Be still… and love.

Luke 6  

This past Tuesday, Deacon Kari and I had the pleasure of worshipping at Luther Seminary chapel. We went because our former vicar, Bethany Ringdal, was the preacher. In her message, she reflected for a long time on a Psalm that rejoices in the destruction of enemies… how it can feel good that our enemies are going down for a while, but sooner or later, when the Bible is calling for judgement against the unjust, we just might find ourselves on the wrong side... we might find out we are the unjust, the  enemy of God. She invited us, in the face of all that, into God’s invitation to “Be still.” When we are still, we may just find ourselves opening up to God’s way in a new way.

So in the gospel this morning, Jesus says, “Love your enemies.” Meet all that is evil with what the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called “soul force,” a powerful, nonviolent response that refuses to make more enemies…

I love to watch Trevor Noah, to me this amazing South African-born comedian is still the "new" host of the Daily Show... But to be honest, I have to sort of limit my intake because although at first it's fun to laugh at my enemies, after a bit of laughing…
I can get really, really scared by the overwhelming amount of evil going on in the world and can cycle into a downward spiral of fear and despair that takes me nowhere good.
Instead, I have to claim that wise saying... “You cannot do everything, and realizing that will free you to do something.”

Last Sunday, a number of us went to a workshop with Debby Irving, the author of Waking Up White. She provided us with some very simple but powerful resources about how the culture of white supremacy in the U.S. is part of its very founding. Now, when she says “white supremacy,” she's not talking about just the KKK or active violence or prejudice in action. She's actually describing something much more subtle, hard to see and pervasive... And that's the idea that our culture is mostly white and that's mostly superior. Then, she describes how actually a culture of white supremacy has to be undone because it is destructive to us all, including people who think of themselves as white. And then she shared with us a long list of expectations of a white supremacy culture... Here are a few of the ...

Hierarchical, dominated space

One right way, on right perspective

Emotional restraint

Conflict avoidant

Sense of urgency, fix now

Be busy, Blame, Interrupt

Withholding (empathy, trust, money, knowledge)…

That’s just a little bit of a list that goes on and on, and I feel convicted…

How often I have wished that things didn't have to feel so urgent, yet I can make those who make me wait into my enemies...

How often I have missed the chance to really listen and be present as I want to because of a pervasive culture of busyness that surrounds and gets in me…

How often I have consciously or unconsciously dominated, or felt dominated by another…

So God, knowing full well how easily we project responsibility for our pain outward, blaming others, says "Try the opposite." Meet hate with love. It seems impossible and that's why it's so transformative. And we won't do it perfectly, so there's the opportunity to keep practicing.

In a diverse community like this one, we have such wonderful weekly opportunities to practice forming transformational cultural relationships across what might be deep differences... I remember one week when an Ethiopian member looked at my children and said wistfully, "They are so lucky because they don't know the deep divisions between cultures within Ethiopia..."
We could have a lot of discussion about whether any one of us is lucky, given the whole mix of sorrows and joys in each of our stories... But it also seems like if we can get to the point where we know what the deep divisions have been and we can love across those divisions on purpose, where we can actually intentionally see our differences and not only appreciate them but acknowledge how deeply we need the wisdom from each perspective, where we can bind together and oppose any ideology that wants to make some people enemies and lock them up or wall them off or take all their resources for ourselves, making the resources more important than the people... Then, we might be catching the vision of God who says let's do what all the ancient wise ones have said... Do to others what you would want them to do to you.
Because it's in loving that we'll experience the abundance that is really abundance.

My friend Kate lost her brother this week. Here's what she said about him...

Who was Andy? 

Explaining Andy was a constant task in our family. Andy had a rare genetic condition similar to Down’s Syndrome called Smith Lemli Opitz Syndrome. When he was born, the doctors were unsure about his future. He was 4 lbs 12 oz, had an extra finger on each hand and an extra toe on each foot. There were other concerns as well, his parents were told by a physician that his condition was “incompatible with life”. A priest came to perform the baptism in the hospital room and told his parents, “There are no guarantees in life, you just take him home and care for him”. They did just that.

Andy did not cry to be fed like most infants, he did not naturally know how to breastfeed, nor did he even try to suckle. His mother held him close almost constantly, timed his feedings and expressed the milk into his mouth. Andy never slept well. His dad paid close attention to his needs and often slept near or with him. For every minute of his life, there was one certainty, he would have the best love and care anyone could hope for. He was completely dependent and vulnerable which was a great gift to those who cared for him because it always made us better versions of ourselves.

Better versions of ourselves… 

I heard this week that “Mercy is God's primary quality,” and I imagine that is the source of all that Jesus proclaims to us in Luke this week.

God wants to subvert things we think are important—whatever I am rooted in that is taking me away from God, whether I’m distracted in my resources or relationships (or my problems with both)... and if I get uncomfortable?
Maybe when I am uncomfortable, there is potential to meet God in a brand new way.

My friend Heidi was recently in Nepal.
Here is what she wrote about that experience...

People are poor everywhere. Sometimes that poverty is material in nature. It looks like food insecurity; illiteracy; lack of basic medical care; gender, caste-based, and ethnic oppression. Sometimes that poverty is spiritual in nature. It looks like millions of us, who have allowed ourselves to be convinced that what we need is more and more stuff when what we really need is each other. We who experience these different kinds of poverty have much to teach each other. May we whose voices echo more loudly in the global landscape find the humility to listen for and amplify the voices of those who are excluded. 

God is present everywhere. Her face is reflected in Nepali Dalit hill women and in suburban Chicago soccer moms… May we remain open to the infinite and surprising ways that God still shows up in this beautiful and broken world. 

