The Ultimate Wild Thing

sermon by Carrie Eikler

Acts 2:1-21

Pentecost

The world lost one of the great children’s storytellers and illustrators earlier this month.  Maurice Sendak was the author of dozens of books including In the Night Kitchen, Outside Over There, and Bumble-Ardy published only nine months before he died.  But he is probably most famous for his 1963 book, Where the Wild Things Are.

Pamela Paul wrote on the back page essay of The New York Times book review shortly after his death that, “[Maurice] Sendak [along with] Shel Silverstein and Theodor Geisel, aka Dr. Seuss, are so much a part of the childhood vernacular today that it’s hard to imagine their books were once considered to be wholly inappropriate for children. They brought a shock of subversion to the genre….  [These] books encouraged bad, or perhaps just human behavior”

And  I agree. It has always seemed to me that Sendak’s books and illustrations are simultaneously whimsical and imaginative while, being just the slightest bit disturbing.   There’s a lot about ingesting things…eating chicken soup with rice, a lion swallowing a boy named Pierre who only says “I don’t care.” Who can forget when the wild things say they love Max so much they’ll eat him up?  It is oddly humorous, if not a bit disconcerting.

In fact, after Sendak died, I was listening to some interviews replayed in his memory on the radio show “Fresh Air.”  Terry Gross, the host, asked him if had any favorite comments from readers over the years and he spoke about a letter from a little boy named Jim.  Jim had sent Sendak a card with a little drawing on it.  “I loved it.” said Sendak.  “I answer all my children’s letters—sometimes very hastily—but this one I lingered over.  I sent him a postcard and I drew a picture of a Wild Thing on it.  I wrote ‘Dear Jim, I loved your card.’  Then I got a letter back from his mother and she said, ‘Jim loved your card so much he ate it.’  Just like a real Wild Thing.

Sendak said that little Jim’s response of eating his drawing was one of the highest compliments he’d ever received.  The author said, “He didn’t care that it was an original drawing or anything.  He saw it, he loved it, he ate it.”

As I mentioned, just nine months before Sendak died, he published his final book Bumble-ardy about an orphaned pig who is turning nine years old.  Bumble-ardy has never had a birthday party so when he turns nine his Aunt Adeline (you can already catch on to the rhyming nature of this story) plans to give him a quiet party for two when she returns home from work.  But unable to wait until half past nine, Buble-ardy invites some swine, who come in for a party and dine. 

And mayhem ensues.  The wildness begins.  The story goes: “…the piggy swine/Broke down the door and guzzled brine/And hogged sweet cakes and oinked loud grunts/And pulled all kinds of dirty stunts”

[pause]

I kind of like to think of this as a Pentecost story. 

The followers of Jesus, those intrigued with Jesus, those looking for something more than they had ever experienced, gather for the Festival of the Pentecost, a harvest festival marking fifty days after the Passover.  Not only that, but it became a significant celebration marking the moment of the Ten Commandments given to Moses and the Hebrew people on Mount Sinai.

I do have to make one huge disclaimer and apology, although.  Comparing a story about swine to the festival of the Pentecost is somewhat inappropriate, because many of the party goes were Jewish and pork is not kosher food,  so please forgive me for that analogy, but I won’t dwell on the fact that these characters are pigs…

 I don’t know enough about Pentecost to know what the tone of the celebration might be---joyful, somber, reflective—but wonder,  for those gathered, if there wasn’t just a bit of  a bittersweet feel.  Because if you remember, last week Torin talked about the ascension— Jesus died, resurrected, walked among the disciples for a handful of days, and then was snatched away again, his physical body ascending into the clouds—he “ascended” hence “ascension”.  The hide and seek game of Jesus continues.

So I can imagine there was a range of feelings among the disciples and others gathered.   Maybe some were a bit perturbed: OK Jesus, make up your mind, stay with us or go.  Maybe others knew there would be something more: he’s surprised us once; who’s to say he’s really gone?  Either way, they gathered.  People from all over, who had made Jerusalem their home, had gathered.

