It's My Job to Love

Evensong sermon from July 1st, based upon Romans 13.1-10

If you’ve been hearing any Stateside news over the past few weeks, I’m sure you’ll be aware of the controversy over the enforcing of a policy to separate parents and children during immigration investigations of those seeking asylum. 

If you’ve seen any photos of the facilities and circumstances some of these children have been kept in, it’s difficult to imagine any justification for it, let alone justifications being made based on Christian belief and scripture. 

US attorney general Jeff Sessions quoted a line from the Romans passage we’ve heard this evening.

He said: "I would cite you to the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13, to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained them for the purpose of order."

In using this line he’s making a statement so broad that it could be used to justify anything a government does, whether ethical and moral or not. 

Sessions is a member of the United Methodist Church and his use of scripture in this way has actually led more than 600 members of the church in the US to register formal complaints against him, for violating the UMC’s Book of Discipline, its code of laws and social principles. The charges could lead to a church trial, though that’s unlikely.

The problem we have here is the transposing of one sentence of scripture, written in about 55AD, written to a completely different people in a completely different context, and trying to make that fit this situation. Sessions ignored what comes right before this passage;

"If your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink; for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads." 

And he ignores what comes at the end of this evening’s passage:

“Love your neighbour as yourself. Love does no wrong to a neighbour; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law.”

So given it’s context what do we think Paul meant when he wrote Romans 13? And can this modern situation be filtered through it? 

It appears Paul is telling the church in Rome to tow the line with the authorities, yet we know Paul himself was jailed multiple times. Was Paul concerned his letter might be read and trying to protect the church? Maybe the entire section is advising the Roman Christians to keep their heads down and out of trouble to protect them.

There’s also an echo of Jesus’ words in Mark 12: “Give to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”

Unlike it’s recent use we can’t take this sentence or even the passage from this evening in isolation. So much of the letter to the Romans spends time discussing how the Jews, Christian Jews and Roman Christians should live together. The Jewish people were exiled from Rome under emperor Claudius and were now returning after his death, Paul was encouraging the Romans to accept them, to live alongside them and emphasising the ways in which they were similar. This reading of Romans is the antitheses of Jeff Sessions use of the scripture, with an agenda to divide and separate and to emphasise difference.

You may feel that my reading of scripture supports my own agenda, which I guess it does, but I'd like to think that my agenda is one of love: 

“Love does no wrong to a neighbour; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law.” If I’m to be judged, I’d prefer the charge to be that I was too inclusive, too loving, than of using a faith-based belief to separate families, exclude and judge. 

I have a lot of issues with Billy Graham but there’s a quote of his I’ve heard half a dozen times in the last fortnight:

“It is the Holy Spirit's job to convict, God's job to judge and my job to love.”

It’s our job to love. If the way we use our bible, our holy scriptures, goes in any way against Jesus’ core teaching of Loving God and our neighbour as our self, then we’re doing it wrong. 

Who Then is This?

Playing catch up on homilies I haven't posted!

Based on Mark 4.35-end

“Who then is this?”. How would the disciples have answered that question before what happened on the boat? And what would their answer be after it? How could they even begin to fathom what they’d just witnessed?

We might wonder when Jesus says to his disciples “why are you afraid?” if they’re scared of the storm they’ve just encountered, or scared because of what they’ve just witnessed Jesus do; who then is this? Any abstract ideas or beliefs, or any theories they may have had have now stopped being theoretical, they’re confronted with an overwhelming display of power that can’t be reasoned or rationalised. 

This man who looks like them, is from a background like theirs, has a family like theirs, just rebuked the wind and sea, and the wind and sea listened. I think that might cause the disciples to maybe be a bit fearful of Jesus, and even more than that- to fear what this means, to generate more questions, because as they try to fathom “who then is this” they also have to confront “who then am I?” and “what then does this mean for my life?”

When any of us is confronted with the reality of who Jesus is, that he is from God and is God, it has to change us. We can’t know and believe that and then be left unchanged; because if we believe Jesus is who he demonstrates he is, we have to believe in the things that he said and did, and if we believe in those things we have to start living them; and that’s hard. And it’s scary. It can involve a total deconstruction and reconstruction of our lives, motivations and principles. 

In this passage we see Jesus’ place in the created order- his place over the created order as he commands it and it responds. 

We can often feel like the disciples in the storm, overwhelmed by chaos, waiting for God’s intervention. Sometimes it feels like everything is out of control around us, and we look to see where God can be in this, and hope that he will calm the storm. Sometimes this passage is called the gospel for the overwhelmed, but there’s also a message there that God’s presence and intervention can be unnerving, as can the times when it feels God is napping during our own storms and crises. 

Jesus asks “Have you still no faith?” after the disciples witness his power. When we’re waiting out our own storms sometimes faith is all we have, and the knowledge that the gospel stories don’t end with “my God, why have you forsaken me?” but with God overcoming the very worst that humanity could do, and the disciples finally knowing, really knowing “who then is this”, and as we must be when we come to that truth, forever being changed by it. 

Mary Magdalene

They Have Taken My Lord Away – Janet Morley

It was unfinished.

We stayed there, fixed, until the end,

women waiting for the body that we loved;

and then it was unfinished.

There was no time to cherish, cleanse, anoint;

no time to handle him with love,

no farewell.

Since then, my hands have waited,

aching to touch even his deadness,

smooth oil into bruises that no longer hurt,

offer his silent flesh my finished act of love.

I came early, as the darkness lifted,

to find the grave ripped open and his body gone;

container of my grief smashed, looted,

leaving my hands still empty.

I turned on the man who came:

"They have taken my Lord - where is his corpse?

Where is the body that is mine to greet?

He is not gone

I am not ready yet, I am not finished -

I cannot let him go I am not whole."

And then he spoke, no corpse,

and breathed,

and offered me my name.

My hands rushed to grasp him;

to hold and hug

and grip his body close;

to give myself again, to cling to him,

and lose myself in love.

"Don't touch me now"

I stopped and waited, my rejected passion

hovering between us like some dying thing.

I, Mary, stood and grieved and then departed.

I have a gospel to proclaim.