The Consuming Fire of God's Love

 Preached at  North Valley Friends Church

September 22, 2024

The Consuming Fire of God’s Love

When Leslie asked me to consider preaching at NVFC, I told her that I think I am always preaching one sermon in different guises, namely that God’s love must have an object and God’s creation is that object, that God loves you and me. Often this is a consoling message. As Jesus said, perhaps with a bit of wry humor, “are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and yet not one of them falls to the ground without my Father knowing. Fear not, for you are of more value than many sparrows.” Here is a bit of the flavor of Micah 3.  "Listen, pray, chieftains of Jacob and captains of the house of Israel. Is it not yours to know what is right? Haters of good and lovers of evil . . . who devour My people's flesh and strip their skin from them and crack open their bones.  And they cut it like flesh in the pot and like meat in the cauldron" (The Hebrew Bible, "Prophets," tr. Robert Alter, 2015).

It was a surprise to me to find that it took only a few hours to see that this message too is about the fact that God loves us, you and me.  This is a message about God’s grace.

But first, I want to respond to Micah. I notice that he addresses three classes of people with power in their culture: priests, judges, and prophets. These define morality for the rest of their society. They tell other people what is right and wrong. But Micah accuses them of cannibalism towards other people, skinning them, breaking their bones, sucking out the marrow. To bring this into non-figurative terms, they destroy the lives of those for whom they define the rules, those in their care, under their influence; they take away their lives in order to enrich their own. They are predatory. 

We can look at those in our own society’s leadership who also cannibalize others, who remove from them the means of life; who destroy others to add to their own abundance; who ruin others’ chances to live fully and freely. 

And while it is comforting to point the finger at corruption above us in the power structure,

it would be a mistake to hear Micah talking only to those at the top of his culture. For this to have relevance to us, we need to consider that power includes greater physical strength, greater prestige and social capital, greater ability to decide who gets in and who must stay out—gate keeping. We need to recognize our own power over others, whether it is coercive or manipulative or accidental. We need to admit when we have misused our power, our privilege, depriving others of the ability to thrive and become their whole selves.

We can hear echoes of Micah’s message in the words of Jesus, first to the religious leaders, but then to everyone who has ears. I won’t rehearse all of the condemnations of the actions of the scribes and Pharisees, but I’ll remind you of this one: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs which on the outside appear beautiful, but inside they are full of dead men’s bones and uncleanness. You bind heavy loads on others’ shoulders but you are unwilling to lift a finger to help them carry those loads.”  I will remind us, remind me, that Jesus also said, shockingly, that anyone who makes it hard for a little one to trust God would be better off drowned, and that whatever is done to the “least of these” is done to Jesus Himself.  And also that not everyone who says Lord, Lord will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only those who do what Jesus’s Father and our Father says to do. And further that those who look on their hungry, thirsty, ragged, imprisoned neighbors and do nothing to alleviate this distress are not part of God’s sheep, not among God’s people. How much worse to actively contribute to or even cause another’s misery.  Jesus is not less demanding than Micah, and perhaps, given that he is talking right to us, is even more so. No wonder the liturgical confession includes both what we have done and what we have left undone.  

When Jesus was asked the greatest commandment, he said, “Love God with everything you are and have, and love your neighbor as yourself.” Jesus knew he had to add the second, which he said is like the first, because we can talk ourselves into believing we love God while we are doing harm to our neighbor. But also, this contains in it the truth that when we harm others we also harm ourselves, and conversely that love for others and love for oneself go arm in arm.

We have seen that Jesus shares Micah’s outrage about the misuse of power and influence. So how can we move from admitting our selfishness and apathy and self-indulgence at others’ expense to a better understanding about God’s love for us, God’s grace toward us? We need to recognize that God’s grace may look a lot like judgment, God’s grace is surgical, and our response to this intrusive grace of God makes all the difference.

I owe much of my understanding of God’s intrusive and uncomfortable grace to three writers: George MacDonald, Flannery O’Connor, and Julian of Norwich. George MacDonald was a novelist and preacher in the 1800s whose writing was hugely influential on C.S. Lewis.  He writes in one of his Unspoken Sermons, “The Consuming Fire”:

Nothing is inexorable but love….Love has ever in view the absolute [the potential] loveliness of that which it beholds. Where loveliness is incomplete, and love cannot love its fill of loving, it spends itself to make more lovely, that it may love more…Therefore all that…comes between and is not of love’s kind, must be destroyed. And our God is a consuming fire. (18-19)

Let us have grace to serve the Consuming Fire, our God, with divine fear; not with the fear that cringes and craves, but with the bowing down of all thoughts, all delights, all loves before him who is the life of them all and will have them all pure. (20)

…the fear towards God will be one with the homeliest love. Yea, the fear of God will cause a person to flee, not from God, but from the self, in terror lest that person do [wrong to ] God or [to] a neighbor .… (21)

In sum, God will love us into our best selves, and whatever we carry around with us that prevents us being that best self will have to go. This is the work of grace for us.

