The Losers of the World Have a New King.

John 18:33-38

November 25, 2018 + Christ-the-King

I.

Jesus stands on trial in Jerusalem before the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate.  Pilate has been told that this fellow is yet another hapless, deluded Jew imagining himself to be a king, which of course, is a crime.  Only Caesar and his client lackeys get to be called king.

Pilate’s first question, looking down at the prisoner, is, “Are you the King of the Jews?”  In other words, are you a political problem for me?  Are you another seditious rabble-rouser I need to make an example of?  Or are you just standing here because you offended the easily offended leaders of your own people, and they want me to get rid of you for them?  Is that what this is about?  A disagreement about some meticulous point of your ridiculous theology?  Or are you more of a threat than you look?

When Jesus answers that his “Kingdom is not from this world,” all Pilate hears is the word “kingdom”.  That’s what Pilate cares about.  “So, you are a king,” he concludes.

The Lord then responds: “You say that I am a king.  For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth.  Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.”

To which Pilate cynically scoffs, “What is truth?”  You’re way too naive to be the king of anything if you think there is any truth other than what the Emperor says it is.  You’re just some pathetic, irrelevant, hopeless, harmless mystic with an imaginary “kingdom” in the clouds somewhere.  But why do they want me to execute you, I wonder?  Because you testify to a different truth, no doubt.  There is no truth, loser.  “There is only power and those too weak to seek it.”  (That’s actually a quote from Lord Voldemort.)

One of the biggest crises we are facing right now may be summed up with Pilate’s words: “What is truth?”  We are losing our grip on what is true.

When I was a kid there was an accepted consensus about truth.  Truth was what Walter Cronkite, David Brinkley, and Howard K. Smith said it was.  We had a basic agreement about the fundamentals of our history and institutions.  

We considered ourselves vastly superior to our Communist enemies who rather blatantly and regularly adjusted the “facts” to suit their ideology.  The Nazis infamously did this too.  But not us!  We were about objective truth, justice, and the American way! in the words of Superman.  

That consensus began to fray when we gradually discovered that what we thought was true, was also conditioned and framed by our ideology.  Our accepted truth was not measuring up to the facts on the ground in people’s lives.  

It may feel good when everyone seems to be united in accepting the same things as true; but it is a big problem if a lot of it is actually not the case.  As Mark Twain is supposed to have said, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble.  It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”

II.

An experienced political operative like Pilate would think that truth was actually malleable and relative.  It changed daily, depending on who had power, and what the needs of the Roman State happened to be.  The basic fundamentals of the truth were that Rome is good, Rome is progress, Rome is peace, and anything that was good for Rome, was good for everyone.  What was true is whatever the rulers decided was good for Rome.

Pilate’s only calculus, when he looks at Jesus, is, What is best for Rome?  He eventually decides it is best for Rome that this guy be killed, with a sign posted over his head proclaiming him to be King of the Jews.

All empires are built on lies that are perpetrated as ultimate truth, which is the main reason why all empires fall.  Eventually, their loudly proclaimed delusions are so out of synch with reality that they just can’t hold anymore.  Which is what happened to the Soviet Union.  They could not handle the possibility that what they thought was true just wasn’t so.  Just like Pilate could not understand what Jesus is talking about, empires have no capacity to listen to other voices giving them new information.  If it did not fit into their ideological preconceptions it does not register, or it sounds like sedition.  They especially do not want to hear from their victims.

When Jesus Christ appears, he represents those other voices.  He is the bearer of a truth far deeper, broader, higher, and better than some ideology invented to prop up a ruling class.

This is why every great reform movement in the church has been based on the Bible; specifically on Jesus, the Word of God.  Because the Word is like dynamite.  If we pay attention to it — and most of the time we don’t — but if we pay attention, we hear other voices.  We hear “the voices of people long silenced,” who have a different perspective and experience, people who simply do not relate very well to the self-satisfied self-image of a powerful empire.

