May 17, 2020 - God's Love Frees Us to Love - 1 Corinthians 13:1-13

God’s Love Frees Us to Love

1 Corinthians 13:1-13

Easter 6 – May 17, 2020

 

1 Corinthians 13 familiar to many, if not most, people – even people who have little to do with church or the Bible

·       Famous for its use as a reading at weddings

·       A beautiful, eloquent poem about the amazing-ness of love lived out

·       A great description of love shared – what better reading to have as 2 people are beginning their lives as a married couple?

But Paul was not writing about love to a couple in the throes of young, romantic love

·       Was writing to a whole faith community, the church in the Greek city of Corinth

And far from being a community bound in love, they were fractured and divided

·       This church was on the verge of divorce – in desperate need of relationship counseling!!

·       Talked about that a bit last week – so many conflicts in this young, diverse church, where there were rich and poor, slave and free, men and women, people of Jewish and Gentile backgrounds; differences across the board

·       In chapter 1 of this letter, Paul had reminded them that God had poured out grace upon them, enriching them in speech and knowledge; that they were not lacking in any spiritual gift

·       And here they are, a people in conflict – abusing their freedoms, refusing to share, scorning their neighbor’s spiritual gifts and bragging about their own – and on and on

And so we have this beautiful description of love – a reminder that it doesn’t matter how gifted or talented or amazing they are; if they aren’t living in love, Paul says, then all of it is nothing

·       Though they have all they need to be the community God has called them to be and to reach out to the world around them when they use their gifts together, they are falling apart, crashing into one another in their competition to be the best, the greatest, the most important and valued

 We are fractured and divided in our time too

·       Paul’s call in this letter is for followers of Jesus to love above all else

o   Love spouses or partners

o   Love children and parents

o   Love siblings and extended family

o   Love pretty much every person we encounter (and those we never will meet!)

·       Call to love is the central theme of God to God’s people – both in the Hebrew scriptures and in the words of Jesus (Mark 12:28-31 – Love God with all you are, and love your neighbor as yourself – the greatest commands)

o   Love not as a feeling, but as an action – a deliberate choosing of relationship with the other over selfishness

o   And yet we are so often divorced from one another

§  If we don’t have this damage in our close/family relationships, look at the world around us

§  Don’t listen to one another, don’t see or try to understand another POV, We judge one another, resent others, boast, envy, allow our irritation to spill over, cling to our own version of the truth, taking up our positions and refusing to budge

o   We become noisy gongs and clanging cymbals, not playing in concert with others, but seeking to drown one another out

·       We fail to live into this grand vision of love

Make no mistake – Paul has set the bar high when it comes to the topic of love and what it looks like to live that out

·       When I preach this at weddings (which I often have), I often point out that there are clearly times when we fail – we are often impatient and unkind; we do get envious and boastful and arrogant and rude; We do insist on our own way and get irritable and resentful

·        And maybe we don’t rejoice in wrongdoing, but we’ve certainly been known to say (or think!), “I told you so!”

We will inevitably fail when we try to live out this kind of active love

·       Paul does not describe a warm and fuzzy kind of love, but a fierce, dedicated, hard-working love that chooses over and over and over again to work it out, to work it through

But the good news is that even though we cannot love in this way completely quite yet, one day we will

·       Because we are already loved in this way by the God who created us, who came to be one of us, who lived and died and rose again for us

·       The love the Paul describes, the love that Paul calls us to live out toward one another – that is a love that we have already received from God in Jesus

·       It is unshakable. It is never-ending

·       Though God knows us completely, with all of our faults and failings, God loves us with a love more powerful than death!

·       Knowing that we are already loved in this way: fully, completely, with no reservation – we are freed to love one another, to be agents of God’s love in a hurting, sometimes-hard-to-love world, seeking not our own way, but God’s way so that we may be part of God’s mission to love, bless, and redeem the whole world

·       May this love overflow from our lives into our relationships and the world around us so that they too may know how much they are loved.

