St. Andrew's Episcopal Church

THINKING ABOUT LOVE    The Rev. Brian E. Backstrand    2-23-14

There is a Christian folk song, very popular during the 1970s, called ”We are One in the Spirit, We are One in the Lord” that concludes presumptuously  “  And they’ll know we are Christians, by our love,  by our love.  Yes, they’ll know we are Christians by our love.

Others might disagree.

What is it about Christians who, despite professing themselves followers of Jesus Christ, nevertheless manage to show themselves capable of monstrous acts of hatred, intolerance and even violence all in the name of love?

How does one explain a pathology of cruelty and hatred that stems from a religion based on Christian love?

One thinks of Germany in the middle of the previous century.  How does  this Lutheran Christian nation turn against its Jewish minority in the 1930s and 40s and agree to a plan of ethnic cleansing that results in Holocaust?   How do good people ignore what is happening?

But we don’t have to travel that far.   American declares itself One nation under God.    But how do we explain the phenomenon of lynching?  .   The lynching of black American males in the South in the twentieth century by white Southern Christians, especially during the period 1910 to 1940?  Then the Ku Klux Klan—a group still very much active in our world—attracted many supporters from the Southern clergy and it was said that “Jesus Christ himself would have been a Klansman.”  (See Peter Gomes, Living the Good Life.)  Culture and Christianity were melded together in acts of hatred.  Nor has this thing entirely died away.   Recently the statue of James Meredith, that brave young African American who integrated the University of Alabama, was discovered to be wearing a noose.

What about Fred Phelps, a Baptist preacher from Kansas, who gathers his congregation, mostly members of his own extended family, and protests the funerals of gay men who have died of AIDS with hate-filled placards.

There is an old aphorism that says We have just enough religion to know how to hate, but not enough religion to know how to love.

Today Jesus says that we are to love.   The message is pretty clear and pretty astounding if we are even willing to consider it.   We are to love everybody.  Jesus says that we are not to resist an evil doer –a bold act of resistance and not one of mere passivity.  Struck on the cheek we are to offer the other.  Asked for our coat (that is an inner garment like a tunic) we are to offer the outer one, the cloak, as well.

On and on it goes.    Jesus takes the Levitical understanding (that we heard read this morning from the 19^th chapter) and stretches it to the breaking point.   It turns out that everybody is our neighbor.   Listen to Soren Kierkegaard, Danish philosopher writing about the neighbor:

The neighbor is neither the beloved, for whom you have passion’s preference, nor your friend…. Nor is your neighbor, if you are a cultured person, the cultured individual with whom you have a similarity of culture…. The neighbor is every person…He is your neighbor on the basis of equality with you before God….”  Soren Kierkegaard

If we do all this, Jesus says, we will be children like our Father in heaven.  And so we must face another question, one meant for reflection well beyond this sermon.  What do we mean when we say that God is love?

Do you have a concept of God’s love that admits vindictiveness?   Or is God’s love complete?   Enveloping?   Eternally hopeful?   I John (chapter 4) tells us  God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.  This is a pretty big canvass to be talking about.   Love connects us to God and to God’s being and purposes.   And I suspect that all of us have a pretty puny idea of the meaning of love and a pretty puny idea of what it means to say that God is love.

The first thing that we have to rule out when it comes to love is the popular notion of love as an emotion or inner feeling.   Again, Soren Kierkegaard:  “Christ’s love was not an inner feeling, a full heart and what not, it was the work of love which was his life.”   This sounds pretty much like I John when in chapter 3 verse 18 we find this admonition:  Little children, let us love not in word or speech but in truth and action.  Or James:  Religion that is pure and undefiled before God the Father is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself unstained by the world.  Or Micah:  What does the Lord require of you but to do  justice and to love kindness and to walk humbly with your God  And so we must consider that feelings are not at the heart of what it means to love.   Action is.  Behavior is.  And that makes love pretty much will and nerve and discipline.   Christ’s love was the work of love that was his life and it is out of this context of doing love that we are called to love.

