Love, Passion and Obedience

Love, Passion and Obedience      The Dover Church

May 13, 2012                Scripture: 1 John 5:1-6, John 15:9-17

Looking back on my childhood, my mother was pretty flexible with me about a lot things. As long as I was happy and had a full stomach, she figured the rest would sort itself out. My mother believed in lots of free time for me to just play, dream, climb trees, read, sing, whatever. Parents these days call what I call free time “down time,” as in down from all the running here and there to organized activity times we fill our children's days with. For me, however, free time was actually up time from the down time I spent in school or other organized activities. I played on teams, took music lessons and sang in the choir, but equally important were the bicycle and a fishing tackle my parents gave me. My mother fully expected me to actually ride my bike, as in ride it by myself or with friends out of our yard and away from our house to someplace else, which is where the fishing tackle came in. My mother expected that I would actually go fishing at Indian Lake and that I would come home for supper, with torn pants, maybe wet with poison ivy or a hook in my hand, but having had a grand time. If she found me hanging about the house moaning that I had nothing to do, she would always say, "how can you be bored on such a lovely day? I'll give you something to do," which meant helping her with the laundry or cleaning, or mowing the lawn. It always worked. I was out the house and pedaling away in a flash. 

My mother was actually more than flexible with me. She was downright indulgent of what I will call my little idiosyncrasies, the sorts of things which, if I was as student at the Chickering School nowadays, would probably get me evaluated for an IEP, an Individualized Educational Plan. For one thing, I loved hats, Greek fisherman's caps, US Navy sailors hats, berets, even a pith helmet, when the other boys were wearing Red Sox caps. On top of that, I loved to impersonate Curly of the Three Stooges with nyuk nyuks, whoo whoos, slaps and shuffles. And finally, I could often be seen walking like Charlie Chaplin home from school. If anyone dared to inquire about my emotional or intellectual development, my mother would tell them that I was a genius. Like I said, my mother was indulgent.

Just so you don't get the wrong idea, my mother also insisted on obedience about a number of things. Be nice and polite. No vulgarity or cursing. Eat what was served. Say thank you. No hitting my sisters. No playing with electricity, fire or fireworks. No unsupervised bb guns or other weapons. And no playing with the kids whose parents let them do those things. As every parent knows, she demanded obedience for the simple reason that she loved me and knew better than me and wanted me to live long enough in one piece to be able to know for myself what was good and safe and true and right and beautiful.

Many people, upon leaving their mothers, set about finding out if mother really knew best, if everything she taught us, warned us about, advised us against, was really as bad as she made it out to be. It's called differentiation and starts getting exciting in adolescence. I have noticed in our society that a lot of people spend their lives struggling with differentiation and stuck in adolescents, doing what they want, finding their own way, thinking any old way they feel like thinking, seeing things the way they want them to look, and perhaps most importantly, not holding themselves accountable to anyone but themselves, which means not really holding themselves accountable at all because all of us are experts at self-justification, rationalization, relativization and every other slippery as an eel mental gymnastics we can come up with to get us out from under the boulders we've pulled down on ourselves.

Enter modern American liberal Protestantism where we have a tendency towards spiritual adolescence. Many of us hear Jesus' lesson about obeying his commandments and how loving him amounts to doing just that, to obeying him, to actually doing what he tells us and acting as he acted, to learning to think as he thinks and see how he sees and...whammo...petulant adolescence! "there it is! Oppressive, paternalistic religion, blind obedience, everything that's bad about church. No way. I'm going my own way." For a lot of liberal Protestants like us, the whole loving God and unconditionally loving Jesus seems to be an invitation to dodge commitment to the hard work of doing anything. Jesus says, "if you love me you will obey my commandments." And a lot of us reply in our heart of hearts, "well, Jesus, if you really loved me unconditionally, you'd approve of me no matter what." Those of you with actual adolescents might recognize that argument, the confusing of love with approval. And so, in our spiritual adolescence, we stay on the sidelines, not buying in wholeheartedly because doing what some authority tells us to do is exactly what we've been trying to escape since childhood.

