May 1, 2018
 
 
 
 
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Led by the Holy Spirit,
St. John's mission is to inspire people to grow into the heart and mind of Christ by engaging together in worshiping, serving, and spiritual formation.

 
 
 
 
 

A school of love

 
 
 
 

This week I offer my sermon preached on April 29th, continuing my April 17th commentary on Brian McLaren’s book.


Here’s a bit of Bible trivia: the word “love” appears 221 times in the [NRSV translation] New Testament. [Other translations list slightly different word counts.] Twenty-seven of those appearances occur in today’s reading from the First Letter of John. I’m currently reading a book titled “The Great Spiritual Migration” by Brian McLaren. [1] McLaren says that Christianity has spent way too many centuries fighting about correct doctrine and right belief. Christianity has poured all kinds of energy into teaching its adherents that what matters is not how you live or how well you love but what you believe. And now we stand at a place in history when Christianity is on the decline, observes McLaren, and people wonder what went wrong.


What’s wrong, he says, is that Christianity long ago lost its mission—the mission Jesus handed to his apostles, the mission we see Philip carrying out in the reading this morning from Acts. That mission is to love. McLaren says that Christianity should be a school for learning how to love but instead, throughout our history, we’ve too often been an arrogant, judgmental, and dictatorial institution.


It was love that compelled Philip to befriend a stranger on the road, to share the good news about Jesus. It wasn’t just any stranger, but a eunuch who had traveled to Jerusalem—presumably from Ethiopia—to worship in the Temple. The eunuch would have been turned away because Hebrew Scriptures forbade eunuchs from entering the Temple—they were considered blemished and therefore unfit.


Perhaps Philip told the eunuch that in Jesus Christ God had revealed a love that has no caveats, no exclusions, no bounds.  Perhaps Philip said that God loves us not because we are so irresistible and unblemished but because God is so loving.

McLaren says that “If the prime contribution of Christian faith to humanity can be shifted from teaching correct beliefs to practicing the way of love as Jesus taught, then our whole understanding and experience of the church could be transformed.” [2] At speaking engagements around the country, McLaren is inevitably asked what he thinks the church of the future will look like. In response, he shares his dream that across this country, tens of thousands of congregations will become schools of love. Regardless of denomination, worship style, size or location, these churches “w[ill] aim to take people at every age and ability level and help them become the most loving version of themselves possible.” [3] McLaren refers to 1 John 4:20—part of our epistle reading today—to close his argument: If you don’t love your neighbor whom you have seen, how in the world can you claim to love God whom you have not seen? [4]


When you are judging whether or not your affiliation with church—our church, or any church—is bearing fruit in your life, these are the questions you might consider asking to help you measure:


Am I being formed into someone who feels more at home in myself, more comfortable in my own skin; am I learning at this church to love myself more fully, despite my failures and imperfections and quirks?


Extending outward from that: Am I being formed into someone who has more empathy for others, who feels more drawn beyond my comfortable place to help and care for others; am I being called into making connections with others; am I learning to love others more fully, despite how different they may be from me?


And extending outward from that: Am I being formed into someone who sees the populations of the earth as one family? Am I learning to regard the Hindus, the Muslims, the atheists, the snails and the maple trees, the deer and the red-tailed hawks as my siblings, and all of us children of one God?


And flowing outward from that: Am I being formed into someone called to lose myself in God, so I become as connected to God and as nourished by God as the branch is connected to and nourished by the vine? Am I learning to love God?


What brought you here to St John’s this morning?


Some might come to church seeking healing, some forgiveness, some an antidote to loneliness, others an hour’s worth of peace—a respite from a noisy world. Some people come seeking to be inspired, to find purpose and meaning, to connect to something larger than themselves. At the root of all these things is love: love of self, love of others, love of Creation, love of God. I want to become, to grow into, as McLaren says, the most loving version of myself possible, and I know you want that too.


As we immerse ourselves together in this new way of understanding church—as not an institution of correct and proper belief but as a school for learning how to love—let us take a suggestion from McLaren and start with the Nicene Creed. I invite you to turn to page 358 in the Book of Common Prayer and let’s look at it. There are four statements that begin with the words “we believe in”: We believe in one God; we believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ; we believe in the Holy Spirit; we believe in one holy catholic and apostolic church.


I invite you this morning—just for this one morning—to join me in saying “we love” instead of “we believe in”. So, we love one God, we love one Lord Jesus Christ, we love the Holy Spirit, we love one holy catholic and apostolic church. I think the fellows at the Council of Nicea would be okay with our one-time departure from their words, for they would agree that love is the substance of Christ. It is our destiny and the destiny of the world. Amen.


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Following the sermon, we all stood and said the Creed together, using the words “we love” instead of “we believe in”. For me, and I suspect for others, it radically changed the meaning of the rest of the statements in the Creed. I’ll write to you about that next week—about the Creed, about the new meanings I discovered, and about how the words “belief” and “love” have more in common than we think.

 

[1] Brian McLaren, The Great Spiritual Migration (New York: Convergent, 2016).

[2] Ibid, 48

[3] Ibid, 54

[4] Ibid, 57