Comments for Jim Other sermons.                 

What is the truest form of Christian love – being or doing? Is it experiencing the love of God in our hearts or enacting the teachings of Jesus in our world? If your answer is "both" then I would ask, which comes first? The New Testament scriptures this morning give us a glimpse of these two aspects of Christian love. In St. Paul’s exquisite meditation on love, he clearly believes that love resides in our being, not our doing. His words focus on inward attitudes – patience, kindness, forgiveness, and so forth. He even says that you can perform all sorts of heroic and sacrificial deeds, including self-sacrifice, but if the motivation is not love, they mean nothing. It is amazing to think that, in the eyes of Paul, two different people could be engaging in the same good work, but out of very different motives. Looking back on the social activism of the sixties, it is clear to me, in retrospect, that many, Martin Luther King, Jr. for instance, were motivated by love. While some who marched and demonstrated were filled with hate. Paul says only love that is central to our being will ever bear good fruit.

But our other scripture from Matthew says clearly that Christian love is about picking up the cross and making hard choices. It is giving yourself up in some important way that could conceivably pit yourself against those closest to you. It is about doing. In the Epistle of James, we find words that seem to be the very opposite to what Paul says in I Corinthians:

If a brother or sister is ill-clad and in lack of daily food, and one of you says to them, "Go in peace, be warmed and filled," without giving them the things needed for the body, what does it profit? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead. But some one will say, "You have faith and I have works." Show me your faith apart from your works, and I by my works will show you my faith.

If we think also of the clear calls to work for justice and peace that unquestionably resonate throughout our Bible – New and Old Testament, that love which does not bear the good fruit of justice is useless, and probably not love.

Think, for a moment, about what we are experiencing in our worship service this morning. We began by praying for Merlene Bagley as she prepares to travel again to one of the most dangerous places in the world at the moment. This trip is an expression of solidarity with people living very different lives from ours. It involves risk on her part. It is one thing for us to pray for these beleaguered sisters and brothers. It is quite another thing to pray with them, side by side. Our Social Witness Ministry is, ultimately about doing. Yes, it is about studying and learning and asking questions and being humble and realistic about what we can and cannot accomplish. But it is about doing, risking, going someplace, working, giving up.

And together with our solidarity with Merlene, we have baptized a beautiful little baby. Patrick Hinkeldey. What kind of love are we talking about here? This is the love that Patrick both radiates and welcomes because he just "is." He is this totally authentic loveable and loving little bit of creation that doesn’t have to do anything at all. Oh, he does a lot, of course. But everything he does is grounded in this spark of the divine that he has within him. It is the same holiness that we each carry around in us. Only he, unlike us most of the time, is letting it shine. He hasn’t obscured it with strivings and ego and calculations and worry.

If we put these aspects together, being and doing, I think we’ll find that both are necessary. But they may represent a kind of polarity. Love is being, being loved and radiating love. But love that never does anything, love that becomes so inward that it sanctions a kind of rejection of the suffering of others in the world; really isn’t love anymore. It has become a kind of narcissism. When that happens, then we should have a look at Matthew’s Gospel and James’ Epistle and Jesus’ teachings on sacrifice and action. True love will always, eventually, seek to bear fruit in right action. Even if that action is simply prayer. The withdrawal from the world of a Thomas Merton in a monastery, for example, represents a separation from the world in order to be more fully for the world. That is a loving action motivated by compassion. But if action in the world, our social witness we would say, begins to lose touch with loving inwardness, then it becomes rootless. Other motivating energies get in there when love is absent; things like anger, cunning, control, pride, arrogance, an obsession with winning or getting what you want. Then we need to turn to Paul’s Letter to the Corinthians.

I suspect there is a spiritual rhythm at work here, between being and doing. Perhaps like the dynamic between work and rest. Our goal is to work in the Lord, and rest in the Lord. Individuals, communities, and cultures vary in this. In our Western culture, the premium is usually placed on the "doing" – achievement, accomplishment, work, work, work. Sometimes it is work that one truly believes in passionately. On other occasions, we may be driven by other reasons: money, acclaim, or power. A sage once ironically suggested that we, in the west, stop calling ourselves "human beings" and instead call ourselves "human doings."

If this polarity, this back and forth, between being and doing makes sense to you, how would you describe CCC over the last few years? I think we’ve been doing a lot. And we have been doing important things. And they have been very demanding and exhausting tasks. Planning and building. Fund raising, fund raising, fund raising. Moving out of our building and moving back into our building. The moving back is still going on with many lending a hand just yesterday. We’ve been doing the things we have to do. But might it not be time to begin to think about paying a little more attention to our being? Don’t get me wrong, CCC will always be a doing church, especially doing in the world. But to do that better, we need to find true Sabbath time and space. Sabbath means rest. Not vacation (where some people still don’t rest much). Sabbath is resting in the Lord. It is experiencing the nourishment of God’s love. Not trying to prove anything to God by what to do, but simply receiving. I believe what we have been called to "be" is truly empty vessels. That is, incidentally, why I support expanding worship opportunities on Sunday morning. Not to make more work, but to create more sacred space for our Sabbath.

Some of you have commented on my recent Newsnotes article in which I did some thinking out loud about my upcoming sabbatical – the first three months of 2003. I am interested in learning how to find better balance in my life- a balance between being and doing. A balance between faith and works. Between giving and receiving. Between discovering who I am in God, and finding God in me. Is this the kind of journey that interests you? If so, let’s talk. AMEN.

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