The Bible is the story of a band of slaves whom God delivers from bondage in Egypt.  It therefore and thereafter tells the story of poor, suffering, weak, victimized, oppressed, and beaten people, repeatedly conquered by stronger foes, whom nevertheless the Creator of the Universe chooses, loves, heals, redeems, delivers, and blesses.  And it reaches its fulfillment in Jesus Christ, who is born in a barn to refugee parents, and who ends up executed as a criminal.  It is the precise opposite of any imperial ideology.  It is not a cooked up justification for the power of the powerful; rather, it always takes the perspective and the side of the powerless: people whose real bodies are experiencing real pain. 

That is the truth that Jesus embodies when he stands before Pilate.  That is the truth that Pilate cannot see and doesn’t believe exists.  He asks, “What is truth,” while the Truth is standing there right in front of him.  God loves us and identifies with us and saves us in our most humble, ordinary, basic places.  God sees and cherishes us in our material, creaturely, humanness.  And that is where we will find God, because God flows into our open, empty, broken, and vacant spaces.  The more we lose of ourselves, the more God appears.  

III.

In the old, classic Bob Newhart Show, there was a scene in which Bob, a psychiatrist, has to deal with a hapless and inept patient who is a failure at everything, including his new job, which is giving away money.  No one will take it; they think there’s a catch.  Upon hearing this, one of the other patients, the cynical Mr. Carlin, quips, “The losers of the world have a new king.”

I imagine Pilate having the same thought, looking down from his imperial seat of authority and judgment and power, at this beaten rabbi from Galilee.  “This is what they call me into the office for so early on a Friday morning.  This is what was so urgent?  Look at this guy.  The losers of the world have a new king.”

The losers of the world are the ones who explode our false truths and open us up to an encounter with the One Truth.  When we listen to their stories we move closer to the truth, and closer to God.  It is when we begin to hear the cries of excluded, marginalized, poor, working, and disenfranchised people.  When we even hear the voices of animals and trees, that’s when we broaden our perspective.  That’s when we begin to perceive more from God’s all inclusive, universal point of view. 

If we insist on sticking to Pilate’s view that, since truth is relative, we should just enforce the version that suits us best, we will perish.  We will fall like every empire that founded itself on lies.  We will end up like Pilate, who is now and forever an object lesson of what not to do.

It grieves me how often, over the centuries, Christians, for the sake of power, followed the cynical, jaded, self-serving words of Pilate, and sacrificed the lives of the very people with whom Jesus Christ identifies.  We allowed slavery, lynchings, genocide, war, torture, conquest, and other atrocities, because we went with our self-serving ideologies instead of the truth.  The church was often more Pilatian than Christian.

The Lord says that everyone who belongs to the truth listens to his voice.  Belonging to the truth means belonging to him, the One who is the Truth, and the Way, and the Life, the One in whom true God and true humanity are united, the One through whom we identify with all people and all creation.  And listening to his voice means hearing the Word of God come to us in everything that God speaks into being, and cherishing and caring for everything and everyone as the marvelous, wondrous, miraculous works of God they are.  It means realizing our deep connection to each individual, and living in respect and gratitude and awe for this amazing life.

IV.

For once we realize who our true King is, we are turned from losers into people who are receiving everything.  We move from a focus on what we are giving up to seeing that we are being given everything.  

When Jesus stands before Pilate, he has only a few hours to live, and most of those will be spent in excruciating pain and humiliation.  He is about to  give his life for the life of the world.  He is about to witness to the ultimate truth of God’s love, poured out for the redemption of all.  In giving up his mortal, temporal existence to the violence of the empire, he will emerge in a resurrection life that will spread through all the world.

We who belong to him listen to his voice, and we keep his commandments, all of which have to do with love.  We love one another as he loves us, and spread that love in all we do, in all the world.

+++++++ 

A Birthing Center.

Mark 13:1-8

November 18, 2018

I.

