Sunday, June 14, 2015

Sermon: On One-Anothering

Acts 10:34-48; 1 Corinthians 13:1-13
On One-Anothering
James Sledge                                                                                       June 14, 2015

One Sunday, right after Shawn and I first got engaged, we were sitting in a pew at her home church, First Baptist of Gaffney, SC. We were beginning to think about the actual service, and Shawn mentioned wanting to use the famous Bible passage on love that was our scripture for this morning. So I grabbed a pew Bible and started looking for it. This was long before I ever thought about being a pastor, and I didn’t know exactly where to look. I thought it might be one of Paul’s letters, but I searched and searched without finding it.
Turns out my scant biblical knowledge was only a part of the problem. That pew Bible was a King James version, and in place of the word “love” it had “charity.” And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.
Doesn’t quite have the same ring to it, does it? “Charity” isn’t really the best translation, but discovering that word was my first hint that Paul never imagined that his difficult letter to a troubled and fractured congregation would become a staple at weddings. Not that Paul’s words are bad advice to newlyweds, but he has a larger community in mind.
Paul was not happy when he wrote the Corinthians. He’d received reports of quarrels and divisions in the congregation, and he sees that as a clear indication that the Corinthians have not yet grasped the full meaning of their faith.
We humans are remarkably skilled at dividing ourselves into groups, clustering into clumps of those who are like us. We get started as toddlers on playgrounds and only get more sophisticated at is as we grow older. This likely served some evolutionary purpose in our ancient past, but now it seems more a curse. We tend to fear and distrust those who are different from us, and we presume that our group is better than their group. It’s a problem that afflicts even our most noble undertakings. Just consider the connotations of that word “charity.” Very often it is something that we do for them.

Christian faith often gets viewed through “us and them” lenses. That’s a bit surprising considering Jesus’ example. Jesus crossed “us and them” boundaries with great ease, often infuriating the religious boundary keepers. “He eats with tax collectors and sinners and prostitutes,” they complained. “His disciples don’t follow the correct purity rituals.” Jesus didn’t seem very good at the “us versus them” thing.
But the church that sprung up after Pentecost got better at it, and before long before the first Christians were arguing about “us and them” boundaries. “Jesus was a Jewish Messiah,” some said, “and so you have to become Jewish to be a Jesus follower.” But others, Paul among them, said that Jesus was bigger than that.
Paul insisted that being united to Christ broke down all those other barriers, all those markers of us and them. Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male or female, some of the big boundaries in his day, didn’t matter to Paul. That’s part of the reason he is so upset with the Corinthians. They are creating “us and them” boundaries within their own congregation between intellectual Christians and simple ones, those with impressive spiritual gifts and those with less flashy ones, those with money and those without.
We still know how to play this game. Unlike the Corinthians, we aren’t impressed with folks who speak in tongues, but we have our hierarchies. We still prefer some gifts over others and cater to some members over others.
This is the sort of problem Paul has in mind when he pens his famous words about love. Upset because wealthy Corinthians don’t wait for poor who work late to arrive at the pot luck dinners that was part of worship and also served as Lord’s Supper; upset because they value some spiritual gifts and dismiss others, Paul tells them that every member of the body has gifts allotted by God for good of the whole. And then he writes, And I will show you a still more excellent way. If I speak in the tongues of mortals and angels, but do not have love…
The love Paul writes about is not romantic love. It is not a feeling but Christ-like action that is patient and kind, not envious or rude and doesn’t insist on its own way. It views the world from a very different perspective, not looking for boundaries that separate us from them but seeking to become one in Christ.
Speaking of this concrete, active nature of Christian love, Brian McLaren notes how often the phrase “one another” pops up in the New Testament. Love one another… wash one another’s feet…become slaves to one another… welcome one another… bear one another’s burdens… be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another.
One another; it’s an odd idiom when you think about it. If you’d never heard it before, you might have a hard time figuring out exactly what it means. I’m one. You’re an other. And I don’t know if you’re an other I can trust or not. If you look different from me, have different politics from me, are a different generation, or have different musical tastes, that may raise my suspicions. And if you’re enough different that I think you’re one of them, I may actually dislike you and even fear you.
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Some years ago, when our denomination was still battling over whether to ordain people regardless of sexual orientation, I was at the Covenant Network of Presbyterians’ annual conference. I was sitting in one of the many workshops, and conversation turned to concerns about conservative congregations leaving the denomination if the standards changed. Would it be possible for us to stay in community and do ministry together with those who disagreed with the Covenant Network’s position?
“I say good riddance to them,” snapped one participant. “I’ll be glad when they’re gone.” Many disagreed but some felt the same. They had been deeply hurt by those who told them they were sinful and unfit to be ordained, and so those voices became a them, an enemy.
We have now seen many conservative congregations leave the denomination, more so following the approval of same sex marriage. Votes at presbytery and General Assembly that might once have been difficult or controversial are often less so. It is easier to do things when more of us agree, when more of us think alike. But we look less like the motley, rag tag group Jesus assembled and hung out with, less like the strange neighborhood Jesus proclaimed where Jews and Gentiles, righteous and sinners, friends and enemies, clean and unclean, all get invited, where all are our neighbor, the anothers we are called to love.
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Who are the others you want nothing to do with? It’s easy to think of this as a problem restricted to homophobes or Islamophobes. But if you’re online you hear the voices on the left that are just as strident and harsh, who say all Republicans, conservatives, bankers, police, politicians, CEOs, people of faith, and so on are heartless, evil, others who are a them, enemies it is okay to fear and hate.
So who do you feel free to fear or hate? I’m not talking about disagreeing with them but about considering them an other who gets excluded from the one anothers we are called to love, welcome, be kind to, bear burdens for, and forgive.
I have my list, but I’m trying to cull it. After all, I say I’m a follower of the one who met hate with love, who endured suffering rather than inflict violence, who prayed for those who killed him.  As Brian McLaren writes, “For all of us who want to be part of the movement of God’s Spirit in our world, there is no more important and essential pursuit than love. That’s why we walk this road. That’s why we seek to improve our fluency and grace in “one-anothering”— especially with people who seem very different from us.”[1]
And becoming a part of this “movement of God’s Spirit” has implications far beyond our own congregation. We live in a world that desperately needs to learn “a more excellent way.”
Back in 1967, Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “If we are to have peace on earth, our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Our loyalties must transcend our race, our tribe, our class, and our nation; and this means we must develop a world perspective.”
I wonder where he ever got such a crazy idea.

We Make the Road by Walking. The practice begun in Advent continues through summer of 2015. Scripture and sermons connect to chapters in Brian McLaren’s book. This week’s chapter is 43, “Spirit of Love: Loving Neighbor.”



[1] McLaren, Brian D. (2014-06-10). We Make the Road by Walking: A Year-Long Quest for Spiritual Formation, Reorientation, and Activation (pp. 219-220). FaithWords. Kindle Edition.

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