21 Pentecost

Let’s talk about love.

Here’s what Paul has to say: Love is patient; kind; doesn’t envy, isn’t arrogant or rude. Love doesn’t say my way or the highway, isn’t irritable or resentful; doesn’t celebrate wrongs, rejoices in the truth. Bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, and endures all things. And never ends.

I don’t know any human that actually behaves like all that 100% of the time to their loved ones. In fact the longer you’re in a relationship; the harder it is to be this way even most of the time. I know people really who try, but they are often co-dependent and co-dependents mostly fall down on the resentment part.

This is a pretty impossible standard, and so of course we are all sinners, if sin means not living up to this. It is in fact what we confess to every service except during Easter.

Of course these are the words of Paul not of Jesus. I never get the impression that Jesus wants us to be co-dependent. I mean if Paul’s words are what Jesus meant when he said love your enemy, he might as well ask us to flap our arms and fly.

And yes when he says love your enemies he said to be perfect as God is perfect. However on another occasion when the disciples say, that is impossible! Jesus replies with, “For mortals it is impossible, but for God all things are possible.”

You see, I think the trick here is to remember we’re to let God love through us, not that we’re to strive to love perfectly before God approves of us; because we can’t and God can. God is love and when Paul describes love, he’s describing God.

Before we go further, I think I should get around to mentioning the text we read tonight. There’s one thing in the text that always puzzled me. Does Jesus assume we love ourselves?

I mean, to be honest, it’s a common assumption. It’s also one of the reasons most philosophies and ethics never quite satisfy me. They don’t account for the self-destructive and self-sabotaging impulse within us. Some few writers do acknowledge it. Poe calls it the imp of the perverse. Kierkegaard calls it angst.

I honestly believe the entire human race is fundamentally suicidal. I mean how else can you possibly explain climate change deniers; Or the not too far off possibility of nuclear winter? Self-preservation is not a safe assumption to base any philosophy on, much less self-love.

Can you be patient with yourself; kind to yourself; not rude to yourself? Can you not should all over yourself? Not be irritable or resentful of yourself? Can you not wallow in your own wrongdoing? Can you bear all of you, believe in all of you? Have hopes for yourself? Endure all aspect of yourself?

God does. God counts every hair on your head; no narcissist even does that. I think people get it wrong when they say a narcissist loves themselves. It’s more of an obsession with oneself. It could even be rooted in lack of true love for oneself.

Someone once told me that a crush was just you seeing your best qualities in another person. But how many people have felt that way about themselves alone? How many people actually delight in themselves?

When I was trying to figure out how to love my enemies, I did try a technique I learned from Buddhists where you first think of someone who delights you, and then keep hold of that feeling and think about the person who you hate. It’s actually a pretty good exercise.

Now think of doing that with yourself. When a friend made this suggestion to me I honestly recoiled. “That feels incestuous!,” I said. But I think my recoil was really about was that I was taught that the second commandment really said, “Love you neighbor instead of yourself.”

What I did end up doing is imagining God feeling that way about me. And of course, God does. Knowing that God delights in you and actually trying to experience it are two different things, though.

Now more than ever people are asking, how do we live a Christian life?  I believe the fundamental starting point is letting God love you. You could try the exercise I just mentioned, or try others. The point is to cultivate that sense of God’s love in ways that work for you.  From there, loving God back and loving others flow. 

19 Pentecost

“What a horrible parable! This is the (quote) Old Testament (unquote) God, not the God of Jesus!” I’ve heard many people say that, and while, like many who say this, I probably fall into the category of liberal Christian, I can’t at all agree with the folks who say that.

It’s certainly possible that people say this in response to parable being used to justify a lot of harm in Christian churches. It’s been used to justify who is in and who is out gatekeeping. It’s been used to threaten people with hell. It’s been used to suppress people with purity nonsense. I have no patience for any of those interpretations, either.

So let’s look closely at this parable from a different point of view; a point of view that recognizes that Jesus does not present a different God than the God of Jewish scripture. Much of what Jesus says actually is direct from Jewish scripture. And that God is a God of love and mercy.

We tend to think of love as sentimental. It is not always so. The King in this parable is clearly not sentimental. He does not spare people from the consequences of their actions. I will argue, though, that he is loving in that he invited the good and the bad to an extravagant wedding feast.

I’m surprised at how many people think the King killed all the people who refused his invitation. He didn’t. He only killed the murderers who killed his messengers. Yet this conclusion was jumped to time and time again in a Bible study I was at despite being reminded again and again what the text actually said.

Now to a conclusion I jumped to when reading this parable in light of the Gentile controversy. The invited were the chosen people who didn’t hear Jesus and the good and the bad included the gentile Christians. Now I didn’t see this as triumphalism, because I see the gentile controversy as a story about accepting the outsiders and the impure. Clearly others see it as we gentiles have the goods and the Jews lost out.

Of course, though, my assumption was corrected when I remembered that Matthew’s community was a Jewish community, not a gentile one. This is likely more a story of inclusion or exclusion of Christ’s Jewish followers who would not have even called themselves Christians. Matthew’s Jesus was angriest at the scribes and Pharisees, so there’s something there, no doubt, whether or not the expulsion from the synagogues is true.

The most puzzling thing for me was the question of what the wedding garment was all about. It’s clearly not about good or bad behavior, because both the good and the bad are invited but only one person was ejected due to not wearing a wedding garment. 

I’ve seen commentaries that suggest wedding garments were provided, so the man refused to put it on. Other commentaries suggest that there’s no evidence of that, however a wedding garment merely means clothes that were cleaned. Personally I don’t think the wedding garment has anything to do with proper attire.

It’s hard for me to not think of the garment given at Baptism that we’re to make sure is “unstained.” However that leads to thoughts about only the baptized are chosen. Which could be the case, but I don’t like that idea. Nonetheless, I offer it as a likely interpretation.

Even if that is the case though, I do NOT believe the chosen in this parable are the ones going to heaven when they die. When Jesus speaks of the Kingdom of Heaven he is speaking of how God wants this world to be. He’s trying to get people to think outside the norms of human society and imagine a better world. And THAT is the banquet.

I think when we hear this parable it’s too easy to try to think about what the king is doing and not what the people are doing. And I think we do that a whole lot. Leave things up to God. God is good and merciful; God will take care of things.

I think this is a parable about ways people can refuse an invitation. There are the people who don’t show up, there are the people who respond with violence, and there are the people who show up but refuse to participate.

You don’t have to be a Christian. Some of the folks who declined just went about their business normally. If you do choose to accept the invitation, though, there are demands made on you. The yoke may be easy, but it is a yoke.

Remember that in Matthew’s last judgement no one is asked about their purity, the good and the bad are invited alike. No, the yoke is about easing suffering in this world.  It’s about loving God and each other. In many ways that’s easier than following 613 commandments, certainly less of a burden in the sense of policing purity. But it is a very demanding commandment, one as a Christian we are obligated to do our best to follow.