The early church emerges in a time of crisis and catastrophe.  From the perspective of Jesus’ followers, the biggest indication of this rolling disaster was the destruction of the spectacular Temple in Jerusalem by Roman armies in the year 70.  It was around 4 decades after Jesus’ resurrection.  It was the most traumatic event in the lives and memories of any Jew, and that includes the followers of the Way of Jesus.

Jesus himself lives, preaches, teaches, and heals in a situation of colonialism and oppression.  A lot of his advice in the Sermon on the Mount is about how to survive in an oligarchical police State.  Eventually, of course, the leaders arrange to crucify him for blasphemy and sedition.

In the course of his ministry the Lord foresees the destruction of the Temple and warns his disciples that things are going to get very, very bad.  That’s what’s happening here in Mark 13.

This cataclysm is fairly predictable to anyone who knows the Hebrew Scriptures.  Jesus is not being miraculously prescient here.  The process repeats itself throughout the history of the Israelite people.  Over and over we see how a nation and its leadership falls into idolatry, that is, the worship of things that are not God, and that leads directly into situations of deepening inequality and injustice, and that finally leads just as directly and necessarily to a reckoning in which they bring down awful and terrible judgment upon themselves.  We see it in Genesis with Sodom and Gomorrah, and in Exodus with Egypt; we see it in the conquest of Canaan, and in the subsequent history of the Israelites, culminating in their horrible defeat and exile in Babylon.  They miraculously return from that experience and proceed to fall into the same disastrous pattern: idolatry - injustice - destruction.      

We live now in a time of crisis and catastrophe.  Instead of Rome, we have our own version of a global economic behemoth, busily distributing wealth taken from the workers who create it to a few wealthy owners, a process which is wreaking unprecedented havoc on the whole planet, spawning wars, genocides, and famines.  You don’t have to be psychic to see where this is all going.  It’s going to end the way it always and repeatedly ends.  “Not one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down,” says Jesus. 

He doesn’t say this with any relish or satisfaction.  I imagine him practically in tears, because he knows the amount of horror and suffering that will be involved.  He has no smug complacency about always being right.  His own disciples will endure it as well… and no, they will not be “raptured” into safety.  They will “wash their robes in the blood of the Lamb,” which is the book of Revelation’s way of saying that many will die as martyrs.

The early church would be living in the “end times” in the sense of times that see the decay and collapse of a powerful, wealthy, dominant imperial system.  The wrecking of Jerusalem is just one part of this.  A world order that lives by the sword will inevitably and necessarily perish by the sword.

II.

It kind of reminds me of the Titanic.  The grand and glorious ship, a pinnacle of European civilization, that hit an iceberg in 1912.  And Jesus offers the alternative of a lifeboat.  The lifeboat is himself and his new gospel community of people who have been thus pulled out of the icy water, like a kind of baptism, and gathered in for the future.  

The baptismal covenant, symbolizing our passage through death and change, and our emergence into new life, is what keeps the early church together through the “wars and rumors of wars,” and nations rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, with earthquakes and famines and all kinds of related mayhem.

And our sacramental participation in his body and blood, thereby becoming Christ’s Body in the world, is what keeps us fed and strong to continue his mission.  It is what enables us to see through and not be led astray by the many false leaders that Jesus warns his disciples about: ideologies, philosophies, and theologies that come in his name, claiming to be him.  The real Messiah is he: the One who doesn’t claim to be a Messiah.  

The good news in all this, as Jesus insists, is that no matter how rough it gets all around us, all this is “but the beginning of the birth pangs.”  All this is about birth!  It is the way the new future is being born.  Paul talks about how the whole creation is in labor.  Yes, it is terribly painful; but the purpose and goal is the good and beautiful tomorrow that is beginning to emerge within and among us.  It is about hope!

That is our name: hope.  This is our lifeboat, our good ship Hope.  We in the lifeboat of the church are the emissaries and ambassadors from the future that Jesus has for us and shows to us.  As the old order of wealth, power, fame, corruption, violence, and condemnation ignominiously disintegrates and sinks into oblivion, we are the ones called to live together in God’s new community of compassion, generosity, forgiveness, healing, justice, and love.  Do not rely, says Jesus, on architecture and technology.  Great monuments and even spectacular religious edifices like the Temple don’t last.  

