Christ Church Easton | Michael Valliant

Rethinking Fairness

Background: On Sunday mornings at Christ Church Easton we have morning prayer and a discussion of the week’s lectionary Gospel reading on Zoom (in addition to three in-person services with Communion). Each Zoom discussion is different, depending on the reading and who is participating–in that way each discussion is organic and in places unscripted. So when I put together notes for a homily, some of it gets used, other parts don’t, and the key is to find the questions that are engaging people. This past Sunday, the Gospel reading was Matthew 20:1-16, in which Jesus tells the Parable of the Laborers in the Vineyard, where the landowner sends workers into his vineyard in waves from early morning right up until one hour to go in the evening. He then pays all of them the same usual daily wage. And the workers who had been there all day say it isn’t fair.

This is the homily I put together, though the discussion itself moved in different ways and there were parts that weren’t used and great questions and comments that aren’t written down.

(The image above is “Red Vineyards at Arles” by Vincent Van Gogh, 1888)

“Rethinking Fairness”

How many people are bothered by this parable? And what is it that rubs you the wrong way about it?

Our sense of fairness is disturbed. Even though those who worked from the early morning got exactly what they were promised, what they agreed to, which was a good wage for their work. And it was the landowner who offered them work in the first place.

The context of this reading, what we haven’t heard just before it, was Jesus and the rich young man, who kept all the commandments and was doing everything right, and he asked Jesus what else he had to do. And Jesus tells him to “sell all your possessions, give the money to the poor and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.” And the young man goes away grieving, because he had many possessions.

Jesus tells his disciples that it’s really hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. This goes against all the thinking of the day, where the rich were looked at is being in God’s good graces. That makes the disciples ask who can be saved? And Jesus tells them, “For mortals it’s impossible, but for God, all things are possible.”

And here is the line we are waiting for. Peter gets worked up and says, “Look, we have left everything and followed you. What then will we have?”

Jesus reassures them that when the time comes, they will be taken care of. But he can tell they are missing the point of everything. So we get the parable of the laborers in the vineyard.

Let’s look at the story. What can we say about the landowner? What do we notice about him and how he does things?

He is the one out finding the workers. It would have been more likely to see a manager or one of his employees, but it’s the landowner himself out there.

Michael Green in his book “The Message of Matthew” puts it like this—

“…he goes out himself. Indeed, he goes out repeatedly to seek them. They are hungry, unemployed, and as the day wears on, increasingly hopeless. He cares about that. He wants to give them a job to work and a reward.”

Then we get the payment. Everyone who works gets the same thing, a day’s wages. The order in which people are paid is a zinger, paying the last first, so that the early arrivers see what they are given.

“The Parable of the Laborers in the Vineyard,” by Rembrandt, oil on panel, 1637.

I love this perspective from Debie Thomas in her book, “Into the Mess & Other Jesus Stories.” She looks through a contemporary lens:

“The landowner in Jesus’s story doesn’t judge his workers by their hours. He doesn’t obsess over why some workers are able to start at dawn and others are not. Perhaps the late starters aren’t as literate, educated, or skilled as their competitors. Perhaps they have learning challenges, or a tough home life, or children to care for at home. Perhaps they’re refugees, or don’t own cars, or don’t speak the language, or can’t get green cards. Perhaps they struggle with chronic depression or anxiety. Perhaps they’ve hit a glass ceiling after years of effort, and they’re stuck. Perhaps employers refuse to hire them because they’re gay or trans or disabled or black or female.”

That’s the thing with Jesus’s parables—he gives us a story with just enough information to get our brain turning, but he doesn’t fill in all the details—that is for us to do. And often his parables disturb us and our sense of how things are.

Back to the parts of our story: we’ve got the landowner sending everyone into the vineyard, we’ve got payment being made, and then we have the reaction.

The last into the field are the first to get paid, and they get a day’s wages. As the first, the earlier workers approach, they are expecting more. And then they get upset.

“These last worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat.”

And the landowner says, didn’t I give you what I promised you, what we agreed to? Am I not allowed to give what belongs to me how I choose? Are you envious because I am generous?

What a question. I wonder, is it his generosity that offends or disturbs us here?

Here’s the thing. Part of why our sense of fairness is put off here is that we instantly identify with the laborers who went out at dawn, who have been out in the vineyard the longest.

Let’s move the parable into what it’s really addressing here: salvation. I have to tell you, when it comes to my life, to my faith—I am not one of the early arrivers. Like most things in life, I got there late.

What do the Gospels and Paul’s letters tell us over and over again: we are not saved by works, we are saved by grace, which is a gift from God. We can’t earn grace and it’s not a competition.

Here is Michael Green again:

“Grace, amazing grace, is the burden of this story. All are equally undeserving of so large a sum. All are given it by the generosity of the employer. All are on the same level. The poor disciples, fisherman and tax collectors as they are, are welcomed by God along with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. There are no rankings in the kingdom of God.”

If we fast forward to after Jesus’s death, resurrection, and ascension, into the Book of Acts, what happens at and after Pentecost—Peter and the disciples bring more and more into the fold, baptizing and teaching thousands. They didn’t have the attitude of, “Hey—where were these guys while Jesus was here—these new disciples have it so much easier.” Instead, Peter and company are thrilled to have more workers in the vineyard.

I wonder if the problem here is us and our small sense of fairness. Maybe God’s sense of fairness is bigger and more expansive than ours is, and that is a good thing.

Grace, like forgiveness which we’ve been talking about for the past couple weeks, depends on our receiving it and paying it forward. God’s plan is to include everyone.

Back to Thomas to bring it home:

“Could it be any more obvious that we are wholly dependent on each other for our survival and well-being? That the future of creation itself depends on human beings recognizing our fundamental interconnectedness and acting in concert for the good of all? That ‘what’s fair’ for me isn’t good enough if it leaves you in the wilderness to die? That my sense of ‘justice’ is not just if it mocks the tender heart of God? That the vineyards of this world thrive only when everyone has a place of dignity and purpose within them? That the time for all selfish and stingy notions of fairness is over?”

A question/thought that came up in our Zoom discussion today was, “How can people learn to be generous if they don’t experience it?” That’s so true. Those that were invited into the vineyard last experienced that kind of generosity. Let’s step into that.

Put yourself in the life of those that arrived at 5:00pm, for whatever reason. Imagine the joy you feel, imagine the gratitude, imagine going home and what you would say to your family. Imagine how you might be inclined to treat other people you encounter?

Maybe this is how we should think of fairness, the same way we think of grace and mercy and love.

Bearing With Each Other

Background: Last Saturday evening there was a wedding on Saturday evening at Christ Church Easton, so we moved our Alive @ 5 contemporary music service into the Parish Hall and served dinner at the end of the service. The band was in the style of MTV Unplugged and the Parish Hall was full of good food and fellowship. The Gospel from the lectionary last weekend was Matthew 18:15-20, where Jesus outlines how to deal with conflict/sin between people in the community. With our Rector/Pastor officiating the wedding, I preached at our Saturday evening service.

“Bearing With Each Other”

“Christian conflict resolution” is not a class that would have a waiting list to get into. It comes off a bit like a root canal—necessary, but not something to look forward to.

But when you look around society and how we deal with feeling wronged, we do need some guidance. These days there are a lot of passive-aggressive outlets out there. What are some notable passive-aggressive ways to not actually deal with conflict?

If your neighbor has done something to you, you might go through the neighborhood association, or contact the town. When a friend makes us angry, we might defriend or block them on social media, or write huffy, angry comments under something we disagree with. Politically these days, when someone slights or disagrees with someone, the goal is to discredit, belittle, shame, and have others pile on. Nothing is resolved. And resentment becomes more deeply rooted.

When someone wrongs us, when someone sins against us, we want things to be made right, for us. Our self-righteousness demands satisfaction.

That’s not what’s going on in today’s reading. Jesus is looking at this earliest church community, not society at large. And he is giving instructions for the benefit of the sinner, whose actions are pulling him/her/them outside of the community. Jesus is giving the disciples steps to restore that person, to keep the community together.

What an unmodern concept—to care about the sinner, and about the community, more than our own sense of justice.

This is a teaching about reconciliation, and it’s reconciliation based on love and forgiveness.

It’s not easy. It’s counter-cultural. It doesn’t make sense with how our laws are written.

But community can’t be built on the law. Legalism won’t save us. If you look at most laws, including those in Scripture, they’re drawn up around doing no harm. And that’s not bad—those kinds of laws help keep us safe.

When it comes to a faith community, safety isn’t enough.

Jesus doesn’t summarize the commandments by saying, “don’t harm God and don’t harm your neighbors.”

We’re called to love.

God doesn’t want us to coexist (though the sentiment on those blue bumper stickers is better than the alternative of wiping each other completely out of existence).

God wants us to thrive. To help one another. To be there for each other. To love one another.

Both Paul, writing today’s New Testament reading, and Jesus, speaking in today’s Gospel, want to make sure we get the message loud and clear.

When we love, we more than fulfill the law. And Jesus looks at conflict within the church community through love.

When there is conflict, where someone is going astray: deal with it, fix it, work it out. This is where things get hard for us, especially in a church. Historically, churches have publicly fallen on their faces with conflict resolution on big issues. Look at how many scandals and atrocities have been dealt with by the church, by transferring an offending clergyperson somewhere else—out of sight, out of mind, not our problem. That’s conflict, that’s crime, and that’s reconciliation on a different scale, but it’s real and something the church has to deal with in order to be the example it needs to be in the world.

As parishioners, on a much lesser scale, when it comes to having an issue with someone in the congregation, we might find it easier to find another church rather than work through something difficult when someone has wronged us.

