You all know that I often preach about love, but this isn’t some new fad or agenda. Consider the profound Collect that our liturgy opened with: “O Lord, you have taught us that without love whatever we do is worth nothing: Send your Holy Spirit and pour into our hearts your greatest gift, which is love, the true bond of peace and of all virtue, without which whoever lives is accounted dead before you.” That prayer was written in 1549, so hardly a passing trend. Love really is what it’s all about. As I’ve said many times though, the sort of love that we’re talking about is more than a feeling; it is a priority, an orientation, a commitment, an action. If it’s true that a picture is worth a thousand words, the best depiction of love is Jesus on the cross. That is what love is all about.
And
more than love being something we are to do, love is something that we receive.
As we read in First John, “We love because God first loved us.” Love is
something we are given to participate in. Love is hard, and the grace of God is
that we don’t have to muster up love when it’s not natural, easy, or
preferable. Instead, God loves us all abundantly and, in that abundance, we can
join God. Maybe loving our neighbors or our enemies seems like too much for us,
but, without question, God loves our neighbors and our enemies. Even if our
loving them seems impossible, we can at least join in the love that God already
has for them. Because, as the Collect puts it, if we don’t have love we are
essentially dead – meaning we aren’t living the life that God intends or
desires for us. Without love, we are not living a good, true, or beautiful life
and we are as good as dead if we are disconnected from the source of life: the
God who is love.
On
these Sundays after the Epiphany, which are heading towards a close next
Sunday, we’ve been considering what Baptism means and does in the life of
faith. The aspect of Baptism that I’m highlighting today is that Baptism declares
and cements our identity as the beloved of God. To be clear, Baptism does not
make God love us, as God already loves all that God has created, but Baptism is
when this love is declared for all to see and know. But, as I’ve said, being
loved by God isn’t about saying “Oh, how nice that God, whatever that word
means, thinks nice things about me.” No, the fact that God loves us changes
everything.
But
what this love exactly means can seem abstract. How can we be assured of God’s
love for us? What does this love look like? How does this love transform us?
These are good questions and we need to do a better job asking questions. These
days, people are looking for answers and, if we’re honest about it, we’ve
gotten to be intellectually lazy. That’s why misinformation spreads so easily
these days – people are satisfied getting answers, even if they aren’t remotely
close to correct. Asking questions is a lot harder – questions open us to
answers we aren’t prepared to receive, questions require a sense of humility in
admitting that we don’t know it all, questions take more energy as we have to
tap into curiosity and exploration.
More
than being a place to come to be given answers, church is a place to ask
questions. And, if we’re being a faithful church, we’re not going to try to
give people any answers. Instead, our mission, our purpose, our calling is to
introduce people to the answer: Jesus Christ. He does not give us answers, he
is the answer. This is why faith can be so difficult – it’s not as simple as “Think
this and do that.” Those would be things to check off the list and move on to
whatever our other priorities are. Instead, the life of the Baptized is one in
which we are told to “Follow him.” Following Jesus is the work of a lifetime,
it’s never something we can say we’ve finished. This is why the earliest
followers of Jesus were not called “Christians,” rather they were called “members
of the Way.” This is the way: the way of following Jesus in love.
And
as lovely as that sounds, it can be hard to figure out how exactly we are to do
it – so ask questions. Questions are why we have the passage that we read from
First Corinthians. St. Paul had been talking about the Resurrection of Jesus, a
topic that really does make us scratch our head and ask “How does that work?”
and people, understandably, had questions. Paul addresses their questions and
uses metaphors to try to help people have a better grasp of the Resurrection of
Jesus which they were Baptized into.
I
absolutely love being a parish priest, and particularly being the Rector of St.
Luke’s. Without question, this is what God would have me to be doing and this
is where God would have me to be. Like any job though, there are parts of it
that are more enjoyable than others. The holiest part of what I do is being
invited into hospital rooms when a family has welcomed a newborn and when a
family asks me to pray with their loved one near death. Holding babies and
holding the hand of the dying is the part of my job that is the most profound.
