February 1, 2009 - "Thoughtful"

1 Corinthians 8:1-13

Prior to giving this message, a fair amount of time was given to an exegetical overview of this passage. While few of us deal with "meat offered to idols," we all deal with issues of sensitivity and thoughtfulness about others. At the heart of this passage: while we may have knowledge, it's never about what we know but how much we love. Hence, Paul's reminder that those "who think they know" have not yet arrived at real knowledge.

----------------------

Her name is Mary … for as long as Donna and I have known her, she’s sent us Christmas cards, Thanksgiving cards, Easter cards, birthday and anniversary cards. She never forgets; she always remembers … she’s thoughtful, mindful … every time Donna and I receive a card from her, we’re reminded of something good, something important … Love builds up!

Her name is Catrina … she had, and still has, her problems – personal and family; she has a lot on her plate, but time-and-again, she sends an email or a card – just last week, remembering my 39th ordination anniversary … her card touched me deeply … Love builds up!

His name is David … he and I went to Haiti in 1992 … it was my first, and to this day, my last mission trip, but not for David …

In a recent email to David, I wrote:

I remember wading across the river ... wondering about the water ...
One of the guys with us volunteered to carry us across ... but I couldn't do that.
What a trip that was ... you've continued, but I haven't.
~ Tom

David wrote back:

Well, can't say it was my choice - God called me to mission and you called me to bible study, two things that have certainly been blessings in my life.  Haiti was the eye-opener for a middle-class city kid.  Now, about 24 trips later, it's still hard to put into words.

 Still hard to put into words …

David said to me dozens of times: if anyone had told me I’d be doing what I’m doing, I would have told them they’re nuts!

But love took hold of David’s life, and love always builds up … it’s a strange thing, as David says, still hard to put into words.

Frederick Buechner writes:

I entered Union Theological Seminary in the fall of 1954. If anyone had told me as little as a year or so earlier that I was going to do such a thing, I would have been no less surprised than if I had been told I was going to enter the Indianapolis 500. The preceding year I had become in some sense a Christian though the chances are I would have hesitated to put it like that, and I find something in that way of expressing it which even now makes me feel uncomfortable. “To become a Christian” sounds like an achievement, like becoming a millionaire. I thought of it rather and think of it still more as a lucky break, a step in the right direction. Though I was brought up in a family where church played virtually no role at all, through a series of events from childhood on I was moved, for the most part without any inkling of it, closer and closer to a feeling for the Mystery out of which the church arose in the first place until, finally, the Mystery itself came to have a face for me, and the face it came to have for me was the face of Christ. It was a slow, obscure process … and the result of it was that I ended up being so moved by what I felt that I found it inadequate simply to keep it inside myself like a secret but had to do something about it [Feb. 1 – reading, Listening to Your Life].

Love builds up.

I remember Aunt Lala … her name was Sylvia, but as a toddler, I could never say it – somehow or other, Sylvia came out as Lala, and for the rest of her life, I called her Lala, and so did everyone else.
She was as poor as a church mouse … her husband a dreamer … she worked hard all of her life, and for years, they lived with her parents, in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, my hometown.
Aunt Lala was an amazing person … every time I visited her, she made me feel like I was on the top of the world. Looking back now, I wonder if she knew about my sorrows – how her sister, my mother, was burdened with some bitter darkness … I don’t know what she knew, but she knew how to make a child feel like a million bucks.

Love builds up.

Love is powerful …
Love empowers us to take some chances and step out of the little box in which we all tend to live so much of our life.
Love pulls up the shades so we can look out on the world around us … and the light comes flooding into all the little corners of our life … and the light is nothing less than Christ, the light of the world.
Compassion, mercy, hope and peace.
Love opens a door, and we step out of ourselves.
Love takes us to Haiti,
To Nicaragua,
To the streets in front of the LAX Hilton.

Love takes us places reason would avoid.

If reason had held sway, Jesus would have beaten a hasty retreat back to Galilee, gotten married and settled down.
But reason, as good as it is, isn’t good enough for some things … reason only goes so far, and sometimes there’s plenty of reason to back off, to retreat, to call it a day and wash our hands of it.
Pilate was a reasonable man – so he washed his hands of it – that was a reasonable thing to do …
But love goes on when reason fails.
Love takes the next step.

Jesus didn’t beat a hasty retreat …
Love took Jesus by the hand,
And hand-in-hand, they went to the City on the Hill,
They overturned the tables,
And challenged the rulers.
When questioned by Pilate,
Jesus stands in silence, the power of silence: Pilate, you have no authority over me – you would not, and could not, understand who I am, for you understand only the power of the state, the power of wealth and command, the weakest forms of power, a power that isn’t power at all.

I suspect Pilate was tempted for a few moments,
But in the end, Pilate could only be Pilate.
And for Pilate, and for all the Pilates of the world,
And that includes you and me, too,
Jesus died …
Because that’s what love does …
Love takes up a cross …
Love gives.
And that’s why love builds up.

Sure, it’s costly.

Every one of us in this room has paid the price of love.