Avoidance is an easier path than reconciling. And there is a cost to that.

Best-selling author, theologian and Bishop N.T. Wright says:

“Reconciliation is a huge issue today. We can see the results of not doing it: suicide bombs, campaigns of terror, heavy-handed repression by occupying forces. That’s on the large scale. On the small scale, we see broken marriages, shattered families, feuds between neighbors, divided churches.”

Jesus knows how hard it is going to be for the early church to stick together in community, especially once he is gone. And he goes straight at things, right up front.

He says, first, try to work it out between the two of you. If that doesn’t work, take a couple people with you. Expand that circle slowly. Allow the person to save face as much as possible.

Jesus doesn’t say—talk about that person, gossip, try to get everyone on your side. Instead, deal with it quickly and between the two of you.

Let’s remember the goal: bringing the sinner back into the fold, keeping the community together. All while dealing with what happened.

Here is N.T. Wright again:

“Forgiveness doesn’t mean saying “it didn’t really happen” or “it didn’t really matter.” Forgiveness is when it did happen and it did matter, and you’re going to deal with it and end up loving and accepting one another again anyway.”

We are sinners, all of us. We all mess up. We all fall off the path we are trying to walk. Forgiveness, grace, love—how God deals with us, is how we are to deal with each other.

What does the church need? Reconciliation (that’s our word of the night). The mission of the church is to reconcile the world to God. To do that, we have to model it in our midst. Not in some abstract way, but right down into the details of our lives and how we treat each other.

There’s a part of this reading that is easy to miss. Jesus tells the disciples that when an offender refuses to listen even to the church, “let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.”

Let them go, as outsiders.

What do we know about Matthew from the text a few weeks ago? He’s a tax collector. And Jesus still loved and restored him. Even in continued disagreement and going separate ways, the goal is still restoration.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer has a little book called “Life Together,” where he looks at Christian community. He says that when it comes to ministry in a community, listening, active helpfulness, and bearing with others are foundational. He says it is hard to bear the sin of another person because it breaks fellowship with God and with his brother.

“It is only in bearing with him that the great grace of God becomes wholly plain. To cherish no contempt for the sinner but rather to prize the privilege of bearing him means not to have to give him up as lost, to be able to accept him, to preserve fellowship with him through forgiveness… As Christ bore and received us as sinners so we in fellowship may bear and receive sinners into the fellowship of Jesus Christ through the forgiving of sins.”

And Bonhoeffer ties it together saying that “where ministry of listening, active helpfulness, and bearing with others is faithfully performed, the ultimate and highest service can also be rendered, namely, the ministry of the Word of God.”

If as a community, we aren’t oriented towards listening, actively helping, and bearing with others, we are going to have a hard time ministering the Word of God to others. Because where would it be found in our lives and our community?

And then we get to these incredible last lines of the reading: “For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.”

How many people have heard that line before? How many have used it in the context of gathering together? And how many realized that Matthew includes those words from Jesus, here, when he is talking about sin, disagreement, and reconciliation—not at the Last Supper, or the Sermon on the Mount, or some hopeful healing or miracle. It’s here, where or when we are struggling, maybe even divided, that we need to remember and call on his presence among us.

If we as the church are going to reconcile the world to God, we aren’t going to do it on our own. We need God’s help. Thankfully, God has already done the work, in and through Jesus, who is with us, always.

And if we are going to call on his name, and continue his work, we’ve got to work through the tough stuff, not brush it under the rug and pretend it didn’t happen.

We’ve got to listen, we’ve got to help, we’ve got to bear with each other. That’s what love and forgiveness look like.

Amen.

Bonus quote, which we used in our Zoom discussion about the Gospel reading on Sunday morning. The quote comes from Padraig O’Tuama’s book, “Daily Prayer With the Corrymeela Community”–

“Listening is a sacrament when the topic is important, and when strife divides people in small places, the sacrament of listening is vital. So many people and so many places in the world have difficult relationships with difference. We seek to practice the art of hospitality in the places of hostility, and in so doing practice kindness in places the most in need of kindness.”

Beware of Mustard Seeds

Background: this is the text of the sermon I gave on July 29 and 30 in response to the reading in Matthew’s Gospel of the parable of the mustard seed and other parables that are grouped together and more so in response to Fr. Bill Ortt, the rector/priest at Christ Church Easton for the last 24 years announcing that he will be retiring later this year. He then left for an already-scheduled vacation.

“Beware of Mustard Seeds”

Looking at a mustard seed, there is nothing that tells you or hints at the growth it is capable of. The tiniest of seeds, it can grow to a height of eight to ten feet. But you wouldn’t know it at first sight.

I came to Christ Church in August 2016, looking for a church home. I walked in to the 9:15am contemporary service, sat about halfway up the pews (on the left side when entering the church) on the window side. The greeters that day were Matt and Kelsey Spiker, who I’d never met. I came here because I was going through a kind of spiritual awakening, I had been attending Real Life Chapel across town for a year, had started studying and writing about the Bible—I was getting stirred up and I wasn’t sure what to do with it all. I knew A.K. and Susie Leight were members here, and I had always thought highly of them, so I gave it a try.

I could tell from that first service that I had found my home. Then I went over to Rise Up Coffee afterwards and got in line right behind Kelsey and Matt and got talking to them.

I think I can speak for the Spikers when I say that none of us came to Christ Church thinking this was going to be somewhere we were going to work or that both Kelsey and I would discern calls to the priesthood.

Those things came from a combination of Fr. Bill Ortt and the Holy Spirit, both waking up something we had that was latent inside us. Something probably about the size of a mustard seed.

Beware of mustard seeds.

Neither of us felt a call to work at “a” church or for “the” church, we felt called to work for THIS church, and at the chance to work for Fr. Bill. We weren’t the first or the last to feel that. Carol Callaghan became a deacon while working here; Barbara Coleman was ordained a deacon here in 2020 after being a part of our congregation; Susie Leight discerned her call to the priesthood during her 20 years here; along with Kelsey and I—Joanne Fisher and Jessica Stehle are fellow postulants and seminarians working toward the priesthood who have come through Christ Church and Fr. Bill; and Kimberly Cox leaves for Virginia Theological Seminary four days after she gets back from the Peru Mission Trip.

That’s more than a notion. That’s the Holy Spirit coming through this place in waves, and Fr. Bill has been casually handing out surfboards, with a smile.

And that doesn’t even begin to touch on the music ministries or the lay ministries that have sprung up and the people along the way who have blossomed in their callings and become instrumental to the life and community of this church and the broader community. We could be here for a couple hours if we started listing names.

Beware of mustard seeds.

This is not a church for the casual observer. If you open yourself to it, you are likely to get caught up in a call. And for 24 years, Fr. Bill has helped create those opportunities and encouraged people on their paths.

There is a common thread to the parables in today’s reading:

The mustard seed that someone took and sowed in a field
The yeast that a woman took and mixed in
A treasure hidden in a field that someone found and hid and sold everything he owned and went and bought the field
A merchant finds a pearl of great value, sold everything he had and bought it
A net that was thrown into the sea, drawn ashore full of fish and sorted.

Every one of these things involves taking action. It asks the person in the story to do something. God doesn’t just do it for us, He wants us to be active participants in His work. In another well-known Gospel story, when it comes to feeding the 5,000, Jesus doesn’t do it all by himself, he uses the disciples to help.

If you’ve been around Fr. Bill, you know he likes things to be done to a certain high standard. He jokes around that that standard is mediocrity. We all know better. The thing about it though, if you look at the different ministries that have grown during his time here—Stephen Ministry, Food Ministry, Outreach ministries, Youth Ministry, Adult Education, Contemporary Music, the list goes on—none of them have his fingerprints heavily on them. In those ministries you will find the hands, and the sweat, and the tears, and the joy of those who have done the work, with his encouragement.

You’ll hear him say that life, and faith, are about the questions we ask—and that we should try to ask the right questions. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been in a meeting with Fr. Bill, thinking I have a good idea, and he’ll ask a few questions, that will send me back to the drawing board, to either scrap something, or to help it go from being a good idea, to a great idea.

His questions can serve as both sunshine and rain to seeds looking to grow.

Beware of mustard seeds.

I think about the phrase, “going to church.” Do you go to church?—someone may ask us or we might ask someone else. That sounds very nice. Something you do for an hour a week and it sounds like a fine thing to tell other people. “Yes, I go to church.”

One of the reasons I was drawn further and further into Christ Church is that there are so many opportunities to do so much more than “going to church.” Anyone who wants to can jump in with two feet—Bible studies, small groups, bands, choirs, youth ministry, hospitality. All it takes is the willingness to try. But like in our parables today, it may change everything.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer distinguishes between cheap grace and costly grace. He says:

“Costly grace is the treasure hidden in the field; for the sake of it a man will go and sell all that he has. It is the pearl of great price for which the merchant will sell all his goods… it is the call of Jesus Christ at which the disciple leaves his nets and follows him.”

“Costly grace is the gospel which must be sought again and again and again, the gift which must be asked for, the door at which a person must knock. Such grace is costly because it calls us to follow, and it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ. It is costly because it costs a [person] their life, and it is grace because it gives a [person] the only true life.”

For 24 years, Fr. Bill has talked about and tried to model costly grace for Christ Church. The kind of grace that changes lives. That can change our lives. What a gift that is.

Last week when he told the staff he was retiring, after the stun-gun effect wore off, we all asked how we could walk beside him through these next few months, how we could support him. I think as a congregation, we have an opportunity to make these next few months an incredibly special time in the life of the congregation, and in the life of the Ortt family.