In the meantime Jesus is saying, that we have a choice.  We may choose to identify with the institutions, traditions, and buildings that reflect and express human glory.  We may base our lives on what feeds our ego and makes us feel good about who we think we are.  Or we may notice that all that stuff is breaking apart and going down.  We may therefore choose instead to get into a considerably less glamorous and luxurious lifeboat, and make our way together into the future with the other ordinary, broken, traumatized people huddling therein.

These are the gentle who inherit the earth, the poor in spirit to whom God’s Kingdom belongs; these are the grieving, the hungry, the merciful, and the peacemakers.  These are the disciples of Jesus, the church, the gospel community.  They receive a special blessing from the Lord who calls them.  

III.

This is the day we have set aside to be about renewing our covenant together in Jesus Christ, to each other and to the living God.  We are reaffirming our place in the lifeboat and our commitment to the voyage of discipleship, as we follow Jesus into his future.  We are remembering our baptism, when we are delivered from the perishing old order, and from our perishing old selves, and welcomed into God’s new order and our new selves in the Spirit. 

And we commit ourselves anew to each other, promising to be there for each other with support and feedback, with forgiveness and welcome, with energy and intelligence, imagination and love.  

+++++++  

The Widow's Plight.

Mark 12:38-44

November 11, 2018

I.

Jesus is in the Temple with his disciples.  As they are walking around, Jesus sees some of the functionaries and officials of the Temple, in their professional vestments.  And he points them out.  “Watch out for these scribe types,” he says.  “They like to walk around here in their long, flowing robes, and to be greeted with respect in the market places, and to have the best seats in the synagogues, and the places of honor at banquets.”

We know what and who he is talking about.  Not too many of us see religious officials in impressive vestments these days; even Roman Catholic bishops tend just to wear black suits.  But other kinds of officials?  The kind that our society values and reveres?  The men who wear 3000 dollar suits and work on Wall Street?  The ones who land the 1500 dollar box seats at Yankee Stadium?  The ones to whom the market is engineered to be kindest?  Who easily get the choicest tables at the most expensive restaurants?  Who always fly first-class?  That’s the analogy today.  They have made it, they are a success, and they want us to know it.

Jesus is watching them.  “Don’t be impressed,” he says.  “Certainly do not emulate them or aspire to be like them.  In reality they are devouring widows’ houses.”  Their wealth is built on the backs of the poor people who do the work.  The people who pay high taxes, high interest rates, high fees and tolls; the people who have to pay someone to cash their paychecks; the people who make minimum wage if they are employed at all.  The people who actually do the work, that makes a society work as well as it does.

The biblical shorthand for such people is often “widows and orphans.”  They represent people with no regular means of support, which in Jesus’ time would have been a connection to a man: a landlord, a father, a brother, or a husband, even a son.  Men generally owned everything in those days… and pretty much in these days as well.  “Widows and orphans” are people who have lost their connection to the owner class who control the wealth.

Jesus has already thrown out the more obvious manifestations of the commercial debasement of the Temple, the people changing money and selling animals for sacrifice, all at a profit.  Now he is observing the ones behind that whole system who fed on it.  The ones who “devour widows’ houses,” which is to say foreclose on the homes of people who cannot pay their rent.   

These are the religious professionals who “say long prayers for the sake of appearance,” says Jesus, which adds tremendous insult to injury because of the hypocrisy.  These are people who are supposedly devoted followers of the Bible, the Torah, God’s Law!  The same book that was written from the perspective of escaped slaves and refugees, and over and over again, says stuff like love your neighbor, redistribute wealth downward, welcome the stranger, show mercy and love kindness, be fair even to birds and trees, and so forth.  How does someone whose job it is to teach and profess this particular faith end up devouring widows’ houses?

II.