One of the things my mother insisted on was passion. She enjoys the little things of life for what they are, but when it comes to the big things she would alway say, "Whatever you choose to do, whatever you put your mind to, do your very best. If it's not worth your best it's not worth doing, so stop wasting your time and do something else." It turns out that this isn't just old fashioned Yankee work ethic but also good Christianity. Following Jesus is always and ultimately only about one thing, love, and love is always and only passionate. Think about it for a moment. You really can't sort of love someone or something. You either really do, in which case you really know it because you feel it, can't stop yourself from it, want nothing more or other than it; or, by default, you really don't. Love isn't like horseshoes or hand grenades in which almost may be good enough. As long as we hedge our bets in life, we sound like the teenage boy who uses every verb to almost but not quite tell his teenage girlfriend how he feels about her, "I really like you. I think you're really neat. I think you're cute," whatever he can come up with to avoid the all out commitment of using the "L" word, because then he's in and there are a lot of fish in the sea. But love is passionate and totally committed, all the way with no reservation, or it's not love. And that's how Jesus tells us to be in life, passionately committed, to love God with our whole everything, to love our neighbor in the same way, and also to love ourselves wholeheartedly.

Now Jesus' message, while ultimately a universal as "in love everyone," is, in this instance, aimed specifically at his disciples and by extension us, his present disciples, where it ought to be easiest because we're all on the same page, right? Right! I have discovered that funny things happen when you get all these disciples together in one place called the church. A lot of us are really passionate, so passionate in fact about, this, that, or the other thing in the church, our cause, our group, our mission, our turf, our theological interpretation, our way of doing this or that, that we end up rubbing each other raw on our competing passions. We have the passion but we have lost the focus, which is being passionate about Jesus, being irresistibly in love with this Godman because of the ways he has and is transforming our very persons and our lives more and more into love if we'll only let him.

You see, when we're passionate about something or other other than Jesus in the church, that thing may be at that center of our attention but it's still our attention, which still places us in the center. We say it's about this, that or the other earth shatteringly significant thing, but it's really about us. When, on the other hand, we love Jesus and it begins and ends with that, we are sharing the center with another, allowing room for another, an other who insists on pushing out the periphery to make room for yet others. The love Jesus has for us and the love Jesus invites us to live is never self-centered but always outward focussed, serving the other, preferring the other, lifting up the other, listening to and hearing the other, building up the Body of Christ, the church, offering ourselves, our gifts, our lives to the other and the church, because Jesus has already offered himself, his gifts, his life to us.

Which brings us back to obedience. Here is some pre-liberal Protestantism for you. Obedience is essential for misguided human beings like us because this love is not easy. It is challenging in every way. It is countercultural, counterintuitive, and often seemingly counterproductive. Few come to it lightly and few stick with it easily. Most of us have to get up every day and begin again, confessing our failures, casting ourselves on his mercy and seeking his grace to give it another try, ever hopeful and always confident in the kingdom and the power and the glory, for which we pray and towards which we strive. In a word, we have to obey because, left to our own devices, we just won't love as Jesus loves. We have to go against our own instincts and better judgment and obey the commandment to love Jesus and consequently love our brothers and sisters in Christ in the church. Why would we possibly be such fools? Because we trust that Jesus really loves us, knows better than us, and wants us to live long enough in one piece to be able to know for ourselves what is good and safe and true and right and beautiful, just like our mothers did when we were children. Without Jesus in our midst, without love for one another, we are nowhere. It's not our white building, our long history, our strange meeting time, our music, our lingo, or any of our other little idiosyncrasies which define us. It is this central rule of love. Without love, we're  just a bunch of passionate people behaving no better than those who have never heard of, let alone felt, lived and therefore believed in the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord in whom all things are possible.

On that note, I would ask all of you to take out your hymnals and open them to our Covenant. In place of the words “andbe kindly affectioned one unto another”, let's say the words and “love each other.”