Bound by Love II      Rev. Thomas Cary Kinder

First Congregational Church in Thetford, Vermont   UCC

November 1, 2009    Twenty-Second Sunday after Pentecost,  All Saints Day

Mark 12:28-34

 

A Psalm of Love, adapted from Psalms 16, 23, 119, 122 and 133,

and John 14 and I John 4.

 

Leader: I was glad when they said unto me,

“Let us go into the house of the Lord!”

People: God is love, and those who abide in love

abide in God, and God abides in them.

All: You are our God.

We have no good apart from you.

We are bound by love.

Leader: Happy are those who walk in the law of God,

who seek God with their whole heart.

Great peace have they who love your law;

nothing can make them stumble.

People:  Truly I love your commandments more than gold,

more than fine gold.

All:  “I give you a new commandment,

that you love one another.  Just as I have loved you,

you should love one another.”

We are bound by love.

Leader: Behold how good and how pleasant it is

as we dwell together in unity.

People:  Surely goodness and mercy shall follow us

all the days of our lives,

and we will dwell in the house of the Lord forever,

All:  Bound by love.

 

Last week we celebrated the 100^th anniversary of the Grafton-Orange Association, the collection of local United Church of Christ congregations to which we belong.  We meet twice a year for two hours, but back in the old days when people came by train or horse, the meetings lasted two days.  They would hear missionaries from China or Turkey, widening their perspective in ways that we take for granted in the age of global media.  What we need to hear at Grafton-Orange Association meetings now is just the opposite.  We need to hear what is going on in the church in North Thetford or Bradford or Lyme.

A year ago the Grafton-Orange Association met in this sanctuary.  The global economic collapse had begun, and no one knew how far it would fall or what the impact would be on our towns and congregations.  One of the things we talked about that day was what each church was prepared to do to help people in financial trouble.  It was comforting to think that in each of our towns there was a church people could turn to, a church that felt responsible to help its neighbors.  We came away with the sense of a network of support that we were a part of that stretched across our valley and around the world, a network bound together not so much by common association as by common devotion to Christ’s way of love.

The gospel reading in the lectionary that Sunday was Matthew’s version of the lectionary today, the great love commandments.  The churches heard the passage read in the morning, and in the afternoon sang a hymn together that I would like to read you now. 

Jesus’ two commandments bind us

To our neighbor and our God.

When alone, those loves remind us

Of connections deep and broad.

Everywhere we see a steeple

We can find within its shade

Faithful, caring, serving people

Made one by Christ’s loves obeyed.

 

In a world where fear is rising,

Wars and plagues and desperate need,

When the planet seems capsizing

Under storms of human greed,

How can one small church keep sailing

As such waves crash from above?

With whole global systems failing,

How weak seems our hope in love.

 

Yet God’s weakness is far stronger

Than the greatest human force.

Greed may rage, but love lasts longer

And restores the storm-lost course.

Nor alone are churches striving,

Bound as one by love’s command.

Though the fiercest winds are driving,

Strong in Christ and love we stand.

 

The hymn boasts that churches that are bound by love have the power to overcome adversity, but churches do not always stay bound by love.  In fact, it is possible for very religious people to interpret love sometimes in a way that looks an awful lot like indifference or even hate.  Adversity can bring out the worst in a church, rather than the best.  How has love fared in the church during this hard year?  Love is the essence of every saint.  How have the saints fared?

Before looking at that, it would be good to review what the scriptures teach about the love our religion is supposed to have at its core.

Today’s responsive reading began with the 122^nd Psalm and ended with the 23^rd, both of which talk about dwelling in the house of the Lord, as the King James Version calls it.  One Psalm expresses gladness to go into the house of the Lord and the other expresses the assurance that to dwell in the house of the Lord is to have goodness and mercy forever.  So the church should be a place that people can love, that people can enter with gladness, where they find goodness and mercy not just on a good day, not just in days of prosperity, but all the days of their life.  Goodness and mercy need to be constants in the house of God.

These Psalms were read by the Jewish religion of Jesus’ day.  They were ideals then as much as now.  But then as now, the way religious people acted did not always resemble their religious ideals.  In today’s gospel passage, a scribe approaches Jesus with a question.  Everywhere else in the gospel the scribes are enemies and their questions are intended to get Jesus in trouble.  So as soon as we hear that a scribe is asking him a question, we know to brace ourselves for confrontation with the religious establishment that was trying to get rid of Jesus. 

The scribe asks a question that rabbis often wrestled with: what is the most important principle of our faith?  Jesus quotes two passages from the law of Moses in the Hebrew Scriptures, the first being a prominent segment of Deuteronomy called the Shema that would be an expected answer—to love God with all our being.  But the second was less prominent—to love our neighbor as our self.  It culminates a series of laws in the book of Leviticus that prohibit exploiting or oppressing the weak and poor, laws that the religious system of the scribes and priests routinely ignored. 

