Love Without Borders

Scriptures:  Jeremiah 1:4-10, I Corinthians 13:1-13  Luke 4:21-30

 

In January, I heard radical evangelical Shane Claiborne speak.  Shane is the founder of The Simple Way, an intentional Christian community located right here in Philadelphia – their first community house is located on Potter Street, near K & A.  The Simple Way community tries to live according to the description of the early church in Acts, sharing all things in common and helping to improve life in the community.   Shane Claiborne had just returned from Afghanistan, where he met a group of Afghan youth who worked to build a peaceful alternative to the decades of war and devastation that have engulfed that country for decades.  Many adults in Afghanistan have become so beaten down by decades of war that they have given up all hope for peace but these youth…well, for them, hope still springs eternal.  They’ve studied advocates of nonviolent resistance such as Gandhi and King.  They are using social media such as Facebook and Skype to try to make 2 million friends from around the world – a number equal to the 2 million Afghans killed over the past 4 decades of war.  One of the mottoes of these youth is “a little bit of love is stronger than all the weapons in the world.”

 

“A little bit of love is stronger than all the weapons in the world.”  It sounds like the voice of youthful naivete – though these words come from kids who have seen more weapons – more death, more carnage, more mayhem in their short lives than most of us experience in an entire lifetime.  And yet our Scripture readings this morning likewise attest to the power of love, the power of love that can catch us off guard, disturb us, at times even upset us – but the power of love that is nonetheless life-giving and life-renewing.

 

Our reading from I Corinthians 13 is familiar to many of us – it’s often read at weddings – but a wedding was the last thing Paul had in mind when he wrote these beautiful words.  The 13^th chapter of 1^st Corinthians is the conclusion of a long discourse on how sisters and brothers in Christ are to treat one another.  He was writing to a conflicted, fractious church in which the leaders were constantly trying to one-up each other, each trying to prove their superiority in comparison to the rest of the crowd.  Some of these leaders had the very flashy, attention-getting gift of speaking to God in unknown prayer languages.  Because of this gift, these leaders considered themselves closer to God than the rest.  Other leaders claimed special knowledge of God’s will, especially with relation to various religious practices.  Of these people, Paul writes, “Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up.”  Paul goes on to speak of the church as Christ’s body, with each part working together, rather than the different body parts trying to upstage each other or run away from each other.   And what holds the church, the body of Christ, together?  It’s love.  Love forms the ligaments that keep the various members of the body working together. 

 

It’s notable that these words, which Paul intended for the church, are associated with weddings.  Perhaps this is because Paul’s words – patience, kindness, bearing all things, believing all things, hoping all things, enduring all things – love that never ends – describe what we hope for in a spouse or life partner, after the wedding is over and day-to-day life together begins.   Don’t we all want to know and to be known fully?   Most people have little hope of experiencing this quality of love outside a marriage or committed partnership - especially in our society, in which love is hard to find, in which nearly everything can be turned into a commodity to be bought and sold, in which our society’s materialism attempts to convince us, instead of loving people and using things, to love things and use people.

 

And yet Paul’s intent was for these words to describe, not married life, but how we in the church are to treat one another – and how we are to treat our neighbors outside the church.  Jesus went further – as his followers we are to love, not only our family, not only our sisters and brothers in Christ, not only our neighbors, but even our enemies.

 

And that’s what got Jesus into trouble at his hometown synagogue.  Last week we listened to Jesus begin his sermon.  He spoke of proclaiming good news to the poor, release to the captives, recovery of sight for the blind, freedom from oppression, and the year of the Lord’s favor.  And he told his listeners that “today, this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”  But then, as far as the congregation was concerned, he went way off message:  he spoke of God’s loving care, not only for Israel, but for the widow of Zaraphath – foreigner – and Naaman the Syrian – foreigner.  For speaking of the wideness of God’s mercy, Jesus nearly got himself thrown off a cliff.