Celebrating the Eucharist is also a joy and privilege that I could never effectively
put into words. And something else that I truly love doing is meeting with you
all to talk about faith; to explore the questions of faith together with you. People
sometimes tell me “I’d like to meet with you, but I know you’re so busy.” I
want to reframe that reality. Yes, I’m busy, but you asking me to have coffee as
we talk about faith is not adding to the burden of my busyness, it’s saving me
from it. There’s nothing I’d enjoy more than a schedule that is jam-packed with
meetings at the coffee shop or brewery to talk about the questions of faith, to
help you to walk the way of faith, to learn more about what God is up to
through your life. All this is to say – I know you have questions or want to
talk, and there is no thing as a question that is too basic or too complicated,
I eagerly look forward to talking with you. So being inspired by this text from
First Corinthians, know that you can always call on me for conversation and to
ask the questions that you have about faith.
In
his pastoral response, St. Paul writes about the transformative nature of the
Resurrection that we are Baptized into. He says that it is something like a
seed. When we look at an acorn, we don’t imagine a massive oak tree. The
Resurrection is something like that, our bodies become something fuller and
grander than we can imagine. All of our imperfections and frailties, all of our
doubts and sins are reconciled by what St. Paul calls the “last Adam,” which is
Jesus Christ – the human who perfected humanity and opened to us the way of
everlasting life. In Jesus, God does not destroy humanity and say “I’m going to
go a different direction” but rather God restores to humanity the glory and love
with which we were made. This is the point of the Resurrection – to definitively
show in history that there is no death so final and no sin so bad as to
separate us from the love of God. And that is what we are Baptized into. That
is the love that is declared in Baptism.
As
we heard in the Collect, this love is described as “the true bond of peace.” Another
way of saying this is that love reconciles us to God and one another. Out of
God’s abundant and graceful love towards us, we are made right with God. We
might not do all the right things, we might do all the wrong things, we might
not keep the Law – but, in Jesus, God assures us that this last Adam has taken
care of all that the first Adam and his descendants, which would be us, was unable
to do. All are redeemed and all are reconciled in and by Jesus Christ. And this
becomes our identity – that we are reconciled. That is what love means and does
– that there is nothing that separates us from God. As St. Paul famously puts
it in Romans 8, “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels,
nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor
depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the
love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” And this really does change everything.
If we no longer have to worry and obsess about our status, our salvation, our
worth, our value then we are freed to live in God’s grace and peace.
In
another New Testament letter, St. Paul writes, “So if anyone is in Christ,
there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has
become new! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ,
and has given us the ministry of reconciliation.” We are reconciled to God in
order to be a sign to the world of God’s reconciliation. We don’t have time to
get into all of the nuances of the reading from Genesis, but the short version
is that Joseph was treated poorly by his brothers, to put it mildly. They faked
his death and sold him into slavery. By God’s providence though, Joseph found
himself as something like Pharaoh’s Secretary of State in Egypt. When a famine
arose in the region, Joseph’s brothers head to Egypt to find food for their
families, completely unaware of their brother’s place of prominence there. And
when Joseph had the chance to retaliate, to condemn, to lecture, to get revenge,
he instead chooses reconciliation.
The
only reason why this is possible is that Joseph, who had a gift for receiving
God’s revelation in dreams, knew something about the power of God to reconcile
and redeem all things. Only because Joseph was confident of God’s mercy was he
able to be merciful. Brothers and sisters, we are Resurrection people, people
who have been brought into the reconciliation of God in Christ. We know the
future – we know that all shall be well. This does not mean that we can sit
back and relax and not worry about anything; on the contrary, we can live
already as if all is well. Our knowledge of the future is to transform the
present. We are assured of our reconciliation with God so that we can show
forth that reconciliation in our lives. In other words, we can forgive because
we have been forgiven. We can stop keeping score because God doesn’t keep score.
We can remember that the most important and true thing about ourselves, and everyone
we encounter, is we are loved by God.
You
don’t need me to tell you because it’s obvious – but our society is fracturing.
As a society and individually, we are unapologetic, we hold grudges as if they
are our most valued possessions, we avoid conflict which means that we avoid reconciliation,
and we are fractured and unreconciled. Love really is the way and without this
love we have nothing. We need in our parish, in our homes, in our schools, in
our city, nation, and world Christians who know just how tenaciously, fiercely,
and graciously God loves us. Confident of this love, we can ask any question
and wrestle with any issue. Grounded in this love, we can grow into the
Resurrection which we are Baptized into and be transformed as reconciled reconcilers.
Without love, we are accounted as dead before God, and so it is the joy of our
faith this morning to thank God that through the love of Christ, we have been
given life, and life abundantly.
