Love Builds Up

1 Corinthians 8:1-13

I grew up with the Star Wars movies (the original trilogy, thank you), and then acquired some Star Trek fandom in college, so I have a warm spot in my heart for a fair amount of technobabble.

 

You know, the sort of thing where the ship appears to shudder and someone shouts: “Commander LaForge, we have a failure in the spatial subharmonic particle conduit!”

And then they talk about how they’ll route the positronic flux through the neucleonic plasma conduit (or something) instead, but have to replace the metaphasic generator before they can go to warp again.

 

Listening, you get what you need to know to move the plot along – something’s wrong, we have a temporary fix, but there’s going to be more trouble before the end of the episode – but the dialogue itself is, well, nonsense. Recognizable-sounding words that mean something to the characters in the drama, but are complete babble to real people. 

 

Dropping into Paul’s letters on a Sunday morning can be a lot like that. Dense spiritual or theological language that means something important to Paul, words we recognize, but the subject matter – and some of the vocabulary – is far enough removed from most of our day-to-day lives that none of us can be blamed for not being able to tell what Paul is actually talking about – even if we get enough to move the plot along. 

But sometimes the babble effect means that the main point of the plot gets lost.

 

Now, maybe you’re one of the folks for whom Paul’s message came through perfectly clearly when Joan/Peter read it to us this morning.
But in case you don’t have the Social and Religious Customs of First Century Corinth translator handy, I can tell you that this morning we heard Paul offering his unvarnished opinion on whether Christians can legitimately eat the meat which was available in the local market because the animals had been sacrificed to one of the locally important gods.

And…that’s where everyone in the city buys their meat.

Christians know that there’s only one God, yes, who we know through Jesus. So is eating meat that “belongs” to Apollo worshipping Apollo, or not?

 

Paul has a personal opinion on the issue (we know those gods aren’t GOD, so of course eating their meat isn’t blasphemy and idol-worship), but his main point is that the issue here is not really whether you eat meat or not – the issue is not really food – it’s love.

Love of God, love of neighbor – particularly, love of your siblings in Christ. 

 

In fact, whatever the issue his friends at Corinth are bringing him – idol meat, lawsuits, speaking in tongues, other people’s family relationships – the issues, questions, anxieties, and problems facing the congregation in Corinth are never the real issue for Paul. The only real issue is love.

Love of God.

Love of neighbor.

(And also the transformative resurrection of Christ from the dead.

But even that, when Paul comes right down to it, only matters because it reveals the overwhelming love and grace of God.)

 

What matters – what only, ever, matters, at the end of every one of Paul’s detail-filled, run-on theologibabble sentences – is love.

Love of God.

Which, when the rubber meets the road, is also love of neighbor.

Especially the neighbor who is your sibling in Christ, your fellow believer, the amazing – or amazingly annoying – person in the next pew.

 

Facing persecution and the death of your community? Keep your focus. What matters is love.

 

Got your hands on the most amazing prophecy ever? Whatever. What matters is love.

 

You’re cranky because your sibling in the next pew is criticizing your decision to go to a party at the temple of Aphrodite? Listen up, friend, you may be fine with that spiritually, but what matters is love.

 

In this particular case we heard about today, the action of love is to stop eating the meat that’s not hurting you if there’s any chance it’s going to hurt your sibling.
Sort of the same way that when one person in my family tested high on the cholesterol charts, we all stopped eating beef and butter at our shared dinner table.

 

There are folks in the congregation at Corinth who know just as well as you do that Poseidon isn’t real and our God is the all and only God, but for whom indulging in a steak off of one of Poseidon’s bulls still deeply and truly would mean supporting the worship of Poseidon. Eating that feels like having to tell a lie – a very important and spiritually damaging lie. 

And if your sibling has to wrestle through that painful lie with everyone in their social circle who sees you – known to be a worshiper of Jesus – indulging in a Poseidon steak…. Well, just cut it out. 

Love means actions – means not doing things that cause a family member, a fellow believer, pain – more than love has ever meant feeling kindly toward someone.