Where we find only poverty, God invites us to remain open…

Where we find circumstances that are incompatible with life, God teaches us nurture that makes us better versions of ourselves…

Where we are surrounded by domination systems that want to divide and conquer, God invites us to work to navigate complex relationships across difference to building thriving, cohesive communities…

Rather than make enemies, God says, “Be still.” And surrounds us and fills us with love.

The Way of Love in Action

Luke 4 and 1 Corinthians 13

Karoline Lewis writes a column every week for people who need to preach (called Dear Working Preacher) and this week she puts it this way...
“In Luke, rejection to the “Good News” brackets Jesus’ ministry. Jesus’ hometown sermon in Nazareth, his first public act in Luke’s Gospel, has the crowd ready to cast him off a cliff.
And Jesus’ empty tomb will be met with “well, that’s just nonsense.” (Luke 24:11).

“What’s the offense? That Jesus is for those we’d rather forget? That Jesus is for others that just may be in line before us? That Jesus actually imagines the purpose for his ministry as coming to being and bearing fruit without our input and control? All of the above?”
Hmmm... And why did Jesus have to lead off this way? Maybe he could have been a little more... gracious? 

Karoline continues...“No one is saved by our concerns to play it safe. No one is saved by our decisions to protect each other from challenges... When we make the Gospel simply an option for living, we have forgotten that it’s also a choice about dying.”

“And so, this week we lean into the real discomfort of the Gospel, we acknowledge that what Jesus preaches is hard… and admit that we ourselves sometimes wish to call “nonsense”... or worse. We admit that it is hard to carry the weight of believing for others. It’s hard to hold the burden of faith for others. And it is hard to preach what you yourself have questioned.”

This week, several of us attended a conference at Luther seminary—Give us this day our daily bread: food, land, and sustainability...

One of the speakers, Dr. Melanie Harris spoke from the perspective of honoring faith traditions of African-American women and as part of that, she asked us to consider our own Eco-memories. I remembered my grandmother's sun browned arms as she worked in her big, shared garden plot... I remembered working in fields myself, de-tasseling Pioneer seed corn for a crew that my middle school science teacher led. It was hard work and the best money a 14-year-old Iowa city kid could make. During the season, I would wake up with my hands clenched, dreaming I was in the field. And it was also one of the first places I was awakened to the reality of injustice toward farm workers on whom we all depend. As we ate our lunches and complained about the stench of the run-off from early hog confinement barns, my science teacher pointed to a nearby crew. "You see those folks, you all are following the machines as you do your work. They aren't... They’re doing harder work and they're probably making half of what you are because they are migrant workers."

Dr. Melanie Harris, our speaker at the seminary, said that of course a huge part of the collective (and often personal) Eco-memories of African Americans is the slavery system by which they or their relatives not only were forced to work the land but within a system where relatives were themselves sold for less than the price of seeds. So coming out of a commodity system, a destructive system, and empire system where people are treated as property, as less valuable than the beloved ones of God, how do we bring all our resources to heal memories, restore faith and share together in commitment toward earth and all humans, all creatures, all life, even extending our imaginations to include the living soil on which we all depend?

Given the ways that our personal bodies hurt and the way that our shared body hurts when a part of it is in pain, given the way that the earth itself groans… and given that this is not new, although we are certainly more intensely aware of the earth’s groaning now…

The words of Paul to the people of Corinth give us a window into a more excellent way… really the only way to become new, and that is through love.

Love is present all around us—that is true, God’s love is all around us. But in 1 Corinthians, Paul describes a love that is not a noun, not simply omnipresent, but a love that is all verbs.

Paul’s teaching is all about the things we do and the things we refrain from doing if and when we are acting out love.

It’s about accessing patience when we expect instant results. It’s about showing kindness and rejoicing in truth. It’s about endurance and trust, practicing hope and shouldering burdens together.

Love is not ego-based, selfish, jealous, manipulative, arrogant… it does not cause the earth and its people, the soil and all creatures to groan under the weight of it. 

Love is saying “no” to certain behaviors, saying enough, and stopping to make space for community and personal flourishing for each diverse body, for our whole body.

Jesus comes among us and says basically, if you're looking for ministry that's just catering to you... then God wants you to pay better attention to the ones you’ve rejected or just not taken the time to notice.
An older person you think is no concern of yours.Or a child you think is annoying and distracting...or someone who is not easy to like, understand or deal with... 

As his examples, Jesus points to Naaman the Syrian... (in case we don’t know or remember), he was a powerful leader, slave owner, pompous and nationalistic... albeit who listened to his slaves (an action that saved his life)

Jesus pointed to a widow who those gathered might have thought didn’t deserve God’s constant providing as much as some others did…
As we get deeper into this vein, we can sense where Jesus is going with this and maybe begin to imagine how the crowd gathered around him with compliments in the beginning so quickly became a mob, how we might be capable of that, too, in our rougher moments.

We can maybe understand, if we realize how challenging it is to be critiqued into better behavior, how the people turned on Jesus. “Don’t you know you are one of us?... How dare you get in our face about this, Jesus?”

The community tries to harm him but rather than engage in the escalating violence, Jesus passes through and goes on his way.This is a hard word for any of us who are established, who are too unbending, who are becoming set in our ways… if we are not on the path of love, Jesus will simply move on, but we are invited on the way. And what is the way?

It's the way of love in action. It’s a kind of dying… to whatever in us makes us think Jesus or a neighbor is our enemy. It’s a kind of living in relationship that loves us from the start but that continues to challenge us to grow, so that we can live and breathe and find new life daily. So that as Jesus moves on, we might move together with the one who heals our memories, restores our faith and leads us in commitments to bear fruit for the healing of the world.