25Pentecost2024 Deut6Mk12LoveGodNeighbor 10Nov2024
Grandsons Finn & Luke have taken to composing songs – like Luke’s on staying home when he’s sick. Back to home. Back to home. Cause that’s where I feel safe when I feel bad. Back to home. Back to home.
I hear in Luke’s song a reminder to return home again and again to the gospel. We’ve heard myriads of election reactions this week, and they’ll continue. Today, I invite us not to more reaction but to a homecoming in the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Christ, God’s love made flesh, our true home.
We are church in three expressions, congregation, synod, and churchwide – part of something larger than ourselves. We’re a public church meant to address the public square – not by demonizing or lording it over each other, but by living what we know, that God’s love is most clearly seen in the cross.
Every Sunday we gather at the foot of the cross to be sent back into the world, changed by our encounter with Word, Meal and fellowship. Our ending song is a “Sending” Song – meant to guide our engagements in the world.
Today we’ll sing the prophet Micah’s summary of what is required of us by God who is love. Micah 6:8 asks, What does the Lord require of you?
This old question is our question too. What does trust in God who raises Jesus from the dead require? What is it to have as home base the cross of Christ?
Christians across the US aren’t of one mind – which isn’t anything new for people trying to discern the ways of God in the world. Today’s gospel story includes an intense exchange among people all claiming alignment with God.
A question is brought to Jesus. What is the first commandment? The questioners agree Jesus gets is right. Love God with all you’ve got and love your neighbor as yourself. There is no greater command than the combination of love of God and neighbor.
Christians today probably agree Jesus has that commandment right. Where we don’t agree on is how this commandment should be lived out – on how God’s command to love should play out in the world. Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote in Strength to Love, “If the church does not recapture its prophetic zeal it will become an irrelevant social club.” May it not be so among us.
There is a shape to claiming the cross as our central symbol. It calls us to be a servant church, to let life and ministry align with the self-giving love of Jesus.
I find Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins a wise guide for today. He wrote, “As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame…” In other words, kingfisher birds catch fireflies to eat, and dragonflies are called dragonflies for a reason. Hopkins goes on:
“Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Crying What I do is me: for that I came.
I say more: the just man justices;
Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is –
Christ – for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.”
That means, “through the features of our faces” – we who are baptized into Christ. We belong to Christ. We sing this as the newly baptized are walked down the aisle. You belong to Christ, in whom you have been baptized.
“Each mortal thing does one thing and the same: …
Crying What I do is me: for that I came…
Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is –
Christ – for Christ plays in ten thousand places,”
…through the features of your faces.
We learn what love really looks like by gazing on our Savior Christ Jesus. To say we are Christian is to live as ones belonging to Christ crucified and risen back into life through the Spirit who makes of us Christ’s body broken open for the world. Christian love finds its shape in the cross. That’s home base.
Christ is raised out of a self-giving death to continue love’s work now in us. I don’t know how we can call ourselves Christian if our lives are not shaped by cruciform love.
I’ve been singing today’s Song of the Day all week.
“O Christ, your heart compassionate, bore every human pain.
Its beating was the pulse of God; its breadth, God’s vast domain.
O Christ, create new hearts in us that beat in time with yours…”
Till we become “love’s open doors.”
This is our mandate – to become love’s open doors. No election results, whether we like the results or not, change Christ, crucified and risen, or change the call to not huddle behind locked doors but be Love’s open doors.
So we return to the question we began with: What does the Lord require of us? We gather to hear the gospel, share the peace, and receive Christ’s body and blood that we might become by grace and gift what Hopkins says:
Christ playing, lovely in limbs and eyes not his, through our faces and actions of advocating for good in this world God so loves. What the Lord requires is that we do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with our God.
Questions the cross of Christ call us to ask in these post-election days are: What is just for all people? What is truly kind? How does walking humbly differ from other ways of walking? Jesus shows us the way.
Let us take this prayer to heart, O Christ, create new hearts in us that beat in time with yours. And I pray for this beloved ministry, that God’s love will grace you to grow ever in sync with the pulse of God.
Look to the cross, friends. May its shape of love become our way of life.
Amen
+Pastor Peg, LCM, LA