Sunday, October 29, 2017

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. 



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