(Excerpts from a sermon I gave on 1/30/11 at Manhattan Beach Community United Church of Christ.)
Mr Cool owned an edgy restaurant in San Francisco. Mrs Cool was an edgy artist in San Francisco. They lived together in an edgy pad in San Francisco. They decided to get married. "No big deal," said Mr Cool. "She wants it, I'm cool with it."
The wedding happened in her parents' back yard in the suburbs. Mr Cool showed up a bit late, in his raquetball outfit. "I'll freshen up a bit," he said with a jolly laugh. Nobody was in a hurry. There were only 8 people coming to the wedding.
Finally we started the ceremony. The bride and groom looked great. Big smiles. I started to talk. Suddenly things changed.
Mr Cool was no longer cool. He was sweating. Sweating like no human being I have ever seen sweat. It ran off his nose like a waterfall. His chest hairs were visible through his soaking wet white shirt.
Clearly, he was on the edge - the edge of love. He thought he knew what it was all about. He thought he had it under control. But now he realized he didn't. Marriage was a plunge over the edge of all the forms of love he'd ever known before, and he was scared sweatless.
God is love, says the Bible (I John 4:8). That sums up what Christianity is all about. This is the grace I say at dinner: “Love is God.” Love is all there really is to the Christian religion – the rest is commentary.
Christianity is simple and beautiful. God is love. Jesus loved. He loved Love itself with all his heart and mind, and he loved his neighbor as himself, and he even loved his enemies, and he taught people to do the same. Being a Christian is about trying to love the way Jesus loved. And that is all there is to it. It’s not about obeying a bunch of fussy rules from the Bronze Age and accepting a bunch of dogmatic beliefs and spouting a bunch of obscure doctrines. It’s not about believing the unbelievable. It’s about something much harder and much more worthy of the challenge, and that is to love - even the unlovable.
Somebody asked me the other day how I could believe in God when terrible things happen to children and other innocent people. I said that God is love, and that solves the problem. If God is love, then God is not supernatural. Love doesn’t fix everything – it can’t fix everything. If the God who is love is supernatural and all-powerful, well, things would be different at home, eh? Love is not all-powerful. Love depends on free choice, and free choice implies that choices can be made for evil. Even atomic particles can make choices. Some of those choices will result in destruction. Love is the natural quality of the universe that makes creativity and kindness possible. Love is the cosmic tendency toward wholeness and beauty. Love is the looseness in the universe that makes positive change possible, but it also leaves open the possibility for what we call evil. Love guides by gentle persuasion rather than absolute power.
Getting it that God is Love keeps our religion elegantly simple.
But believing that God is Love creates its own set of serious theological problems.
They just happen to be theological problems that are worth the trouble to engage.
I used to be the director of an interfaith homeless services agency. Regularly when I had that job, and for many years after I took another job, I got at least a few phone calls that went pretty much like this: “Jim, I don’t know what to do about my son.” It would be an elderly woman’s voice. “I need to move into an elder care home, but I don’t know what to do about my son. I’m 85, he’s 60, he’s an alcoholic and doesn’t have a job, and he’s lived with me most of his life, if not all of it. What should I do about him?” It was a breathtaking question, every time. The elderly women loved their sons. Their sons loved them. But what did love mean, what form could it take, when the elderly mothers could no longer house and feed their nearly senior citizen sons who, for whatever reasons, were utterly irresponsible? I had answers for these mothers, but even I was not very satisfied with my answers. There were no tidy, happy solutions to their problems. Since God is Love, their questions were theological, but not ones with answers that would fit neatly in a catechism.
Here’s another. You are the parents of a seven year old kid who is wearing you down. He whines, he complains, he doesn’t cooperate, he throws tantrums, he wets the bed, he does poorly in school, he has no friends, and frankly you don’t blame other kids for leaving him alone. He’s your son and you are supposed to love him but you’re not feeling it. You go through the motions, you try to get him help, but you get no relief and you get nothing back from him emotionally. What is love in this situation?
These are situations that push love to the edge, and beyond. These are situations that make you ask yourself, just what is love? When things are wonderful and beautiful, we think we know what love is. When you fall in love, when you gaze lovingly into your child’s eyes and she gazes back lovingly into yours, all is right with the world and love makes perfect sense. But when love gets pushed to the edge, is it love anymore? Is it still there, even if it doesn’t feel like love? Is it still there, even when it seems like a one-way street to nowhere?
The Jesus stories in the Bible really are helpful at these edgy moments. Because Jesus experienced love at the edge. He showed love even to his enemies. But it wasn’t a warm, fuzzy love like the kind he had for his dear friends Martha, Mary, and Lazarus. He showed love to the Pharisees who were trying to bring him down, but that doesn’t mean they were his best buddies. Jesus had dinner with Zacchaeus the tax collector and showed kindness to him, but Jesus didn’t invite him to become the 13th disciple. They didn’t become golfing pals. The same Jesus who preached radical love in his Sermon on the Mount was the guy who turned over the tables of the moneychangers in the temple. But he didn't turn over the moneychangers. Even in that situation, he strove to honor the spark of creative possibility in those moneychangers. I'd hate to see what Jesus would do on Wall Street, after the stupendous deceits by the investment bankers which almost brought down the global economy. Tables would turn, for sure. But I bet he'd find it in himself to try to live up to his own words in the Sermon on the Mount.... and honor the divine spark still shining inside those Wall Street moneychangers.
Love at the edge goes down deeper than the warm, glowing feelings we associate with love. Love at the edge goes to the very essence of our humanity, which is where we also find our divinity. It is a deep recognition of what is essential about each other, and honoring that essence. It is loving the potential for the good that exists even in the most difficult, impossible, irritating, deeply disappointing folks we meet. Love at the edge honors the spark of goodness within the other, even if it is invisible, even if boundaries must be kept between us and the other so that this respect can be maintained. Sometimes love means parting ways, but with gentleness and kindness. Sometimes love means going in peace, because that’s what is best for everyone. Sometimes love means hanging in there, sticking close, even if it hurts. Love calls us to discover what we are really made of, and discover how far love over the edge love can stretch – maybe even farther than Jesus himself stretched it.
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PS: Southern California friends: I hope to see you all at TOGETHER FOR THE COMMON GOOD!Progressive Christians Uniting's Annual Celebration - Monday, February 21, 2011 -$35/per personat First Congregational Church, Long Beach - Time: 3:00 pm panel discussion, 5:00 pm cocktail receptionRSVP at www.progressivechristiansuniting.org