Epiphany 7c Monroe
Nearing the end of Epiphany
Ash Wednesday will be here in less than two weeks. If nothing else we can recognize the passing of time. You know the saying that time goes faster the older you get. One of the young ladies at my therapy commented as February came and gone that she was having trouble keeping track of the new month. I responded saying I’m still having trouble with it being after the millennium. A piece I came across yesterday said, "I just had it brought to my attention that 1980 and 2021 are as far apart as 1980 and 1939."
Time is somehow getting stranger and stranger. Something I thought was obvious turns out to be not so obvious.
I don’t know where I first heard the saying, "If that’s true it’s important." What the scripture seems to say to me today is a little like what I’ve described. It seems like I understand it, but after a little thought I end up saying, "Wait? What?" What seemed like an ordinary truth turns out to be strange. And if it’s true it’s important.
Challenge
"If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them. If you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners do the same. ... But love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return. Your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High; for he is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.
Did I hear that correctly? Love your enemies?
Jesus (Sermon)
Last week we heard from Luke’s Gospel just before this passage. Today it’s a continuation of that sermon on the plain. I characterize that sermon as direct and to the point, contrasting it with the similar words of Matthews Sermon on the Mount which tends to spiritualize the lessons. Blessed are the poor. Blessed are the hungry. Love your enemies.
It’s ordinary words to be sure but they seem strike deep within us a dissonant chord. It’s not the world we live in.
If we let the words in they will challenge us. If we have ears to listen the message of scripture has the power to change us.
What is love? What does scripture ask of us?
Love
O Lord, you have taught us that without love whatever we do is worth nothing:
If that's true it's important.
A few weeks ago we heard Paul talk about love -- "faith, hope, and love abide. But the greatest of these is love."
Love seems like the concept of time I described above. It seems to be something we all know and experience. But what is it? Really? Is it really what it seems? When we speak the words do we let them in?
Love is?
For many of us love is romantic love. I actually learned a word in this last year that is common place to some. “Rom-Com”. Romantic comedy. It's all about love isn't it?
From Romeo and Juliet going backwards all the way to ancient Greeks and Chinese authors we can read about love and all its various manifestations. Many languages have multiple words for different kinds of love. In English we require the word love to carry lots of freight.
If I were to go around the room and ask each of you what is love, I suspect I would hear a huge variety of different kinds of responses.
Love can be a euphemism for things we want to avoid saying explicitly. Love can be an emotion and feeling, something inside us that we can't quite put our fingers on. It can also be the driving force behind self sacrifice for others, and service to those who are poor or in need.
100 years ago a theologian popularized the notion that in the Bible we can see three different concepts of love at work: eros, philia, and agape. romantic love as between lovers, brotherly love as between members of the community, and self-giving love exemplified by Jesus.
Clearly love is not something simple or obvious.
"God is love"
To pursue it further and to deepen the richness of the concept of love we're dealing with here, we have the example from the New Testament itself. The first letter of John in the fourth chapter.
So we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him. 1 John 4
I have heard frequently reference to the so-called God of love in the New Testament. I have heard people contrast the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament while expressing their preference for the New Testament God of love. For myself I hear those descriptions with a grain of salt because it suggests that there are multiple gods who somehow have different name tags or characteristics. I have long been convinced that either there is one living God or there's not.
But clearly the author in the first letter of John was expressing some particular insight about how Jesus has brought his followers to a new experience and understanding of who the living God is.
If it's true it's important.
Four levels of love (Bernard of Clairvaux)
Just this past week my spiritual director pointed me in the direction of a well-known outline of love from a writer of the Middle Ages Bernard of Clairvaux. He describes the development of love from a focus on oneself, moving to a love of God, and finally returning to love self. The whole movement being built on the basic reality that God, the living God, the one who created everything is essentially love. Bernard asks
“Why should God be loved?” I answer: the reason for loving God is God himself...
2. The First Degree of Love: Love of Self for Self’s Sake
Love is a natural human affection. It comes from God. But we don't initially recognize that God is the cause of our love.
3. The Second Degree of Love: Love of God for Self’s Sake
We begin to recognize that God's love protects and nourishes us. We will begin to love God even if it is for our own sake. We love God because we have learned that we can do all things through him, and without him we can do nothing.
4. The Third Degree of Love: Love of God for God’s Sake
We gradually recognize that God's love is always there for us. Thus, we begin to love God not merely for our own sakes, but for himself...
5. The Fourth Degree of Love: Love of Self for God’s Sake
Blessed are those who experience the 4th degree of love wherein we love ourselves for God’s sake. Such experiences are rare and come only for a moment. In a manner of speaking, we lose ourselves as though we did not exist, utterly unconscious of ourselves and emptied of ourselves...
Saint Bernard describes love moving from love of self upwards becoming a mystical experience. He even says it's a rare experience. But the whole symphony of love is in fact common place and all around us since the living God is the God of love.
We have an example in our first reading today of how love is both common place and extraordinary at the same time. #### Joseph reconciling with brothers We hear today from the end of the very long Joseph saga in the book of Genesis. It reads actually something like an ancient novel. There are fallible parents trying to care for an unruly group of children. One child favored over all the others. Resentment and plots for revenge. Plan for killing that is modified to only send the brother into slavery.
But the God who loves, the same God who turns upside down the expectations of the world, spoke to us last week about the blessing reserved for the poor and the hungry, for those who mourn, for those who are weak, that God had in mind the redemption of all the turmoil and ache and grief.
The brothers of Joseph have come to Egypt seeking relief and help because they're hungry and poor. They don't have any awareness that Joseph stands before them with the power and authority to give them life.
Joseph reveals himself to his brothers and they weep tears of joy, overcome with the power of love.
I came to an awareness of the love of God at the birth of my first child. As the doctor held him up so that I could see a flood of tears flowed from me, bottled up for years.
You have similar stories. Hang onto them and remember them. “O Lord, you have taught us that without love whatever we do is worth nothing.”
Back to liturgy ### Notes
http://www.lectionarypage.net/YearC_RCL/Epiphany/CEpi7_html.RCL
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