This is part of the gift that Fr. Bill has given us, and it is in character and in keeping with how he has always done things. We are entering into a process that this church hasn’t gone through in a quarter century. The majority of the congregation who are here now have only known Fr. Bill as the rector.

The process of sending him off with our gratitude, of finding an interim clergyperson or people to come in for the next year, of putting together a search committee, and finding the next rector of St. Peter’s Parish is something that can bring us together and connect us in ways we can’t even imagine yet.

We’ve had a number of small groups read Fr. Gregory Boyle’s book, “Tattoos on the Heart.” It’s an incredible story about a Jesuit priest’s calling to help love and rehabilitate Los Angeles gang members and it has changed the world there. And it has grown into a community that will continue after Fr. Greg is gone.

That’s a bit of the gift Fr. Bill is giving us. Now it’s our turn. Now it’s our time.

We are a community who puts our trust in God. I am going to drop a couple of Frederick Buechner quotes on you here. Buechner wrote:

“Wherever people love each other and are true to each other and take risks for each other, God is with them and they are doing God’s will.”

I believe that describes who we are as a community and how God has been and continues to be with us.

We are entering into a time of prayer and of gratitude, which really is an amazing way to spend all our time. In this case, it is gratitude for the gifts, the time, the friendship, and the leadership that we’ve been given. And for what is to come. And the hope is that prayer and gratitude will lead us into discernment for the way forward.

Today, and every day is unique. This time we find ourselves in, “for the time that we have,”—as Fr. Bill likes to quote Tolkien’s Gandalf—is a time we can bring special attention to relationships; to who and what we are grateful for; and who and how we want to be both individually and collectively.

As we walk forward together, I’ll let Buechner touch on how special this is:

“In the entire history of the universe, let alone in your own history, there has never been another day just like today, and there will never be another just like it again. Today is the point to which all your yesterdays have been leading since the hour of your birth. It is the point from which all your tomorrows will proceed until the hour of your death. If you were aware of how precious today is, you could hardly live through it. Unless you are aware of how precious it is, you can hardly be said to be living at all.”

Today is precious. This time–these next few months are precious. And we get to live it and be grateful for it, together.

What will we do with new life?

Lead in: I just finished my second year of seminary through the Iona Eastern Shore program, which allows our cohort to continue working while we are going to school. July 15 and 16 was a preaching weekend for me at Christ Church Easton. This is the text of the sermon I gave.

Churches/denominations that use the Revised Common Lectionary have prescribed readings for each day and Gospel readings for each Sunday. So we don’t get to pick what Gospel we preach on.

The Gospel reading for July 16 was Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23, “The Parable of the Sower,” where Jesus tells a parable to large crowds gathered by the sea to listen to him, then explains it in private to his disciples.

The image used at the top of the page is “The Sower” by Vincent Van Gogh.

What Will We Do with New Life?

How many people have heard the “Parable of the Sower” before? And how many people have then sat and tried to figure out, “Hhhmmm, which kind of soil am I?”

That’s a fair question to ask. We want to figure out how we relate to the story. At the same time it takes the Gospel message and makes it all about us, the readers or listeners.

I wonder though, if we might hear the Parable of the Sower and wonder what it tells us about the character of God? What can we learn about His kingdom?

Let’s start with the soil. By itself, soil is just soil. And it will go on being soil. But when the Sower adds a seed, that’s when transformation happens; the soil becomes a part of the process of new life springing forth.

Michael Green, in his book, “The Message of Matthew,” tells us:

“It’s not just ‘a farmer’ who went out to sow his field. It is (literally) ‘the farmer’ and he comes bringing the precious seed which can transform the soil. The kingdom comes when the soil and the seed get together. It is a marriage of seed and soil. The seed is the word of God proclaimed by the Sower of God. And the kingdom begins to come to life when the ‘soil’ receives the seed of the word for itself. Then it begins to germinate and shoot.”

In Matthew’s telling of the parable, Jesus is the Sower, and God’s Word, spread generously into the soil, adds what wasn’t there, what we can’t add on our own, what we need God to do. And that changes everything. He changes everything.

Through his sowing of the Word, Jesus is creating his kingdom in and among us. And listen to how He sows: some seeds fell on the path, other seeds fell on rocky ground, other seeds fell among thorns, other seeds fell on good soil. God is not stingy with his seeds, he spreads them everywhere. And that’s good news for us, for sure.

Why is that good news? First, we can’t create this transformation, this new life, on our own. We can’t plant the seed, it’s not our seed. We need God to take the initiative. Forgive me a cheesy pun, but in my head I hear a version of Tom Cruise’s voice from the movie Top Gun saying, “We feel the need for SEEDS!” And I apologize if that is the only line you remember from this sermon.

There are more reasons why it is good news that God is not stingy when he sows his seeds. As mentioned, we have a tendency to hear this parable and try to figure out which kind of soil we are.

Am I the path, where the birds come and eat the seed up? Am I the rocky ground, without much soil, no depth and the sun scorches and dries up? Am I full of thorns, choking the seeds? Or am I good soil, bringing forth grain?

I wonder if this is one of those multiple-choice questions where the answer is: “E: All of the above.” What if on any given day, we might be one way and on a different day another?

Catch me on a Monday and I am distracted, maybe I’ve just been in an argument, or I’ve just gotten some bad news, or the washing machine has overflowed just before I have to leave for work. In those moments, I am not fertile soil. Don’t look for grain coming from me then.

But I don’t have to stay that way. Jesus is going to sow the seeds of God’s Word and I might miss it the first time, but I can have better days and better moments, and be more open and be more fertile. And I might not always stay that way either, as much as I want to.

God’s willing to work with us. No matter what soil we are, he’s going to sow the seeds. But he wants us to get it. He wants us to be fruitful.

Matthew’s Gospel is known as the discipleship Gospel. The author wants us to understand what it means to follow Jesus, what the costs are, and what’s expected of us.

At the beginning of today’s reading, Jesus goes and sits beside the sea. That sounds nice, like something we can relate to living on the Eastern Shore. Then such big crowds gather around him that gets into a boat. The thing about being in a boat on the water, sound carries. He’s created his own amplification system.

And he tells the big crowds about the sower and the seed. And as he finishes his teaching he says, “let anyone with ears listen!” Knowing not everyone will understand.

The way today’s reading is put together, we jump from verse 9 to verse 18, where Jesus explains the parable. But the part we jumped over, is the disciples coming up to Jesus after he has been preaching to the crowds and they ask him why he speaks in parables.

So the second part of today’s reading is Jesus speaking directly to his disciples. No big crowds. And now he focuses on the soil. He asks the disciples to look in the mirror. He asks us to look in the mirror.

If through God’s Word, if through sowing these seeds, Jesus is bringing forth new life, if that’s his example to us, if that is what he is showing as the character of God, what does that ask of us?

He’s asking us to be open, to be receptive, to be good soil. And Jesus spells it out for us clearly. This means, “to hear the word and understand it, to bear fruit and yield, whether a hundredfold, sixty, or thirty.”

What does it mean to bear fruit here?

I want to go back to a couple weeks ago, to something Fr. Bill Ortt said: he said that wherever a believer is, wherever a disciple is, there is the kingdom of God.

As believers, as disciples, we bring the kingdom with us. Well, jeez, what does that mean? Here is another from Fr. Bill—and this is so helpful. Fr. Bill told us to think of it as KINGSHIP rather than kingdom. That we are closer to understanding when we think of it as a RELATIONSHIP, not a place.

To bear fruit, to carry that seed, that new life from God, sprouting in us, would be to have a different, deeper, relationship with God. To put God’s love at the center of who we are, how we live, what we do. To live differently than what we see going on in the world today.

This is not a matter of reducing the moral of the story to, we should all be better people. In fact, we might not want to try to reduce Jesus’s parables to simple morals anyway—they have a tendency to expand and confound our thinking and increase our wonder more than they do to clarify things.

Jesus is giving us a story about the Sower, (he calls it the parable of the sower, not the parable of the soil), about the word of God (the seed) creating new life where there was only soil. And maybe we don’t take enough notice in real life, watching seeds crack open, start to sprout, blossom, BLOOM. Have you ever watched that happen over the course of days, weeks, months in your own garden? I am always late getting vegetables in and right now my tomatoes are green and just taking shape on the vines. And I get excited every time I go water them. Do you get giddy and overjoyed at the very simplest things?

What about thinking about yourself that way, and your relationship with God. What if our hearts were full of gratitude for this new life that has been given to us, that has nothing to do with anything we’ve done?

How do we respond? Maybe we want to do our best to cultivate the soil of our hearts, of our lives, so that God’s Word can take root, can crack open, can bloom, and bear fruit? Maybe our thanks to God IS to bear fruit—to carry that seed, that new life, into who and how we are in the world.

No matter what kind of terrain I am at the moment, Jesus is sowing the seeds that offer me new life. What an incredible gift. What am I going to do with it? What are we going to do with it?

I want to leave you with the words of Debie Thomas, from her book “Into the Mess & Other Jesus Stories,” and what she wishes for the church, and what we might take from the Parable of the Sower—

“How I wish we were known for our absurd generosity. How I wish we were famous for being like the Sower, going out in joy, scattering seed before and behind us in the widest arcs our arms can make. How I wish the world could laugh at our lavishness instead of recoiling from our stinginess. How I wish the people in our lives could see a quiet, gentle confidence in us when we tend to the hard, rocky, thorny places in our communities, instead of finding us abrasive, judgmental, exacting, and insular. How I wish seeds of love, mercy, justice, humility, honor, and truthfulness would fall through our fingers in such appalling quantities that even the birds, the rocks, the thorns, and the shallow, sun-scorched corners of the world would burst forth into colorful, riotous life.”