I learned a similar view of God’s grace from Flannery O’Connor, a mid 20th century writer of novels and short stories. Her self-satisfied characters are often jolted awake by God’s grace in a way they would never have chosen. Their casual American Christianity is not enough. I’ll mention one character and how God’s grace destroys in order to redeem.  In “Revelation,” a good solid Christian woman named Mrs. Turpin is attacked in the doctor’s office as she is making banal conversation about who is and who isn’t trash. A young woman throws a book at her, raising a bump on the forehead, and shouts, “Go back to hell where you came from, you fat warthog.”

What makes this traumatic moment redemptive is that Mrs. Turpin turns immediately to God and complains about being treated like this, while all the while wondering why God would send her this message. And because she turns toward God instead of away, and in recognition of her willingness to learn despite her anger and humiliation, God gives her a vision of the redemption of humanity, beginning with those she places at the bottom of the heap and ending with her kind of people. She sees the vast stream of human beings moving into glory, and her own kind of people are at the end of the line.

She leaned forward to observe them closer. They were marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable as they had always been for good order and common sense and respectable behavior. They alone were [singing] on key. Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away.  She lowered her hands and gripped the rail of the hog pen, her eyes small but fixed unblinkingly on what lay ahead…In the woods around her the invisible cricket choruses had struck up, but what she heard were the voices of the souls climbing upward into the starry field and shouting hallelujah. (The Complete Stories, Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 508) 

And finally, to Julian of Norwich, a mystic and anchorite from the 1300s. She had a near-death experience in which she had a vision of Jesus. She meditated on that vision for the rest of her life and gained profound understanding about God’s love and God’s intention to redeem and make all things well.  Along the way, she hears Jesus say this:

“For I will wholly break you of your vain affections and your vicious pride; and after that I shall gather you and make you meek and mild, clean and holy by oneing (uniting) you to me.” ( The Revelation of Love, tr. John Skinner, 86)

So what can we take of comfort and consolation from Micah 3? We can rejoice that God’s love always intends what is best for us and always builds up what is best in us; we can trust that God will make us good, and we can welcome the intrusion of God’s grace when we are not good as we face the both the consequences of doing harm and the divine surgery that will save us.  We can understand that God’s grace is not about excusing but about remaking, about healing, about redeeming what is perverse, wounded, and lost.  We can take heart, even as we tremble, that God’s love is inexorable and will do us good.

Sacrifice and Salvation

 Preached at Silverton Friends Church

April 28, 2024

William Blake wrote a poem: “To God / If you have form’d a circle to go into / Go into it yourself and see how you would do.” This is exactly what God did in the Son, Jesus. Jesus came into the world, our circle, and we can see how God did and what God did in that circle.

Central to Christian belief is that God loved the world in this way: Jesus came as God’s only begotten Son to seek for and save the lost so that they might not perish. Jesus said that he came not to condemn the world, but so that the world through him could be saved. He was killed for his message of inclusive grace and and for teaching the need to align one’s heart and words and deeds and for his insistence that he would not play the game of power so dear to human beings.

Jesus’s choice to embrace sacrifice and the result that we now are at one with God have been preached around the world.  The way we explain to ourselves why Jesus died at the hands of human beings has enormous significance for how we view God and ourselves and our mutual relationship. I think that each explanation can cite passages from the Bible in support. The discussion, and even enmity, around these explanations underlines the centrality of sacrifice for Christians. Some Christians are uncomfortable and perhaps even queasy about the idea of such a sacrifice being necessary. So I want to think with you about the distinction between being a sacrifice and being a victim, and spoiler alert, the distinction centers on agency.

Probably most obvious is that a victim suffers without having chosen it.  I think about the near death of Isaac in the Old Testament.  The story goes like this: after decades of waiting for a son with his wife Sarah, God sent her a son.  Now, what often goes unsaid is that Abraham had an older son with Sarah’s slave, Hagar, which was apparently an acceptable version of surrogacy in those times.  Ishmael could have inherited, but he would have been known to be the son of the slave. But God showed up to Abraham and promised that Sarah, in her 90s, would have a baby, too.  And she did, recognizing the joke on her by calling him Isaac, which means laughter.  She forced Abraham to banish Hagar and Ishmael so Isaac would be the only son, and he did. In this case, both Hagar and Ishmael were victims of Sarah’s jealousy and Abraham’s spinelessness.  But God stepped in and met Hagar and led her and Ishmael to water and safety. You can read this whole story in Genesis 12-23.