 

Love – the love that’s the only thing that matters, the love of God and neighbor that’s the only issue ever – love is an action verb.
Love is our choices to do what builds other people up.

What builds the community up. 

Whether that’s going vegetarian to protect the conscience of the person in the next pew whose uncle is giving him crap about the leaders of his little “one God” sect “worshipping” beef from Poseidon’s altar, 

or giving up your Saturday morning plans to make sure hungry folks get a decent lunch, 

or showing up for a project or event to make sure a few people don’t have to get it done all alone,

or introducing yourself to someone for the third time to make sure no one is standing alone at coffee hour even though you’re embarrassed you can’t remember their name.

 

Love builds up,

shows up for relationships so reliably that you know you’re never going to be left with no support in trouble, or no companions in joy.

 

Love builds up,

always saying the thing that gives courage and hope, 

always choosing to let go of the complaint or argument that pushes friends apart.

 

Love builds up,

looking for opportunities to be generous, selfless, encouraging, forgiving, kind,

and acting in those ways, every chance we get.

 

I know Paul’s friends in Corinth needed to hear that. 

(if) You read his whole letter, it sounds like they were having a lot of struggles, anxiety, and stress about how to be a good church, a strong and welcoming community, a beacon of hope and faith in a time and place when it really wasn’t easy to be church, to be Christian.

 

And I know I need to hear it, we might need to hear it, now.

Because you and I live in a time and place when – in different ways and for different reasons – it’s not easy to be church, to be Christians. 

We are facing some challenges to the ways we’ve known how to be church – changes to our budget and program that we’ll talk about at the annual meeting today, and also changes in the way the world around us supports or challenges us in our faith. And any of that could raise our anxiety about how we, how Trinity, will be a good church, a strong and welcoming community, a beacon of hope and faith.

 

And I suspect, if Paul sat down at our annual meeting today – if he talked with us about what’s in our budget and what’s not, and anything else we’re worried about, or excited about this year - in our individual lives as well as in our church life – I suspect he’d have a definite opinion (Paul always has a strong opinion) – but I suspect he’d also say to us: it’s not the budget that’s the issue. It’s not the programs or the dollars or the worries or the excitement. None of that’s the issue. It’s love.

Love of God.

Love of one another.

 

Focus on love.

Because love builds up.

 

Love of God builds our spirits stronger as we find ourselves known and embraced by the power and presence that gives us life.

Love of one another builds our hearts and our community, generous and hope-filled and patient and encouraging and rejoicing in our life together.

Love builds us up.

 

Love addresses every crisis; love makes the ordinary matter.

Love is where we begin our story, and where we end.

And no matter how technical the dialogue gets in the middle, no matter how complicated, tense, or boring the plot, no matter what else is at issue,

love is only point we cannot miss, 

the only word we really need to understand.

Answer Readily

Jonah 3:1-5,10; Mark 1:14-20

Every few years, when today’s set of stories comes around in the church’s cycle of scripture and prayers, I find myself getting a little…resentful, maybe?

 

You see, right near the beginning of the service, we prayed “Give us grace, O Lord, to answer readily the call of our Savior Jesus Christ….” And then we read these little excerpts of God’s story in which there is a very clear call to action, and a quick response.
And I notice, every time, how much that’s not like my life.  And I suspect it’s not much like many of yours.

 

Most of my life, the “calls” I may have gotten from God play out a lot more like those times when there’s a garbled voicemail on your phone but it didn’t even ring, or show a missed call. (Maybe that’s just my phone?)

Or like the phone call went to someone else, who’s trying to tell me about it - but they don’t remember exactly what the caller said, or when they called, or really what I’m supposed to do about it, anyway. 

Tell me in text messages.

While we’re both driving.

It’s hard to “answer readily” a call like that.

 

When I tell my story about feeling “called” to be a priest, it sounds a lot clearer and simpler than it actually was, or felt at the time. I quite frankly spent years pushing back at God with the emotional equivalent of “if you actually want me for something, or to do something, you’re going to need to spell it out in a certified letter.” 

