April 6, 2008 - "The Beloved Community"
Crescent Hill Baptist Church
Louisville, Kentucky
The Third Sunday of Easter
April 6, 2008
W. Gregory Pope
Acts 2:14a, 36-41; Psalm 116:1-4, 12-19; 1 Peter 1:17-23; Luke 24:13-35
(Holy Communion)
This past Friday, April 4, marked the 40th anniversary of the death of Martin Luther King, Jr. One of the wisest, courageous and most inspiring individuals to ever walk the face of this earth, he deserves every street and building named in his honor.
He dared to dream of what he called “the beloved community” and “the solidarity of the human family.” It was the dream of a nation and a world where his children and all people would not be judged by the color of their skin but the content of their character. He faced what seemed to be the insurmountable forces of racism and hatred embedded in church and state. Yet he, along with the thousands he inspired, victoriously faced such evil forces with the power of the spoken word and actions of non-violent love.
King proclaimed that our loyalties must transcend our race, our tribe, our class, and our nation. His was a vision of a completely integrated society, a community of love and justice wherein brotherhood would be an actuality in all of social life.
He sought integration more than desegregation. Integration, as King understood it, is much more inclusive and positive than desegregation. Desegregation is essentially negative in that it eliminates discrimination against blacks through laws, whereas integration requires a positive change in attitudes. It involves personal and social relationships that are created by love - and these cannot be legislated. King knew that once segregation had been abolished and desegregation accomplished, blacks and whites would still have to learn how to relate to each other across those barriers which have traditionally separated them in our society. All of us would have to become color blind.
In speaking about the possibility of actualizing the Beloved Community in history, King attempted to avoid what he called “a superficial optimism” on the one hand, and “a crippling pessimism” on the other. He hoped it could at least exist in isolated forms in some group life. In his mind, such a community would be the ideal corporate expression of the Christian faith. [1]
As we dream of such a world, we have to start here in this place, the community of faith. The church is a training ground, a school for life in the world. Over the past year our congregation has begun to look more like the diverse world in which we live. And we are still learning how to live as Christians in a fully integrated congregation.
Clarence Jordan, in his Cotton Patch version, translates the beginning of our epistle lesson to say, “If you claim as Father the One who utterly disregards a man’s race and is concerned only with the way he acts, then carry out your Christian commitment with fear and trembling.”
If the church is to be a training ground for creating a beloved community in the world it is essential that we learn what it means to act like Christians and love one another.
Jesus told his disciples in the Upper Room as they broke bread together the night before he died that he was giving them a new commandment to love one another as he had loved them. And that it was by that love that the world would know they were his disciples. Love is so central to being Christian that scripture says, “If you say you love God and don’t love your brother or sister, you are a liar.”
Peter calls us to have “genuine mutual love” and to “love one another deeply from the heart.” He calls us to an authentic, sincere, unhypocritical love without false pretense. Not the sweet smile through clenched teeth that gossips behind a person’s back or rolls the eyes when the other speaks.
It is a mutual love, shared among brothers and sisters in the human family, especially the family of faith. It is a love where all are treated as equals.
It comes deeply from the heart, a heart trained in obedience, shaped by the love of God. And yet, it is not a love that comes just in obedience to a command. But a love that is constant and enduring, unshaken by adversity or shifting circumstances.
To learn to love with a pure love and to allow God to create among us a beloved community, we must begin with God’s love for us. The love of God for us defines love and makes it possible. It is the source of all genuine loves. It is the source we return to time and time again when love is so difficult.
Love is difficult for many reasons. The writings of Christian ethicist Sondra Wheeler have helped me a great deal this week as I have sought to understand the difficulties we have with love. [2] She talks about how we both do and suffer wrong in our human relationships, and how our failures in love confront us with the weaknesses in ourselves - our honest errors, our limitations in wisdom and insight and understanding. We are unable to clearly see into another’s heart and we are only partly acquainted with our own. Many times we lack not only the wisdom to love well but also the courage to love faithfully when it is hard or costly to do so. We are often fearful, driven by the impulse to protect ourselves. Our loves are challenged and frequently compromised by a kind of selfishness. [3]
It is no great revelation to say that human beings tend to be self-centered and self-absorbed. When basic needs of love and companionship go unmet, the pain tempts us to ensure our needs are met by controlling others. Human loves not anchored in the reality of Christ’s redemptive love depend for their survival on their ability to give us what we want. [4]
But if we only love and do good to those who love us and can give us what we want, Jesus asks, what do we do more than unbelievers? The lack of love one often finds in Christian community leads you to wonder whether the things we say we believe make any real difference in our lives.
Our failures in love teach us it is more about the person we have become than it is what we say we believe. Peter says that those who show genuine love are those whose hearts have been trained in obedience to the truth - the truth about who we are and why we humans act the way we do, and the truth about the kind of person God wants to shape us to be.