Jesus has sown new life, God’s love, into the soil of our lives. What are we going to do with it?

Send Us Out

Lead in: I just finished my second year of seminary through the Iona Eastern Shore program, which allows our cohort to continue working while we are going to school. June 17 and 18 was a preaching weekend for me at Christ Church Easton. This is the text of the sermon I gave.

Churches/denominations that use the Revised Common Lectionary have prescribed readings for each day and Gospel readings for each Sunday. So we don’t get to pick what Gospel we preach on.

The Gospel reading for June 18 was Matthew 9:25-10:23, where Jesus calls his 12 apostles and sends them out to further the work that he has been doing: curing the sick, raising the dead, cleansing lepers, and casting out demons, with warnings about what will happen to them.

“Send Us Out”

In January 2017, I had just started working at the church and I remember sitting down with Fr. Bill Ortt. It was time to start Bible studies and kick off The Alpha Course and he asked how I felt about everything. I said, “it’s daunting. And exciting.”

I was starting things I hadn’t done before. Anticipation and anxiety were in the water together. And all I could do was jump in.

Saying that, I can’t imagine what was going through the minds of the 12 disciples when Jesus calls them in today’s reading. So far in Matthew’s Gospel, they have seen Jesus teach, heal, and cure diseases; they have heard him give his Sermon on the Mount. They watched Jesus make a leper clean and were afraid for their lives on a boat as he commanded a storm to stop. When they got off the boat, he drove demons out of man everyone was afraid of; and we heard last week how he cured a woman who had been hemorrhaging for 12 years and then he raised a leader from the synagogue’s daughter from the dead.

Now he calls the 12 together and says, okay, your turn. Now you do it. “Proclaim the good news, the kingdom of heaven has come near, cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons.” Wow. No nerves or pressure there.

The disciples have been riding the bus that Jesus was driving, but he was making all the stops and doing all the work. They were just along for the ride. They probably didn’t realize what “Follow me” entailed.

Let’s look at today’s text just before Jesus sends them out to see what prompts him to do this. He’s going about to all the cities and all the villages teaching and proclaiming the good news and curing every disease.

And then Matthew tells us: “When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. Then he said to his disciples, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore, ask the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.” And Jesus calls his 12.

The time is now. The harvest is ready. People are lost, hurting, sick. And Jesus needs those he has called to help him, to be the laborers.

This is the first time in Matthew’s Gospel that he refers to them as “apostles,” which means those who are sent out.

What are they sent out to do? Help people. Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse lepers, cast out demons. Do what Jesus has been doing. They are to share in and further his calling, his mission, under his authority. Go to where people are hurting. Care for them, give them hope. The things you do when you love someone.

As Matthew was making the point to get these things across to his readers then, they are still intended to speak to us now. Michael Green was an international evangelist, pastor, and author. In his book, “The Message of Matthew,” he gives us a way of thinking about Jesus’s mission charge to the apostles by summarizing it in five words: see, care, pray, receive, go.

SEE: “When Jesus SAW the crowds”—this is first and foremost, the apostles had to SEE the needs of those who were suffering or in trouble. We need to do the same.

CARE: “When Jesus saw the crowds, he had compassion on them.” Green points out that the word Matthew used for having compassion means “he was moved in his guts,” he was stirred deep inside. For the first apostles, or for us, when we see people suffering, we are called to care deeply.

PRAY: “Ask the Lord of the harvest to send workers into his harvest.” We are not the Lord of the harvest, that’s God, and we need to ask for his help and guidance. Stay connected to Him.

RECEIVE: And what Green says here is that the apostles, and we, need to receive training from Jesus, which they do both in watching him, in being with him, and in being sent out by him; and that they also need to receive authority. “It will not be you speaking but the Spirit of the Father speaking through you.” We need to allow ourselves to be open to, and filled with God’s Spirit. It’s not about us, it is about what God can do through us.

GO: Jesus commands, “Go,” and “As you go”… that’s the thing about being sent out. They and we actually have to go out. In preparing them for what’s to come, Jesus doesn’t lecture them about weekly church attendance. He sends them out and warns them that it is going to be dangerous.

Jesus and apostles. Fresco in Cappadocia

Jesus spends some time on this warning. He goes over the rough things that are on the horizon for the apostles. It’s going to be difficult, and it is going to be costly. “But the one who endures to the end will be saved.”

Debie Thomas in her book, “Into the Mess,” says when it comes to faith, “Discomfort is what success looks like.”

“If our overriding priority as Christians is to secure our own comfort, then we cannot follow Jesus. The discipleship Jesus describes will disorient and disrupt us. It will make us the neighborhood weirdos. It will shake things up in our families, our friendship circles, our churches, our communities.”

Caring is costly. As a society now, we are flooded with images and stories of worldwide suffering, violence, sickness—and what is the most common response? Change the channel. Close the laptop. Don’t think about it. Or better yet these days, find someone or a group of people who don’t agree with us and blame them. If we make it a point to care for the marginalized and cast out, we risk becoming marginalized or cast out ourselves. Jesus asks us to step out and take that risk.

When we care about those around us, we open ourselves to getting hurt. When we open our heart to love someone, sooner or later, pain is a part of that love. Love in this life also has loss lingering behind it.

The apostle Paul has a sense of that loss, of that cost, when he writes today’s reading from Romans. He finds something in this suffering:

“We boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.” (Romans 5:2-5)

Jesus didn’t send the apostles out alone. He was with them. He cared about them. And he doesn’t send us out alone. He cares about us. And when we go through the pain and suffering that loving God and each other can bring, Jesus shows us that suffering can point ultimately to hope, and hope in God does not disappoint us.

If we are doing the work that God has given us to do, loving like Jesus, in a world that pushes back against it, we are going to struggle. I will tell you something that is amazing to me: we have so many people in our church community, who have used the struggles, the suffering, the loss they have experienced as a launching point either for ministries that they have helped start, or who are showing up for people in new and deeper ways because of what they have been through. They don’t want others to go through the same struggles alone.

That’s part of what being sent out looks like. Seeing, Caring, Praying, Receiving, Going.

A number of years go in Fr. Bill’s 30-week Kerygma Class, he drew two circles on a white board, one that had arrows pointing inward, and one with arrows pointing out. He talked about the circles as churches, inward facing and outward facing, and asked which one looked more like Jesus’s idea of love and caring? Barbara Coleman, now the Reverend Barbara, put her hands on top of her head with her fingers facing up to show the arrows facing out. And that has been her apostolic antler reminder ever since. We don’t see Barbara as much here anymore because she discerned a call to become a Deacon. She was ordained here in this church in October 2020, and now serves multiple parishes in Dorchester County, and heads up the food pantry. She calls herself the “Deacon of Dorchester.” She’s been sent out.

“Apostolic Antlers” from Rev. Barbara, Fr. Bill, and our Kerygma Class

Another part of today’s reading that keeps stirring me up is how the apostles learned from Jesus. He didn’t ask them to do anything he wasn’t already doing. Beyond his teaching, I bet they learned as much from watching him, from being around him, and from trying to do what he did.

It’s Father’s Day weekend. Happy Father’s Day to all the dads here. I’m convinced that we learn more from watching our fathers, our parents, and who they are, than from anything they might tell us. At least I hope that is the case, as neither of my daughters seem to listen to anything I say… The story about watching who someone is that that comes to my heart happened leading up to Halloween many years ago. So you get a quick Halloween story in June. Sorry, I’ve got the microphone.

From the late 1970s to the mid-80s, Easton had an annual haunted house that was unparalleled and unrivaled. In terms of scariness, creativity, and ingenuity, Disney World fell short of the haunted houses that the Easton Kiwanis Club put on. My father was a part of the Kiwanis Club and our whole family jumped into helping, for a good chunk of September and all of October each year.

They moved from place to place—from an old house on Dutchman’s Lane, to the old Idlewild Elementary School, when it was left empty in Idlewild Park. There were spot-built hydraulic floors, an illusion where a man changed into a werewolf on stage; swinging rope bridges, chainsaws, and even a flamethrower. The last two years of the haunted house, it was on a property in the woods off Manadier Road, at the end of Dutchman’s Lane. People had to park in front of what is now Auto Zone on Dover Road, and ride buses to the haunted woods.

The last year they held it, my friends and I as teenagers were given our own area along the wooded trail, a rundown old farm building, to create our scene to scare people. It was right next to where the buses pulled in.

One night a crowd got off the buses, a big crowd, most were in their 20s, and after riding the buses out there to this dark, deserted woods, they were scared, freaked out, didn’t want to go in and started screaming and shoving, not listening to anyone—it was the beginning of a riot. No one could calm them down and things were elevating past a boiling point.

From where I was standing, I could see my Dad come out of the woods, walk right up to the guys in the front of the crowd, who no one wanted any part of dealing with, and he stepped right into the mess, right where someone was needed. He diffused the whole situation. The entire crowd calmed down, made peace, and the evening, and the show, went on.

That night was more than 35 years ago and I have never forgotten it, watching my dad help restore order out of short-fused chaos. Talking about it later, he said, “I have no idea what I would have done if it turned violent.” He didn’t think, he acted—not just sent out, he seemed shot out, going to where the critical need was. There have been times when I have called on his example in chaotic situations and tried to live into that, diffusing things, and trying to bring peace.

God connects us to people we can learn from; we are always being shaped.