 

Which brings me back to Shane Claiborne’s talk, that I described at the beginning of my sermon.  Considering all the carnage that the Afghan people have suffered over decades of invasion and occupation, it would be entirely understandable if they wanted to shut out the rest of the world and tend to their own wounds.  And yet the Afghan youth seek, not isolation, but connection. That’s the power of love that’s stronger than all the weapons in the world.  The Afghan youth handed to their visitors blue scarves, similar to this one that I have.  The scarves represent a beautiful message from the Afghan youth – that we all share the same blue sky, that one blue sky connects us all.

 

The love of which Paul and Jesus spoke is not the sentimental love of Valentine’s day, in which loved ones exchange chocolate candy and Hallmark greeting cards and whisper sweet nothings to one another.  Rather it’s an action word, an act of will, for, as St. Thomas Aquinas wrote, “Love means to will the good of another.”   Love conveys this message from ourselves to others, “I want you to be.”  It’s not the love that will lead us to stare soulfully into a loved one’s eyes, but rather the love that commits us to standing by and caring for that loved one no matter what. 

 

The love of which Paul and Jesus spoke transforms lives.  A close friend of mine once told me about his formative years, in a family marked by alcohol abuse and violence, in which he couldn’t feel safe around his own parents, in which members of his extended family had felony criminal records.  To this day he is being treated for post traumatic stress disorder, which generally is an outcome of military service, but in the case of my friend, was the result of having grown up in a home that was like a war zone.  And yet this friend is one of the most gentle people you could ever meet.  I asked him once why that was.  He told me that every summer, he got to spend two weeks with his grandparents at the shore.  Those days with his grandparents gave my friend fleeting experiences of human decency, amid all the indecency and brutality he knew most of the time.  Could his grandparents ever know how much of a difference those days at the shore made in the life of this friend?  And can we ever count the number of people whose acts of kindness over the years have helped form us into the people we have become.  And can we ever know how our own acts of kindness and caring are touching the lives of those around us, without ever knowing it.   Love is what helps us keep on keeping on, even when we see no obvious results.  As, for example, it was Jeremiah’s experience of God’s love that empowered him to speak difficult truth to entrenched, corrupt power, even at risk to his own life.  Despite being rejected over and over, love for God and love for his people compelled Jeremiah to continue to try to speak out.

 

We can never fully understand the impact our actions may have on others.  As the Evangelical and Reformed theologian Reinhold Niebuhr puts it:

Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime,
Therefore, we are saved by hope.
Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history;
Therefore, we are saved by faith.
Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone.
Therefore, we are saved by love.
No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own;
Therefore, we are saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness.

 

The writer Chris Hedges grew up as the son of a Presbyterian pastor, and himself went to divinity school to study for ordination.  While he did serve a church, he eventually gave up the pastorate and became a journalist, serving as a war correspondent for 20 years, providing news coverage of brutalities in El Salvador, Bosnia, and many other war zones.  His theological training and his having witnessed the worst of man’s inhumanity to man have led him to write movingly on, among other things, the importance of love and religious faith in our world.  Hedges offers these challenging words:

“The point of religion, authentic religion, is that it is not, in the end, about us. It is about the other, about the stranger lying beaten and robbed on the side of the road, about the poor, the outcasts, the marginalized, the sick, the destitute, about those who are being abused and beaten in cells in Guantanamo and a host of other secret locations, about what we do to gays and lesbians in this country, what we do to the 47 million Americans without health insurance, the illegal immigrants who live among us without rights or protection, their suffering as invisible as the suffering of the mentally ill we have relegated to heating grates or prison cells. It is about them.

We have forgotten who we were meant to be, who we were created to be, because we have forgotten that we find God not in ourselves, finally, but in our care for our neighbor, in the stranger, including those outside the nation and the faith. The religious life is not designed to make you happy, or safe or content; it is not designed to make you whole or complete, to free you from anxieties and fear; it is designed to save you from yourself, to make possible human community, to lead you to understand that the greatest force in life is not power or reason but love.”

Paul writes, “And now abide, faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.  May the self-giving love of Christ compel us, in turn, to let Christ’s love be seen in our lives through words of kindness and acts of love.  Amen.