The Main Point of it All
Mark 12:28-34; I Corinthians 13:1-13
Good morning friends! So much has happened this week! Apparently I’ve gone from being a local church pastor to being an internet televangelist. (Like and Subscribe if you like this channel!) I’d like to thank Josh - our Neighborhood Pastor, for taking the lead on technology to make this service possible. And I’d like to thank Jason - our Facilities Genie - for going above and beyond to install internet access in the sanctuary.
I have noticed that nearly every TV show that is usually taped before a live audience, has just stopped altogether because it’s too weird to do a show that depends on interaction with an audience, to an empty room. Well friends, today I feel like one of them. Except we aren’t cancelling! So if you are watching live and you want to respond to something I say - please go ahead right there on Facebook and type in an Amen! or a thumbs up or a laughing emoji. Or a snoring emoji if you like to sleep during the sermon. We are going to make this as normal and interactive as possible.
I’m so grateful for the technology that can bring many of us together from our homes today.
I came over here into the sanctuary last evening, trying to finish my preparations. And sitting alone in this quiet room, I felt all of the emotions that had been stacking up for past few days spill over, and I sat here on these steps and let myself cry for awhile. All the tension, the worries and fears, everything I’ve been holding inside for the people I love, and for the state of the world. And in letting down all those tears, I found myself praying for all of you. I could see your faces in your usual places in this room, and hear your voices and all the sounds of community and friendship that are usually in this place. You are a wonderful bunch of people who already know that church isn’t a building. You are already well-practiced at watching out for one another and caring for each other in hard times. And you are people who don’t just care about yourselves - you keep loving and caring for our neighbors whether or not they’ve ever set foot in this room.
And before I preach, and I'm gonna preach, I want to give a shout out to our Backbacks ministry leaders, who still filled and delivered weekend food bags this week for kids at our neighborhood schools who are at risk for being hungry. I want to give a shout out to those of you who in less than 2 days have organized a group of over 500 people who are sewing masks for our local health care workers. I want to give a shout out to everyone who has participated in the gift cards for school kids that our District initiated. That initial $20,000 has grown to about $35,000 that has been distributed to low-income schools for their families, in the form of store gift cards throughout our Crater Lake District. And I want to thank our team of retired pastors who are helping by making phone calls to ensure that all of our people have a point of contact and access to support from their church family, even if they don’t have the technology to connect in this way. Another shout out to those of you who have stepped in to help get groceries and prescriptions for folks who especially need to be home. I’m watching how you all take every opportunity you have to love. I’m proud of you, and I know that we will weather this together - even as we practice safe spatial distancing!
We’ve been working our way through the gospel of Mark, following the Narrative Lectionary since Christmas. And today’s scripture is the one I read - the greatest commandment. That we love God with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and love our neighbor as we love ourselves. I also read the most famous chapter on love - 1 Corinthians 13, to help remind us what this kind of love looks like.
In Mark, we are at a point in the story where the leaders are trying to entrap Jesus with tricky questions, hoping they can catch him in some offense that will help them take him down. But Jesus responds again and again with answers that they can’t argue with. Finally, this guy - an expert in the law, wants to know if Jesus knows which commandment is the most important of all. And of course Jesus does. And this scholar cannot find any fault, but affirms what Jesus says - love of God and love of others as self are the most important central teachings of all. And then Jesus affirms him right back saying, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.”
We’ve heard this and we know this. But there are moments on the journey when we start to truly get it. This moment we are in together, when all the world is faced with this pandemic, this is a moment that will reveal whether we are getting it or not. This is the time when we find out if we believe in the transformational power of sacrificial love, or whether in our heart of hearts we really believe in other things.
It’s chapter 12 in the book of Mark, in chapter 13 Jesus goes into a long, rather depressing foretelling of hard times that are coming. In chapter 14 Jesus will eat his last meal with his friends, be betrayed with a kiss of one of those friends, be arrested, and be abandoned. In chapter 15 he’s brutally killed. So just before all hell breaks loose and everything gets dark and sad and tragic, Jesus says with efficient clarity - the most important thing is love.
People can lose their minds a bit when they get scared. When that primitive, self-protective part of our nervous system gets triggered, we can do all kinds of things we wouldn’t do on a calm day in our right minds. The disciples ran and hid and lied. No one on a calm day in their right mind buys 6 cases of toilet paper for their family of 2. But fear and scarcity, and the fear that creates scarcity can send us quickly into a state of me-first, and not you, behaviors that are actually much more serious than toilet paper hoarding.
Maybe you’ve heard about the racism that has been unleashed on our Asian neighbors in recent days - expressed in everything from interactions at the grocery store to national press conferences to physical violence and verbal attacks. Fear exposes and emboldens the racism and xenophobia that lies barely beneath the surface of our society.