I have to imagine that as Peter, John, and Matthew the tax collector were sent out, and their ministries expanded, that they had their own experiences of watching and learning from Jesus as he healed, cared, loved, and brought peace. They could call on their experiences of watching him. And as we read and discuss the stories of Jesus in the Gospels, we learn how to model ourselves after him. What would Jesus see? What would he care about? How would he love? Who would he send?

How about us? Are we ready to see, care, pray, receive, and go?

Believe

Lead in: I am in my second year of seminary through the Iona Eastern Shore program, which allows our cohort to continue working while we are going to school. April 15-16, with a last minute switch, was a preaching weekend for me at Christ Church Easton. This is the text of the sermon I gave.

Churches/denominations that use the Revised Common Lectionary have prescribed readings for each day and Gospel readings for each Sunday. So we don’t get to pick what Gospel we preach on.

The Gospel reading for April 16 was John 20:19-31, which most people know for “Doubting Thomas,” the disciple who won’t believe that Jesus has been resurrected until he touches Jesus’s wounds for himself. We are all a bit like Thomas. The reading is where Jesus appears to the disciples for the first time after his death.

“Do Not Doubt, But Believe”

I’m a big fan of John’s Gospel. On the one hand, he’s a bit like the Rodney Dangerfield of the gospels—not enough respect to get his own lectionary year like the synoptic Gospels; on the other hand, every lectionary year is made better because we have John peppered throughout them.

For John, “believing” is a big deal. He uses the word “believe” 98 times in his Gospel, always as a verb, as something active and dynamic. He tells us at the end of today’s reading that these stories are written that we might believe that Jesus is the Messiah and through believing have life in his name.

Today’s reading is John’s version of Jesus giving the Holy Spirit to the disciples. Remember, John didn’t write Acts, that was Luke, so we don’t get the Pentecost telling of the story here.

There are scholars who say that John’s Gospel is the one most likely to have originated with an eyewitness account. We read the author describing himself as being there at the crucifixion and later, on the beach with Peter and the others. There are details in John that we don’t find in the others.

Let’s look at two stories of the giving of the Holy Spirit. At the beginning of Luke’s Gospel, he says that after investigating everything he wants to write an orderly account of all that went on, talking to everyone he can. Each Gospel sets out its witness to the good news of Jesus Christ, and I love Luke (he gives us the prodigal son, the Road to Emmaus, etc). But when I think humorously about the way stories get passed down over time, there is some part of me that thinks about Luke asking everyone for their recollection of Pentecost:

“And there was FIRE! Fire? Yeah, FIRE! It was intense! And then people were speaking in tongues, remember that? And people thought we were drunk, and Peter was like, noooo waaaayy, it’s only 9:00 in the morning…”

In Luke’s telling of the story in Acts, it is a public event, a spectacle.

In contrast, listen to John’s account:

“Jesus said to them again, ‘Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.’ When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.’”

Maybe it’s because I tend prefer being understated, but I love the simple, straightforward, intimate and understated way John gives us the Holy Spirit. No crowds, no fire, no speaking in tongues. Jesus breathed on them and gave them a new Spirit. A new life in Him. A life that has overcome death.

Does that sound familiar? This is from Genesis, Chapter 2, Verse 7:

“then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being.”

I love that John sees what Jesus is doing and connects it back to the beginning (remember he starts his whole Gospel account with “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”) John wants to make sure we don’t miss what’s happening. This is new life, that comes through Jesus, which is giving us a direct connection to God.

I get excited about the Holy Spirit.

But let’s backtrack to where the disciples are in the reading and what’s going on.

Jesus has been arrested, crucified, and was buried in a tomb. The disciples scattered, afraid for their lives. Just before today’s reading, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb and found the stone rolled away, she ran and got Peter and the one whom Jesus loved (who we think of as John, the author) and they went in and found the tomb empty. And then the men left and went home. All Peter and John saw was the empty tomb.

Mary Magdalene stuck around, talked to angels, then encountered Jesus, who told her to go and tell the disciples, which she did. But none of them have seen Jesus for themselves yet. They might dismiss her story as being unbelievable story, saying she was overly excited at finding the tomb empty—she could have been hallucinating.

Now, they were hiding out together in a locked room, hoping not to be found or found out. As writer and pastor Frederick Buechner describes it:

“They had bolted the door and were listening for the dreaded sound of footsteps on the stair when suddenly Jesus was among them. He stood in their midst—always in their midst, this man, turning up when they least expected him—and told them to breathe his breath, his holy breath and spirit, so that they could go out into the world again and perform his holy work.”

6th century mosaic in the Church of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo, Ravenna

Knowing that they are going to be scared out of their wits, Jesus’s first words to them are “Peace be with you.”

He reassures them. He shows them his hands and his side, so that they know it’s him and that this is real. And the disciples rejoiced. Of course they did. If there are scenes out of Scripture that you would want to be there for—this has to be one of them! This is massive. It’s transformative. It’s life changing. It’s death conquering.

Jesus gives the disciples what they need to believe. And then he gives them his Spirit and gives them work to do.

But Thomas isn’t there. The other disciples tell him what happened, but he isn’t having it. “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hand and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.”

On the one hand, we can say, sure, everyone talks a big game when Jesus isn’t standing there, just you wait… But I think this is true to life. How many of us, when hearing friends tell us an unbelievable story, decide, “I’ll believe it when I see it.” Even if it comes from people we trust, we still want proof. Thomas wants the same experience the others had.

So what does Jesus do? He comes back. He shows up again, just for Thomas. He gives Thomas what he needs to believe. Jesus doesn’t scold him, he is there for him and tells Thomas, “Do not doubt, but believe.”

Notice, Thomas doesn’t get kicked out of the club for doubting. That is one of the wonderful aspects of this reading—there is room in our faith for doubt. It is okay to want to see for ourselves. It’s okay not to believe just because everyone else tells you to. Jesus works with Thomas.

And Thomas believes; seeing is believing as they say. Jesus then delivers the showstopper of lines, a line so important to faith: “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”

That’s us. I don’t know about you—I haven’t encountered the bodily resurrected Jesus in the flesh. But I have come to believe. How?

Think of the work Jesus is asking the disciples to take on. To help people believe, when they haven’t seen him for themselves.

Here is Frederick Buechner again:

“The risen Christ is risen in his glory, but he is also Christ risen in the hearts of those, who although they have never touched the mark of the nails, have been themselves so touched by him, that they believe anyway. However faded and threadbare, what they have seen of him is at least enough to get their bearings by.”

Believe. What does that mean here? Is that an intellectual affirmation? Is it convincing ourselves and never doubting? Is this just a box we have to check off? I don’t think so.

For the disciples, their belief was foundational to the mission Jesus gave them. If they didn’t believe, what kind of witnesses would they be? If they don’t believe, why would anyone they meet want to believe?

Jesus’s life and love and good news are dependent on the disciples to continue to spread it out into the world. He was inviting them into an intimate, dynamic relationship with him.

And the same thing is true of us now. If people are going to come to believe in Jesus, it probably won’t be because they have had a bodily encounter with the resurrected Christ; it will be through the Holy Spirit, which is carried and passed on by the NEW body of Christ, the church, US.

The former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, in his book, “Tokens of Trust: An Introduction to Christian Belief,” talks about a young Jewish woman named Etty Hillesum. She was in her 20s when the Germans occupied Holland. She watched her world turn into an utter nightmare. She was sent to a concentration camp at Westerbork before being shipped to the gas chambers at Auschwitz.

She wrote in her diary: “There must be someone to live through it all and bear witness to the fact that God lived, even in these times. And why should I not be that witness?”

Williams describes her attitude and commitment like this:

“She decided to occupy a certain place in the world, a place where others could somehow connect with God through her. She took responsibility for making God credible in the world. She took responsibility for God’s believability.”

What if THAT is what believing in God, believing in Jesus, means. That with and through our lives, we take responsibility for God’s believability. How many of us would say that we believe if that were the standard?

That’s what Jesus is asking of his disciples. But he doesn’t leave them on their own to do it, he doesn’t abandon them. He shows up. He brings them peace. He breathes his Holy Spirit into them.

The fact that we are gathered here in a church worshipping and loving Jesus, trying to understand his life and example, and bearing witness to the good news of his Resurrection says that the early disciples, with God’s help and the Holy Spirit, were up for the task.

I wonder: are we?

Let me give a brief witness. Over the past month, my daughter Ava has been in and out of A.I. DuPont Hospital, three times, first for surgery, then with multiple ambulance rides for seizures she couldn’t come out of. She’s home now and we’re hopeful she’ll be back in school this week and going to her senior prom next weekend. But epilepsy is challenging at times, and it’s been a rough, slow, frustrating go of things.

Not once going through it, have we, or I felt alone. Through so many text messages, phone calls, people checking in before or after classes, the school systems offering help, prayers, hugs, you name it–I have felt the Holy Spirit and God’s love at work through friends, through this congregation, through family, sometimes through strangers–volunteers at the Ronald McDonald House or, nurses, doctors, and people working at the Einstein Brother’s Bagels at the hospital, who can tell you are beyond tired this morning.

My experience is not unique. One of the things that touches my heart the most is to hear how people have shown up, how people have been there, how people have been LOVE in the lives of others. The way we love one another, even as Jesus loves us, can help make God believable for others.

We can see the Holy Spirit being God’s love in the world. We can be the Holy Spirit being God’s love in the world.

In the dark and confusing times that we are in the middle of in the world right now, can our belief, can our lives, can our love, be a witness for God’s believability in the world?