When disagreements arise and tempers flare, the important thing is not about declaring who is right and who is wrong. The important thing is to realize that most likely the other person is suffering in some way and that people tend to behave badly when they are in pain. A little bit of reflection may then make you wonder whether your being in pain has led you to behave badly as well. [5]
Love can be so difficult and painful we would probably turn away from relationships altogether if it were not for one thing: We crave love like we crave air. We long for it and reach for it and hope for it against all odds and beyond all reason because we must. In some basic sense love is what we live for. I believe it’s because Love is what we were made for. [6]
To know what love is and how to love others we hear Christ’s daunting call to love one another as he has loved us - all the way to sacrifice. We love because God first loved us. Human loves cannot flourish without something like the self-giving love of God. The love of God that reaches across barriers and offenses and takes on itself the task of reconciliation, even where we are the offended party. [7]
The question comes: Are we are willing to love as God loves? Frankly, we are not willing. We are often moved by Jesus’ picture of unconditional love. We claim the Sermon on the Mount as one of our favorite portions of scripture. But when it comes to acting according to Jesus’ teaching, we quickly find that we don’t really want closeness to God on those terms.
A three year old girl was sent into her room to pick up the toys she had scattered from one end of it to the other. Her mother went in to check on her a few minutes later and found her sitting contentedly on the floor playing with something, the toys still scattered everywhere. When asked why she had not picked up any of her toys she answered with remarkable clarity: “I can’t want to.” [8]
So how do we love rightly?
1. To love rightly requires our receiving and our dependence upon the gift of the Holy Spirit. When Peter preached at Pentecost, the people asked him what they must do to be saved, to be whole, and he said, “Repent, be baptized, so that sins are forgiven, and receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.”
We need a love grounded in something stronger and deeper than our own capacities to see truthfully and care faithfully. It will be the Holy Spirit within that enables us to love one another as Christ as loved us. We cannot do it on our own.
2. To love rightly calls for continual repentance and change and transformation of the heart. It is to change our “want to.” Peter will go on to say “put away all malice and guile and insincerity and envy and slander.”
3. To love rightly calls us to remember our baptism, that we are each of us the beloved of God who have committed our lives to the way of Jesus, which is the way of love. Our loves must be governed by the realization that each and every person is first and last and always the daughter or son of God, redeemed by Christ and claimed by him for God’s own.
Richard Niebuhr says that love is rejoicing over the existence of the beloved . . . it is profound satisfaction over everything that makes him great and glorious. Love is gratitude; it is thankfulness for the existence of the beloved. Love is reverence . . . it rejoices in the otherness of the other; it desires the beloved to be what she is and does not seek to refashion her into a replica of the self. Rejoicing. Gratitude. Reverence. Respect. That is love. [9]
4. To love rightly calls us to the forgiveness of sins - to remember that our sins are forgiven and that we must forgive. We pray it every Sunday: “Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.”
So many of our offenses against God take the form of failures in fairness, honesty, patience, and kindness toward other people. Wheeler says that confession offers a constant reminder that we hurt others as often as we are hurt, and that we disappoint as often as we are disappointed by those we love. The practices of confession and pardon remind us that our connections to God and one another rest not on success but on mercy, and that forgiveness is the ordinary texture of a shared life. [1]0
One of the most beautiful visions of an all-encompassing love was penned by another visionary who died unexpectedly the same year King did, 1968. Ten years earlier Thomas Merton had his own epiphany of “a beloved community.” March 18th of this year marked the 50th anniversary of that epiphany occurring right here in Louisville at the corner of Fourth and Walnut (now Muhammed Ali), right at the edge of what is now Fourth Street Live. The placard and a portion of the quote can be found on the cover of your bulletin. He writes:
In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all these people, that they were mine and I theirs, so that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation. . .
The whole illusion of a separate holy existence is a dream . . .
We belong to God. Yet so does everybody else . . .
There are no strangers . . .
The sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud . . .
It is a glorious destiny to be a member of the human race . . .
If only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are walking around shining like the sun. . . .
It was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God’s eyes. If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more greed. I suppose the big problem would be that we would fall down and worship each other. . . .
At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God . . .
It is like a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven . . .
I have no program for this seeing. It is only given. The gate of heaven is everywhere. [11]
We find in these inspired words what it means to love in the beloved community. If only we as a congregation could see each other like this and love in this way.
To love is to realize we all belong to each other and to God.
To love is to realize we are not alien to one another even though we may be total strangers.
To love is to realize we are no longer isolated, separate, but one beloved community.
To love is to make sure all people have the necessities of life.
To love is to no longer judge by the color of skin but by the content of character (and to judge character with grace and forgiveness).
To love is to listen to each other with the heart.
To love is to see people walking around shining like the sun, and to try to tell them they are. Someone recently told me they were sitting on an airplane and all of a sudden everyone he saw was walking around shining like the sun. It can still happen today if only we have eyes to see.
To love like this is indeed to walk through the gate of heaven.
The psalmist asked the question today: What will I do in return for God’s bountiful goodness? More than anything else, what God wants is for us to love one another. That will be more than enough to make God’s heart sing. Because our acts of genuine mutual love are snapshots of reality into God’s original dream, the dream of the beloved community.
*****************
1. Kenneth L. Smith and Ira G. Zepp, Jr., “Martin Luther King’s Vision of the Beloved Community,” Christian Century, April 3, 1974, 361-363
2. Sondra Wheeler, What We Were Made For: Christian Reflections on Love, Jossey-Bass, 2007
3. Ibid., 1-2
4. Ibid., 27, 41, 46
5. Ibid., 121
6. Ibid., xiii
7. Ibid., 18-19
8. Ibid., 170
9. H. Richard Niebuhr, The Purpose of the Church and Its Ministry, HarperCollins, 1956, 35, as quoted in Wheeler, 52)
10. Wheeler, 59
11. Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, Doubleday, 1966, 140-142
posted by fret @ 8:22 PM
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