“They will receive the greater condemnation,” says Jesus.  And what he means is, I think, that if we let our egocentricity and selfishness rule us, even in the name of law and religion, we separate ourselves from God so profoundly that we can’t perceive God’s love at all.  All we see is our own false and empty glory reflected back at us, which is nothing but a shadow.  We unwittingly condemn ourselves to the darkness that we in our ignorance were happy to impose on others.  We make ourselves into the abandoned and forsaken ones we fed off of.

Jesus brings his disciples over to the place in the Temple where people presented their tithes and offerings.  And they sit down and observe.  

People come in, mostly men because that’s who generally has any money, and they enter and check-in at the desk and probably get some kind of receipt, and they leave bags or boxes of coins.  The more wealthy people perhaps make a bigger deal about it, showing how not only are they doing their civic and religious duty, but they are making sure everyone knows whose wealth is keeping this institution going.  Nobody is ever happy about paying taxes; but the pain is kind of mitigated by these other factors from which they get at least a little reward and solace.

Then a woman comes in who is obviously a poor widow, on her own, paying her own taxes, doing her own civic and religious duty.  Jesus spots her right off.  “Watch this,” he says to his disciples, as she quietly and unobtrusively drops two tiny copper coins in the box, which together are worth a mere penny.  Nobody notices.  And she hurries back out of the Temple.

Jesus motions for his disciples to come closer so they can hear him over the echoing noise in the cavernous space.  “Truly I tell you,” he says, “this poor widow has put in more than all those who are contributing to the treasury.  For all of them have contributed out of their abundance; but she out of her poverty has put in everything she had, all she had to live on.”

Now, most of the time this is interpreted as Jesus commending her for her amazing, selfless generosity.  But in the context of what he has just said about wealthy scribes devouring widow’s houses, it is more likely that he is lifting her up as an example of just that.  

In other words, the Lord is angry and disgusted at what they have all just witnessed, which is a poor widow being compelled to lose her only remaining excuse for wealth to prop up the expensive pomposity of the scribes, not to mention this magnificent edifice of the Temple.  Jesus will immediately go on in chapter 13 to predict the destruction of the Temple as a pointless and counterproductive institution that God will not let stand!  God does not have much patience for any system that allows for the devouring of widows’ houses.  Such systems and institutions inevitably collapse of their own corrupt weight.  Always.

III.

The thing that occurs to me about this passage is that Jesus apparently can’t count.  By any quantitative metric the 1 penny given by the woman is not “more” than the thousands of dollars that were given by everyone else.  In the larger scheme of things, a single penny is an insignificant, barely perceptible drop in the proverbial bucket.

I’m just being a little facetious, of course.  Jesus simply means that her tiny donation means more to her, it has more of an impact on her life, frankly it hurts more, than the donations of other, richer people.

Jesus is exposing the injustice of the practice of what we call a “flat-tax,” that is, having everyone, regardless of wealth, pay the same percentage.  If you have a million dollars it is easy to scrape by on the $900,000 you have left after paying your 10%.  But for most of us, 10% would be a considerable hit requiring us to cut back on some essentials.

But what Jesus is so upset about here is the hypocrisy and cruelty of the religious authorities in driving people like this poor widow into destitution in the name of religion, while the self-important authorities and functionaries do very well.  I personally get about as focused and angry as I get when I hear of ministers or presbytery officials pulling down the 6-figure salaries.  I know where that money comes from.  I have personally known actual widows who tithed to the church voluntarily, and lived very simply, to put it nicely.  In my first church there was an elderly woman who was regularly audited because the IRS could not believe someone with so little actually gave to the church as much as she claimed. 

We will see that in the gospel community that Jesus’ disciples set up in the Book of Acts, the widows, and presumably others with no way of gaining income, receive support.  It is such a central and important task of the church that they have to institute a whole new order of ministry to attend to it: the deacons.       

The church is called to model the practice, which first appears in the Sabbath laws in the Torah, of redistribution downward.  Give what you have; take what you need.  That’s the way we might summarize the economics of Jesus.  That is what the church even now continues, at its best, to embody.