Then, when Isaac was old enough to help carry firewood, God told Abraham to take him up on a mountain and offer him up to God at that place. I have wondered whether this took place in a culture that practiced human sacrifice, but I don’t know. Abraham followed God’s instructions, even proceeding to the point of tying Isaac on top of the firewood, lifting his hand with the knife in it. God halted the proceedings at that point, saying, “Now I know that you are in awe of God—you have not withheld your son, your only one, from me.” And God provided a ram for the sacrifice instead of the boy.  

If Abraham had gone through with the offering, he would have sacrificed, but Isaac would have been the victim, having had no choice in the matter. However, like his banished brother Ishmael, Isaac got to witness God taking care of him when God provided the ram in his place. This is God’s repeated posture in the scripture—identifying with the victim, caring for the victim.

I’ve speculated about this story more than once, wondering why an omniscient God had to find out whether Abraham would be obedient, wondering if instead Abraham had to find out whether he would be obedient. God only knows what lessons God wanted Abraham to draw from that incident, but it’s likely Isaac did not draw the same ones. I’ve wondered how Isaac viewed his father after this event, and how Isaac viewed his father’s God. I’ve thought about how it connects up with Jesus saying that anyone who loves father and mother and wife and children more than they love Jesus is not worthy of him (Matthew 10:37-39). Or even more shockingly, Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple.(Luke 14:26, NRSV). These passages, particularly the reference to hatred, make me so uncomfortable. I had to try to soften them, and the word itself does not actually permit softening.  So we have to look at how Jesus behaved as he followed the Spirit of God to help us understand. What does it look like to live putting everything second to God’s Spirit?

Jesus had no wife or children, though people like to speculate, and the possibility is that because his conception was irregular, he was in something of a marginalized position in Jewish society. He did have a mother, and we can look at how he treated her in order to understand what he said.  At the age of 12, which is the Jewish age of manhood, he let her know he would put God’s business first. He listened to her and granted her request at the marriage in Cana, turning the water into wine, but he pushed back, rebuking her a little.  When she came to see him, worried he was in danger of losing mind and life, he refused to go out to see her, saying, “My mother and family are those who hear the word of God and do it.” But when he was dying, he committed her welfare to the disciple he loved, John, who from that day took her into his family. He let her know that obedience to God was top priority, making Mom happy was second at most, but he cared for her.

Further, I want to point out that Jesus also called to account those religious people who let their parents suffer while they designated big sums for the temple, and he condemned those who made it hard for children to approach and trust him and his Father. He said that what people do to the little ones they do to him, so all that has to be carried in the mind while meditating on the absoluteness of the call of God on our lives. Following God first does not mean carelessness about those we love or cruelty to our neighbors.

Jesus made his all or nothing statements in reference to the decision to follow him, so we need to observe closely and intelligently what Jesus did with his life.  Crucially, he depended always on God to tell him what to do and how to do it.  “I do only what I see the Father doing,” he said.

One way Jesus resembled his Father is in looking beyond surfaces to see what another human being is prioritizing. He looked at the rich young ruler and saw that, despite his goodness, what he held as a priority was riches. So he said, “Give them away and come follow me.” He looked at Peter, Andrew, James, and John, and saw that they prioritized their family business and heritage as fishermen. So he said, “Come follow me and I’ll make you fishers for human beings.” He looked at Nicodemus and saw he prioritized his age and intelligence and knowledge of the law. So he said, “You must start over as a new baby in order to follow me.” He looked at Judas and saw he prioritized political expediency and personal advantage. So he said, “Make your choice about what to do and choose quickly.” He looked at the woman caught in the act of adultery and saw she prioritized being desired and desiring. So he said, “Go and sin no more.” He looked at Pharisees and saw them basking in superiority about their knowledge and observance of the law. So he said, “You exempt yourselves from the spirit of the law by following your interpretation of the letter, and you make it impossible for others to measure up. Unless you change direction, you are the children of the devil.” He looked at Zacchaeus and saw that he prioritized getting to see Jesus at the cost of personal dignity. So he said, “Come down and I’ll eat with you.” And Zacchaeus said, “I’ll repay everyone I’ve defrauded and pay damages as well.” 

Some of these people indeed set aside what they had made central to their lives and identities, choosing to follow Jesus. Occasionally they expressed the feeling that they hoped this would pay off tangibly somehow, and occasionally Jesus pointed out that how people treated him was a good indication of how they would treat those who follow him.

When Jesus chose to allow himself to be arrested and crucified, he sacrificed himself despite all his human fear of pain, his ordinary desire for life and happiness. In the garden he sweated drops of blood as he contemplated his near future of torture and death, and on the cross he cried out his sense of abandonment by God. He protested against pain and death and aloneness, but he held fast to his intention because it brought and brings good for us. His ultimate act of agency was choosing to forgive his torturers. Forgiveness reclaims agency and is so good for our souls when we come to a place where we find it possible.