Yes, we can be that witness. Yes, God’s love, moving through us, through our belief, and our lives, can be credible in the world. That’s how the Holy Spirit works. No fire required.

Amen.

Our Iona Eastern Shore seminary class with professor, Fr. Dan Dunlap and guest presenter, Dr. Tom Long, one of the United States foremost preachers. That is how we started Saturday.

No labels, just love: the woman at the well

“I want to love like Jesus”—that’s a goal that’s thrown around by both fans of Jesus and maybe even doubters. Most people agree that Jesus knew something about love. And that that was and is a good thing.

How many people can tell us more about what that kind of love looks like? Is it just a hopeful thing to say without any real substance behind it? Or are we willing to look closer as to what it might mean to love like Jesus.

John’s Gospel story about the woman at the well is a great model for what that kind of love looks like in action.

Throughout each of the Gospels, Jesus makes a point of reaching across cultural, social, and religious boundaries and barriers to include people who were cast out or left out.

True to that form, the woman at the well, per culture and circumstance, is someone Jesus should not have been talking to.

Going through Samaria, Jesus was in a region and among a people the Jewish people didn’t look kindly on.

It’s the middle of the day, incredibly hot, a time when no one would have been at the well. And here comes a woman to get water.

Bible scholar N.T. Wright spells it out:

“In that culture, many devout Jewish men would not have allowed themselves to be alone with a woman. If it was unavoidable that they should be, they certainly would not have entered into conversation with her. The risk, they would have thought, was too high to risk impurity, risk of gossip, risk ultimately of being drawn into immorality. And yet Jesus is talking to this woman.”

If her being a woman wasn’t bad enough, on top of that she is a Samaritan. The Jewish people and the Samaritans didn’t mix. The Jews wanted nothing to do with the Samaritans. And no way in the world would they have considered sharing food or drink with them, much less sharing a drinking vessel.

Jesus reaches out to the woman by asking for a drink. He puts himself out there. Asks for hospitality. He makes himself vulnerable.

And who does he do this to? A woman who is coming to the well in the middle of the day to avoid having to deal with people, someone who has a stigma on her, a shame.

Debie Thomas in her book, “Into the Mess & Other Jesus Stories” makes the point perfectly:

“The Samaritan woman is the Other, the alien, the outsider, the heretic, the stranger. Jesus breaks all the boundaries he is not supposed to break to reach out to her.

What Jesus does when he enters into conversation with a Samaritan woman is radical and risky; it stuns his own disciples because it asks them to dream of a different kind of social and religious order. A different kind of kingdom.”

Maybe that’s a clue for us. Loving like Jesus asks us to envision a different kind of social order, a different kind of kingdom.

I picture this woman and the gossip about her, the things said to her, the looks, the scorn, the judgment. And here is Jesus, a Jewish teacher, and how does he talk to her? Without judgment, without shaming, without looking down on her, and at the same time fully engaging with her and fully seeing her for who she is.

John, as the writer, packs a lot into this story:

This conversation is the longest conversation Jesus has with anyone in any of the Gospels.
In John’s Gospel, this woman at the well is the first person to whom Jesus reveals his identity as the Messiah.
She is the first believer in any of the Gospels to become an evangelist and bring her entire city to a saving experience of Jesus.

All this for a Samaritan woman. This encounter was a big deal to John for him to give it so much space and meaning, and it was a big deal to Jesus.

So how does Jesus go about revealing his identity to the woman? Does he prove himself by healing the sick? Does he feed 5,000 people? Does he raise anyone from the dead or turn water into wine? No. He has a conversation with her.

He offers her “living water,” which she doesn’t understand. But he sits with her, listens to her, speaks to her, and reveals who he is.

Cynthia Kittredge in her book, “Conversations with Scripture: The Gospel of John points out:

“That Jesus’ revelation and the woman’s realization of him come through dialogue is an important feature to notice… Jesus does no sign here. There is no miracle.” He makes a claim which then takes a dialogue, a back and forth to make sense of.

“This is a type of dialogue in John’s Gospel which reflects a way individuals and people come to faith—through a process of effort and discussion.”

Jesus reveals himself with no miracles or signs, simply with conversation, insight, and presence. He hears her, he sees her, he doesn’t dismiss her—he shares with her.

How did the woman respond? She goes running off to her town and tells absolutely everyone there. And Jesus stuck around and confirmed her testimony for people. She went from scorned outsider to credible witness.

Jesus restores her and transforms her.

Is this what it looks like to love like Jesus? Is this something Jesus still offers us today?

Here’s where Debie Thomas asks questions that we need to ask:

“Just as he does for the Samaritan woman, Jesus invites us to see ourselves and each other through the eyes of love, not judgment. Can we, like Jesus, become soft landing places for people who are alone, carrying stories of humiliation too heavy to bear? Can we see and name the world’s brokenness without shaming? Can we tell the truth and honor each other’s dignity at the same time?”

In the six-plus years I have been at Christ Church Easton, being a part of small groups has been a revelation for me in witnessing what becoming this kind of soft landing place can do.

For several years we ran the Alpha Course after our Saturday evening service, and we had between 90 and 100 people who would meet in the Parish Hall for dinner. Our youth group and leaders were a part of that number as well. Our Parish Hall was packed with food, laughter, and new relationships forming. Everyone sat and ate together before breaking into small groups, and over the course of 11 weeks we also went on a weekend retreat together.

That program became a landing place for people in recovery. In many cases these were people who were getting clean through Narcotics Anonymous. And it was a huge leap of faith for them to walk through the door of a church. Repeatedly we heard, “I didn’t think a church would want someone like me here.” People named and worked through shame they carried. They shared stories of why they started using; of their low points, in some cases being in prison; and they shared hopes and dreams—things like being able to be present, to be a parent in the lives of their children.

They went deep when they shared. And that gave permission for everyone else to go deep with their own struggles and failures. We had a congregation of people come to know by name someone who they might have dismissed, labeled, and judged. Which would have been the congregation’s loss.

Middle schoolers in our youth group would find and sit with—both in church and at dinner—the friends they made, in some cases big dudes covered with tattoos, who came to absolutely love these kids. There were no labels, just love. There were no more outsiders or outcasts, just a community of people, a group of friends. It has a holy thing and a holy time.

It looked a lot like Jesus with the woman at the well.

Fr. Gregory Boyle in his book, “Tattoos on the Heart,” tells a story about a former gang member who lived near their church and who liked to hang out his window to talk to people on their way by. One day Boyle was walking by and the guy yelled out, “Hey G, I love you,” and waved him by like he was blessing him. Boyle thanked him, and the guy’s reply was, “Of course, you’re in my jurisdiction.”

Boyle uses the idea of “jurisdiction” to talk about the area of our love, and he talks about God’s jurisdiction, the area of His love, which is all-inclusive.

When thinking about how to love like Jesus, we need to expand our jurisdiction to be as inclusive, as expansive, as Jesus’s. In the story of the woman at the well, he gives us the example of what it looks like to expand our love and compassion to include someone who had been left out.

We don’t need miracles or signs to accomplish this—it is something any of us can do. And we do it with presence, vulnerability, empathy, dialogue, listening, and seeing.

I want to leave you with some of Fr. Gregory Boyle’s words about expanding the jurisdiction of our love:

“Close both eyes; see with (eyes of your heart). Then, we are no longer saddled by the burden of our persistent judgments, our ceaseless withholding, our constant exclusion. Our sphere has widened, and we find ourselves quite unexpectantly, in a new, expansive location, in a place of endless acceptance and infinite love.

We’ve wandered into God’s own jurisdiction.”

That’s how we love like Jesus.

Amen.

* On Saturday, March 11, I preached at our Iona Eastern Shore seminary class (at Old Trinity Church in Church Creek, MD) on John 4:5-42, the story of the Samaritan woman at the well. The text above is the sermon that I gave.

Meeting in the Mess and the Mystery

There is something about this time of year. As Fr. Bill Ortt points out, the word “Lent” comes from an Old English word that means “lengthen”—for the days getting longer. It’s not the spring is here yet, but we are moving in that direction. The magnolia tree in our front yard attests to that (as do the neighbors saying, “there he is in the yard staring at and taking pictures of the tree again…”).

This week we end a long study of Paul’s Letter to the Romans. And we start both Zoom and in-person studies of Debie Thomas’s “Into the Mess & Other Jesus Stories.”

Talking about Romans, Rev. Jay Sidebotham in his book, “Conversations with Scripture: Romans” writes:

“Paul offers specific examples of what a community transformed by grace looks like. It is a community of righteousness, a matter of being in right relationship with each other. That community will be marked by a willingness to forgo one’s own agenda for the better of another, most definitely a countercultural thing to do… The Christian community is to be marked by a spirit that honors the other.”

For Paul, it was the impossible task of unifying the Jewish believers in Christ with the Gentiles–something that had never been done. It’s telling that we have had more than 2,000 years to work at this, but we seem to have taken steps backwards at welcoming and honoring the outsider, the other. That is something to think about and pray on during Lent (and beyond).

In society today, we’ve decided that faith is a personal/individual thing, it’s between us and God. But I wonder what happens if we poke our individual faith with a stick.

In the first essay in “Into the Mess,” Thomas looks at Luke’s Gospel, (1:26-38) where the angel Gabriel tells Mary what’s going on with her and how God is calling her. Thomas talks about what a shocking and impossible reality was being opened up for Mary. And after the angel leaves:

“(Mary) has to consent to evolve. To wonder. To stretch. She has to learn that faith and doubt are not opposites–that beyond all easy platitudes and pieties of religion, we serve a God who dwells in mystery. If we agree to embark on a journey with this God, we will face periods of bewilderment… (leading to) it’s when our inherited beliefs collide with the messy circumstances of our lives that we go from a two-dimensional faith to one that is vibrant and textured.”