That is what stewardship is about.  It is fitting that Jesus spends a lot of time in these autumn lectionary passages talking about money and wealth.  Because this is the season in the church when we are preparing budgets for the coming calendar year.  This is when we are most explicit about how we can support God’s mission with the wealth God has entrusted to us.

IV.

If it helps to lift up the widow in this story as a positive example, and ask ourselves what we would have to give for it to be "more than everyone,” or “all we have to live on,” then do that.  If it helps to remember how Jesus is jamming into reverse a system that bled the poor and the working people in order to keep the wealthy and powerful comfortable, then do that.

At the end of the day Jesus witnesses to that verse from Psalm 24 that I repeat almost every Sunday, about how the whole creation and all people belong to God.  We are therefore responsible to organize ourselves after God’s pattern, and see that God’s abundance is shared, distributed, allocated, and given, with generosity and grace, where it is needed.  If it all belongs to God, and it does, then our only economic question is how we can best devote what has been placed in our care to the service of discipleship.  How can we do what God wants with what belongs to God?

+++++++

Christ vs. Christianiness.

Mark 12:28-34

November 4, 2018

I.

Jesus is in Jerusalem, teaching in the Temple, when a scribe comes up to him.  Scribes are establishment religious professionals who usually have big problems with Jesus, and vice-versa.  This scribe starts out by watching Jesus debate some Pharisees, Sadducees, and representatives from Herod’s government, in which the Lord basically runs rings around them theologically and shuts them up in frustration.

So this scribe comes forward and asks Jesus which is the first of all the commandments in the Torah.  And Jesus gives the obvious and most orthodox answer: “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.”  The Lord is paraphrasing from Deuteronomy 6.  It is the basic Jewish confession, which Jews to this day keep as the centerpiece of their faith.  Jesus also makes it a fundamental pillar of his own movement.  I say this verse often as a charge before the benediction at the close of worship.

That would have been enough, had Jesus stopped right there.  He would have satisfied everyone that he was a good Jew.  But Jesus insists on adding another, somewhat more obscure, verse to it.  “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” from Leviticus 19, a chapter full of injunctions about social and economic justice, compassion, integrity, and fundamental fairness.  The chapter is summed up in this verse about loving our “neighbors,” which, as we know from Jesus’ teachings in other places, means everybody, all creation.  Leviticus 19 even has a short section on justice for trees.

The Lord means that, without the second commandment, our claim to be keeping the first is an empty lie.  And yet, Christianity has too often been quick to separate them, or at least to interpret the second in a self-serving manner.  We’re very good at saying how much we love God.  We’re not so good at actually loving people.  We even reduce Christian faith to saying the right words, and even performing the right ceremonies… while disregarding the Lord’s command to also perform the right actions.

Indeed, we have too often separated “belief” from behavior, as if the faith we confess has merely to do with our private cognitive opinions, but little to do with how we act.  It does not necessarily occur to us to take our faith into account when we make decisions about our relationships, our money, or our laws.  Or at best we find a loophole or another perfectly good, reasonable argument why Jesus’ teachings don’t apply to us in this particular case.

Indeed, I know people who long with nostalgia for a culture that looked and sounded all pious and Christiany… but who don’t want to be reminded about the kind of oppression, violence, hatred, fear, bigotry, and injustice that festered under the surface of that culture.  It is easy to prefer this superficial Christianiness to actual discipleship of Jesus. 

II. 

Last week I received a letter from someone in Newark naming himself as “Child of God,” with 3 pages of advice about how Christians should vote in the election on Tuesday.  All of his complaints were centered on his view that America no longer looks and sounds like the white-Christian-nation he fondly remembers.  He’s upset that we’re not verbally affirming our love for God anymore.  More importantly to him, we’re not forcing others to make the same affirmations.  As far as I can tell, this guy defined Christianity by who Christians hate, exclude, condemn, judge, and oppress.  

