Radical Hospitality Part Three...

NOTE: Here are this Sunday (March 22, 2009) worship notes for my message on Lent Four. (Where did the time go?) Please stop by if you are in town at 10:30 am.

I came of age in the 1960s – a time of countless changes, blessings and curses – an era that was simultaneously optimistic and filled with fear. And while I have no interest in revisiting that wild time – or refighting its battles – I continue to be nourished by the music of the Beatles who were the cultural ambassadors of my generation.

They began their all too short career singing rock and roll songs of love and longing like “Please, Please Me” and “She Loves You.” As they matured they created some very sophisticated pop tunes like “Yesterday” and “Michelle” that are still being covered by torch singers all over the world.

+ And then they entered the realm of social commentary with music like “Eleanor Rigby,” “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” and “Revolution” that gave us vignettes of broken hearts and broken social structures.

+ No wonder that the incredibly gifted Broadway director, Julie Tamor of The Lion King fame chose Beatles songs as the score for her visual history of the 60s called “Across the Universe.” They were brilliant.

And one of their most important songs goes like this:
There’s nothing you can do that can’t be done
There’s nothing you can sing that can’t be sung
Nothing you can say but you can learn to play the game
It’s easy… All you need is love – all you need is love
All you need is love, love – love is all you need

Do you know it? Want to try the chorus with me…?

Small wonder that Christian social commentator, Steve Turner, wrote a book called The Gospel According to the Beatles: he understood that love was at the core of almost everything they created just as Jesus had taught us. When asked by his disciples at what we know as the Last Supper to condense the essence of his ministry, the Master said: “A new commandment I give unto you, that you should love one another even as I have loved you. By this others will know me: if you love one another.” (John 13: 34-35)

So today – in the third part of our Lenten investigation into what Christ’s radical hospitality might mean for you and me – we’re going to look at what the scriptures tell us love looks like both in general and in particular. Like the Beatles – and Jesus and St. Paul – said: “There’s nothing you can do that can’t be done… all you need is love.”

If I speak with human eloquence and angelic ecstasy but don't love, I'm nothing but the creaking of a rusty gate. If I speak God's Word with power, revealing all his mysteries and making everything plain as day, and if I have faith that says to a mountain, "Jump," and it jumps, but I don't love, I'm nothing. If I give everything I own to the poor and even go to the stake to be burned as a martyr, but I don't love, I've gotten nowhere. So, no matter what I say, what I believe, and what I do, I'm bankrupt without love.

Peter Rollins talks about this when he tells us that Christian leaders are those who REFUSE TO LEAD. That is, they are people who refuse to let OTHERS do the hard working of loving - women and men who understand we are all in this together - so the BODY - the priesthood of all believers has to stand and deliver.

First, love in general with two insights from St. Paul. In his letter to the church in Rome, which Paul wrote after about 10 years of ministry, the apostle wants to remind the gathered community that God is the source of all grace and that everybody needs it. That is, we can follow all the rules perfectly – sing all the notes like a professional – and give all our time to strengthening the institution, but without the gift of God’s grace alive within and among us, we will always be alienated from God and one another.

+ Like I sometimes tell you: you can sit all night in your garage and that won’t make you an automobile anymore than baying all night at the moon will make you a coyote, right?

+ God’s grace – God’s life changing and always amazing grace – is essential.

In general, therefore, Paul teaches that when we have experienced God’s grace and are willing to trust it as the ground of our being, then we can:

+ First, love from the center of who you are and not fake it. Run for dear life from evil; hold on for dear life to good. Be good friends who love deeply and practice playing second fiddle. Romans 12: 10 tell us that there is intimacy in a true church – we know and care about each other – so much so that we are willing to serve and even protect the other.

+ And second, reach out and welcome one another to God's glory. Jesus did it; now you do it! Jesus, staying true to God's purposes, reached out in a special way to the Jewish insiders so that the old ancestral promises would come true for them. As a result, the non-Jewish outsiders have been able to experience mercy and to show appreciation to God. Romans 15: 7 is clear: Jesus practiced radical hospitality with insiders and guests – with those who fit and with those who needed to fit in – and we, too, need to make God’s grace visible.