Jesus said that there is no greater love than this, that a person will lay down their life for a friend.  Paul said that some might be brave enough to die for a good person. but we know God really loves us all, because Christ died for, as Paul puts it, the ungodly (Romans 5).  Jesus said that he himself is the good shepherd, and what makes him good is that he lays down his life for the sheep, unlike the hired hand, who runs for his life (John 10). We are the sheep of God’s pasture (Ps. 121). What we learn by observing and listening to Jesus is that God has acted and eternally acts sacrificially for our good. 

Jesus was clear that there is a cost to discipleship, and that top priority would always have to be listening to what God’s Spirit says and doing what God’s Spirit says to do. And Jesus warns us not to judge others for how well they’re doing this hard work, noting that the severity of our judgment will rebound onto us. 

God always knew that the only way to make clear how much God loves us is to show us God’s Son entering into our world to be a willing sacrifice, enduring the results of human choices. It’s as if God was willing to go through the experience Abraham was spared in order to cement our understanding of how much God is committed to loving us. This kind of sacrifice was and is chosen by the one who will be sacrificed. Because of what Jesus chose, we see that we can trust God with our whole selves and lives. 

God's Repair Shop

Preached at Silverton Friends Church

September 24, 2023

 
I’ve been watching The Repair Shop from England on YouTube. The show is built around a workshop of experts in restoration and repair in woodworking, clock-making, leatherwork, art, ceramics, toymaking, metalworking. These experts meet with ordinary people who bring in cherished heirlooms that need attention. As the show says, “While some of the items pass through The Repair Shop due to unfortunate accidents, others are simply ravages of time.” And still others are there because of bad actors. But all are welcomed into the shop and the skillful crafters there work on them, often with nearly magical results. As Will the woodworker says, “This is the workshop of dreams.”

This show makes me reconsider how God looks at the work of restoration and ask myself, “Do these experts reflect something of God’s response to human beings who  need repair, restoration, conservation?”

There are some problems with the analogy I’m going to draw, so let’s acknowledge them up front. First, when people in the Bible encounter God personally (or even just God’s messenger), God often has to say, “Don’t be afraid.” Something about God is awe-inspiring, filling ordinary humans with dread and even terror. “Woe is me!” said Isaiah. Even Jesus occasionally terrified his followers, as when he stilled the storm.  “Who is this that even the weather obeys him!” The experts on The Repair Shop, though amazingly skilled, are friendly humans.  Not scary.  So there is that.

Second, the items brought in do not have wills. They are objects rather than persons, so they do not resist or evade their repairers, though they are certainly often a challenge. Often these items have been loved almost into life by their owners, particularly if they have been a part of their childhood; nonetheless, the items cannot and do not sabotage the repairs.

So what about this show reminds me of the love God has for human beings? As Psalm 8 says, “What are mortals that You God should notice them? What are human creatures that you pay them heed?” There is a mystery about why God loves us, and we take refuge in the word from the Bible that God is love. Jesus is historical evidence that God loves us and wants to save us from error, from brokenness, from evil. This is simply the character of God.

Many Christians have been taught to think that God sees human beings as evil. Some theologies even say that God cannot look on us human beings because of our sins. Imagine this attitude in The Repair Shop.  Clockmaker Steve looks at a broken watch and all he sees is brokenness. So he simply looks away until someone puts a brand-new watch in between him and the broken one. As long as that perfect watch blots out his view of the broken one, he can be happy. Otherwise, he tosses someone’s cherished heirloom into the rubbish.

All through the Bible, the various writers are well aware that God sees their good and their evil.  Job challenges God by reciting how he is good and asking to be told what he’s done that is so wrong it deserves punishment.  The psalmist who wrote Psalm 139 explores in detail how well God knows him or her: You know when I sit and I rise…and with all my ways you are familiar. Wherever I go or even run away from you, your hand leads me and your right hand seizes me. Search me, God, and know my heart, probe me and know my mind. And see if a vexing way be in me, and lead me on the eternal way. (Alter, 316, 317, alt.) And the writer of Hebrews reminds us that the Word of God is sharper than a two-edged sword…a discerner of the thoughts and the intentions of the heart.

George MacDonald, 19th century writer and preacher, believed in the inexorable love of God, a love that absolutely wants the best for us, wants us to be our best, and will work on and with us until that goal is met. When C.S. Lewis suffered the loss of his wife Joy, he wrote that if God was just cutting us open to torture us, we could hope that he would lose interest, but that if God was performing surgery to heal us, we could not hope for any relief until God’s work is done.  (Sounds a lot like Job, who said, Could you not look away from me long enough to let me spit on the ground.) Perhaps absolute love can both terrify and comfort us.  After all, God remembers we are dust.
 
When someone brings their beloved object into The Repair Shop, broken, worn, sometimes vandalized, clockmaker Steve and his colleagues say things like this:

I love the challenge of [fixing] something like this.

