Love As THE Calling

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"Love As THE Calling"

1 Peter 4:7-11
September 25, 2011

The end of all things is near; therefore be serious and discipline yourselves
for the sake of your prayers. Above all, maintain constant love for one
another, for love covers a multitude of sins. Be hospitable to one another
without complaining. Like good stewards of the manifold grace of God, serve
one another with whatever gift each of you has received. Whoever speaks
must do so as one speaking the very words of God; whoever serves must do
so with the strength that God supplies, so that God may be glorified in all
things through Jesus Christ. To him belong the glory and the power forever
and ever. Amen.

Recently, I was online just checking out church websites, check out the
competition, so to speak, at least when it comes to websites, just to
compare ours to there, to see what we might be missing, and I stumbled
upon one that was clearly geared to the young and hipster crowd. It was
very well done, and it followed all the rules for what we young people seem to
like—clean, simple, dynamic, hip and cool. The worship services, the sermon,
were presented in the manner that church consultants say we should do
them, if we want to reach young people: the minister was young and hip, and
didn’t wear a tie, and walked around the front sharing the message, which
was delivered as if he had just casually stumbled on something he found in
the Scriptures, and simply wanted to pass on the good news. Obviously, it
looks a lot less planned than it really is, but that is the point, to look more
casual, nonchalant, than it really was, at least in the planning stages. I say
that as someone who has actually lead one of those contemporary services in
a church I once served in Dallas, and knows all the planning that goes into
making a service look so unplanned, so casual, so to speak.

But let me be clear here: there is nothing wrong in and of itself with
contemporary worship services, and I am very, VERY aware that the
traditional way we worship God in this place does not necessarily meet
everyone’s needs, especially those who come from expressive and emotive
traditions—charismatic traditions, or more energetic evangelical services. You
can do good, thoughtful, contemporary worship—and this particular church
did, at least seemingly. But then came the sermon—it’s not a sermon in
these type of churches, but a message, because the word sermon seems to
turn off some people—but then came the sermon, and it was the same old
stuff you would have heard from a conservative Baptist preacher a
generation ago, when I was a growing up in the Southern Baptist Church.
The difference, of course, was that it was delivered in a much softer tone,
without the possibility of seemingly offending anyone.   Really, though it was
same message that the biblical scholar Marcus Borg calls “heaven and hell”
Christianity, which was a message that seemed obsessed with who is and isn’
t going to get to heaven, as if that was the whole point of Jesus’ very
existence. There are a multitude of reasons why this twisted form of
Christianity became the dominant form over the last two thousand years, but
that is for a different sermon, and a different sermon series altogether.

What is interesting was the belief behind strategy, this strategy of soft
peddling what I believe and many believe is a toxic message, this heaven and
hell version of Christianity, where God and humans are obsessed the fate of
the human soul, and whether we are saved or not. There is a reason why
young people are leaving the church in droves, why the percentage of
Americans who categorize themselves as non-religious in polling went from
something like 2% to 16% in only a decade, why even evangelicals, the folks
that have often look down on old-line churches like ours for experiencing a
numerical decline, the same folks that diagnosed our decline as being because
we were not theologically orthodox enough—even they are experiencing slow
declines in membership and attendance, like we old line churches did decades
ago. For the first time in literally recorded memory, the Southern Baptist
denomination of my youth, and the largest Protestant denomination by far,
actually experienced a decline in membership a few years ago, despite being
in the fastest growing part of the country—the deep South!

But the solution the church growth folks have come up with to meet this
decline, to meet young people where they are, supposedly, is to become
more hip, use music that young people can related and, shares messages
and not preach sermons, etc, etc. And there is absolutely nothing wrong
with that—how we worship God changes all the time, and it’s important to
remember that the way we worship here in this church right now would have
shocked church goers four hundred years ago. However, I think the
diagnosis is all wrong for the disease, the disease of declining church
attendance and participation. The folks doing the repackaging of church
think that the means of delivering the message is all wrong for young people
nowadays, and I’m not sure that they don’t have a point here and there, but
the reality is that what is turning young people off is actually the message
itself, the heaven and hell Christianity that worked for their parents, but
doesn’t work for them anymore. They’re not buying what most churches are
selling nowadays, and you can, as the old saying goes, clean up a pig, put a
ribbon on it's [sic] tail, spray it with perfume, but it’s still a pig—it is what it is
and no amount repackaging and rebranding is going to save a vision of
Christianity that is not working anymore.

Back to that website I was looking at: after looking all over the site, I couldn’t
what denomination they were, but after putting two and two together, I
realized that it was a Southern Baptist church, but clearly they didn’t want
people to know that, because of the stigma and bad reputation that this
particular branch of Christian fundamentalism has gotten over the years.
And I say that as an ex-Southern Baptist who came to faith through their
doors…again, they think the problem is the marketing, but really it’s the
message itself. For me and a lot of my generation, it is the message that
doesn’t speak to us, because we live in a world where religion, especially that
kind of exclusivist religion, seems to be tearing the world apart, and
Christianity, as it expressed on the evening news by the Christian right
doesn’t seem to part of solution to these people. Something has to change,
but I think the change needs to go back to the One who founded the faith
itself, whose life was expressed most clearly and most powerfully in the way
he dealt with other human beings. If we ever want to change the way we
Christians are perceived, we’ve got move away from a version of Christianity
that would have surprised the founder, the kind of religion that seems to be
obsessed with the afterlife, the kind of religion obsessed with power and
control over the levers of government, obsessed with gay people or abortion
or abstinence education in public schools—I think all of these current
obsessions of the church would have just stunned Jesus, especially in a
world where 30,000 people will die of hunger or a preventable disease this
very day.

