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.
____________________________________________________________________________
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.
____________________________________________________________________________
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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