I love to improve things; I hate to see things thrown away.

This is a nice exciting project.

It’s an honor to be working on this.

I’m thrilled to work on it.

I’ve been imagining God’s Spirit with me, with us, seeing our brokenness, our missing parts, our worn-out-ness, and saying to the rest of the trinity, “I love the challenge of fixing something like this.  I love to improve things; I hate to see things thrown away. It’s an honor to be working on this. I’m thrilled to work on it.”

One scripture that comes to mind is this from Psalm 103.

God forgives all your sins, heals all your diseases. He redeems your life from the Pit, surrounds you with steadfast love and mercy….The Lord executes righteous acts and judgments for all who are wronged….As a father [an ideal father] has compassion for his children, so the Lord has compassion for those who fear him. For He knows how we are formed; He is mindful that we are dust. The Lord’s steadfast love is for all eternity toward those who fear him.” (The Jewish Study Bible, p1396)

Or this translation by Robert Alter: [God] forgives all your wrongs, heals all your diseases, redeems your life from the Pit, crowns you with kindness, compassion…The Lord performs righteous acts and justice for all the oppressed….As a father has compassion for his children, the Lord has compassion for those who fear him. For He knows our devisings, recalls that we are dust…The Lord’s kindness is forever and ever over those who fear him…(Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible, “The Writings” p. 239-241)

These words stand out: Forgives, heals, redeems, surrounds, crowns—These are the actions of our God. This is the God we stand in awe of. This is the God who has to say over and over, “Fear not!” Respect is too small a word to describe our response to our God. We can see a little of what it means to see God in action when Jesus stills the storm on the lake, and his close followers and friends fall back in fear and amazement. This is the God who forgives, heals, redeems, surrounds, crowns.  This is the God who, for reasons beyond us, loves us.

It is the attitudes of the repairers toward both the object and the owner that reminds me of God. Their tenderheartedness toward the present owner and absolute respect for the original craftsperson shine through over and over.

Listening
When a person brings an object into The Repair Shop to be worked on, The Repair Shop expert will ask: What do you want me to do with this? Sometimes the owner replies, I want it back as close as possible to when it was first made.  Sometimes the owner says, I want this repaired, but I don’t want all the marks of history taken away. Sometimes the owner says, I just want to hear it chime again, or see it move like it did when I was a child, or I hope you can fix the corner the woodworm ate away.

(This is different from when I took my diamond ring in for cleaning and got it back with all the 1970s antiquing removed as well.  I was shocked and sad, but it was too late to change.  Look at how new it looks, the jeweler said.)

The experts listen to the stories of the objects from their owners.  Their response is always tender and hopeful.  They have confidence in their expertise, and they value what the owners value in the item.  No item is beneath their interest. Steve the clockmaker spent hours on a plastic toy spaceship from the 1960s, getting it to spin but most importantly, getting it to hum like its owner remembered.  

Loving the challenge
These experts love a challenge.  They may moan a little over the complexity of the task, but they really enjoy their work.  Will the woodworker looks at a hundred pieces that have fallen off a chalet music box and puzzles them back on appropriately.  Kirsten the ceramicist looks at a shattered vase and not only reforms it but creates the missing pieces and then carefully paints it so it blends in. The toy experts dismantle a much-loved teddy bear, gently clean years of grime away, carefully match fabrics, and return it to the person who loved it as a child. In many cases, the owner does not want the years of love and use erased, but instead just wants it to be whole again. The owners often value the history revealed in scratches and worn patches, and they also are overjoyed that the bear has both eyes again.

Exercising patience
The experts are patient.  They will say things like, “This is the fiddly bit, but I like fiddly bits.” I’m always amazed at the man who repairs music boxes. He gets it moving first, then listens for false notes.  Again and again he solders or files and then tests it again.

Going beyond expectations
These experts like to do even more than asked. When restoring the chalet music box, Will notices a tiny dog house on the front. So he carves a tiny dog for the dog house. Extra. The toy restorers tie a bow around the teddy’s neck just to dress him up. Extra. Lucia, the art conservator, researches the provenance of the painting she has just restored and gives the owner more reasons to be proud of it.  Extra.

God also listens, God loves the challenge, God is patient, and God goes beyond expectations.

Here are a couple of Repair Shop stories that are lovely parables for us.

Lucia, the art expert, works to conserve the paintings brought to her. The one I saw most recently was a portrait with a hole through the lady’s lips, the result of an adolescent boy throwing a dart at it.  So she had first to repair the 15-year-old hole in the canvas by wetting the threads, restoring them to position with an adhesive behind the canvas, filling in the hole from the front with an acrylic filler, and then painting that twice, once with watercolor to cover the filler and once with oil or acrylic to blend in with the rest of the paint.  She also took the time to carefully clean the painting, and in so doing discovered decades worth of nicotine stain that obscured the rich coloring. Her careful work brought the painting back to its original beauty, and took away the damage caused by carelessness, though of course you can see the repairs from the back.  She also took time to research it, and she explained to its owners why it was more than just a sentimental heirloom, how it fit into history.