We forgive someone, only to have it hurled back into our face a thousand times over.
We signed on for a great project, only to have it ripped from our hands by some mean-spirited person.
We vowed to be kindlier and gentler, only to have ridicule heaped upon us.
We decided to go to church, and our family laughed at us.
We took a chance and took a stand for fair play, and we were demoted or even fired.
We know what needs to be done, but the system says “do it this way,” so we go home at night crushed, knowing that we’ve betrayed not only those we love, but we’ve betrayed ourselves, and that’s the worst betrayal of all.

It was no big deal for Judas to betray Jesus.
You see, Judas betrayed himself.
The greatest betrayal of all.

If only Judas has given God a chance to heal him.

But Judas chose the price of self-interest rather than the selfless price of love, and in the end, the betrayal was more than he could bear, a price more than he could pay.

How many of us go to bed every night having betrayed ourselves one more time … having sold our soul to the system … and the soul grows smaller and smaller … sort of like a wine reduction – but it’s not good wine, but a bitter wine, and the smaller the soul grows, the more bitter it becomes, until it’s just lost … and all the goodies of the world can’t make up for it …

Folks get to the top of the heap,
And then see that’s it just a heap of sorrow and sadness.

The economic crisis of the world – we have worshipped at the alter of wealth and have reaped the whirlwind … 

When self is at the center, even if charity be practiced, we buy off the conscience at great price – Jesus says it well, What good does it do for someone to gain the world and lose the soul.
When self dominates, the soul shrinks … but love builds up.

Love is powerful.

Love sustained Nelson Mandela in prison for 27 years … love kept the dream alive, a dream for his beloved South Africa – to one day be free of Apartheid.

Love convinced Dietrich Bonhoeffer to sacrifice his own principles and join the plot to kill Hitler. Eventually discovered when the plot failed, Bonhoeffer was arrested and imprisoned, and just days before the Allies liberated the prison camp, he was hanged. But love sustained him to the end. 

Love took Martin Luther King, Jr. by the hand and walked him into the storm of Civil Rights – a preacher by profession and love, King had no inclination to take up the cross of justice, but love left him no options.

Love led Mother Teresa through the streets of Calcutta, caring for the least of these, in spite of her own inner doubts and contradictions, and plenty of spiritual darkness, she gave and gave and gave some more.

And on the most basic level of all – the day-to-day stuff of our lives … look, most of us will never have a paragraph in history, our stories known only to our family and friends, and even then, time will wash it away … but our story, if we have one at all, is known and loved by God …
The simple stories we live out every day of our life.
The faith we keep.
The grace we give.
The mercy we practice.
The kindness we live.

To refuse the meanness of our world.
The lust for wealth and the insanity of excess.
To know that the clothing on our bodies is nothing compared to how our soul is dressed.
To keep our eyes on God and thoughtful for one another.

Love builds up.

For some 35 years, Presbyterians been engaged in a fierce debate over the place of homosexuals in our church – I’ve been a pastor for 39 years, so most of my career has been in and around the conflict.
For a long time, I avoided the conflict. I had my feelings, my thoughts, but I kept them to myself.
But the strident voices of those who would close the door to ordination for homosexuals disturbed me … How do they know and why are they so convinced?

They quote the Bible with such conviction, but then, so did those who opposed the ordination of women … those who favored slavery had all kinds of Bible verses to offer, and those who claimed that inter-racial marriage was contrary to the laws of God – they all used the bible and quoted it as if they knew the very mind of God … but time and love proved them all wrong.

Paul’s point for the Corinthians captures it well: Anyone who claims to know something does not yet have the necessary knowledge.

It’s not about knowing, it’s all about loving.
Knowledge puffs, love builds.
We have learned, sadly so, that all the MBAs of the world have brought us to the brink of ruin … and we have learned as well, that all of our theology, all of our books, can take us only so far … when knowledge alone takes us down the wrong path, or takes us as far as it can, then we need something more … something better …

Knowledge puffs, but love builds.
It’s not that love shuns knowledge; it’s just that love goes where knowledge can’t go.
Love relies on and uses knowledge, but only love can conquer the mountains of pride heaped up by those who rely on knowledge alone!
The MBAs of the world, and so many of our hard-charging theologians have forgotten the essentials of life – it’s love that builds, and nothing else, and what love builds, endures … things comes and things go, but love remains - the only monument you and I can build, that will stand the test of time and last throughout eternity – the love we have for one another.

Over a period of years, a lot of study and reflection and prayer, I made my decision: love opens door; love doesn’t close doors.
I became and remain an advocate for the ordination and full-inclusion of gays and lesbians in our church. The time for saying No must come to an end; the time for Yes is here.

Love welcomes and embraces.
Love builds bridges and tears down walls.
Love trusts and makes for peace.
Love transcends personal opinion and gets us out of the little boxes we all build.
Love is humility before the wonder and the mystery of another human being.
Love never pretends to walk in anyone else’s shoes, but only encourages them to keep on walking as best they can.
Love knows very well the limits of knowledge – at best, we only know partially – we see in a mirror dimly … knowledge isn’t good enough for such things; but love is more than good enough.

Paul says it well a few chapters later:

Turn in your Bibles to 1 Corinthians 13 – let’s read that chapter together …

If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.
Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.

Love builds up!

Amen and Amen!