 

Being “called” to be a priest – or to come here to Trinity, or to teach Sunday School, or to heal people, or to get closer to God -- or share good news by the way you parent, or manage, or engineer, or feed people, [or sing,] or befriend someone – is almost never as clear and clean as it looks in the Jonah and Jesus stories we read today. 

 

In fact, I have a sneaking suspicion that for Simon and Andrew and the sons of Zebedee it wasn’t quite as simple as
“Follow me and fish for people!”

“Okay, let’s go and not look back!”

 

And I know it wasn’t as simple as

“Get up and tell the city my message”

“Okay, city, here’s what God said!”

for Jonah.

 

Jonah’s story, in fact, is mostly about not being very ready to answer the call to share God’s good news. The first time God calls Jonah to go tell a message of repentance to Ninevah, Jonah more or less sticks his fingers in his ears and then jumps on a boat going as far from Ninevah as he can. 

And Jonah never really gets comfortable with what God calls him to do.  He never gets quite convinced that telling Ninevah – city of God’s historical enemies – to get reconciled with God is going to be good news for him, or the world - even after Nineveh figures out it’s good news and instantly follows God.

It can be messy, being called to proclaim God’s good news. Unclear and confusing, often.
The things God wants you or me to take on, tell people, do, or change, may look and feel uncomfortable, silly, or unwelcome. (I still can’t figure out why God seems to think I should live in the suburbs, when I’m absolutely a city girl at heart. And yet, it’s good – I believe it’s the call of God – that I get to live and love here with you.)

 

Sometimes the messiness of God’s “calls” is more serious – a need to end a relationship, a need to share a painful truth, a need to take on a task I’ll never feel ready for. 
There’s evidence in the gospels that Simon and Andrew and James and John did have to end relationships, wrestle with and share painful truths, keep picking up work that never got easy, when Jesus told them to come and fish for slippery, complicated, people (instead of income-producing actual fish). It stayed complicated, too, even the parts where they knew, without a doubt, that they were doing the right thing, that they wanted to say “YES” to Jesus over and over again. Evidence that that shiny moment we read today was potentially as confusing and messy and hard as it is for me. Maybe for you.

 

It helps me when I speculate, with other preachers and scholars, that maybe Andrew and Simon and John and James found that particular moment possible because before the day when Jesus walked along the shore of Galilee and said “come fish for people with me,” John and James and Andrew and Simon had actually gotten to know him over some weeks, or months, or years. Maybe Jesus and the guys had already speculated about all going off together to work for God, to work on gathering people instead of fish. Maybe they’d joked about it, or made careful plans (which probably didn’t work out just the way they expected – this is Jesus, after all!), or started to dream about what might be possible, or work out how to help each other with the things that were going to be hard. 

 

And I wonder if one of the things that makes it possible for them, or you or me, to “answer readily” the call of Christ is trust. Trust that Jesus, that God, builds with us before as well as after the particular moments in your story, or mine, that someone else might point to as when God “calls” us. 

The psalm we read this morning is about being steeped in trust with God. Feeling God as the solid ground under our feet, our safety, the place we can “pour out our hearts”, be sheltered and protected, and be strong, whatever happens around us.

When I read all of Jonah’s story – the messy, funny, awkward “not me! Not that!” parts as well as the “Okay, city, here’s what God says” part we heard today – I sense a deep level of fundamental trust that Jonah has in God.
Jonah is in a sulky snit through the whole entire story – but you get into those snits with people you trust.
And when he’s stuck in a fish’s stomach – when obviously God’s all done with him – Jonah sings about his confidence in God. He repeatedly grumps at the Good News Telling God sends him to do because – I believe – he knows, deep down below the level of his sulk, that there’s nothing he can do to break the love of God, to make God drop him. That there’s nowhere he can go – not the ends of the earth, not the belly of a fish – where God will lose him. 

 

I think it takes Simon and Andrew and James and John a little longer, in their story, to get to that deep of a trust in Jesus.
I know it’s taken me longer than one brief shining minute to build up the trust in God that I need.
You might be one of the souls that’s always had that trust – or it might take a lifetime for you, too.

