A Law of Love Written on World-Weary Hearts:
A Sermon Preached by the Rev. Susan Allison-Hatch

Here, in this place, around this table we remember, we celebrate and we believe.

Here, in this place, we bring our sorrows and joys, our pain,
    our deepest griefs, our wildest hopes
    dreams we dare not even voice except perhaps to you, O God, in prayer
    wrongs we dare not even face except perhaps with you, O God, at our side.

We gather here tonight, a people weary with the weight of our world,
    a people numbed by the headlines of the week:
        “Grieving Parents Join in March”
        “‘I Am Trayvon’ Thousands Say”
        “Soldier Charged in Afghanistan Murders”
        “Three Plead Guilty in Death of Black Man”
        “Verdict in Rutgers Case”
        “Slain Teen’s Friends Say He Never Picked a Fight”

We wonder what is happening in and to our world--
    a world marked by fear and violence and disconnectedness from one another
    and from you, O God;
    a world where children die at the hands of elders holding guns;
    a world where kids are bullied into suicide;
    a world where an honored soldier turns to murder;
    a world where a homeless man finds his wallet stolen by police.
 
        
Twenty-six hundred years separate us from the prophet Jeremiah and the people to whom he preached.  And yet I wonder, “Are our worlds so far apart?”  
    They, too, lived in a time marked by fear and the violence fear begets.
    They, too, lived in an era marked by an indifference to the needs and longings
        of those the powerful often overlook.
    They, too, watched children die and folks avert their eyes.
    
To the remnant left in Jerusalem beleaguered, besieged and soon to be defeated, the prophet Jeremiah speaks the word of God:

    The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant
    with the house of Israel and the house of Judah.  It will not be like the
    covenant that I made with their ancestors...a covenant that they broke....
    I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will
    be their God, and they shall be my people.

The Torah, the law, written on the hearts of God’s people, woven into the core of their being.  

There is a story often told about Rabbi Hillel, a great Jewish teacher and philosopher who lived fifty years before Jesus.  A heathen came up to Rabbi Hillel and said to him, “I will convert to your religion on the condition that you teach me the whole Torah while I stand on one foot.”  Hillel answered, “What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor:  that is the whole Torah... “  

That’s what God writes on human hearts:  “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

That’s the covenant God makes with us:  “Love you neighbor as yourself.  In doing so, you love me as I love you.”

And yet we live, you and I, in world of walls. Walls that divide neighbors from one another.  Walls erected out of fear and envy and hate. Walls built with the bricks of othering.  Othering people on the basis of their race or their sex or their gender identity or even how they part their hair or laugh or cry or love or do their homework.  Othering—it is the very denial of neighbor and of God in neighbor.  Othering—it’s a breach, a breach of our covenant with God and our covenant with one another.  

And yet we all do it—sometimes in big ways but most often in small ways—a joke told or laughed at, an insult ignored, a wrong unprotested, a law unchallenged, silence in the place of witness, a pattern overlooked, a behavior dismissed with the words, “They’re only kids” or “Boys will be boys” or “Girls can be so mean.”  Our corporate sin buttressed by our own individual sins of omission and commission, of things done and of things left undone.

So we, like the psalmist, cry to God,

    Have mercy on me, O God, according to your loving kindness;
        in your great compassion blot out my offenses.
    Wash me through and through from my wickedness
        and cleanse me from my sin.
    Create in me a clean heart, O God,
        and renew a right spirit within me.

That’s what God does as God, again and again,  writes the law of love on our hearts.  

That’s what God does as Jesus invites us, time and again, to follow him into a life of radical neighborliness, a life where we, with God, begin anew the work of healing the world from the wounds that othering inflicts, the work of building God’s reign with the bricks of love of neighbor.  

So we gather at this table bringing with us the hurts that we absorb and the hurts that we inflict on one another.  We eat the bread, we drink the wine and we remember our oneness with God and one another.

We remember, we celebrate, we believe.

For God so loved the world that God gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.

This is perhaps the #1 best known bible verse,
and it would be easy to hear this in the gospel reading and say,
”Oh, yeah, that again. I know all about that.”

