| July 30, 2006 | Church of the Covenant |
| Jules Osborne Tryk, guest speaker | |
| Printer-Friendly Version |
Ephesians 3:14-21
I suspect that members of this congregation lead blameless lives. My evidence is that during the private prayers of confession, I'm almost never past Monday afternoon when the rest of you are wrapping it up. Amen? “OK – I'll have to get back to you.” However, while I have to force myself to confront the many ways in which I err and stray, I have not often needed to be reminded to be thankful. I am aware that the gifts I receive are extraordinary, and I wake up, most mornings, grateful to God. I breathe a little prayer of thankfulness for those small moments: the taste of the first sip of coffee in the morning, the slight breeze that finds you on a hot day, a cute baby passing in a stroller. But most of my moments of grace seem to involve other people: the walk around the Shaker lakes with a friend, the phone call from an old acquaintance just wanting to say hi, a colleague stopping by my office with a great idea, a Eureka moment from a student, researching in the library, a photo from my daughter, Allison, in my e-mail, or a text message from Marse on my cell phone – “Whuzzup, Mom? xox.” These moments do not go unnoticed or unappreciated.
But as easy as it is for me to be happy and grateful, I confess to a wide streak of selfishness inherent in my joy and gratitude. Some people are easy to love. Although my friend Orene first introduced me to the quote attributed to Gracie Allen, “Don't place a period where God has placed a comma,” I have begun to be aware of it appearing on billboards, t-shirts, and bumper-stickers around town. It strikes me as a timely admonition to avoid circumscribing, delineating, and truncating God's purpose and God's love. Naturally, I did not see how it applied to me.
But, as it is wont to do in the most irritating of circumstances, my legal training challenged me to apply this to my life and beliefs. Mind you, I'm still talking about that sage theologian, Gracie Allen. Where in my thinking, in my loving, have I stamped THE END, period, when I should have penciled in, AND THEN, comma…?
I found several books in the library that purported to illuminate the Ephesians passage we started with. A couple of ideas worked their way past the erudite discussion of the Greek pronouns and Hebrew puns. The verses can be viewed as prayers. The first from Paul, seeking spiritual strength and growth for the addressees, recognizing that this change is never final or complete. And one recognizing that God delivers more than humans might ask or think. No period. Comma.
These prayers have given me a context in which to examine how I learned, not only HOW to love, but WHO to love.
The first lesson is easy. We love those who provide for us. Before we understand love, we understand hunger. We understand discomfort. The people who alleviate these conditions are welcome to us. We learn to anticipate their ministries, and become happy to see them even when they don't feed us. We trust them through momentary betrayals (I'm thinking diaper pins here, but that's probably an obsolete concept these days), and we even wish to please them. We become anticipatory, and with luck, it is reciprocated. Is this the genesis of love? Perhaps, in part, if we are lucky.
But we are told not to stop here. This is a hard lesson, because the ties of family, tribe, and gratitude are comfortable and familiar, and bind us pleasantly, one to another. We are told to love our neighbors. Ok, that makes sense. We live with other people. We borrow and lend cups of sugar, take in each other's mail, and keep an eye on each other's homes. It's a quid pro quo kind of arrangement, at least at first, with its basis in self-interest. An easy kind of love, seeking out the comfortable company of those like ourselves, or the interesting or challenging company of those who are just a little different. Does it always work? No, the equations don't always balance, but at least we understand the mandate.
But we are told not to stop here. As comfortable as the ties are of family and tribe, nation and denomination, ethnicity and race, political orthodoxy, and socio-economic strata, we are told to go on. We are expected to expand our family to include our enemies, to include those with whom we have no natural affinity, no common ground. As William Barclay wrote in his commentary to the Ephesians passage, “It is as if Paul invited us to look at the universe – to the limitless sky above, to the limitless horizons on every side, to the depth of the earth and the seas beneath us, and said, 'The love of God is as wide as that.'” We are to try to emulate God's love, breathtaking in its scope. We are asked to follow.
Sometimes it is easy to love. I had a friend describe the moment his daughter was placed into his hands in the delivery room as the moment he understood the simplicity of love. Love, in his life, had not come easily, but suddenly, in that moment, he understood. It was just there.
It is seldom that simple. We are often expected to love someone who is just plain not loveable. This is where another familiar concept comes into play. If we behave lovingly towards someone, regardless of whether we feel loving, we can learn to love that person. We can't order our emotions by force of will, but we can conform our behavior. At the very least we will create a more tolerable atmosphere. We behave as we would feel, hoping for God's help, hoping to change. What began as “no,” period, ended up as a “maybe,” comma.
Now here's where it gets tricky. In discussions about the Middle East in the past few days, I have heard honest opinions characterized as either (and possibly both) anti-Semitic and/or anti-Muslim. In either case, the accused was labeled woefully naïve and uninformed. Given the complexity of the situation, I can accept the latter – we are all naïve and uninformed. But, as a product of the sixties who proudly proclaims to love her country while disagreeing with its policies in, well, numerous situations, I realize the elegance of this mandate. Our histories encompass thousands of years of swapping eyes for eyes, teeth for teeth, lives for lives. But Christ told us to love, and ended that mandate with a comma. You are permitted to disagree with those whom you love; you are required to love those with whom you disagree.
So, how do we deal with emotions such as love or loathing that may inconveniently arrive unbidden? We are allowed to argue, bemoan, and otherwise rail at others, but they are ours to love. We can hate the deed, but we are required to love the wrong-doer. We can try discipline, reasoning, bribery, guilt trips, benign neglect, “tough love”, and of course, prayer (by the way this, with the addition of whining and threatening, is a pretty accurate description of the arsenal I used when my kids were teenagers), but love we must. We don't have to like them, but we are told to love them. All of them. Pretty tough order? When and where can we say The End? When can we stop? Where's the period? No period: just “And then,…” comma, and comma, and comma….
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