Steve, the clockmaker, had a pocket watch that was the only family possession saved by a woman taken to the concentration camp in WWII. She had hidden it by sewing it into her clothing. It was so thin and delicate that it gave Steve more anxiety than most of his repairs.  He began by opening it up and observing the works. He cleaned the clockworks of 80 years and he washed its face. Then he put it back together and it ran, as they say, like clockwork. It was a reminder of resilience and also of the present time. The grandson was moved to tears with gratitude.


When people get back their items, they will often tear up in the stoic British way and then apologize for being emotional. They most often say “Wow” and “I can’t believe you were able to do that,” “this takes me right back to my childhood, to happy memories,” and “I want to give this to my grandchildren, to people I love.” They want to share with their loved ones how the item was magical for them, how it brings simple pleasures and sparks the imagination. They want to share joy with their beloveds.

Imagine God asking us, what do you want me to do with you? Do you want yourself restored to like new? Do you want yourself conserved by having areas of wear and tear and damage remedied? Do you want cleaning so you can operate normally? Do you want the signs of age removed? Or do you want to keep the honorable scars of your history, even as the brokenness is repaired and beauty is restored?

The Fruit of the Spirit Is Love

Preached at Wayside Friends Church, 2023

When the pastors asked me to consider speaking on Love, I became immediately conscious of many failures to love in my daily life, and I nearly declined. But often in preparing to speak to others, I find God speaking to me, so I thought this sermon prep might create that opportunity.

I’ll start with a confession that when I was discussing politics, I said, “I despise that person. He’s a liar.” So there’s that. And then, I’ve been married to a lovely man, Mark, for 48 years and counting, and I find that instead of worshiping the ground he walks on as I did at 16 when we began dating, now I snap at him daily for one thing or another. It reminds me of my dad who came up to my house one day from his room at Friendsview and said, “Your mommy loves me, but she doesn’t love all my ways.” So there’s that, also.  And then I have not outgrown neediness—particularly with those I love the most.  To quote the movie “What About Bob,” “I want I want I want, I need I need I need.” Perhaps the most embarrassing on this list.

None of these things I confess to you make me love myself. In fact, I am ashamed of my unloving actions and words. I am also sad that as I age, I am not becoming sweeter and kinder. This actually dismays me.

When I was in graduate school for English literature, I chose to do my doctoral research on George MacDonald. MacDonald was a 19th century Christian who wrote fiction, poetry, and sermons. His thinking has shaped me in more ways than I can identify.

He lost his preaching job because of his beliefs. He believed that God’s love would never rest until hell is emptied, though the way out of hell is to give up saying "I am my own," to cede our sovereignty to God. We must give ourselves to God, and the way we do that is to obey what God says to us to do.

I turned to my friend and mentor George MacDonald and his disciple C. S. Lewis for help in thinking through this topic of love with something that I hope you and I will find useful. Together, George and I will cover topics of vengeance, justice, forgiveness, and obedience, all as aspects of love.  

Much of what follows is directly quoted or my paraphrase of things George MacDonald wrote, particularly in his 3 volumes of Unspoken Sermons.  His writing is infused with scripture.

As St. Paul confessed, “The good I want to do, I don’t do; the evil I don’t want to do, I do.” What MacDonald says is that we do not know the sources or causes of our impulses, our desires, our tendencies, our likings. To put his ideas into modern terms, we are subject to neurological diseases, we catch the contagious evil around us, we have hatreds rooted in our childhoods, we have inherited genetic tendencies and traits. MacDonald also says that God will make every excuse for us that can be made, that God is pleased with every effort we make in the right direction toward love, and that God will not rest until we have been made right from deep within.  MacDonald is fond of quoting that “Our God is a consuming fire.”

We must recognize the inward opposition to love comes from the part where God is not yet present; we need to realize that it takes time for our whole selves to be redeemed because God goes to the roots of ourselves beyond our consciousness, starts there—when God inhabits that part which is presently opposing our desire to love, it will become holy.

MacDonald counsels honesty. Don’t try to feel good when you recognize that you are not good, but cry to God who is good. Wait in the quietness until light goes up in your darkness, and in the meantime, do something positive that needs doing—make your bed, prepare a meal, visit a friend, weed the garden. He says, astringently, we must give up any notion of playing the hero when we are not yet barely honest. Indeed, the purest efforts of will of which we are capable cannot keep us from doing wrong to our neighbor.