What is missing, of course, in this desire to just repackage the old message,
is an unwillingness to admit that we Christians may have gotten the message
wrong all these years, that we Christians might have heard what Jesus said
and yet not really heard it at all, not really. And what he said, over and over
again, was that the God you know loves you more than you can ever know,
and if we come to believe in the message, that message in embodied in the
life and death and life of God’s child, this Jesus, we will have gotten it. God is
love, Jesus says in Gospel of John, and it really all just boils down to that.
Don’t’ get me wrong—it is both very simple, and as anyone who has
experienced that love can tell you, it is the most challenging thing in the
world, to embrace the One who first embraces us, over and over again. I’ve
often said that if people actually really believed that God is love and that God
loves them, it would change their life forever, and it would change my life in
so many dramatic ways, but somehow and for some reason, it just seems
impossible to us, this idea that we are just loved—not loved because of
anything we did or didn’t do, but just loved as we are. It breaks with all the
patterns of how love is done on this side of eternity, and so it just doesn’t
seem real, and we only give it lip service—we can’t believe that someone
might love us without an agenda other than love itself.

Look at our text today—even the New Testament letters sometimes struggle
with Jesus’ message: it was hard letting go of the old way of doing religion
even back then and it remains so now. The earliest Christians believed they
were living in the end times, the time when Jesus would come back to earth
and set the world right, and so much of the latter part of the New Testament
is written with that belief in mind—everything is drenched in the expectation
that the next moment could be the last moment, the end of all things. First
Peter, our text today, is no different—it is soaked in what scholars called
apocalyptic expectation, that Jesus’ return to earth was right around the
corner, and yet, as always, thank goodness, something stops the writer from
completely missing the point, missing the heart of the matter, right near the
end of his letter.   Listen to the text again:

The end of all things is near; therefore be serious and discipline yourselves
for the sake of your prayers. Above all, maintain constant love for one
another, for love covers a multitude of sins. Be hospitable to one another
without complaining. Like good stewards of the manifold grace of God, serve
one another with whatever gift each of you has received. Whoever speaks
must do so as one speaking the very words of God; whoever serves must do
so with the strength that God supplies, so that God may be glorified in all
things through Jesus Christ. To him belong the glory and the power forever
and ever. Amen.

Be good to each other. Love covers many, many hurts and sins we have
caused each other, and God. Give yourself and what you have away to
others, knowing it what God has first given you. Use your words as if they
were God’s words, and you know how God speaks to you—with love, with
love. Be strong but be strong through and within God. Do love, do love,
the writer says to us. Even here, when the end of all things is near, love is
the point, after all, even this writer knows that truth.

Now, I could unpack that truth for days, and days, and years and years, and
I would still live in amazement over that very simple truth: that I am loved
and you are loved and the world is loved, and everyone everywhere is loved,
and that is it, really, the message Jesus came to deliver, to die for, and to be
resurrected for. But not enough people are sharing that message, and no
amount repackaging of the old message will get to that simple truth, buried
under layers and layers of moralisms and politics and meanness of spirit that
seems pass for Christian faith. If you have dig deep to get to the message
of love, you’re digging in the wrong place. And yes, I do think we are all
loved, even the ones who bury that good gift of the Gospel under mounds of
rules and regulations on how to follow Jesus.

I bring you this rant about the current state of the larger church, and this
meditation on love for one simple reason, and that is because I believe this
church is trying to do what so few churches are trying to do nowadays, and
that is to give witness to Love itself, as expressed in the Christ some two
thousand years ago. We just got through the process of putting together a
new vision and mission statement—and love is what you said you are all
about…go to the mission statement in the first page of your bulletin, down at
the bottom. I’ll let you find it… Remember, mission is all about what you think
God has called you to do, in particular, as a community of faith. And now,
look at the vision statement, and remember vision is about what we want to
become in light of the mission that God has given us. Go ahead, read it
again to yourself.

Mission Statement: The mission of First Congregational UCC of Coloma is
to embrace, affirm, and extend God’s love for all.

Vision Statement: As a community of Christian faith that seeks to embody
God’s love, we welcome without judgment all who dare to trust, respect and
think while on their spiritual journey.

And I want to say this to you, I actually do believe you, and I think these
mission and vision statements fits you perfectly, and when times get tough
around here, and they have and they will, don’t forget why you exist, why
God has placed you here, for one more day, one more year, one more
decade, one more whatever. Not enough people know this message, nor
believe this message, because, like me, frankly, they have been told they are
loved, but they soon find out that such love has strings attached to it—there
are conditions, many “if’s” all that marketing, that hipster repackaging, can
never quite hide. Like those car ads on TV with the guy speaking quickly
afterwards with all those conditions needed for that 0% interest, no money
down offer, that is the way of it for about 95% of the churches out there,
well meaning though they may be and love by God as they are—you got to
read the fine print. As I end my ministry with you ends here, as my journey
ends with you and your journey with Pastor Brenda begins, don’t forget
what makes this very imperfect place, full of imperfect people, pastored by 42
very imperfect pastors over the years, such a special place—you spoke the
gospel of love, which is Christ’s Gospel, which is the heart of the matter and
the heart of the universe. Don’t forget that and when you get weary, and
you wonder what’s the point, go to the mission statement, go to vision
statement, and remember what your work in this world is really about: God’s
love, and love, and love itself. Amen.