Then an amazing thing happens: the scribe agrees with Jesus and honors him.  He says that these two love commandments taken together are “much more important than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices.”  This was somewhat revolutionary for a scribe to say, because the religious establishment that was the source of the scribe’s power was built on the structure of offerings and sacrifices.  Jesus was impressed and said, “You are not far from the realm of God.”

It is important to note that Jesus did not say that the scribe had entered the realm of God.  In order to do that he would have to practice these commandments, not just commend them.  As long as he was part of the system of injustice and oppression, he had not yet attained the realm of God where neighbors are loved as our own self, where our neighbor is especially any person in need.

Today the sad truth is that many churches have not attained the realm of God, either, that Jesus came calling us to enter and establish on earth.  Many Christians actively oppose or at least fail to promote public policies designed to help the poor, including universal health care.  Many Christians fiercely defend the economic system that makes people poor and keeps people poor, or they stand by and say nothing even as the poor get poorer.  How can the kind of poor people Jesus loved and served sit in the pew of such a church on a Sunday morning and say, “I was glad when they said unto me, ‘Let us go into the house of the Lord?’”  How can they say “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever,” when that house of the Lord is not extending its mercy to them? 

We know from last year’s Grafton-Orange Association meeting that there are other churches that are truer to Christ’s commandments.  What about us?  Have we kept ourselves bound by the commandments to love God and love our neighbor during this difficult year?  Have we kept this a house of loving saints where people who are suffering hardship can find goodness and mercy and be glad to dwell? 

A year ago this week we were deeply concerned about our own economic problems.  We were watching our investment funds crash, and while pledges were holding steady in the stewardship campaign, one-time gifts were far behind the previous year.  The Trustees and Church Council prepared three budgets for Annual Meeting, one that made extreme cuts in programs and staff to balance the budget, one that made modest cuts to reduce the deficit, and a third option that carried the prior year’s budget forward and created a whopping deficit. 

As we approached Annual Meeting last January fear seemed like a reasonable thing to feel and let guide us.  In the end what dominated the discussions was not fear, nor self-interested love, but generous-hearted love.  People felt it was not right to cut staff in the midst of an economic crash.  People felt it was not right to reduce our ministry when so many would be needing extra care.  People spoke about their love of our Mission Statement and all that this church stands for in the world, “promoting nonviolence, creating a loving, just society for all, caring for youth, for the struggling people of our world and community, and for the health of God’s creation.”  People promised to make an extra effort to bring in the support we would need to keep going.

That has happened to a large degree.  We may not end the year with a balanced budget, but we will end with a much smaller deficit than we feared. 

As a result of the “Yes We Can!” spirit that we heard at Annual Meeting, we have been operating at full capacity this year.  So we were able to make a difference in the struggle for marriage equality, and we were able to take a stand for single payer, universal health care, and we were even able to save our piano from demise.  We were able to contribute generously to the CROPWalk to help struggling people here and around the world.  We were able to give thousands of dollars directly to people in dire financial need through our Floyd Dexter Fund as the recession hit our region.  Our Calling and Caring Coordinator, Eleanor Zue, was able to help people find other sources of support through public programs and other churches.  We are getting more requests all the time and our Floyd Dexter Fund is getting low, but I have no doubt that the generosity of this church community will continue, despite our own struggles.

And we are struggling.  This fall has been the hardest time in our church that I can remember.  One after another, one leader and saint of the church after another has had an emergency heart procedure or received other devastating medical or financial news or gone through the death of someone very close to them. 

At the beginning of this unprecedented stretch of hard times among us we had a healing service.  Tammy Patten reported at it that her daughter Eleanor had asked why bad things happen to people who do so much good.  Tammy replied that she did not know, but maybe it was so that we could show them how much we love them and they could feel how supported they are.  That is a very good answer, and it is certainly what has happened here.  We have dedicated ourselves to making people feel loved and supported this fall. 

But we could say more.  We could say that our hardship has given us the opportunity not just to draw near the realm of God by loving Christ’s commandments, but to enter the realm of God by living Christ’s commandments.  Or to say the same thing in a different way, it has given us the opportunity to make this church more than ever a place people love and feel grateful for, where we feel glad to come in and dwell.  The Apostle Paul said that we can have all the gifts and all the strengths in the world, but if we do not have love, we are nothing.  Love is what makes all the difference, and in this difficult year we have kept ourselves bound by love.

If we continue loving our way through this ongoing storm, we will emerge stronger and able to do more good in the world than ever before.  In the meantime, we will continue to have the immense comfort of this house of God’s goodness and mercy, this house of loving saints, whatever may come.

Let us pray together in silence…