Now, there really isn’t a lot of room for argument in these general descriptions of Christian love, right? In fact, there is broad unanimity throughout the Church – conservative, liberal, evangelical and new age – that we are to be a people created in the love of God as made flesh in Jesus Christ our Lord. Where we get into trouble, however, is when the general becomes particular – when the word becomes flesh – and when the abstract becomes concrete.

Do you know the story of the psychology professor who had no children who used to regularly lecture the parents in his neighborhood on the right way to raise children? He was always telling them not to do this or that – never to spank their little ones – and always to love your kids rather than punish them.

Well, one day as fate would have it, the professor put in a new cement walk in front of his house. And after working for hours on his hands and knees with a trowel to make it just right, he noticed out of the corner of his eye a little boy making hand- prints in the cement. And before he knew it, he rushed over to the child and started to spank his butt. A neighbor who was hanging out her clothes noticed all of this and hollered, “Hey professor, what’s going on: don’t you remember you’re supposed to love the child?” To which the psychologist yelled back, “Yes, of course, and I do love this child in the abstract… but NOT in the concrete!”

It is in the hard realities of real life – broken hearts, betrayal, job loss, humiliation and fear – that Christ calls us to trust both God’s grace and human discipline in a radical way. Our Old Testament story this morning makes that clear in the complaining and moaning and groaning of God’s chosen people. This is a classic example of selective memory and blaming our woes on everybody else rather than take responsibility for real life. Remember that Moses has just led this group OUT of the oppression of slavery in Egypt:

+ By God’s grace they have been rescued and set free; by God’s grace they have crossed over the Red Sea from despair and fear into the possibilities of liberation and hope; by God’s grace their future is limitless.

+ And still… and still the people rescued and set free by God’s grace… complain. Oh, the food is crap here – better we should return to the chains of slavery: at least Pharaoh fed us well. And our living arrangements – what a mess? At least in the days of bondage we had a warm place to rest and safety from the elements.

Do you get what is going on? The Biblical and archeological evidence is clear that the slaves of Egypt did NOT eat well – garlic wasn’t even a part of their diet – and God knows they were not well cared for in slavery. But they chose to believe it – and carp about it – because the alternative was to trust God ever more deeply and make some hard choices.

And as we know all too well, it is easier to carp and blame than trust God and move forward boldly in faith. But that is what loving in the particular is all about. St. Paul is very clear in the second half of I Corinthians 13 that:

+ First, love doesn’t fly off the handle or keep score of the sins of another. Rather, love refuses to go bitter when times are tough: those bathed in Christ’s love look for evidence that God is with them, they take a deep breath when people become irritable and they look beyond the other’s failures so that they can find ways of serving together. “In fact, this expression of love refuses to traffic in unexpressed resentments” (Charles Swindoll) because they become just like those poisoned snakes in the desert: they kill and wound and keep on biting long after the actual offense is over.

+ Second, love doesn’t revel when others grovel but takes pleasure in the flowering of truth. There is just nothing to celebrate when somebody stumbles. Remember the Religious Right and President Clinton? Where was the love? Especially when both those in elected office and in pulpits across America who were hurling stones were committing multiple acts of infidelity themselves to say nothing of their subsequent financial scandals.

+ Look: people of Christian love reach out a helping hand when a sister or brother stumbles – we don’t kick another when they are down. And when we do have a problem or disagreement – and we often do – we go to the other and talk about our differences openly and with sincere affection. As one preacher likes to say: “It is better to be bruised by the trustworthy words of a caring friend, than to be flattered by the deceitful compliments of a self-serving foe.”

+ And third, love puts up with anything, trusts God always, always looks for the best, never looks back but keeps going to the end. What Paul is telling us is that love doesn’t have tissue paper feelings: if we are overlooked, it isn’t the end of the world; if a confidence is broken, we don’t give up or turn on the other; and if our hearts are broken… Well, we look to Jesus who was neither easily wounded nor distracted from his calling of love.

