Sermon: Shrink To Fit, or Grow Into It
Text: Matthew 22:34-46
Date: October 26, 2008
Rev. Dee Eisenhauer, Eagle Harbor Congregational Church
In Matthew’s gospel, Jesus is enduring a period of testing among those who want to end his career as a holy man. In the second part of the gospel text, we hear Jesus expand the concept of Messiah beyond a simplistic understanding of the messiah being a descendant of David. In the first part, he is challenged to consider which of the 613 commandments in the Jewish tradition were most important. He comes out with this famous pronouncement linking the love of God inextricably to the love of neighbor. He then declares that all the law and the prophets hang on these two; the other 611 are, in essence, commentary on these two. I’ve heard this called “the Jesus Digest Condensed Version” of the commandments. Any follower of Jesus from that moment on wondering about the essence of Christian life can call up these verses. This call to love God and neighbor without reservation and without separating the two is like a “one size fits all” pronouncement.
My husband John once had a beautiful sweater knit for him by—I think—someone who was sweet on him years ago. Very nice, maroon and navy blue wool yarn with an expertly rendered warm but breathable stitch. Sometime after we started our life together, that sweater somehow ended up in the washer, and what’s worse, the drier. It doesn’t fit John any more. I think John still feels a little cross about the sweater incident, although I will swear until my dying day that I did not deliberately shrink the sweater. But I have to confess that since it does now fit me, I have often enjoyed wearing it in its new size when we’re cross-country skiing. It’s so comfortable, though not as stretchy and breathable as it once was. It brings out my sparkling blue eyes, and it looks very natty with my wool knickers. But I did not mean to shrink it. Really.
I couldn’t be so confident in claiming that I have not tried to shrink the love of God down to a manageable size, a love on a scale that will fit me. Paul uses this figure of speech in Romans, the idea of “putting on Christ,” or in another translation, “clothe yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ.” I doubt he had a hand-knit sweater in mind when he was talking about putting on Christ; he had been talking about the “armor of light” a sentence or two earlier. But let’s pursue the idea of a sweater for a bit. If we picture the love of God and neighbor as it was made manifest in Jesus coming to us as a hand-knit article of clothing that we are encouraged to don, we might imagine that it would be a pretty large garment. We might see ourselves in it like a three-year-old who has put on his daddy’s sweater for dress-up and finds that he is tripping over the hem and having to roll the sleeves way up to find his hands. A pretty comical picture. And maybe just a little bit scary, if you feel like you are swallowed up in this huge outfit, not at all sure you could move with any agility.
Is that what being invited to participate in the love of God is like? The love of God is just so immense, so deep, so broad, so steadfast—won’t it swallow us up? It’s a great temptation to mentally shrink it down to a more manageable size. To take the Divine Love and throw some cold water on it and pop it into the drier and hope it comes out closer to fitting me, to fitting the love I already have to offer.
One of the shrinking methodologies we might use of to make this dual commandment to love God and neighbor fit our lives is to imagine that love is all about feelings. Of course there is a feeling, an emotion we identify as “love.” It is very evident in an age-old form of human communication known as the love poem. I went fishing on a love poem internet site and reeled in a few verses:
I Wanted To Tell You,
In Words Of My Own;
You're The Most Precious Person,
That I've Ever Known.
You're The Prettiest Girl,
Than Any I've Seen;
Your Body Is Flawless,
So Slender And Lean.
Your Eyes Have That Sparkle,
That I Can't Live Without;
One Day Without Them,
And I'd Die There's No Doubt.
And I Just Lose Control,
When I Glance At Your Hair;
Those Curls Are Just Stunning,
So Perfect And Rare.
You're The Most Caring Person,
That I've Ever Met;
There's No One Like You,
And That I Can Bet.
What Attracts Me The Most,
Is Your Sweet And Kind Touch;
You're A Gift Sent From Heaven,
And I Love You So Much.
So Hold Me As Close,
As You Possibly Can;
'Cause Now And Forever,
I Am Your Man.
It’s sweet, isn’t it? A poem that while not exactly elegant, is brimming with emotion. There are hundreds of similar works out it cyber-space, many of them apparently written around the time couples are preparing to marry. The feelings are palpable, intoxicating. I don’t know the author of this particular poem, so I don’t know how long he might have been married. But those of us in long relationships know that there comes a time when the curls aren’t as stunning, and the body is not so flawless, and the words aren’t all sweet and kind. And yet, many marriages endure the cooling of earliest ardor, because along with feeling there is commitment. And that is what the love of God and neighbor is—not feeling but dedication.
Biblical scholar Douglas Hare puts it this way: "In an age when the word 'love' is greatly abused, it is important to remember that the primary component of biblical love is not affection but commitment. Warm feelings of gratitude may fill our consciousness as we consider all that God has done for us, but it is not warm feelings that Deut. 6:5 [the commandment Jesus quoted, identifying it as first in importance] demands of us but rather stubborn, unwavering commitment." [1] And regarding love of neighbor, Dylan Brewer’s lectionary blog notes that people in Jesus’ world wouldn’t have thought of love as a vague warm feeling toward someone but as a pattern of action—attachment to a person backed up with behavior. We Americans may think of both “faith” and “love” as interior mental or emotional states, but in first-century Mediterranean cultures “true faith and true love are both matters of affiliation backed up with consistent action, or treating people with respect and enacting rather than merely professing compassion.” [2]
This means that loving God and neighbor are not dependent on feelings. Feelings alone make love too small for what God had in mind when God knit the Christ spirit together. We can’t use the lack of feeling love to justify bad behavior or excuse a deficiency of right behavior. We mustn’t use feelings for or against someone to shrink the love God wants us to participate in down to the size of our often whimsical emotions. Some days we’re all emotional midgets, but that needn’t stop us from acting loving.
