Matthew 4:12-23
Transforming Love
James Sledge January
26, 2014
How
many of you think that everything in the world is just about as it should be,
with no real problems to fix or issues to deal with? Everything is fine, right?
I
suspect most anyone here could rattle off a long list of problems, troubles,
horrors, and more that desperately need straightening out. Civil war continues
unabated in Syria with an obscene death toll among civilians and refugees in
the tens of thousands. Things are only slightly better in South Sudan, and Iraq
seems to be descending into anarchy.
Brutal,
gang rapes occur with staggering regularity in India, but the brutalization of
women is hardly confined there. Sex trafficking and slavery, fed by crippling
poverty, is a worldwide problem, including in our own country and in the DC
area. Meanwhile income inequality continues to grow in this country. In a
nation where everyone once claimed to be middle class, a smaller and smaller
percentage of the population controls a larger and larger percentage of the
wealth. And of course there was yet another shooting yesterday.
I’m
sure we could add plenty of other examples of problems in our world, but let me
shift the focus a bit. How many of you think that everything is fine, with no
real problems to fix or issues to deal with in your own life?
Most
of us have personal lists of things we’d like to change about ourselves. We
want to exercise more or volunteer more. We need to lose weight or stop
smoking. And many of us having bigger issues than self-improvement lists. We
lead harried, hectic, and anxious lives that are good for neither our health nor
our relationships. We hurt others, including those we love, far too often. We
have been overly conformed to our culture’s narcissism and consumerism, and so
we chase after stuff thinking it will make us happy, and we obsess about self
and our need to be happy and fulfilled. It’s a stressed out environment that is
toxic for us and for our children.
Of
course there is much that is good about the world and about our lives. The
world is God’s good creation, after all. But even the most Pollyanna among us
know there is much that needs fixing and changing in our world and in our
lives.
“Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” Jesus begins his
ministry with words every bit as appropriate today as they were nearly 2000
years ago. It is a message about change, change for the world and change for us
personally.
Unfortunately,
Jesus’ message got distorted, largely by the church, over the long passage of
time from then to now. Jesus’ message of personal change connected to a changed
world somehow got turned into a religious change of heart that let you escape
this world’s problems. “Believe in Jesus and be a good little boy or girl, and
you’ll get a ticket to a better place, to heaven when you die.” But Jesus says
nothing of the sort.
Jesus
does say that even death will not separate us from God’s new day, from
transformed relationship with both God and neighbor. But he does not come to
get us from here to heaven, quite the reverse. His ministry is about heaven
coming to us. That’s what the kingdom is about, as he says so clearly in the
prayer he teaches us. “Your kingdom come. Your will be done, on
earth as it is in heaven.”
This kingdom is about things on earth
getting fixed and straightened out, and changing the world requires changing
people, a project Jesus begins in today’s gospel with, “Follow me.” Following
Jesus means learning how to live lives that conform to God’s new day, and
almost immediately after our reading today, Jesus begins to teach his followers
about just that in the Sermon on the Mount.
____________________________________________________________________________
Now
I suspect that when many people hear the word “Repent,” especially in a
religious context, they hear a human version of, “Bad dog! No! No!” We tend not
to think of ourselves as all that bad,
and so we tune Jesus out when he says, “Repent” assuming he’s not talking to
us. But the repenting Jesus calls for is about change, and the call to follow
him as a disciple is a big piece of that change.
Notice
what happens when Jesus calls Peter, Andrew, James and John. They leave former
lives behind and become something new. That’s not an indictment of fishing as a
career. Jesus doesn’t wag a finger at them and say they are bad. The repenting,
the change he calls them to is a gracious invitation to new life, an invitation
to discover something new and wonderful, patterns of life befitting God’s dream
for humanity, for us and for the world.
It
is not unlike the pattern of falling in love. When people fall in love,
everything changes. It does not mean who they were or what they were attentive
to before was terrible or wrong, but who they are and what matters most is
transformed by falling in love.
The
same thing happens when people hear Jesus’ call to follow him. Jesus invites us
to become new and different people, transformed by our encounter with him so
that nothing is ever the same again. That is why the apostle Paul speaks of the
new life in Christ saying, So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new
creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything old has become new!
Just
as falling in love never leaves a person quite the same, so meeting God’s love
in Jesus transforms. More than that, it transforms in ways meant to transform
the world. To be caught up in God’s love is to love as God love, to live as
Jesus lives, willingly giving oneself for the sake of others.
Our
world teaches us to guard and protect ourselves, to look out for ourselves and
our kin and our tribe ahead of others. But God’s love in Jesus shows us and
calls us to an entirely different way. Those who are caught up in that love are
transformed by it. And communities of faith transformed by that love transform
the world around them.
I
sometimes think that the Christian mystics have understood this better than us
regular Christians who, strangely enough, have sometimes dismissed mystics for
being too spiritual and not enough engaged in the world. Julian of Norwich, an
anchoress from the 14th century had a series of revelations or
“showings” experienced through visions. Writing of them she says, “It is God’s
will that I see myself as much bound to him in love as if everything he has
done he had done for me; and so should every soul think with regard to his (or
her) lover. That is to say, the love of God creates in us such a unity that
when it is truly seen, no man (or woman) can separate (themselves) from
another.”[1]
Imagine
that. So caught up in God’s love and God’s love for the world so as to become
one with every other person in the world. Such an experience might change us
beyond recognition. And if enough of us shared it, it would surely transform
the world.
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