But I wonder if we really do know about it.
For that matter, I wonder if John really knows all about it.  
It’s almost as if he comes out with this really wow, prophetic statement:
For God so loved the world that God gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.

And then he backs away from it.
John goes on to say that, actually, some of the world will be condemned
through whether or not they believe in God’s Son.
John makes this amazing statement about the depth of God’s love and will for the world’s salvation –
    and then he sets conditions.
Belief in Jesus = salvation; unbelief = condemnation.

But then comes the verse that I think is really the zinger:
This is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil.
There, I think, is the real condition.
Not a condition of belief or unbelief,
resulting in eternal salvation or condemnation,
    but the condition of brokenness in which we find ourselves
unable to choose the light, even when it is right in front of us.

It is a choice we face every day – between darkness and light.
Madeleine L’Engle, one of my favorite authors, wrote:
“Like it or not, we either add to the darkness of hate and fear and indifference which surrounds us, or we light a candle to see by. “
 
Some very few people seem to be almost wholly of the darkness or of the light – to be what we have sometimes called saints, or to be irrevocably evil.
But in the gray in-between of our daily lives,
    aren’t people really a complex mix of the two?
Don’t we live every day in the struggle between these poles?
Paul perhaps described it best when he said,
    the good which I would do I do not, and the evil I would not do, I do.
Haven’t we all experienced that that place –
    striving to walk in the light of Christ, but falling short.

And this is where salvation finds us.
Because God offers us forgiveness,
    and each day another change to walk further into the light.
God knows when we stray, and does not shut the door on us –
    but rather, as the Father who welcomes home the prodigal son,
    comes running down the road to meet us and draw us home.
God loved the world – loved us – so much that God sent Jesus,
    who came to be a living incarnation of that love.
Jesus came to show us love, not only for those who are like us,
    but for those whose race and tradition and ideas
are very different from ours.
Jesus came to teach us forgiveness by constantly offering forgiveness to all -     both those who were despised and outcast,
    and those whose rank and privilege made them think
they did not need forgiveness at all.


Can you think of a time when you were very aware of God’s love for you and God’s forgiveness of your sins and shortcomings?

I remember one night rocking my new baby boy in the rocking chair in his room. I was basking in the love and tenderness I felt for my long-awaited child. Suddenly, it hit me, that if I say God loves me as God’s beloved child,
 that means God feels for me just the way I feel now –
the tenderness, the hope, the acceptance and joy. Wow.

I also know that it isn’t easy for everyone to experience
or accept such love from God.
I remember a discussion I had with my roommate in college.
She was intense and single-minded in her studying
 and pursuit of grades and accolades, and she told me,
“I have to get good grades and constantly prove myself to my father. I’m never sure if he loves me. That’s why I don’t really understand you when you talk about God’s love. I just don’t know what it means to be loved unconditionally.”


That may have been the first time I realized the power we have
to bear God’s love to one another –
     or to be a stumbling block which keeps another from knowing God’s love.
Again, we find that we have the ability to bear light into the life of another person – or to hold them more firmly in a darkness of loneliness and fear.

There is a bit of Lutheran teaching that addresses this idea,
    which I want to share with you briefly.

Luther was all too aware that the message of God’s love and forgiveness could be hard to hear. He had spent most of his life in utter terror of God’s judgment, certain he would be condemned for all the petty sins he discovered in his hours of self-examination.
His realization that God’s love and forgiveness is a gift,
    not earned, but given freely through the love of Christ,
    changed everything for him.

He knew that when we speak words of grace and forgiveness,
it is easy for them to be missed
by just the people who most need to hear them.
But there is more to our practice of faith than words.
One gift we have in worship is the meal that we share –
    the sacrament of Holy Communion in which Jesus comes to us.
When Lutherans serve communion, we say,
“The body of Christ, given for you,” and “The blood of Christ, shed for you.”
These words are significant, because here is where everyone encounters
the personal message of God’s grace.
Not just general statements like, “God so loved the world” or
“the blood of the covenant shed for all people” –
but this bread, this sip of wine, carrying Jesus’ presence and promise to you,
here and now.