It was a festival that no doubt had been celebrated before.  Maybe there was an order to the whole thing.  Maybe the people there knew what would happen.  Again, I’m not sure how it all would have gone down, but we do know one thing--before you know it the celebration takes an unexpected turn.  The party has an unexpected visitor and the wild rumpus of the Spirit begins.  It was so wild that indeed, people on the outside thought it was a drunken time, apostles and disciples swilling wine, but Peter says “nay, tis only nine”

And now, two thousand years later, Christianity still points to this event at Pentecost as sort of the birthday of Christ’s church.  Isn’t interesting that we say the birthday of the church comes not the birth of Jesus, or the death of Jesus, or even the resurrection of Jesus…but when the Holy Spirit came in all its wildness and chaos and confusion and joined the people in a power beyond understanding…while somehow, creating an experience where each person strangely—deeply—understood what was going on.

This wild thing.  It’s a hard thing for us, and me, to appreciate you know?   We aren’t prepared for the wild thing to be let loose…We are even suspicious, as Torin alluded to last week, about the nature of this Holy Spirit.  I mean, if we’re honest, the Spirit is probably the most vague member in this trinity.  We get God (or at least we can feel what we mean when we say God).  Jesus the Christ is super clear—we’ve got four gospels to help us see that he was someone who existed, who had words.  But the Spirit…the spirit is elusive, mystical.  The Spirit doesn’t speak itself…others speak in the spirit.  The Spirit moves.  The Spirit breathes. 

And you have probably heard me say before our separate English words for wind, and breath, and spirit all share the one same word in Hebrew: ruach.  Ruach was what blew over the empty vastness in creation. There are elements of this same spirit that go with the Hebrew people as the make their exodus from Egypt.  And just to make things even more unclear, the author of John’s gospel says the spirit/wind blows where it chooses.  We can’t control it.  We don’t know.  It is what it is.  Will do what it will do.

Try to build a solid faith on that.  It seems appealing and disturbing at the same time.  Something that can at once be a cooling, comforting presence can change and become a fiery presence, leading you to do things you didn’t think you would do, build things you never though you would create, begin something that [signal to congregation] two thousand years later [pause] still exists, waxing and waning, struggling to understand, failing, succeeding, confessing, reconciling, and all the while…coming and reuniting as a gathering of Christ.  The Church (with a big C), the church  (with a little c).  The church that incorporates all languages, all people, all matter of wildness.

The Pentecost story is one about the universality of God’s love.  The openness of Christ’s church.  The wildness that the Spirit can wield when we simply gather in worship.  It’s about transformation of people into a church and in turn a transformation of a church into a people…of Christ. 

And you’d probably agree we need to hear a Pentecost message again from time to time because it has lost its power. Like Maurice Sendak and Shel Silverstein and Doctor Seuss, it’s amazing that what was so subversive at one time has become so commonplace. Even this story, which comes around once a year, is unimpressive to us. 

But that’s exactly why this story comes around every year.  Because—forgive me for sounding, well…Pentecostal—but we need some Pentecost wildness in our lives, don’t we?  In our life, in my life, in your life.  We need it, but…if you’re like me, you don’t really want it.

There’s no room right now in my life for the unexpected, thank you very much.  How about yours?  Can you handle some unexpected surprises?  Some uninvited party guest?

In Bumble-ardy there are two disturbing lines, sort of like that “we’ll eat you up we love you so” uncomfortable humor. When Aunt Adeline returns home from work she is furious to see such wildness from Bumble-ardy and his party.  She says “OK smarty you’ve had your party, but never again” to which Bumble-ardy replies “I promise, I swear, I won’t ever turn 10.”

[pause]. 

Sendak said that those two lines, Aunt Adeline saying “never again” and young Bumble proclaiming “I won’t ever turn ten” were his favorite lines.  And he doesn’t know exactly why.  But he said that when he wrote book, he was intensely aware of death.  His friend and partner of 50-years, Eugene, was dying in their house when he wrote it and he said “I did Bumble-ardy to save myself. I did not want to die with him. I wanted to live as any human being does... Bumble-ardy was a combination of the deepest pain and the wondrous feeling of coming into my own. [Yet writing it] took a long time.  A very long time”

A combination of deep pain and wonderment.  I bet that’s what was seasoning among those disciples that Pentecost.  Deep pain and wonderment…a perfect recipe for the unleashing of something amazing and unexpected.  Those gathered did not want what they experienced to die with Jesus.  In our lives, we do not want to be taken further down the dark road of depression or loneliness or aimlessness or pure...mundane life.  As a congregation, we do  not want to be drug down with what we think needs to be done because it is what always has been.  In life we don’t want to continue marching in lock step towards death.