For both Mary and Paul, when they said yes to their callings/journeys with God, their lives got more difficult, harder to bear, not easier. For some of us, that kind of poking may be uncomfortable. It’s meant to be.

Thomas goes on to talk about the cost of loving, “to love anyone in this broken world takes tenacity and grit, long-suffering and great strength.” She goes from talking about Mary, to talking about us:

“The particularities of our own stories might differ from Mary’s, but the weight and cost of ‘bearing’ remain the same–and so does the grace. When we consent to bear the unbearable, we learn a new kind of hope. A hope set free from expectation and frenzy. A resurrected hope that doesn’t need or want easy answers. A hope that accepts the grayness of things and leaves room for mystery.”

Bearing the love for another in the world has its cost and its grace. Bearing the love of Christ in the world–being those who love God, welcome and love the outsider/other, those who feed the poor, heal the sick, or simply those who try to understand and love those who are difficult for us to understand or love–has its cost and its grace.

Faith isn’t an individual matter of being rescued from the mess, it is a choice to meet God in the mess, where He is, and we are, needed.

At Christ Church Easton, Fr. Bill has declared this Lent to be a season of healing, a time of sharing our stories and listening to others; of helping to find and spark hope for each other.

Tell us your story about where God entered your life and did something unexpected and remarkable. Share your story of healing.

The days are getting longer. We have a season where creation around us is going green and things are starting to blossom. We can use this season to draw closer to God and to encourage each other. We can bear the love of Christ into the world and in the process expand our faith into something vibrant and textured that embraces the messiness and mystery of life.

Love Over Law

Lead in: I am in my second year in seminary through the Iona Eastern Shore program, which allows our cohort to continue working while we are going to school. February 11-12 was a preaching weekend for me at Christ Church Easton. This is the text of the sermon I gave.

Churches/denominations that use the Revised Common Lectionary have prescribed readings for each day and Gospel readings for each Sunday. So we don’t get to pick what Gospel we preach on.

The Gospel reading for February 12 was a rough one–Matthew 5:21-37, part of the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus tells his disciples that not committing murder or adultery aren’t enough, you can’t hold onto anger or lust, or you are in the same shape, then moves into divorce and lying.

“Love Over Law”

There is a quote that comes to mind when I read this part of Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount. It’s by Lao Tzu, a Chinese mystic philosopher. He says:

“Watch your thoughts, they become your words; watch your words, they become your actions; watch your actions, they become your habits; watch your habits, they become your character; watch your character, it becomes your destiny.”

What begin as our thoughts, form who we become; and inform our destiny.

Our thoughts matter. Our words matter. Our actions matter. From their smallest beginnings, they can become our lives without us realizing it.

Let’s remember what Jesus said in last week’s reading, the passage just before today’s Gospel. Jesus said, “Do not think I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill… not one letter will pass from the law until all is accomplished.”

He continues on to say not to break the least of the commandments or teach others to do the same, and that your righteousness needs to EXCEED that of the scribes and the pharisees.

Your righteousness needs to EXCEED the the letter of the law.

Some of the laws that Jesus cites in today’s reading are about actions: “You shall not murder,” “You shall not commit adultery,” and then he brings in divorce and lying. These are all actions, things that people do.

Jesus is trying to head these things off at the pass before they get anywhere close to being actions. Work with them when they are still thoughts.

Since Jesus has gone there, let’s think about it in a hypothetical situation with vengeance and anger. If someone has wronged you in the worst way, so much so that you decide you are going to take action: you are seething, you get into your car, you drive to where they are, you walk up to the door.

If the law is “thou shalt not commit murder”—where is the easiest place to stop that from happening? It’s not when you get to the house looking for revenge. It’s before you even get into the car. Once you’ve started the process, you are moving down a path that the further you get, the harder it is to turn back.

Jesus is telling his disciples not to go down that path.

Murder is obviously an extreme case. Jesus dials it back to anger: if you are angry with a brother or sister or if they have something against you—and here he says something remarkable for those of us sitting in church—before you go to church, reconcile yourself with your brother or sister. Then come to church.

Why would he say that? How is that a good church growth strategy?

Jesus is trying to build a community founded on love and caring for each other. If you’ve got a bunch of people worshipping together who have grudges against each other, or who come to have real issues with each other, that’s not a loving community.

Fr. Bill pointed out last week that in relaying this teaching and these stories that Jesus is telling his disciples, Matthew is passing along those instructions to his readers and ultimately intending it for us as disciples today. Jesus’ teaching is also meant for us today.

Let’s think about things in terms of us today. I think we all have friends who aren’t church-goers, some who maybe used to be, and others who simply don’t go to church and when they tell you why, it is because they know people who go to church and then they see how they live their lives outside church, and they want nothing to do with that kind of hypocrisy. They see them out in the community, how they treat people, the masks they wear, the things they do.

Look again at what Jesus is saying: if you have issues with someone, work it out, then come to church. Have your heart in the right place and your lives in the right place when you are here. Our relationships with each other are integral to who the church is. Jesus is holding us to a higher standard.

We have to see our relationships with each other as part of our Christian calling.

Jesus is asking his disciples, and us, to be accountable. Both to God and to each other.

My grandfather, my mom’s father, lived to be 92. He was a recovering alcoholic and spent the last 56 years of his life sober. He was a director of Tuerk House in Baltimore and a program director for the National Council on Alcoholism. He ultimately made his living and his life about helping people who wanted to get sober.

He lived in Baltimore and Towson, before spending the last years of his life in Easton. When he and my grandmother moved here, one of the first things he did was to find out when and where the AA meetings were, so he could connect with people.

We had a memorial service for him at Londonderry, where they lived, and people who knew him from AA came from Baltimore to be there and to speak. The Baltimore Sun newspaper wrote two stories about him after he passed.

He was extroverted, loved to talk and tell stories, and he was compassionate and an incredible listener. He was considered a rock for those battling alcoholism who were trying to reclaim their lives.

A saying that became his mantra was: “I don’t care whether an alcoholic came from Yale or jail or Park Avenue or park bench, I’m here to help.”

I will also always remember someone asking him if once you were an alcoholic, you could ever not be an alcoholic again, to which he said, “You can turn a cucumber into a pickle, but you can’t turn a pickle back into a cucumber.”

I bring my grandfather up because the 12 steps of AA became a way of life for him. And I want to look for a minute at a few of the steps and think about them in terms of accountability and in terms of how Jesus is asking his disciples to think and live. Here are a few of the steps in the program:

Make a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

Admit to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

Humbly ask God to remove our shortcomings.

Make a list of all persons we have harmed, and become willing to make amends to them all.

Make direct amends to such people wherever possible.

Continue to take personal inventory and when we are wrong promptly admit it.

Seek through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, as we understand Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.

That sounds a lot like what Jesus is asking of his disciples.

There is law and then there is lifestyle. The 12 steps in AA are a way for people to live differently, to be accountable, and to stay humble.

Jesus is asking his disciples, and us, to live differently, to be accountable, and to stay humble.

It’s a way of life, not just about following the law.

We’re getting towards the end of our Bible study of Romans, which started in the fall. I won’t pull you too far into Romans, but one of the points that Paul makes repeatedly is that the law is not sufficient for salvation.

The law is prescriptive: it tells you what to do and what not to do, but by itself, it doesn’t change us.

Jesus Christ is transformative, he takes us from being stuck in the flesh, in sin, to being in Christ, in the Spirit, to becoming new creations.

Paul points out where we are stuck in today’s reading from Corinthians:

“I fed you with milk, not solid food, for you were not ready for solid food. Even now you still are not ready, for you are still of the flesh. For as long as there is jealousy and quarreling among you, are you not of the flesh, and behaving according to human inclinations?”

The law is the baby food. It’s meant to get us to the next thing. If we are stuck on the law, in jealousy and arguing, we’re not there yet.

Let’s leave the law for a minute. Let’s talk about anger.

For me, road rage is a hang up, it’s a real thing. When I am driving other people can lose their humanity quickly for me and I can lose mine. And I don’t mean in a run- people-off-the-road or get-out-of-the-car-and-start-a-fight way. I mean in a being overtaken by anger-way; a not being the person I should be-way.

I commuted from Easton to Washington, DC, and back for work for more than four years. It was a 70-mile commute, one way, which included Route 295 into DC. I mostly listened to sports radio or loud, obnoxious music, both of which helped. But I frequently felt my blood boil, my heart rate ramp up, and it wasn’t a good thing. And then when I got home in the evening, I wasn’t a horrible person or a terrible father, but I wasn’t fully present.

Some of that anger, some of that stress came in the house with me and kept me from connecting the way I should have. Jesus is warning us against this happening, he is trying to keep us from that kind of disconnect.

My life fell apart while I was making that commute. And in our reading today, Jesus warns us about divorce. He says don’t go there.

The law says, “whoever divorces his wife, let him give her a certificate of divorce.” No big deal. And that’s where we are in society today. We treat marriage and divorce as if it is no big deal, almost as if divorce were expected.

Going through a divorce tore my heart to pieces. Nicky Gumbel, the pioneer of the Alpha Course, compares marriage to gluing together corrugated cardboard… and he says when you try to pull the cardboard apart, it destroys both pieces in the process.

That’s an accurate metaphor in my book. When I hear that someone is separating or going through a divorce, my heart breaks for them. It’s not something that is casual or that is meant to be casual.