Now on to MacDonald on love (what follows are assorted quotations from MacDonald's Unspoken Sermons, many of then collected in C.S. Lewis's George MacDonald, An Anthology):

Why do we love? We do not love because we see why but because we love. In the main, we love because we cannot help it—there is no merit in it but neither is it selfish. The love that is born in us is our salvation from selfishness.  

Where we do not love, the not-loving seems rational. How can we love a man or woman who is mean, unlovely, fault-finding, untrusting and untrustworthy, self-righteous, self-seeking, sneering and contemptuous? These things cannot be loved. But are they the whole of the person? Is there not within the person the divine element of brotherhood or sisterhood, something lovely and lovable, something human, however it seems to be fading or even dying?

Though we cannot make ourselves love, we can and must fight against the hatred inside us.  Hate concentrates itself on the thing hated. Love makes everything lovely.

If your neighbor, who owes you love, gives you hate, you must nevertheless pay that neighbor the love you owe them, says MacDonald (and also Jesus).

Do not heed much if people mock you and speak lies of you, or even in goodwill defend you unworthily. Heed not much if even the righteous turn their backs on you. Only take heed that you turn not from them.  

In the dungeon of self we are breathing in the same air we breathed out.  “Love your neighbor” is the only way out of  this dungeon. “Love your neighbor” frees us into God’s sunlight and the sweet winds of the universe.

However, the impossibility of following God’s command to love our neighbor drives us to God for help.  

God says, “Vengeance is mine.” When we understand God rightly, we might as well pray for God’s vengeance as for God’s forgiveness. God’s vengeance is to destroy the sin, to make the sinner reject and hate it. The same unblinking purifying love God has for us, God has as well for our enemy. No one escapes the flame of God’s love.

Indeed, Christ died to save us not from suffering, but from ourselves; not from injustice, far less from justice, but from being unjust. A human being is not made for justice from another human being but for love, which is greater than justice. Love is the law of our condition without which we cannot render justice.

It may be … less evil to murder a person than to refuse to forgive them. When we will not forgive another, we cannot believe that God is willing, even wanting to forgive us.

The will of his and our Father is the yoke Jesus would have us take and bear together with him—it is this yoke—shared with Jesus—that is light and easy.

Do you ask what is faith in God? I answer, leaving your own way, your purposes, your self, and taking God’s way, God’s purposes, God’s self—the leaving of your trust in humans, in opinion, in character, in atonement itself, and instead doing as God tells you.

Ask yourself whether today you have done one thing because God said "Do it," or abstained from one thing because God said "Do not do it."

To those who obey and thus open the heart’s door to receive the eternal gift, God gives the Spirit of the Son, the spirit of God’s Self to be in them, and lead them to the understanding of all truth…true disciples shall thus always know what they ought to do, though not necessarily what another ought to do.

God does not by the instant gift of the Spirit make us always feel right, desire good, love purity, aspire after God’s self and God’s will. The truth is this. God wants to make us in God’s own image, choosing the good, refusing the evil. For God made our individuality, our apartness, so that freedom would bind us divinely dearer to God’s self with a new and inscrutable marvel of love.

To be right with God is to be right with the universe: one with the power, the love the will of the mighty Mother/Father, the cherisher of joy, the Lord of laughter, whose are all glories, all hopes, who loves everything and hates nothing but selfishness.

It is only in God that the soul has room. In knowing God is life and its gladness. The secret of your own heart you can never know; but you can know God who knows its secret.  

It is by loving and not by being loved that one can come nearest to the soul of another.  Let us be compassionate and humble, and hope for every person.

Let us also be compassionate toward ourselves, humble within ourselves, and hopeful for ourselves.  God is faithful and God’s love is unstoppable until it achieves God’s purpose for us which is to love God wholly and first and to love our neighbors as ourselves.

Who Are Our Untouchables?

Preached at Silverton Friends Church

May 14, 2023

I have been thinking about touch. We use touch as a metaphor when we stay “in touch” on social media or by snail mail, when we find news stories “touching.” And these metaphors work because of the emotional component of touch. Touching is communication without words. A touch can be selfish, taking something without permission from someone else; a touch can be desperate, grabbing something in order not to be lost or destroyed; a touch can be consoling, wiping someone’s tears away or brushing back a sick person’s hair; a touch can be healing. When we touch someone else, we move into their space with intention, and truly only we can be sure of the goodness of those intentions. (I will also add that asking permission to touch is a helpful practice.)

There is also the word “untouchable.” We use this to describe athletes who cut through defenses like butter, who run away from the crowd in races, and so on.  We use this of people who seem to live charmed lives, untouched (!) by poverty, sorrow, sickness, slander. It has an overtone of invulnerability. (And it is often an illusion.)