What I want, and maybe you want, but certainly the church needs, is a reminder of the Spirit.  Remember what Sendak said about little Jim’s response to his Wild Thing picture? “He didn’t care that it was an original drawing or anything.  He saw it, he loved it, he ate it.”  We won’t ever go back to the original church in Acts when tongues of fire came down.  Or the height of Christendom when people filled the pews because they had to. 

But we can be children of the Spirit, bringing out of ourselves our deepest fear and wonderment with our eyes lifted ever upward to receive the unexpected wildness of the Spirit,.  To see it.  To love .  And…maybe not eat it, but certainly consume into the depths of our being. 

And that begins with an openness to let this ultimate Wild Thing into the party of our lives.  Pain, wonderment, love, joy.  It’s the making of a wild and scary party. 

But most certainly…a good one.

Waiting … Faithfully

sermon by Torin Eikler
Luke 24:44-53             Acts 1:15-17, 21-26

‘Tis the season of graduations, and everywhere I go (or at least in the shops), I see all the merchandising that goes along with marking those important steps in our education.  Most of it seems … a bit much to me – jewelry, watches, tablets (the computer kind, not the paper ones), engraved pens, and stuffed animals.  There is one particular gift, though, that I really do approve.  It’s this book … “Oh, the Places You’ll Go!” by Dr. Seuss.

I got a copy of this book when I graduated from high school.  And, I think it’s probably the best gift I received.  I certainly used the dictionary and thesaurus a lot, and the luggage saw me through my college and volunteering days admirably.  But those things have either worn out or become outdated.  What’s still left for me … and my boys to enjoy is this bit of wisdom right here.

And there’s one particular section that hits me every time I read it.  It’s about the dangers of getting stuck in a holding pattern in life – of disconnecting and just letting things slide by.  Other people talk about that as lacking ambition or as just trying to “make it through” until “this too passes” depending on the circumstances, but those words carry freight and judgment with them.  Dr. Seuss  goes a different route.  He calls it “the waiting place” (and it’s not a very good place to be.)

It’s a place “for people just waiting.

            Waiting for a train to go …

or a bus to come, or a plane to go …

or the mail to come, or the rain to go…

or the phone to ring … or the snow to snow…

or waiting around for a Yes or No…

or waiting for their hair to grow.

Everyone is just waiting.

Waiting for the fish to bite

            or waiting for wind to fly a kite

            or waiting around for Friday night

            or waiting, perhaps, for their Uncle Jake

            or a pot to boil, or a Better Break

            or a string of pearls,

                        or a pair of pants

            or a wig with curls,

                        or Another Chance.

Everyone is just waiting.”[1]

It seems to me that the Disciples were in that kind of place during the ten days in Jerusalem that we read about this morning.  They are coming off a roller-coaster couple of months.  First the triumph of their entry into the city and the rebuke of the money changers followed by the horror of their last supper with Jesus, the trial, and the crucifixion.  Then, grief when the Jesus’ body disappears followed by unreasoning joy at the appearance of the risen Christ.  After forty days of growing understanding and wonder, the sense of loss as they stood and watched Jesus rise into the sky and disappear.  Finally, the trek back to Jerusalem filled with hope and anxiety by the promise of power to come.

At that moment, though, they were waiting … rung out or hyped up or however they were feeling, they were waiting … just waiting. 

Katherine Willis Pershey talks about these ten days as a “somewhat Godless time.”[2] Caught as they are between the Ascension and Pentecost, the Disciples have neither the risen Christ nor the Holy Spirit to guide them.  They were told to go and wait, and I suspect they may have felt a bit anxious – anxious to get on with the mission that Jesus had given them … and anxious about when the Spirit would come to them.  They were alone and waiting for God.
 
