how he got there. But, one would think that if love was the heart of the matter, and if one were to preach about that with some regularity, the crowds would be pleased; like the initial response Jesus received, all would speak well of the preacher and be amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth. And the interesting thing is, of course, that Jesus spent a lot of his time expounding about love – God’s love for us, our love for God, loving one another and so on. He put some teeth into it when he said that no one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for others, and then went off to Golgotha to do just that. But now, at his first preaching gig, what went wrong? Why did everyone get so exercised over this man whose message about love would lead him into a gruesome state execution? Did he tell everyone to vote Democrat in a red state or vice versa? What was it exactly? And here the story does get interesting, because although the details are a bit sketchy, what we do have of what he says next suggests that the crowd got angry precisely because of how Jesus understood the limitless bounds of love. Now remember, the Jews of his day were living under Roman oppression. They longed for the restitution of their legitimate theocracy, throwing off the yoke of the oppressors. We could imagine that, in living under such conditions, their collective identity grew extremely important. In the pressure-cooker of first century Palestine, the “us vs. them” mentality was brewed piping hot. Though the details differ, we see a similar sort of brew in the same land today, 2,000 years later. Jesus strolls into the Nazareth synagogue, a local boy made good, even a potential leader, and the crowds are impressed by his lucid and eloquent exposition of the Jewish scriptures. But then, he does something they can’t stomach. By citing at least two examples, he explains that God’s loving care is not limited by Jewish blood – it extends even to their potential enemies – to gentiles and potentates. Later we’ll learn that prostitutes and Samaritans and centurions and every sort of person is meant to be accorded the dignity that love prescribes. In effect, he told them God’s revolution was not a national call to arms, but a spiritual call to love. He referenced how, in more ancient days, God came to the rescue of non-Jews even in the face of great Jewish affliction. And then the crowd moved against him. So here’s the irony – the crowd could not stomach the size of God’s love. Surely God was theirs alone. Surely to say otherwise was a great blasphemy, even treason that flew in the face of the cultic core of their belief. They knew who belonged to them and who didn’t. Jesus said otherwise by using examples from their own sacred writings. And this enraged them. Well, we don’t have to look very far to feel resonance with this theme. Two weeks ago, I had the privilege of being the first white person to address a gathering of over 2,000 people celebrating the memory of Martin Luther King, Jr. in Raleigh/Durham, North Carolina. Preparing for that, I was immersed once more in those tense days of rage, when certain Christians couldn’t stand hearing their own scriptures used against their entrenched and privileged positions. They knew what was what and who was who, who was first class and who was last class. They knew how God intended love to be meted out in the world. It cost King his life to go against that tide of anger and hatred. The arrest in Mississippi this past week for the murders in 1963 of two 19-year-old black youths brought this bad memory back to life. So, then, I do preach the gospel of love. I think that over all, from the largest view, that is the most legitimate agenda for preaching. I try to make that my message, as best as I can understand it, preached and embodied by Christ, our namesake here. And I am aware that the size of it can terrify and enrage; that God’s love can be destabilizing. It’s bigger than we are. Thank God. If it were not bigger than we are, we’d really be in trouble. This astonishing love is what inspired Paul to write his beautiful hymn. He sent it out to a Corinthian church deeply mired in conflict. He called it, “the more excellent way”. And so it is. But it’s costly, demanding, and the only thing truly worth a life’s desire. Previous sermon: Our Family Album • Next sermon: A Thin Place All past sermons |
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