mad crazy invisible love

SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN

and St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN

SECOND SUNDAY OF EASTER (8^th April) 2018

READINGS:

Acts 4:32-35

Psalm 133

1 John 1.2 – 2.2

John 20.19-31

When the early Christians began to spread out into the Roman community they were noticed primarily for two criteria: ridiculous beliefs and powerful love. The near exponential growth of the Christian sect in the decades that followed was a result of these strange bedfellows. Over two millennia the cutting edge of these ingredients has been brutally blunted.

Can we reclaim them? The author of the several documents we name “John” pleads with us to do so. So does Paul. And every iota of the teaching and life of Jesus embodied love.

Embodied, too the ridiculous nature of Christian doctrine: the God man, the celestial human, a God who in ancient thought could never suffer becomes the suffering, executed God on a Cross. Paul called it offensive and foolish. Paul spent his life and death preaching it anyway: Jesus, Christ, God, human, crucified, risen.

For the writer we call John love was the essence. In the passage from Luke’s Acts we get a glimpse of love so powerful that followers of Christ had ceased to own goods individually, pooling resources as an expectant, communal body, eagerly awaiting the return of their Lord.

John was less interested in questions of property: he was adamant that every aspect of a Christ-follower’s life should radiate self-sacrificial love. God is love. Where love is, there is God. Where love is not, there God is not. The equation was simple. The psalmist had seen it centuries before: “How very good and pleasant it is when kindred live together in unity!” Because there, the poem suggests, dwells the fullness of God’s blessing.

We can for now leave the questions of ridiculous beliefs. Suffice it to say that the ridicule was not directed as it is in some quarters today at Christians’ belief in an “invisible friend.” The ancients took seriously the proximity of humanity to nature, the latter centuries later defined as “red in tooth and claw.”

The ancients had little need to explain away the complexities of spirit and a spiritual world, or even the existence of an external Creator or Creative Force. Humans did not consider themselves so superior that they could giggle at the gods or God, for spiritual handiwork was evident at every twist and turn. As our intellects destroy our earth we might pause and wonder if we shouldn’t listen to the ancients and their readiness to believe.

Nor was the ridiculousness of early Christian faith the sort of embarrassing spectacle that comes out of militant modern forms of Christianity. The first, exponentially effective, transformative Christians were not the sort that see God as a belligerent punitive being, one who militantly hates minorities, militantly hates non-whites, militantly hates those who adopt beliefs or lifestyles different to those claimed to be lived by the haters. I allude of course to the sick parodies of Christianity that confuse God with any one nation, but most obviously the United States. I allude to forms of Christianity that turn blind eyes to the obvious darkness and predation embodied in the person of an elected leader.

The God of the Cross does not choose predatory opportunists to be a chosen leader. But God may well allow blind humans to live, for a season, with the results of foolish choices. The world is doing that, I fear.

But I partially digress. The ridiculous ways in which God chose to reveal the sacred, the divine redeeming love that is God’s nature were chosen precisely because we must never intellectualize our way to God. God’s love reaches to the darkest darknesses, and there gives birth to light in which there is no darkness at all. Ridiculous, but I’ve not come across a better explanation. “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”

In response, we are called to be a people of love. Generous love. Forgiving love. Redeeming love. Love that overlooks otherness and overlooks foibles and overlooks human fallibility. Love that does not demand that all are perfect – or I would have been cactus long ago, but so might you. Love that embraces the other, celebrates the foible, acknowledges the fallible. Love that says “come as you are.” Love that says “come” to the lonely and the broken, but also accepts that some of the loneliest and most broken do not at first sight appear to be so, and says “come” even so. Love that says “come” to the refugee and the abused and the dependent even when those states of existence are dressed up in Pierre Cardin and Louis Vuitton. But love, too, which says “come” to those arrive without access to a shower or fine words or polished intellects. Love that just says “come … stay, worship our mad maniacal communal God of love, ridiculously revealed on an ancient cross and rumoured in transformed lives of a resurrection-believing people.”