Me-first, opportunism rears its head in times like this, when people do things like buy up all the hand sanitizer and then try to sell it at gauged prices. Or when people who get briefed on the pandemic sell off all their stocks before the news hits the markets.
People behaving badly will make a strong case that love can’t win. They will use power and manipulation and fear and hatred. They will exploit grief and profit off of human suffering. And we will be tempted over and over to believe the lie that the main thing is looking out for yourself instead of loving and loving and loving no matter how hard it gets. There will be Judas’s who betray with a kiss and sell out their souls for a profit, while real people suffer.
What about you? Do you believe in the power of love to transform the world, even in the face of such evil? As so often happens, I was given an opportunity to practice what I preach, in the moment when I was still finishing this sermon. And I’ll be honest - I failed. I had to deal with someone whose attitude and behavior was - in my evaluation - rude, paranoid, judgmental, and reactionary. And with no sense of irony, I suddenly realized my attitude towards this man wasn’t far off from his toward the people he was judging. It’s such an easy trap - to give rudeness back to rudeness, to judge back in response to judgment, to react to someone else’s reactivity. To think “What’s wrong with you?” instead of “What happened to you?” It was humbling, and I thought - here we are, in these extraordinary times, under so much stress. Do I believe in the power of love? Can I let it transform me? How will I lean more into love and allow this hard season to shape me in a good way? This hard season we are in comes with opportunity. Let’s talk about this season for a moment.
I’ve had some emotional deva vu in the past week. This whiplash feeling, like everything just suddenly changed and I’m not sure what happened and I’m trying to catch up. It’s familiar. As many of you know, when Josh woke up that Thursday morning in September of 2018 and within an hour couldn’t move his legs, it launched a season of mind-bending unreality. Every day was a deeper descent into a frightening and unknowable future. No one could tell us what was happening, and then no one could tell us what the future would hold. It was about 3 months into that experience when a very wise friend gave us this metaphor, and I share it today because I think it speaks to the disorienting trauma we are all sharing in right now.
She said, you were going along with your lives, living in your universe, and one day without warning you were sucked into a black hole. In a black hole, you can’t tell which way is up or down. You can’t see. There isn’t much to orient yourself around and you have no control over what’s happening or how long you’ll be in there. Eventually, you will come out of this black hole, but you’ll be in a different universe. The new universe will have some things in common with the old one, but you will have to learn how to live in this new universe when you get there.
On our personal journey, we’ve found this to be exactly true, and we’ve been learning to live in our “new universe,” with all its challenges and its many good gifts.
But now, with the arrival of COVID-19 and our whole world in the midst of its impact - it feels like we were all going on with our lives in our regular universe, and we’ve been sucked into this black hole together. We can’t see the future, and it feels scary. We can’t go back to the way things were, and that feels sorrowful. We can’t orient ourselves very well when things keep changing, and that feels destabilizing. This black hole means not seeing people we want to see, not getting to worship together in our beautiful sanctuary, not getting to eat at our favorite restaurants or meet up with friends. It has disrupted our routines. For some it means a loss of work and income. For some - especially those who were already very vulnerable, those living outdoors, those with fragile health, those barely making ends meet, and so on - it feels like being pushed up to the edge of a cliff. For some - like those working in hospitals, or at grocery store cash registers - it feels dangerous just to get through the day. For those who were already grieving, already anxious, already running on a narrow margin - the stresses of life in this black hole have gone into new dimensions. It can feel suffocating and scary.
We will not always be in this black hole! This will not last forever. We will come out of this on the other side. We believe in resurrection, right? But meanwhile, it’s Lent. how do we live in this bizarre time? Will we grow in our capacity to love with the love that transforms the world?
When we begin to come out of this black hole, we will not be the same. Who we will be and how we will create that new universe depends a great deal on the power of love. Every day we get a new choice. To choose love over fear. To choose love over hate. To choose love over judgment. This is a moment of opportunity to recreate our universe on a foundation of divine love. This opportunity exists on a global scale - to re-format our ways of being that have been so destructive to people and to creation. And it’s an opportunity that exists on the level of every person - to re-format our ways of being with ourselves and with one another, and with God. I pray that we would see the opportunity in this dark place, to shine a brighter light than ever. Even in the breaking, let us break open.
I Corinthians 13 ends with the famous line, “And now these three remain: faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love.
Friends, if your faith wavers in the face hard times. If your hope seems to fade on the darkest of days. Be encouraged! Know that love is greater still. Love is the bedrock, the foundation that cannot be shaken. Love will carry us through the darkest night, through even the sorrow of death. Love is the power of resurrection that brings the sun to rise up after the darkest of nights. May you bear all things, believe all things, hope all things, and endure all things in the power of God’s unquenchable love! Amen.