Trinity Episcopal Church

Here’s a question for you to consider.  If you were to pick one word that described you – yourself – to the world – the word by which you are “known” what would that word be. 

Perhaps more to the point…  if those of us gathered here in this sanctuary were to pick one word but which we are “known” in the larger community around us who would that word be?  Would we all pick the same word?  If we did all agree on one word would we all be representative of that word or would some of us be more representative than others?

These lessons today,

1.                  the story of Peter’s confrontation with the “believers” in Jerusalem,

2.                  the Psalm acknowledging that the sun and the moon, the monsters of the deep , the cattle and the birds, and even the kings and princes, men and women, young and old – all are to stand and praise God with one voice;

3.                  that wonderful reading from Revelation where we are reminded of the totality of God’s presence, the futility of our efforts to control or to perpetuate our own small worlds in the face of God’s New Creation,

4.                  and finally this reading from John, offering this teaching to the disciples and to us on what it means to grasp

a.                   the expansiveness and inclusiveness of God’s love as shown in the gift of the Holy Spirit

b.                  and the high bar to which Jesus’ life and ministry of love calls us . 

      These are rich lessons that beg to be preached.  They are fundamental to our theology, the core of our faith.  And if we are honest with ourselves they speak of one of the most elusive qualities of being a Christian – they call us to widen our understanding of who is loved by God and who God desires that we love.  Let me say that again,  These lessons call us to widen, to make more expansive – our understanding of who is loved by God and they tell us very plainly that we are to love those whom God loves. 

      The catch is how does this play out in our everyday lives.  In this obtuse statement that Jesus makes about God’s glory, he reveals to us a fundamental change from our understanding of what it means to be glorified.  Jesus says that the source of God’s glory is not fame but love.  Instead of power God chooses the humility of the cross, instead of worldly renown God chooses compassion.  God is revealed perfectly in Jesus and so we look to Jesus’ life to give us clues on who is loved by God and who is not – who we are to love and who we are not.  Simple right?  Wrong!  At least not if you take the last 2000 years of religious history as an indicator of our understanding and commitment. 

      When I was in school taking history courses,  I had to learn dates for everything.  There was 587 BCE, 79 AD, 1492, 1776, 1588, 1863, 1941.  There are two things that these dates have in common first they are dates that are taught mostly to North American and European children and they are all dates of some sort of conflict or oppression.  It seems that we tend to follow our history through our wars and conquests.  I say these are taught mostly to American and European children because Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Arab and whatever – they have their own list of conflicts and conquest dates to remember – the principle is the same…    Most of the time when we talk about who we are  -whether that is individually or communal - we talk about what makes us different from others.  

      From the day we slip into this world – perhaps from the day we are conceived – we compare ourselves to others.  Am I as handsome as he is?  Is my skin as blemish free as hers?  How can I outmaneuver him so that I will get that high paying job?  He/she is not as smart/pretty/ upright/motivated, loved/hated as I am because he/she is a man/woman, black/white, native/immigrant, straight/gay, legal/illegal, educated/or not.  You pick the appropriate X versus Y category.  I don’t care who you are or how liberal or enlightened you think yourself to be (and I am talking to myself also) everytime you or I walk into a room we size ourselves up against everyone else in the room.  We are self-centric organisms.  Anyone or anything that does not fit into our own personal scheme of things becomes the “other”, the “stranger”   

      And there lies the difficulty because when we see all that is around us from the paradigm of “me at the center” then it is really very difficult for us to understand ourselves to be made in God’s image.  Instead we see God through our own image and that makes it really really difficult to understand the magnitude of the love that God feels for you or for me.  Do you see where I am going with this?  If I cannot see the face of God in those who are different from me then I have narrowed my vision of who God is.  I can only know God partially – that part that is like me.  I do not know the part of God that is reflected in the homeless man, the teenage mother, the addict, the perfectly dressed Harvard graduate in the corner office, or the woman who seems to have everything going for her.   Refusing to let go of preconceptions and misconceptions of stranger makes it very easy to let anger and hatred be first response to difference.