It is not as simple, and shouldn’t be, as divorce papers, and divorce parties to celebrate. It’s something to mourn. It’s a death.

And that is where some of us end up, with the life that we had ending.

Thankfully, God doesn’t leave us at death. Jesus will come to know something about new life, after death. And in my experience, in giving divorce the gravity it can have in our lives, in mourning it and working through it as a death, new and unexpected life can come out of it. We need to walk through that and help others through it. That’s been part of my story and I am grateful for new life.

New life is what Jesus wanted for his disciples. It is what he wants for us. Life to the fullest.

The commandments, the laws, are not meant to make us miserable or keep us from that life. They aren’t meant to be spoilsports to take away the fun stuff. They were put in place to be guidelines for how to live in a community together without hurting each other, intentionally or unintentionally.

Murder, adultery, lying, coveting—none of these things help us love our neighbor better. Quite the opposite. And our thoughts, words, and actions can influence our lives in ways that move us in those directions.

Idols and false gods don’t bring us closer to God, they put things between us and God.

And when you add all these behaviors up and stir them up in a pot, you get what we see when we look around the world today—a world that is lost, people who are suffering from being estranged from God and each other; people who feel alone and confused.

The commandments and laws are already there. They haven’t changed or fixed things by their existence.

So what do we do? How do we fix this? We have to live differently. Righteousness has to let go of the law and point to God’s will and love.

To help us see a different way to live, a better way to live, I am going to borrow from a couple of our small groups—one of which looks ahead in Matthew’s Gospel just a bit.

Matthew Chapter 7, Verses 13 and 14 says:

“Enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the road is easy that leads to destruction, and there are many who take it. For the gate is narrow and the road is hard that leads to life and there are few who find it.”

We have a men’s study that just began Fr. Gregory Boyle’s book, “Tattoos on the Heart,” about his experience working with Los Angeles gang members. They have an incredible ministry and they see ex-gang members transformed and leading new lives, by virtue of finding a community that loves and supports them and who are there for them.

Fr. Greg Boyle and trainees at Homeboy Industries.

And about the narrow gate, Boyle writes:

“Jesus in Matthew’s Gospel says, ‘How narrow is the gate that leads to life?’ Mistakenly, I think we’ve come to believe that this is about restriction. The way is narrow. But it really wants us to see that narrowness IS the way.

“… Our choice is not to focus on the narrow, but to narrow our focus. The gate that leads to life is not about restriction at all. It is about an entry into the expansive. There is a vastness in knowing you’re a son or daughter worth having. We see our plentitude in God’s own expansive view of us.”

And we take that in, God’s view of us. Boyle says we marinate in it.

God is vast and his love for us is expansive. But we can’t marinate in that, we can’t feel that, if we are scattered. The pharisees and scribes Jesus says we need to be more righteous than were obsessed with the law. Do you know how many laws are listed in the Old Testament? 613. Try to keep all those straight and see how narrow you feel.

We have to narrow our focus onto God’s love. If that’s what we focus on, that we are loved by God; if that’s what we take into our hearts and our lives, that we are beloved sons and daughters, ALL OF US, how does that make us feel and how does that make us want to treat each other?

If we narrow our focus to love, what does that look like?

You know who knows what that looks like? Paul knows. This coming week in our Romans study, we’ll be discussing Romans Chapter 12. Here is what Paul says in verses 9 through 16:

“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.

Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them. Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep. Live in harmony with one another; do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly…”

And he finishes chapter 12 saying, “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.”

THAT’S NOT LAW, IT’S LOVE.

In his Sermon the Mount, which we are working through bit by bit each week, Jesus lays a lot in front of us. We get the blessings of the Beatitudes, we are reminded that we are salt and light, and today we get this over-the-top teaching about being more righteous than the law. Something we can never live up to or fully into.

Paul goes to a similar place in his letters—we need a Venn diagram and flow charts to get through Romans.

It’s a lot to learn and it’s hard to live.

But they both point us to the same place. To the power of God’s love. To the transformative, self-sacrificing love Jesus models for us and gives to us. To the grace that is our gift when we say yes to it.

We are God’s beloved. All of us. He wants us to know that and to live that way, with each other.

We don’t need laws to change us, we need love.

And when we have love, the laws become fulfilled, because our hearts are already far beyond them.

Our hearts are full of God’s love. And we treat each other that way.

Amen.

Let Love Become a Reality

This week, I was asked to lead our Wednesday morning healing prayer service. It’s a small, wonderful, heartfelt and Spirit-led service, which is held every Wednesday at 10:00am. The Gospel reading for the morning was Matthew 22:34-40, which is Jesus answering the question, which is the greatest commandment. I’m including the reading below and then the homily I gave in response to it:

Matthew 22:34-40 NRSV

When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” He said to him, “ ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”

“Let Love Become a Reality”

I love when people asked Jesus questions. Depending on who was asking, they didn’t always love his responses, or the questions he asked back to them.

But I think Jesus also had in mind the spirit in which the questions were asked. Thinking of John’s Gospel—both Nikodemus and the woman at the well were trying to understand. And Jesus encouraged them. Here and elsewhere, when the Pharisees, Sadducees, and lawyers asked questions, it was often to try to trip him up, to trick him into saying the wrong thing so they could discredit him or have him arrested.

Here we have an expert in the law asking him which commandment is the greatest?

So Jesus goes to Scripture, he pulls from Deuteronomy 6:5, part of the Shema, the creed of Judaism, for “Love the Lord your God,” and to Leviticus 19:18 for “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

On these two commandments, hang all the Law and the Prophets. He’s given a perfect legal answer. And he’s done something even more to confound the law expert.

Michael Green in his book “The Message of Matthew,” points out that “For people who, like this expert in the law, were strong on ethics and weak on relationships, this strongly relational teaching was a revealing mirror of the heart.”

Strong on ethics, weak on relationships. A mirror of the heart. When I think about a lot of people today—we are strong on ideas, maybe strong on convictions, but not so great on relationships. We want to label people as different from us and say therefore they are wrong. Our tendency is to distance ourselves rather than drawing closer, rather than trying to understand or to love.

When we think of God and our neighbors in terms of relationships, in terms of beings who we are called to love, we have to get off of our high horses. If we try to love God with everything we have, we also have to love his creation, and the people he created.

Green writes:

“If there is real love for God, there will inevitably be real love for neighbor; God’s overflowing love is infectious. The criterion of whether love for God is real is whether or not it is reflected in our relationships with others. And it will not do to say, as many do, ‘I don’t do any harm to anyone.’ That is not only negative, but it neglects the first and great commandment, to put God as number one in our lives. With God first and neighbor second, all else in the law is commentary.”

To make a go at loving, we have to have softer hearts, our hearts need to be renewed—we can’t just be following orders (the law).

How do we do this? It doesn’t happen all at once. It takes time.

Our friend and brother John Coleman points out that as a police officer, he responds differently to situations today than he did 25 years ago. He always did his job and responded according to law, but now his first response is based much more in love and understanding, then when he was newer at the job. He credits both God and time with working on him.

I can tell you from my own experience that I think and feel and respond differently now to things than I did five years ago. And that has been five years of studying Scripture, of prayer and worship, of spiritual friendships and encouragement. When we use the term Christian formation, we are hoping, working to be formed in a more Christ-like way.

I hope I continue to grow and learn and improve how I love God and love my neighbor.

Reflecting on this passage in Matthew, N.T. Wright (in his book “Matthew for Everyone”) says:

“The heart doesn’t seem to get renewed all in one go. Many, many bits of darkness and impurity still lurk in its depths, and sometimes take a lot of work, prayer, and counsel to dig out and replace with the love which we all agree should really be there.”

I’m thinking of Paul writing in Romans where he says, “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing that I hate.” I think we all can relate to Paul’s dilemma sometimes.

Given the fact that we are standing here together at a healing service on Wednesday morning, I think we all know it is right and a good thing to love God and love our neighbor. We can agree both that that is what we are supposed to do and that it is what we are commanded to do.

But it has to be more than a command, it has to be more than instructions to follow.

Wright says:

Commandments “come into their own when they are seen not as orders to be obeyed in our own strength, but as invitations and promises to a new way of life in which, bit by bit, hatred and pride can be left behind and love can become a reality.”

There it is: an invitation, a promise to a new way of life where we leave behind hatred and pride and love becomes our reality. Let’s make that our prayer, let’s make that our guiding star.

If we go back to the scene, this encounter that Matthew gives us: Jesus is answering the question posed to him by a legal expert, and he gives a brilliant answer.

If we love God with all our heart, mind, and soul—we’re not going to put idols above him, we’re not going to have other gods before him, we’re not going to take his name in vain, and on down the list.

And if we truly love our neighbor as ourselves, that should take care of murder, stealing, coveting, adultery, bearing false witness.

Jesus gives us the Cliff Notes, the summary, the thing we can memorize or a cheat sheet we can put in our pockets and refer to when we need it—you know, for when we don’t have our Bibles with us or don’t have the time to look up the answers about the law.

But it’s so much more than that. It can be a basis for a new way of life, a better way of life.

The poet Pablo Neruda wrote in his love sonnets:

“I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you simply, without problems or pride: I love you in this way because I do not know any other way of loving but this, in which there is no I or you, so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand, so intimate that when I fall asleep your eyes close.”

What if we think about knowing and loving God that intimately. What if we have God’s love so much in our hearts and in our lives that we become that love when we think, when we feel, when we pray, and when we act. What if we know no other way of loving, than as God loves.

What if it didn’t matter that love was a commandment, because love was simply our reality.

Amen.

*Graphic at the top from Scripture Type, Treasure the Word.