But it is not just all about the steel of will and nerve and action.   Perhaps we ought to consider the power of love.  Here is St. Paul writing in Romans chapter 12.

Let love be genuine.  Hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good.  Love one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honor.  Do not lag in zeal, be ardent in spirit, serve the Lord.  Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer.   Contribute to the needs of the saints; extend hospitality to strangers.

But then he later says:

Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them. …  Beloved, never avenge yourselves but leave room for the wrath of God. … No, if your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink;  for by doing this, you will heap burning coals on their heads.  Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

For me,  this passage prompts all sorts of questions.  Do we understand the power of love?   Ghandi blessing his assassin before his murder?   Jesus forgiving on the cross?   Is it possible that the God of complete love is experienced as being wrathful only when love is denied,  when love is resisted?   Burning coals.   What would happen if we truly loved?

Here is a big one:   What would our world be like today if we had decided as a nation to love our enemies following 9-11?   There was just a chance for love then.   There was a moment before more violence and blood shed and war when the whole world was with us?  When people round the globe said “Today, everyone is an American.”

Let us not forget the choices we make.

And so we are called,  summoned.  Told to do things that seem impossible.  Called to face the impossibility of love, we are nevertheless called.   In following our master, let us be willing to reframe our conception of the context and substance of this four letter little word called  LOVE.   Not merely to think it,  not mere to philosophize about it.  But truly to do it.  And when we fail, to confess the failure and turn round and try again.

In the name of the God of Love,  Father Son and Holy Spirit.

SALT          The Rev. Brian E. Backstrand                     2/9/14   A few years ago, I had an opportunity to go for a week of sailing down in Baha de California Sur,  sailing out of La Paz.   It was a memorable week made possible from a gift of my long-term friend Doug.  Doug and I sailed out of La Paz with a group from northern  California, a group of sailors most of whom like me had never been sailing in  Mexico.

One day we came to a beautiful desert island marked by a wonderful cove where we anchored.  A fishing trawler was there, sleeping during the day so as to be able to work during the night.  And there was a wonderful cruising sloops of about 37 feet also anchored there; the couple on that boat had come south from California to cruise Mexico during the winter months.

We went ashore and hiked about and noted the sparse vegetation and the wild goats living up on the steep hillsides of the island.  Near the end of our time there, we came to a broad rectangular pan-like structure carved out in the sand.  The rectangular piece was really an impression made in the sand.  About a foot deep, it was long and wide and flat on the bottom.  Unlike the surrounding sand, however, the stuff on the bottom was white.

This was my first introduction to a small, simple commercial salt flat.  Created by residents from a nearby island, it was a simple operation.  Salt water was channeled into the salt flat during a high tide and the flat was then capped off, trapping the salt water inside.   Days and even weeks would pass under the hot sun.  Slowly the water evaporated, leaving the white salt.  After a few times of this, the remaining salt would be raked and shoveled up and carted off to be sold.

The salt was only available when the water was removed.  It was only accentuated and really noticed and really powerful when the surrounding water had evaporated into thin air.

Today, among other things,  Jesus brings us face to face with salt.  He tells us that we are salt,  salt of the earth, and pretty much leaves it at that.   But salt has many uses and many powers.

Salt in water is not particularly attractive.   Spread on the earth in large quantites,  salt is a killer,  rending the ground useless for growing things.  The ancients used to poison the growing fields of enemies by sowing salt.  We know salt at this time of year,  though we hardly taste it.   Salt in various forms is spread on the roadways instead of sand.  It melts and trickles off into ditches and sanitation systems to play sometimes havoc with our water supply.

So I am thinking that too much salt can be a bad thing.  It can dominate and ruin and even poison.  People too mindful of their own random acts of kindness,  too interested in getting “credit” for their own good deeds fall into this category.   Their actions may be salty, but their spiritual attitude may communicate a very disagreeable spirit that says in effect, look at me, not trying to be too proud—look at all the good things that I am doing,  thank me please.  And often we do.