      There is nothing in this world that unites a people more than a common adversary.   When the God you and I know looks and acts like us it becomes really easy for those of us who fit together to vilify those who do not fit into our box.  For example those who speak a different language, those whose faith is different, those who live in places we have never been nor care to go, those whose sexuality is different from mine, or those who for one reason or another have a very different life story than mine or yours these “strangers” can easily become the common enemy. 

      It becomes particularly insidious when the grounds for difference are not chosen differences – when the difference is core to our make-up,  – color of skin, gender, sexuality, color, ability, birth and family.  Whatever the difference is the degree to which we believe the difference makes us like God or acceptable to God is the degree to which we question whether or not the stranger in our midst is like God, is acceptable to God, or is loved by God.

      In the 1700s the good Anglicans of Virginia and the Carolinas debated whether or not the slaves they owned should be baptized because if they baptized them they would be acknowledging that they were human beings.  In the first century the believers in Jerusalem questioned whether or not the Gentiles were deserving of God’s love and grace.  Peter answered that question for us today.  In 2010, in the Anglican Communion, we are wondering whether of not homosexual men and women are worthy bearers of God’s Word and sacraments.  These divisions tear at our faith and shake us out of those comfort places where God’s personae can be narrowed and limited by our fear of the stranger

      In each of these and in so many more struggles we look for answers in scripture or in our understanding of God.  I can’t get away from that sermon that Brent preached last week where he talked about faith and certainty standing on opposite sides of the river.  How can I be certain that my image of God is not really my image of who I want God to be based on who I see myself to be?  Friday at Clergy conference our speaker Ray Suarez told us that the religious scene had too long been dominated by the “Church of the Made-up Mind” where difference means exclusion.

      The truth is that we live in a world of ambiguity – a world of difference – and that may just very well be the key for us to get a glimpse of who this God is that we love so much and who loves us in ways that we cannot imagine.  Jonathan Sachs, Britain’s chief rabbi, and author of “The Dignity of Difference” agrees that it is through difference that God is most fully known.  He writes that “We encounter God in the face of the stranger… The human other is a trace of the Divine Other. As an ancient Jewish teaching puts it, ‘When a human being makes many coins in the same mint, they all come out the same. God makes every person in the same image – God’s image, and yet each one is different.’ The challenge to the religious imagination is to see God’s image in one who is not in our image. (pp. 59-60)”.   It is when we begin to recognize God in the stranger that we find that our common ground is our humanity and that trumps all difference.   Who then can we exclude from God’s love and from ours?

      Last week in Bible study we talked about this commandment to love one another and whether or not it is a “new” commandment.  Well I did some research…  fact is that in Hebrew scripture we are told once to love neighbor and 36 times to love the stranger.  Jesus taught it another way – he lived it.  It wasn’t until he was nearing the end of his life that he turned to words to communicate the need for human beings to love God by loving one another. 

      This New commandment that Jesus gives us today is not about what we believe to be true or what our image of God might be.  This commandment is about how we live with one another and how our love is reflective of God’s love for us.

      What are we known by here in Haverhill?  Are we known for our building?  Our soup kitchen? Our music program?  Our organ?  Our smells and bells and vestments?  What are we known for?  I hope that when all is said and done we can each look back and say that we at Trinity will always be known for our big wide open red doors, our energy and our enthusiasm, our commitment to building the community, for the beauty of our worship, for our willingness to listen to each other, to care for each other, to see the face of God in each and every person we meet.  But most importantly I hope that we will know our selves to do these things because we ourselves know that each and everyone one of us is truly and deeply loved by God. 

      The newness of this commandment is not that scripture had never before commanded us to love.  The newness was that the source of the love is Jesus Christ.  When we open ourselves up to the deeply penetrating love of Christ and let it take hold of all that we do and say, then we can begin to appreciate how God’s love takes all of our differences and makes them holy and good.  Breathe in the difference.  Revel in the power of God’s hand at work through each of us.  We can’t stop it no matter how much we dig in our heals and want God to love us better than those strange people down the street.     It just doesn’t work that way.  Thanks be to God.  Amen