 

But I’m pretty sure that James and John and Simon and Andrew had some kind of reason to trust their future to Jesus before they left their boats that one particular day. And pretty sure that Jesus isn’t going to call you or me to something we can’t trust Jesus to help us do.
I’m completely sure that no matter what task, or news, or place that challenges us that God may call you or me to, God is never going to let our fears or griefs or worries or sulks or uncertainties disconnect God from us. That God is never going to lose us, no matter how far we go, or how ridiculous a fish-belly situation we might land in. 

 

So when I pray that we can “answer readily” God’s call, I think I’m praying for Jesus to keep showing you and me and us how much we can trust God. How deeply and far, how strongly and truly, we can trust God’s love and protection and care for us – so that it’s possible for you and me to risk the impossible. Or more likely, just the inconvenient, or unexpected, tasks and places and news and opportunities that God calls us to share.

 

So will you watch with me – this week, this month, this year – will you pay attention with me to all the reasons we have to trust God?
Will you try to notice, with me, the ways that Jesus likes to just hang out with us, so we can know him when it’s time to get up and follow?
The ways that God builds our community to strengthen, and protect, and support us, when the unexpected comes? Because that’s how we become ready to answer.

And because, in the end – and the beginning! – what God wants you and me to respond to – to “answer readily” – is love.  

Receive the Holy Spirit

Acts 19:1-7, Mark 1:4-11

Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you became believers?

 

We heard Paul ask that of a small group of Jesus-followers in Ephesus this morning, and now I want to ask you for a show of hands:

Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you became a believer?

 

(if you’re not quite sure, go with what feels like the true answer, not what you think is the “right” answer) 

 

I asked you not to go for the “right” answer if you’re not sure, because basically, whether you showed your hand or not, you are all right.

 

The Episcopal Church teaches that the Holy Spirit is given to each of us in our baptism. 

But our church’s teaching on that has been, mmm, less than perfectly clear through the years. 

So I know a lot of people - including me for many years of my life - who would have answered Paul the same way those disciples in Ephesus did centuries ago:
“No, I didn’t even know there was a Holy Spirit to get.”

I also know folks who have been a bit concerned about receiving the Spirit because that might get us into something embarrassing, like speaking in tongues or preaching in the street. 

And then there are lots of us who know the gift is given to us at baptism but don’t know if we’ve ever experienced receiving it. 

 

What’s more culturally accessible is knowing that we’ve been baptized (all of us who have been baptized) into the forgiveness of sins – much as those who received John’s baptism in the Jordan so long ago were baptized.  We know, mostly, how the sins and errors and omissions we’ve wound ourselves in, the petty or substantial evils that have left their mark on our hearts, the general failure of human beings to love God and one another perfectly – are all washed away in the water that conveys God’s gift of generous love, and we become forgiven – and repeatedly forgiveable –  people.

 

We – or our parents and godparents – generally expected that from our baptism, along with the recognition that we belong – to Jesus who enfolds us in eternal life, to God and to one another in the church.

(That’s easier to track, since you find yourself on the church’s mailing list.)

 

The Holy Spirit part is often…. fuzzier and less certain. 

And – well, let’s do this with another show of hands – how many of you, when you were baptized, saw or heard or felt something like a heavenly bird descending on you? 

Anyone experience something like this when you supported or sponsored someone else for baptism?

 

Experiences like the one Jesus has, as John baptizes him in the Jordan river, are extremely rare among modern Christians (and as far as I can tell, historically, too.)

 

But deep in the heart of the church is a conviction that we must receive the Holy Spirit. That Jesus’ baptism and the descent of the Spirit are a model for what we, too, must experience, becoming children of God with Jesus.  

Jesus himself promised that Spirit to his followers, more than once. The Spirit that will enable us to bear witness to the love and truth of Jesus, empower us to participate in miracles (often the slow and subtle kind, rather than flashy and sudden miracles), inspire us to act like Jesus, abide in us to draw us closer to God.

So we must receive the Spirit.

