Message from Pastor Stanton for December 2019
I went to a conference last month in the Twin Cities to hear Brian McLaren talk about change in the church. In just a few hours he rattled off quite a few memorable lines. For example, “There are two kinds of pain: the pain of change and the pain of not changing.” The claim, of course, is that pain is inescapable. Because nothing stays the same. “So, we have to decide: what kind of pain do we want to experience?” This was not a conference for the faint of heart!
The primary change he advocates for is to ‘migrate’ (his book is called “The Great Spiritual Migration”) from a system of beliefs, known primarily through doctrines, to a way of Life/a way of Love. In the gospel of Mark, when the scribe—who knows his Godlaws—asks Jesus, “Which commandment is the most important one of all?”, he is asking for ONE. Boil it down for me Jesus! Jesus responds by saying, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.” Then Jesus continues, “The second is this: (Remember, the scribe didn’t ask for two!) You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Love of God and love of neighbor are equally important to Jesus. They are intertwined. Jesus does not command that we believe a certain belief. He commands the scribe to LOVE: God and neighbor equally.
“I say “be careful” about how we imagine being a church who is God’s Love in the world because most every other time God followers leap out from comfortable priorities of the world and into God’s Love-priorities, they get in trouble. But at least it’s holy trouble!”
Loving the neighbor means loving the stranger, the outsider, the outcast and even the enemy. Remember the parable of the Good Samaritan, which is Jesus’ response to a lawyer who asked, “who is my neighbor?” Jesus is basically saying that the ‘others’, our hurt enemies, deserve our care, concern and resources as much as ‘our own’ people.
What if being Church meant being God’s Love in the world instead of simply being a group of people who agreed on a list of doctrines?
Be careful with your answer. According to McLaren, if we allow ourselves to make this migration, we will find ourselves recognizing that money is a liar. We will also see, as Pope Francis saw and shared in his encyclical, “Laudato Si” that “the earth cries out” in pain as much as we can hear “the cries of the poor.” Migrating to a spirituality of Love rather than doctrine will change the ways we know neighbors, ourselves, Creation and God. And it will hurt a bit. Because we ourselves will be changed. Our greed will perish. Our buried racism and classism will perish. Our indifference to harming the earth with our carelessness will perish. And our Love will blossom in unexpected ways. I say “be careful” about how we imagine being a church who is God’s Love in the world because most every other time God followers leap out from comfortable priorities of the world and into God’s Love-priorities, they get in trouble. But at least it’s holy trouble!
God modelled this dangerous choice for Love most obviously through the birth, life, death and resurrection of Jesus. As we approach the season of Christmas, there are lights and gatherings and gifts and feasts. But the celebrations are not simply done for us to feel full and a little tipsy. Faithfully done, Christmastime remembers that God chooses the harder way: stooping down from the heavenly places to be born as one of us. In Jesus, God is born as a mortal, who will model Love and true Life which is so powerful it overcomes Death.
We, too, as God’s church can be born anew this Christmas season. Baptized into the Love and Life of Christ, we can be God’s Love in the world courageously seeking ways to love God and love neighbor… equally.