No, the salt that Jesus  has in mind, I think, comes in smaller doses.  That is it is in small doses when salt really is valuable.  We say that salt brings out the flavor in things.  If we, therefore, are to be  salt,  then we can better be about the task of bringing out the goodness,  the humanity,  the richness,  the uniqueness of things.   Isn’t that what being a follower of Jesus is all about?

Are we not called to be some kind of enabling and enhancing presence as we live our lives?

But let’s not get too carried away with salt and saltiness.   There are times when we will be the ones needing the extra touch,  the extra presence,  the extra bit of encouragement or care or love that salt can bring.  And so we have also to ask ourselves,  am I ready to receive,  to find again the flavor of living and loving and serving?    If I am depressed, am I really willing to be encouraged or do I simply want to abide in the depths of my darkness and cling to everything there?   If I have harbor childhood memories of times when I was bullied or abused or discounted or left out or maybe even simply ignored,  is it my duty to define myself by these things or to let the flavor of other times and other experiences,  properly salted,  now come into play to change my perspective?

On that island,  the waves were gently lapping the shore of the beach as we looked at the salt flat.  Behind us, in the cove,  vast quantities of salty water could be seen looking a pale blue.   And so it is that salt is all around us.  But it is hardly available. What we need, to be salty or to be salted, is to be intentional.   We have to stop and to take some of that water and boil it down until we get to the grains of salt themselves.   When this happens, then we can capture the salt,  take the salt and use it in our lives.

It takes a long time for water to evaporate on a primitive salt flat.  For water to leave behind white saltine crystals.   And so one must ask Does salt, to be in my life, have to be cultivated,  teased into existence?   Does it take time for me to become salty?   I think that perhaps it does.   In the flow of life, in the flowing past of one experience after another,  perhaps we need to have a way of trapping things, if only for a moment,  to squeeze the goodness out.

Prayer is one way to slow things down and to examine things over a longer period of time.  Contemplation is something that we should also use. Journaling is another way to examine the flow,  to trap the water of life if you will so that the goodness,  the tang,  the zest of things can come out.

Story telling is perhaps something that we may not think of in this regard, but it is another dimension of life that we need to use.  A few years ago, Marilee and I attended an eighth grade graduation party for a member of the church I was serving in Illlinois.   The party was for the kids, but gradually the adults and some of the kids also found themselves out of the backyard where the food had been served and back inside the living room where people sat around in chairs, couches and on the living room rug.  The conversation of the usual sort went on for a while until finally someone decided to tell a story.  It was a story from the past, followed by  another and yet another.   Sometimes people offered little stories in reaction to a particularly powerful or funny one.  But often one memory would trigger the memory of another who would offer a story that would take us in an entirely different direction.  Stories did not have to match or to be connected.  Rather, in the silence, they were offerings.

The sun was gradually setting.   The light in the room softened.   I was struck by the way in which all of us together were really listening very hard,  focusing,  savoring.  We were not waiting in line to be able to tell our story.  We were not sifting through the backroads of our own mental process, hoping to be able to find a particularly wonderful ‘capper’ of a tale.  No,  we often were silent; we listened deeply.  More than telling, we together tasted the richness and the flavor of someone else’s experience.   And so in this way, the flow,  the ordinary water of human experience, was trapped.   It was trapped and held until some of the water evaporated and the salt of the experience itself began to appear.

If we are to be salt,  then we have to find salt.   To make sure that life does not pass us by.   If we are to bring salt,  to bring out the flavor in someone else’s life,  then we by all means will need to find the flavor in our own experiences and to savor them.

God is present in all the experiences and events and perceptions of the life flowing about us.   Now our challenge is clear:   Taste and see that the Lord is good.

In the name of God:  Father, Son and Holy Spirit.