We need it.

 

Paul knows this – and immediately acts to make sure that the Jesus followers in Ephesus, and everyone who follows them, receive, and are filled with the Spirit of God, promised by Jesus, which empowers us to proclaim – by word, by action, or both – the good news of Christ. 

 

And since that day, the church has prayed, and baptized, and laid hands on new believers, right down to you and me and the next person to be baptized at Trinity, so that we receive the Spirit, that we’re empowered to proclaim, to show, the extraordinary power, wonder, and love of God – just like Jesus himself begins to do after his baptism.

 

And I know – with Paul, with the example of Jesus, through the experience of generations in the church – that we, you, have been given that Spirit.

 

The thing is, you and I might not have felt that the day we were baptized.

Some of us have felt it – then or since.

But any of us here might live a full life trying to follow Jesus, to believe, with the church, in the good news of Christ, and still be wondering if we’ll ever start feeling empowered, or inspired, or enabled by, or filled up with, the presence or power of the Spirit of God.

 

Sometimes (often?) we need help to recognize and receive that gifted Spirit, that spark in us that is the life of God, breathing in us.

We need something – a situation of challenge or opportunity – a ritual or special moment – to evoke that spark already in us. To make the Holy Spirit already given, a tangible, noticeable, vivid part of our lives, our selves.

 

I wonder, a little bit, if that’s part of what brought Jesus to John, at the Jordan river, all those years ago. The fullness of God was in him – the Spirit was him already – and being also just as human as you and me, I wonder if Jesus wanted or needed something to make tangible, visible, vivid the truth already in him.

(I’m out on my own little theological limb here, don’t take that as the gospel truth, but…)

 

Then I wonder a bit if that’s one of the reasons the Episcopal Church encourages us, when we’ve been baptized, to keep renewing that baptism each time someone else is baptized, and repeat the beliefs and promises we claimed at baptism – the things that honestly, aren’t very practical without the gift and work of the Holy Spirit in us. To choose confirmation when we are ready to make a personal claim on the promises and beliefs someone else claimed for us when we were younger. And to – from time to time – get a little wet, just a sprinkle of ritual, to refresh our first experience of baptismal water, renew ourselves as people ready to receive the gift of that empowering, inspiring, challenging, vital Spirit.

 

Maybe one of us, or more of us, will feel and receive that gift turned loose in our lives today, as we repeat our commitment of faith and promises of how we live our beliefs – promises we need the Spirit to help us fully carry out. As we renew promises about the practices of faith, love, witness and action that demonstrate the work of the Spirit in us, whether we ever see a diving heavenly bird or not. Maybe you’ll feel the Spirit turned loose in you as get just a little wet, sprinkled with a bit of Jesus’ immersion in the waters of the Jordan and our own baptismal water.

 

I want that for us. I want that empowering of the Holy Spirit, which lets us “witness to” – proclaim and share – our experiences of God’s love and power. 

That might mean you start to prophesy or preach; to tell the world about God’s presence and will and work, like those disciples in Ephesus when Paul renewed their baptism. 

But it also might be that what’s set free in you is the “witnessing” of discovering and sharing God’s work in the world by just reading the Bible with other people;
deepening the love with which you pray, or gather in church;
opening your heart to a stronger desire to forgive and be forgiven;
inspiring you to see just that bit more easily the face of Christ in other people;
empowering you to make a claim for justice or a move to make peace, in an everyday way in your family, workplace (school), or community life.

 

We need that, all of us – that’s the strength of our community at Trinity, when you come right down to it – those not-so-preachy, not-so-flashy inspirations and experiences and openings that the Holy Spirit works in us.
I see that work among us, the Holy Spirit in and among you, and me, whether you raised your hand to claim that Spirit a few minutes ago, or not.

Maybe you see it, among us, too.

 

And maybe, if I asked that first question with a plural “you” – have you, have WE received the Holy Spirit, as we become believers? – maybe your hand would go up with confidence, lifted by that Spirit.

 

Have we received the Holy Spirit?

I say “Yes”, and you say…..?