I think we’re a little like that too.  We know that we have been given a mission to share the good news of God’s love with the world, and we want to embrace that work.  We do embrace that work.  And yet we feel anxious.  How, exactly, are we supposed to do it?  Why don’t we feel the Spirit falling on us like it did with the Disciples?  When will we feel that promised sense of empowerment we long for?

When I lived in South Carolina some years ago working to rebuild a church that had been the victim of arson, I attended the Prodigal African Methodist Episcopal Church on Sundays.  It was a small rural church made up of several extended families that had lived in the area for a long time.  So, it wasn’t all that different from the churches where I had grown up … at least in that way, but it was very different in other ways.

This was a very “Spiritual” church, and by that I mean that the people in this congregation were very connected to the Holy Spirit.  They weren’t exactly Pentecostal in that I never heard people speaking in tongues and stories of that particular spiritual gift were not part of their history.  But, there was a whole lot of spontaneous clapping and many “Thank you Jesus”-es during worship.  And there was one older woman who sat up front who regularly “went out in the Spirit,” slumping back in the pew and sliding onto the floor where her daughter would kneel and fan her back into the present.

At first the whole thing scared me more than a little.  I would tense up, and as worship went on, I would have to fight the urge to get up and leave.  After a while, I got accustomed to it.  I even stopped dreading Sunday morning and started to look forward to going to worship there.  But, I was never completely at home … because I didn’t feel it.  And, … I worried that the rest of the congregation saw me as a bystander – a gawker who was there for the show more than for any real desire to worship.  It wasn’t until I read this poem by Thom Shuman called “Justus” last week that I realized what I was really feeling was … left out.

(Justus – Thom Shuman)

my fingers intertwined with the chain link fence,
  i watch the two teams play one another,
         casting me aside,
   as there was only one position left
         and two had shown up to play . . .
. . . so i'll go home, toss the ball with the kid  next door,
        whose mom works two jobs;

after all those years of practice (so many hours!),

      i was so hoping to get one of the leads,
         but the director chose someone else . . .
. . . so i'll take my place in the back row of the chorus,
   helping those on either side
      when they stumble;

i thought this would be the year

   when i would be chosen
      to be one of the leaders in the church,
   but when the ballots were counted
      one of the pastor's 'pets' had won . . .
. . . so i'll keep on
   handing out the bulletins
      and cleaning up the sanctuary,
   teaching the youth class
      for the 23rd year,
   showing up for all the work days;

i may have lost the toss of the dice,

   but i haven't lost my
            faith.

WE don’t do miracles of healing.  WE don’t prophesy or speak in tongues.  The Spirit has never moved me to clap or to speak out in praise during worship, and I certainly never came close to “going out” … at least as far as I know.

Don’t get me wrong, most of the time I am really o’kay with that.  … Most of the time, I’m relieved.  But once in a while … once in a while, I feel left out, and I wonder, “Why?”  Why am I not “blessed” by the Spirit like my brothers and sisters in South Carolina?  Am I not good enough?  Is my faith not strong enough?  What is it that set me … that sets us apart?

Brian Donst suggests that our problem may be that we spend too much effort trying to fill in the hole left by Jesus’ ascension.  He suggests that we sometimes fail to keep open Jesus' place – that we fill it with other things instead.[3]  …  That may be part of it, but if we do fill in that space too readily, I think it’s because we just don’t like waiting.

In our culture, we fill our schedules with things to do.  We can get most of the things we need or want at the cost of only a little time and effort.  We have just about everything at our fingertips. 

If it looks like we may have to wait a few minutes in the check-out line, we immediately look around to see if there’s another line that’s moving faster.  If we have to stop at an intersection for the minute or two it takes to get through an extra cycle, we get frustrated.  If it takes more than … say … 10 seconds for a webpage to load onto the computer, we start to think it might be worth it to get that dedicated high-speed connection.  Just watch what happens when I tell my children “just wait,” and you’ll get a pretty good indication of how we all feel when we are faced with even a small delay.  When we need to wait … (pause) … we really don’t like it. 