·       Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

September 22, 2019 - God Blesses Our Wrestling - Genesis 32:22-20

God Blesses Our Wrestling

Genesis 32:22-30

Pentecost + 15 – September 22, 2019

Jacob Wrestles God

Intro: Kids wrestling with a parent who is clearly the stronger person

·       My kids wanting to wrestle with their dad (or sometimes me)

·       Physical contact, joy, maybe getting something out of their system

·       Clearly not going to win, and yet, persistent in the wrestling

TT: Jacob wrestled a mightier opponent

·     Thought about this in light of this story from Genesis

·     We hear about Jacob, whose name means “heel” because he came out of the womb grasping his twin brother Esau’s heel.

o  Even in utero the 2 wrestled with one another, trying to best each other, and this continued throughout life into adulthood

o  Sibling rivalry, each one a favorite of one of their parents (Esau – Isaac; Jacob – Rebekah)

·     The name Jacob also has the sense of supplanter or trickster

o  He is one who uses moments of weakness in others to his advantage – getting Esau to sell his birthright for a bowl of stew

o  Deceiving an old, nearly blind Isaac into giving him the blessing that was supposed to be for the first born son (at mother Rebekah’s urging)

o  And has to flee to his uncle’s in a distant land in order to escape Esau’s murderous thoughts of revenge

·     Jacob is older now, perhaps wiser – sent back on his way to his father’s land by God

o  And still concerned, many years later (20ish?) about how Esau will respond – so sends messengers ahead, who return to tell him that Esau is coming to meet him with 400 men!

o  So Jacob sends a series of gifts ahead of him – cattle, camels, sheep, goats, donkeys, in hopes of appeasing him

o  Splits camp into 2 – and finally sends family across the river and spends the night alone

·     Jacob is left alone, the reading says – and a man wrestled him until daybreak

TW: We wrestle with God sometimes too

·     Oh, we can relate to Jacob’s wrestling, can’t we?

·     Not the physical, but the mental, emotional times when we find ourselves alone, often at night

o  And the struggle and the doubts and the questions come and attack us – or at least that’s how it feels

o  Not usually just one night

·     When uncertainty of life is just so present and so raw

o  And anxiety and fear just won’t leave us alone and let us get some much needed sleep

o  Sooo very many reasons; sometimes rational, sometimes not so much

·     And we wrestle in those moments, not just with worry and stress, but if we are people of faith, we find we are wrestling with God too

o  Asking the deep, hard, unanswerable questions of why bad things happen to good people

o  Wondering if God has the power to fix everything that is going wrong, or might go wrong, why God doesn’t just fix them already; why God lets such awful and traumatic things happen to us and the people we love

·     We want to pin God down, get an answer, get some resolution, find some peace

·     Don’t tend to enjoy it in the ways that kids enjoy wrestling with their parents, and yet…

GT: God Blessed Jacob in the Wrestling

·     This story from Genesis is a great reminder that wrestling with God is not a bad thing

·     In fact, even though Jacob walks away limping, he walks away blessed

o  Through his persistence and willingness to hold on to this being who had taken hold of him, Jacob finds himself given a new name – Israel – “the one who strives with God”

o  A new identity that doesn’t ignore or forget what he has been in the past, but that opens the way for him to grow into someone different going forward

o  And who becomes the father of a nation that will continue to wrestle with God through all of the ups and downs, rebellion and faithfulness that will be a part of their lives and relationship with God

o  A nation, a people, who are blessed to be a blessing to the world, ever since God called Abraham – this is the covenant made; and some of that blessing comes through the wrestling

GW: Wrestling with God is part of our spiritual inheritance – and God blesses us in the wrestling

·     God is a mightier opponent than we are, just like kids with grown-ups

·     But just as a parent will engage the wrestling, even though they could “win” almost immediately, b/c they know that the wrestling is about connection and contact and a need to work things out – God honors our need to wrestle with someone bigger than ourselves – even though God too could beat us in a second

·     God enters into the wrestling with us, holding on to us in the midst of our struggles and our grappling for as long as the wrestling takes, knowing that sometimes that what we need to do in order to feel and experience God’s love, in the blessing that comes after the struggle

·     Because God isn’t in this great wrestling match to win by besting us, God is in it to win by drawing us to God’s self – we see that in the death of Jesus, who allowed himself to get pinned to a cross so that we might see the depth of God’s love

·     And so, we too, are given a new name through the life and death and resurrection of Jesus – joined to him in the waters of baptism (water is a big thing in the Bible and in our lives!) – we are given the name “beloved child of God”, no matter what else our given names may be, no matter what others (or even we ourselves) may call us

·     God wrestles with us as a parent with beloved children, holding on to us until our wrestling is done. No matter how long that takes, God will never let us go.

·     Thanks be to God. Amen.