But the saddest meaning of the word untouchable is quite literal. This person cannot, must not be touched. In historical India, the lowest class of people was and is called the Dalit, the broken, scattered, divided. They were and are outsiders within their own culture. But every culture has its untouchables, including ours. In Jesus’s day, the Mosaic Law recorded in Leviticus defined a number of people as unclean and therefore untouchable, and if you touched them, you were also unclean, at least until the day had passed and you had undergone a ritual bath. Lev. 5:2 says, “If a soul touches any unclean thing, he also shall be unclean and guilty.” Lev. 10:10 says that the priests are responsible to teach and enforce “the difference between holy and unholy and between unclean and clean.” Proper behavior towards unclean people helped define your religious commitment, your holiness.

As you already know, Jesus didn’t care about the proper behavior towards unclean people.  Jesus came as a prophet, both in his words and in his actions. We can look at what Jesus does to understand what he taught and the reverse as well.

One of the causes of uncleanness was the skin disease that caused discoloration called leprosy in the Bible.  (It does not seem to be the same as what we call leprosy today, by the way.) Leviticus spends a lot of time on leprosy. People afflicted with leprosy were required to leave their homes and communities and stay outside the city. (Lev. 13.3) They were not allowed to join in festivals or pilgrimages or religious ceremonies. In Jesus’s time, we see them sometimes travelling together. So it is remarkable that, as recorded in Matthew 8 and Mark 1, Jesus reached out to touch a leper.

Now a leper came to him, imploring him, kneeling down to him and saying to him, “If you are willing, you can make me clean.”  Then Jesus, moved with compassion, stretched out his hand and touched him, and said to him, “I am willing; be clean.” 

The physical seat for compassion and sympathy and mercy was considered at the time to be the bowels. I find this imaginatively engaging. We probably would use the word “visceral” or “guts” so as not to be disgusted, but it carries the idea of an irresistible movement from our depth toward the outside. It is love and caring that must be expressed.  And Jesus makes it visible with a touch.

Now, by rights, Jesus was unclean as a result of this touch, and he doesn’t seem to care about it.  

Another group of unclean persons were women who had “an issue of blood,” whether menstruation, postpartum, or a chronic condition.  They themselves were unclean, and thus outside of religious observance, and everything they touched and everyone who touched them was unclean as well.  Irritatingly, women were unclean for a week after giving birth to a boy and two weeks after a girl.  (Not sure about boy-girl twins…) There were upsides to this, namely that during “an issue of blood” a woman was pretty much set free from wifely and housewifely obligations, but there were significant downsides if the bleeding persisted, as it did for a woman in Jesus’s time. Mark (5) tells the story of the woman who pushed through a crowd in her desperate search for healing and touched Jesus’s robe.  Jesus perceived that healing power had gone out of him, and he asked who had touched him in that way.  When she confessed, he praised her for her faith. At the same time, Jesus was now unclean, and he didn’t seem to care about it. (Of course, all the other people she pushed by were unclean as well, demonstrating the nightmare of keeping track of who is clean and who is unclean.)

Another source of uncleanness was death. A dead body and anyone who touched a dead body were unclean. When the woman touched Jesus’s robe for healing, he was, according to Mark, on his way to see Jairus’s daughter, despite the news that she had died.  He took her by the hand and told her to get up, and she did. 

In Luke 7, Jesus was walking and a funeral procession passed by.  He touched the open coffin, immediately becoming unclean, and told the young man in it to get up. Which he did.  

Jesus did not care that touching the dead person would make him unclean. His compassion for the living moved him to meet a need, and he did so.

No wonder that in the Acts of the Apostles, God taught Peter that no one is unclean through a vision and a visit to Gentiles (unclean). And Paul wrote in Romans 14:14, “Nothing is unclean of itself.”

It is unsurprising, given their religious law, that the people of Jesus’s time and culture distanced and diminished those identified as unclean and therefore unholy. What is surprising is that in our time and culture, and in our individual hearts, we also have people we consider unclean and unholy. I have people I wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole. Maybe you have some of those also. 

But what Jesus teaches us by example is that no one is actually an untouchable. Jesus also teaches us by his word that when we are moved with compassion, we need to reach out with loving, healing touch, whether literal or figurative. We feed the hungry, visit the imprisoned, give water to the thirsty, clothe the ragged and naked, set the captives free, and do even more good together than Jesus was able to do in his short life. Jesus takes all those loving actions as done to him. 

And, just to get real personal, sometimes we have parts of ourselves we despise and consider “untouchable”—we want to partition it off from the rest of our selves and isolate it outside the camp, so to speak.  But what would Jesus do with that aspect, that part of who we are?  Wouldn’t Jesus reach out a hand to stop the bleeding, to give life, to make whole? Could we be similarly compassionate to ourselves?

I think in Jesus we can see someone wholly at peace with himself and with God, and the result of that is that he does not need to hate or fear anyone else. All he really complains about in other people is their unwillingness to admit who they really are, and when they do admit it, he meets them with compassion.