But waiting is exactly what Jesus told us to do.  His last instructions to his followers were “wait.”  So, we’re kind of stuck with it.  But, if we look to those first disciples as any kind of an example, we are not meant to “just wait.”  We should be preparing as we wait.  We should be getting our leadership in order.  We should be planning and building relationships and praying for a greater sense of understanding.  We should be worshipping and eating together and praising God for the gift of grace that came to us through Christ.

And … good news ….  We are doing that.  This congregation is great at doing that – especially the eating together part.  We may need to work on our communal prayer life a little, but we are good at the rest of those things too.  To paraphrase Shuman’s poem: 

“we may have lost the toss of the dice … this time,

                    but we haven't lost our faith.”

Let us live in the embrace of that faith,

            leaving space for the Spirit to come to us,
            praying for inspiration and understanding,
            praising and thanking God for all that we have been given already,
            living the good news of hope and salvation,
and waiting … but not “just waiting” … faithfully waiting for God’s guidance … in God’s time. 

---

[1] Dr. Seuss, “Oh, the Places You’ll Go!” (Random House, New York), 1990.

[2] Living by the Word, “Sunday, May 20.” The Christian Century: Thinking Critically. Living Faithfully. Vol. 129, No. 10.  20.

[3] Sent to Midrash list serve by Brian Donst, May 15-16^th, 2012.

Forsaken

sermon by Torin Eikler
Psalm 22

“My God, my God, why have your forsaken me?”

If you recognize those words, it’s not surprising.  But if the rest of the reading sparked any memories, you are, in my experience, one of only a few people who are familiar with the 22^nd Psalm.  Mostly, Christians know that first line as one of few phrases that Jesus spoke while on the cross if they know it at all.  I probably wouldn’t even know that it was connected to a Psalm if I hadn’t had a reason to look it up when I was younger (seminary).

When I was in Jr. High, my parents Sunday school group had a get-together at my house.  A couple of my friends were there too, and we were all included in the fun.  The first of those “fun” activities was an ice-breaker where we all had snippets of the gospels taped on our backs and had to figure out what they were by asking questions of other people.  It helped that all the phrases were well-known quotes from Jesus … well they were supposed to be well-known anyway.

After about ten or fifteen minutes, everyone else had gotten theirs, but I was at a loss.  I had no idea what my card said, and I couldn’t think of even one more question to help.  Eventually, someone decided that things had gone far enough and took pity on me by offering the hint that it was one of the “seven last words of Jesus.”  (By the way, if you’re ever in the same situation, that is not a great hint to give to a 13-year-old.)

I tried, “It is finished,” “Father, forgive them…,” and “into your hands I commit my spirit,” and when none of them fit, I left the room quite embarrassed.  Though I would never have admitted it at the time, what I really wanted was for my mother to come in and hold me … to reassure me that no one was laughing at me … that I wasn’t stupid … that everything would be okay.

A couple of minutes later, our pastor came and found me with a bible (She must have gotten it from my parents because I wouldn’t have known where to find it), and told me to look up Psalm 22.  I read the first line, found my answer, and went back to the group.  Later that evening, I went back and read the whole thing through a couple of times, and it opened up the Psalms to me in an entirely new way.

J. Clinton McCann, Jr., calls the opening words of this Psalm haunting, and they certainly feel that way to me.  The psalmist complains of begin forsaken, yet still addresses God as ‘my God.’ … That points toward the “close personal attachment” she or he feels to the God who seems to be absent.  “Why me?” seems to be the question at the heart the psalmists lament.  “Why has this God that I know and love forsaken one of [her] own children.  Why am I left alone in my time of need?[1]

That’s exactly how I felt that night.  No dogs surrounding me.  No wild oxen.  Certainly no evildoers in that room.  But the emotions rang true, as I sure they have for all of us at one time or another.  I felt a bit like a worm, abandoned by my parents, scorned by others, mocked in my own mind for not knowing what I should have.

I know that’s small beans compared to what the Psalms talk about, but that’s the power of the Psalms.  They speak to us in the midst of the life we live.  They tell the stories of people who have been in lowest places, surrounded by enemies, and just about ready to throw in the towel, lie down, and die.  People who would probably have done so already except … except for their faith.