There are many ways we may experience God’s love  -
    through beautiful worship and music,
    through the Word and sacrament shared in church,
    through the wonder and beauty of nature,
    through the love of a family member, friend, or teacher,
    or the care of a community.
One reason to practice prayer is to be open to receive God’s grace,
    to see God’s love when it is offered to us.

And once we have received the gift of grace,
    we can go out into the world God loves to share that love.
When we live in the light of God’s love, it is easier –
    not easy, but easier –
    to choose, day by day, to light a candle in the darkness.

Thanks be to God.
Amen.

Beyond the Box:
A Sermon Preached by the Rev. Susan Allison-Hatch

Years ago, I worked at a school that rented out its commons space to a church.  Every Sunday morning the church wheeled a big cabinet out to the commons where they set up church.  One of my neither spiritual nor religious friends referred to that church as “The Church in a Box” implying that all that was that church could be boxed up and rolled out on Sunday mornings and boxed up and rolled back to its place on Sunday afternoons.   “Church in a box”—it’s more than a metaphor.  For some it’s a way of life.  A way of keeping the Holy contained, at arm’s length, safely within a carefully proscribed space.

Well-spaced shelves, each neatly ordered and organized according to the structure of the service.  Easy access to all that you need to worship God.  Right there at your finger-tips.

No agonizing search for worship essentials.  Just open the box and you’ll find what you need.  Prayer cards second shelf on the right.  Scripture lessons smack dab in the center.  Songs of praise in the middle on the left.  Easily accessible to right-handed people.  Candles on the bottom shelf.  You don’t want to reach too far for the light.  And on the inside of the door, a guide for setting up.  Nothing left to chance.  

“Church in a box”—it sounds rather like a caricature doesn’t it?  Nobody really approaches church like that.  That’s the stuff of fantasy or maybe fanaticism.  The stuff of folks who have it all figured out.  Folks who are quite clear about who’s in, who’s out and why.  “Church in a box”—that’s the other folks’ kind of church. Church for people who think they have it all together.  Church for folks who have found their worshipping niche.  Church of the safety zone.  

To the people of Corinth—people who have God boxed up tight with their ideas about how best to know God—the apostle Paul says, “We preach Christ crucified”.  What a scandal!  What an enigma!  What a challenge!  A bit later in the same letter to the church in Corinth, Paul says, “For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.”

Christ crucified, tortured, dying a painful and humiliating death.  Exposed to shame and ridicule.  Powerless.  Abandoned.  Alone.  This is the God Paul proclaims?  This is the God who trumps the signs of the Jews and the wisdom of the Gentiles?  Christ whose last words are, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me.”  

Is this the God we seek?  The crucified God?  The abandoned God?  God whose cries of pain echo through the ages?  What comfort, what strength, what hope can we find in this God of the Cross?  What box contains this God—this crucified God?

So often the God we seek, the God we claim is a lesser God.   A God  we can understand.  A God we can influence.  A God we can bring home for dinner.  God who comforts.  God who inspires.  God who plays fair.  God who plays nice.  A fixer God.  God in a box.

But this is not the God Paul proclaims.  This is not God of the Cross.  Not the God of our weary years or the God of our silent tears. Not the God of Auschwitz or Dafur or the Killing Fields of Cambodia.  Not the God of Matthew Shepard and those who mourn him still. Not the God of the women buried on Nine Mile Hill.  Not the God of you and me in our worst moments.

To the people of Corinth and to you and me as well, Paul proclaims Christ crucified.  Foolishness to some and a stumbling block to others.  But to those with their backs against the wall, to those who have lost all hope, to those in the midst of despair, assurance that no terror, no shame, no fear, no pain fall outside the embrace of the Cross.  

In his autobiographical novel Night, the Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel tells the story of the night two Jewish men and a boy were hanged as a lesson to the other prisoners.  Everyone in the camp was forced to watch the execution.  The men died quickly, but the boy died slowly, torturously.  At one point someone in the crowd yells out, “Where is God?”  Silence meets the question, so again the man cries out, “Where is God?”  A voice deep inside Wiesel replies, “There hanging from the gallows.”

Only a God of the gallows, only a God of the Cross, only a God abandoned and alone is God enough for our lowest moments, our fractured world and our broken lives.  We proclaim Christ crucified: God of the long haul.