We may also be tempted to shrink Divine Love down to a size that fits the contours of our current lives, something that closely conforms to the shape of the life we already lead. We might be rather selective about the kind of neighbor we have been willing to extend ourselves toward, for instance, consciously or unconsciously limiting our affiliations to people who look, act, or think like we do. It certainly takes a lot less time and emotional energy to reject someone who is very different than to try to understand them or open ourselves to compassion toward them. Is prejudice of any kind acting like a hot clothes drier in our thoughts and actions, shrinking down God’s love to what we deem an acceptable size?
We may consider social contours that affect our lives as well as personal habits and attitudes as we ask ourselves whether we have tried to shrink love of neighbor down to a shape we are used to. In this country we are used to a social system based on relatively free market competitive capitalism. We may have come to think of that system as “just” enough that faithful people need raise no particular objection to how it shapes our lives together. We are used to that form of our life together; it fits us. Or we might say that like those tight jeans in the closet we have had to squeeze our Christian values into the current economic patterns, but we got ‘em buttoned up and we can live with it.
But is this pattern of life together righteous? Is it loving? Biblical scholar Marcus Borg calls justice “the social form of love.” We already know that as Jesus taught and embodied love, the love of neighbor is not restricted to the neighbor who lives next door to you; he had an expansive understanding of neighbor or neighborhood. You can be neighborly by loaning that cup of sugar that your next door neighbor comes over to ask for. You can also be neighborly by striving for social systems that protect the vulnerable. It’s unlikely that your next door neighbor has come knocking on your door asking you to help provide adequate health care for her family. But we know that people are needing and asking for help with this. We now have 47 million uninsured American citizens. Is that neighborly? Those uninsured citizens are our neighbors, whether they literally live next door to you or not.
As people of faith we are not only allowed, we are urged to raise questions and participate in whatever ways we can to create more neighborly social systems. We cannot claim to be in a loving relationship with God if we are not also offering love to our neighbors by all means possible. I believe we have an amazing opportunity during this very volatile period in world economies to ask important questions about what kinds of social structures are neighborly. We may well be frightened by the volatility in world markets these past weeks. It’s so chaotic, and many systems we had come to rely on seem very unsettled. It’s not wrong to be unnerved, but as people of faith we should also recall that God created a great deal out chaos.
Maybe some entrenched systems and customs need to be tossed up in the air to make room for more just and neighborly practices. Theologian John Cobb says that in recent years we have been living with a system he calls “economism”—somehow human society has come to serve the economy rather than the economy serving human society. It’s not a healthy arrangement. It may be a time now to re-arrange our practices so that other values besides unending economic growth are considered in our social practices and policies. We are experiencing a moment in history when we are being forced to reassess our underlying social creed, as stated by movie character Gordon Gekko, “Greed is good.” This could be a moment of enormous creativity for our nation and the whole community of nations. Let’s not shrink back in fear to such an extent that we overlook an opportunity to increase care for our neighbors in more just systems and not simply more frequent charity.
Shrinking back in fear. The hot winds of fear always have a potential of shrinking our perception of the vitality and sheer creativity of God’s love. In an attack of fearfulness our circle of concern may shrink to include only ourselves and those closest to us in an “every man for himself” mode of behavior. Those moments of panic are precisely the moments when we may let God’s love claim us, calm us and open us to greater possibilities than cocooning. The commandment Jesus speaks of first, urging us to love God with all our heart, soul, and mind speaks to me of opening our selves completely to the love of God. It’s not that we generate love which we then direct toward God. God is love; our call is to take down all the barriers which would keep us from being embraced and moved by that divine love.
Put on Christ, Paul said. Clothe yourselves in the Lord Jesus Christ. Imagine God holding out to us this huge sweater like a mother helping her little one slide a too-big garment over that little head, and helping the child find the arm holes and extend arms out into sleeves. The love of God and neighbor as taught and modeled by Christ is mighty big. But there is a better choice than trying to shrink it down to a smaller size so that it fits our feelings, prejudices, social customs, political habits and dwindling courage. The alternative is to choose to grow into a love so deep and broad that at present we feel dwarfed by it. We may feel dwarfed by it, but we may grow into it, if we give ourselves to it.
Listen to this Celtic declaration of love for God written in the first millennium:
I am giving You worship with my whole life.
I am giving You assent with my whole power.
I am giving You praise with my whole tongue.
I am giving You honor with my whole utterance.
I am giving You kneeling with my whole desire.
I am giving You love with my whole heart.
I am giving You my soul, O God of Gods.
The love of God and neighbor that we are urged give ourselves to and participate in surrounds us with warmth but does not bind us and restrict us to a particular kind of life. The life of love to which we are called is flexible and breathable and gives us wiggle room to discover our own unique patterns of neighborly action. And when we give ourselves to God, we find that God gives love that expands our hearts to us.
[1] Cited in http://www.ucc.org/worship/samuel/october-26-2008.html
[2] Brewer, Sarah Dylan http://www.sarahlaughed.net/lectionary/2005/10/proper_25_year_.html