In the midst of the darkness that surrounds them, they call out in pain and desperation – sometimes in anger.  They beg.  They bargain.  They blame and scold God for letting it all happen.  They remind God of the promises that she has made – covenants that pledge support and love forever.  They find relief and hope in the stories of others who have been in tight spots and found a way through … with God’s help.  And, … they invite us in to share their experiences.

Psalm 22 is no exception.  We are each invited in to the experience of feeling surrounded by enemies with no support, an experience that we may remember all too well.  We feel our hope and energy abandon us as we lie down in the dust.  We stand on the verge of giving up and offer up our last prayer for salvation – for any path to the future.  And, along with the author, we discover with surprise and relief that God is still with us … that God suffers with us and cares for us.  No matter how bleak the outlook, there is hope and there is reason to offer thanksgiving and praise.

What does make this Psalm unusual, perhaps one of the reasons that Jesus quoted it, is that it is not just the lament of one person.  It speaks for the whole community as well.  Nearly from the beginning the psalmist calls upon the community’s experience of God’s mercy in the past to provide hope (however meager) for a renewed future, and as soon as God has heard and answered the plea for deliverance, the psalmist turns to the congregation, praising God and inviting everyone to participate.

Then he goes a step further.  He creates a community of the afflicted, the poor, and even those who are outside of the faith and invites them to come to the table of God’s grace to be satisfied.  Everyone, he says – everyone in the whole of creation will know the love and care of God.  We all will live and serve one another under the wings of God.[2]

Sometimes we write sermons with the hope of helping people experience a bit of what is going on in the scriptures in order to open doors for understanding.  I don’t think I need to do that today, though, … because I think this congregation already feels abandoned … at least a little bit.

When we came here, there was an average attendance of about 30 people with no little children, and people were tired….  Tired from the extra work of look for a new pastor.  Tired from keeping up with the work of the Board and the Commissions with so few people.  Tired of feeling small and worrying about the future.

After a while, things began to look a little better.  People were coming to share the life of our community.  Attendance was up.  There was … enough money.  And there were enough people to share the work more evenly.  We felt blessed.  We felt alive.

Then some of our friends had to leave, and in some ways it seems like we are back to where we were five years ago.  The sanctuary feels a bit empty sometimes.  It often seems like there is more work than there are people to do it.  And we are disheartened.  We feel as though we are “poured out like water” and all out of joint.  Sometimes, … sometimes we feel more than a little forsaken, but we have not lost faith.  Deep in our hearts we still dare to hope and dream.

So, this morning I invite you all to enter into fully into the Psalm – into the pain and despair of feeling forsaken so that we, too, may find hope and grace for the future.  I invite you to join the Psalmist in lament and praise (these are not quite her own words):

O God, our God, why have you forsaken us? 

Why are you so far from helping us, from our whimpers?
We cry out day after day, week after week, and you do not answer.

Yet you are holy, praised by your children everywhere.
In the past, we turned to you, and we found comfort.
We trusted in you, and we found hope.

But now, we feel like we are failing.
We have poured ourselves out like water.
We are so tired of this struggle that we feel like giving up.
We worry about what the future will bring (if there is a future for us)

O God, do not leave us alone.
Come dwell with us.
Deliver us from despair. 
Save us from the fears and worries that haunt us.
 
You pull us back from a place of hopelessness and regret,
     And we will tell stories of your mercy and grace together.
The power of your love brings songs of thanksgiving and praise to our lips.
     for your grace and care give us hope for a bright future.
They promise that everyone who hungers for you will have all that they need.
They remind us that we are never … will never be alone,
     for you are Lord of all the Earth.
            Wherever we may be, you are there with us – walking with us …
                        And we shall praise you.

We are not alone.  We have not been forsaken.  Look around you.  There may not be a hundred people sitting in these pews, but this is a strong community … filled with life and love.  We have so many children in the congregation that we are looking for new ways to care for them.  And we are growing as new people find us and make us their home.

It is a fact of life in this more and more mobile society (and in a University town especially) that people come and go.  But God is with us.  God will always be with us, sharing the sorrows that come, comforting and supporting us when we are filled with worry or feeling exhausted, holding our hand and leading us forward … into new life.