Are you with me? Have I been clear? First love in general is broad, helpful and inclusive: we don’t fake it, we regularly share it like Christ did and we know that God is at the center of any and every act that is authentically loving. Second, the particulars of Christian love in a congregation include: refusing to hold grudges, searching for forgiveness and reconciliation when sin and alienation does happen and trusting always that God’s love is bigger than our feelings. As the old preachers like to say: It may be Friday… but hold on, baby, cuz Sunday’s coming!

Now there is one last word I need to share with you and it is not easy: please don’t make the mistake of thinking that you can embody this type of love all by yourself. You can’t – I can’t – nobody can: it takes the whole community of God’s people encouraging one another together for us to grow and mature in grace. It is romantic but sentimental hooey to believe that we can love like Jesus all by ourselves. And it is equally self-centered and ugly to say that we’ve tried to love but people are just too cruel so we’re going to take care of number one.

Lots of churches do precisely that – and then they shrivel up in their self-centered stupidity and become a burden to the Lord and a pain in creation for those aching and searching for true Christian love. Mike Yaconelli, one of the finest youth ministry experts in the United States, once put it like this and we need to hear his words because we are about to embark on a journey that could be filled with snakes. As we make bold and radical decisions about how we are going to use our resources to advance Christ’s love, count on the fact that there are lots of snakes waiting to poison us.

Yaconelli writes: “There is something wrong with the organized church. You know it. I know it. We all see that something is wrong – drastically wrong. Just one semi-close look at the organized church – with its waning influence, its corruption, and its cultural impotence – tells us that something has gone awry. But, the question is, what has gone awry? What is wrong?”

I think I know. The problem with the church is not corruption. It is not institutionalism. No, the problem is far more serious than something like the minister running away with the organist. The problem is pettiness. Blatant pettiness. Visit any local church board and you will be immediately shocked by the sheer abundance of pettiness.

The flower committee chairman has decided to quit because someone didn't check with her before they put flowers on the altar last Sunday. The Chairman of the Board is angry because a meeting was held without his knowledge. One of the elders is upset with the youth director because the youth director wants to take the church youth group to a secular Rock concert. The Woman's Kitchen committee is up in arms because, at the last youth group meeting (which has mushroomed from 15 kids to 90 kids in six months), the kids took some sugar from the kitchen. The janitor is threatening to quit because the youth group played a game on the grass over the weekend and now the lawn needs extra work.

Now let’s be clear: his gripes are not our gripes, right? We don’t have 90 kids in the youth program – or even a lawn to be really worried about. But we do know something about pettiness – so listen carefully to the way he wrap us his comments – because they are in the spirit of making Christ’s love particular:

Churches are so preoccupied with the petty that they can't spend the time required to do what matters. So, I would like to say what people in church leadership are apparently having a difficult time saying today: There is no excuse for pettiness in the Church. Pettiness should have no place at all in any church for any reason. Petty people are ugly people. They are people who have lost their vision. They are people who have turned their eyes away from what matters and focused, instead, on what doesn't matter. The result is that the rest of us are immobilized by their obsession with the insignificant.

It is time to rid the church of pettiness. It is time the Church refused to be victimized by petty people. It is time the Church stopped ignoring pettiness. It is time the Church quit pretending that pettiness doesn't matter. Pettiness is a cancer that has been allowed to go undetected; a molehill that has been allowed to become a mountain. Pettiness has become a serious disease in the Church of Jesus Christ -- a disease which continues to result in terminal cases of discord, disruption, and destruction. Petty people are dangerous people because they appear to be only a nuisance instead of what they really are -- a health hazard.

I want to join brother Yaconelli by saying that the “most basic result of the presence of Jesus Christ in our lives is our deliverance from the sin of pettiness. It really is true that, in Jesus, we are freed from the bondage of the insignificant and let loose from the tyranny of the trivial.” As someone far wiser than me once said, “all you need is… love.”

O Lord, may it be true within and among us by the spirit of Christ Jesus our Lord.