But that second commandment, about loving our neighbor as ourselves?  That wasn’t mentioned in that letter.  It’s like he wants a country where everyone affirms their love for God, where everyone goes through the motions of Christianiness… but loving neighbors by actually following Jesus?  Not so much. 

By connecting these two commandments, the Lord clarifies the whole difference between him and the establishment figures he has been arguing with.  They are about keeping to the superficial, pious letter of the Law; he is about doing the commandments and enacting the Spirit of the Law, which is always love.  They are about maintaining their national and religious identity, rituals, leadership, and institutions.  He is about doing justice, loving kindness, and walking humbly with God, to quote the prophet Habakkuk.  Even the scribe admits that Jesus is right, that compassion “is much more important than all whole burnt-offerings and sacrifices.”  

The Lord says that if we think we are keeping of the first commandment while we systematically transgress the second commandment — that is, if we think we are keeping our religion, while we are oppressing, rejecting, harming, stealing from others, especially those already at the bottom and in need, then we really aren’t keeping our religion at all.  We are just using it as a pretext and a cover for our own fear, anger, and our own lust for money, security, and power.  

In the previous chapter Jesus made the point of throwing the exploitative commercial interests out of the Temple.  He’s been engaged for several days in these theological cage-matches with all the successful and prominent religious leaders.  Right after this passage he will blast the scribes as a class for their rampant greed while they steal from the poor.

The implication in the commandment to love our neighbor as ourselves means that we can’t get away with doing something to someone and calling it “love,” — “tough love” is the usual term these days — if it is not something we would want done to ourselves in the same situation.  If we were refugees (and many of our ancestors were), would we want to be treated with hostility and violence?  Is that love for our neighbors?  If we were homeless or hungry, would we want pious sermons about personal responsibility?  If we were sick would we want our only options to be bankruptcy or death?  If our children were suffering and dying in war?  If we were suffering from addiction?  If we were Muslim, or transgendered or Gay?  How would we want to be treated?  What would we feel that “love” would look like for us?

III.     

Jesus here forces us to see God only through one lens, which is the suffering and need of our neighbors, the people with whom he identifies in coming to dwell in human flesh in the first place, and having that culminate in being executed on a Roman cross as a criminal.  Christian faith is that if we don’t see God in him, and in the people he is reflecting and representing, then we don’t see God anywhere.  If we do see God, then it is because we see God in the neighbor.

THIS is what it really means to love God with all our heart, mind, and strength.  Compassion is the expression, of the gospel.  One follows inexorably from the other.  We cannot love God and hate our neighbor.  If we deny these basic human requirements to anyone it is an expression of hate, not just for them, but for God, no matter what we regularly mumble in our religious creed. 

At the same time, the commandment about compassion is and must be rooted in and based upon the primary commandment about loving God.  I get nervous when the church veers too far in the direction of a mere social service agency or political lobbying effort, and is liable to forget its ultimate and necessary Source in the living God.  

I have seen how efforts to supposedly help the poor can devolve into bloated and ineffective bureaucracies.  I have seen high-minded activists burn out for lack of a moral compass and adequate spiritual nourishment.  I have seen comfortable and privileged people use “charity” in ways that really just cynically maintain inequality and their position of superiority.  Anything that is just another way to get something for ourselves, thereby separating ourselves from each other, is not the love of God.  

It is not even love for ourselves, but a cruel trick of our deluded ego-centricity to make us think that our doing well is itself doing good.  Jesus says that real self love, a love that empowers and manifests and realizes our true Selves in God, is expressed and discovered in compassion for, and identification with, others.

IV.

The Lord Jesus comes into the world to show us who we are and who God is.  He shows us the boundless compassion and forgiveness of the God who does love us so profoundly as to become one of us.  Compassion therefore is not just love for another, it is love for ourselves and God as well.  It is not just a statement of our religion and faith; it expresses our own true nature, revealed in Christ.  It expresses our deepest connection to each other which Christ revealed to us.  To love another as God loves us in Christ is to love ourselves and to love God, because love is One.

+++++++