---

[1] J. Clinton McCann, Jr. in “Psalms” from The New Interpreter’s Bible Commentary. 762.

[2] J. Clinton McCann, Jr. in “Psalms” from The New Interpreter’s Bible Commentary. 765.

Love is Complicated. Love is Simple

sermon by Carrie Eikler

Acts8:26-40, 1 John 4:7-21

May 6, 2012

Love.

I love you. 

I promise to love you forever.

I love you man!

Oh my gosh, I love this sweater.

Try it…you’ll love it.

Have you seen the new episode of “Glee”?  I loved it.

I love Thai food.

I love my children.

I love my new washing machine.

Love makes the world go round.

Love the sinner, hate the sin.

Tough love.

Love hurts.

Beloved, let us love one another.

There seems to me a problem with either the English language itself, or our flippant and careless use of it when we can use the same word to describe the way we feel about our children, that we use to describe the excitement of a new appliance.  I love it! …Really? I love that high efficiency top loading horizontal axis Staber washing machine? 

Yes, I love my children…generally.  No, I know I don’t love our new washing machine.  But it doesn’t keep me from saying I do.  Our contemporary language is one in which free love is supreme.  Love abounds.  We throw love around like teenagers with low self-esteem.

So it makes sense that this verse may induce the yawn factor: Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God. Yawn.  Yeah right, let us love one another.  This verse doesn’t seem too radical, as far as words go.  We love lots of stuff, so why not each other?

Most of us know that when we say love, we don’t mean love, language is like that.  Maybe we’re just being “poetic” in our everyday parlance.   Maybe we’ll talk about that in Sunday School?!  But really, do you know what love is?  Can you define it, or do you just feel it?

 I mean, I know I love my husband.  I know I love my children, my family.  I know I’m supposed to love my neighbor, that I’m supposed to love you, as a community of faith, that I’m supposed to love God’s creation.  But I can’t put those things alongside the things that I know I love and see how my love for one thing should shape my love for something else, like my love for you, or my love for the earth.  

One of my favorite “feel good songs” is from the country-folky songwrite Iris Dement.  In her song Let the mystery be, she sings: 

Some say they're goin' to a place called Glory and I ain't saying it ain't a fact.
But I've heard that I'm on the road to purgatory and I don't like the sound of that.
Well, I believe in love and I live my life accordingly.
But I choose to let the mystery be.

Every time I hear this song I do my own little silent, preach it sister.  It seems to capture the scripture, live in love.  But the more I think about it, if I were to take Iris Dement’s lyrics as gospel…I think I would still be confused. 

So I guess, to be fair, we know there are many different ways to love, I’m not trying to play ignorant here.  I’m just realizing that love isn’t something that can easily be identified, just as God…can’t. be. easily identified.   To link God with love is…well…lovely, but…what does it mean, especially when we see around us abuses of love, things that are done towards others—children, spouses,  those we label taboo—horrible things done to them under the claim that it is done in love. 

There are two stories that each of our two scriptures for today made me think of.  And let me say that I love that these scriptures come together in the lectionary for today because if 1 John, about beloveds loving one another, is sort of the theoretical seminar on love, this story in Acts is like the internship.  One scripture seems warm and fuzzy, if not a bit elusive, the other seems a bit more challenging…

We watched the movie 50/50 this last weekend.  It’s  based on the true story of Adam, a young man who is diagnosed with a rare form of cancer on his spine when he is 27.   His chances of survival are 50%.  He can’t understand how this happened: he’s young, he doesn’t drink, he doesn’t smoke, his job as a radio journalist doesn’t expose him to toxins or harmful chemicals. 

As his disease progresses, and the treatments move him into new territories of real life and death questions,  we witness the multitude of love that surrounds him.

There is his mother, played by Angelica Houston: overbearing, worries too much, wants to move in with him and take care of him while she also cares for her husband with Alzheimer’s, who makes him green tea on the night she finds out he has cancer, because she heard it could reduce the possibility of cancer by 15%.  “But mom,” he says “I already have cancer.”

There is his girlfriend: he gives her an out, saying she doesn’t have to stick around to deal with this, but she says she won’t abandon him, she will take care of him…only to find it difficult to mix the world of his illness with the “real” world of her own life and ambitions and memories of how their relationship used to be.

And then there is the best friend, Kyle, played by Seth Rogan.  Now if any of you know the characters Seth Rogan plays, you will expect him to be nasty, crude, offensive.  And he is.  He tells Adam that his prognosis of 50% has better odds than most casino games.  He uses the cancer to try to get girls, firmly believing in the sympathy factor to land women into bed.

But he’s also the one who takes Adam to most of his treatments.  He’s the one who helps Adam shave his head when he starts chemotherapy.  And when some of his shenanigans almost pushes Adam to the point of questioning his friend’s commitment all together, he find’s a book in Kyle’s bathroom called “Facing Cancer Together”, dog-eared and highlighted.

Each of these people, mother, girlfriend,  best friend…loving in the only ways they know how, many times failing miserably.   And yet entering into a place of pain and uncertainty to offer themselves, warts and all.

Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God.

[pause]

Nadia Bolz Webber is a Lutheran pastor, but you really wouldn’t know it to look at her: cause she has an armful of sleeve tattoos and self-admittingly swears like a truck driver.  She lives in Denver, Colorado where I guess it must be ok for pastors to do that sort of thing.  Nadia shared about one Sunday a few years back, and an experience with a man named Stuart. 

Stuart was a gay man who usually wore a Grease Monkey jacket and dirty pants.  This day he was dressed in a button down shirt and slacks, because he was becoming the godparent to the child of some friends, a straight couple.

Following the baptism, there was a reception, and the parents of the child got everyone’s attention so they could say a few words about why they had chosen Stuart to be their child’s godparent.  And they said “We chose you Stuart, because for most of your life you have pursued Christ and Christ’s church even though, as a gay man, all you’ve heard from the church is that there is no love for you here.”  They were saying to him “You, Stuart, convert us again and again to this faith.”

Nadia, the pastor, reflected on this as she recalls the story of the Ethiopian eunuch.  She remembers that in her study Bible as a child, this text was called “The Conversion of the Ethiopian Eunuch” and that the message was that “we should tell everyone we meet about Jesus because in doing so we might save them.  We might convert them.  We might change them into being us.”  But after this experience, she wasn’t so sure.

As Nadia points out, “if the eunuch was reading Isaiah as he returned from Jerusalem having gone there to worship, then I would bet he was also familiar with Deuteronomy, specifically 23:1—‘No one whose testicles are cut off or whose penis is cut off shall be admitted to the assembly of the Lord” (otherwise known as the very best memory verse ever,)” says Nadia.

“The law strictly forbids a eunuch from entering the assembly of the Lord.  [Their gender differences] do not fit them into proper categories, made them profane by nature.  They do not fit.  But despite the fact that in all likelihood he would be turned away by the religious establishment, the Ethiopian Eunuch sought God anyway.”

“I wonder if” Nadia asks “when the Spirit guided Philip to that road in the desert, if she guided him […Philip] to his own conversion.  When Philip joined this person who sought to worship God despite his exclusion, was it perhaps Philip himself who was converted to the faith?   The only command came from God and the command was go and join.”

Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows Go:  beloved since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another

Love is a complicated thing, no doubt.  And yet, it can be the simplest acts that can embody it.  It may be shaving the head of a friend at the scariest time in their lives, or it may just be holding their hand on a day like any other, a surprising, unexpected expression of connection.  It may be proclaiming a bold statement to a crowd that one who has been deemed unlovable by church or society has blessed you deeper into God’s love…or it may just be a note to someone telling them the same thing.

So we can’t define love, we can only feel it and express it.  We marvel how it can rise in us, unbidden.   And that is how we know it is not from us, with all our narrow and selfish ways.  We know it comes from God.  It came from God’s sending love to us, asking nothing of us but to receive that love, to go, and join. 

And undoubtedly we will fail along the way as we try to open ourselves up more fully to that love.  But like that couple who spoke of Stuart the godparent of their child, we will be converted again and again…saved again and again, by the surprising love…of others who will love us into God.

Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God: everyone who loves is born of God and knows God…beloved since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another.  No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us.

Let this be our prayer.