Des Moines, IA November 1, Growing in Love

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Ambrose Lyons
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Mark 12:28 34 Valerie Miller-Coleman Des Moines, IA November 1, 2015 Growing in Love Last weekend my husband and I packed up our babies in the station wagon and drove down to Kansas to visit his

1 Mark 12:28 34 Valerie Miller-Coleman Des Moines, IA November 1, 2015 Growing in Love Last weekend my husband and I packed up our babies in the station wagon and drove down to Kansas to visit his parents. My in-laws are lovely people. We really like to visit Nonnie and Pop Pops. The kids run wild in their basement. Ben eats potato chips and lounges around in his pajamas. And best of all, my mother-in-law saves up a mountain of catalogues for me to thumb through on her sofa. I just glaze over and swim through the worlds of Neiman Marcus, Talbots, Boden, Sundance and the Peruvian Connection. It s like eating peanut butter right from the jar. Catalogues are wonderful things. Page after page of stage sets are carefully composed to sell you a fantasy about who you might become if only you bought this poncho or those high tech yoga pants. My favorites are the holiday home catalogues. I am totally vulnerable to that line of marketing. This is my confession. I love the mood of belonging and safety set by Garnett Hill. The family tableaus with winsome yet hip young adult children and their mothers wearing Eileen Fisher and pouring tea from Marimekko teapots. Or the young family fully coordinated in Hanna Andersson pajamas around the monogrammed Christmas tree. It s like a vision of family love perfected. All this could be yours! But of course it can t. Our lives aren t like that. In the catalogue, no one ever has a runny nose or a nasty argument or a few too many drinks. We are beautiful, broken, real people. And we can be sold any number of things to set the stage for love, belonging and a sense of home. It s such a compelling promise: to be loved and to belong. And smart marketing people know we ll pay more for that than almost anything else. To be loved and to belong is a fundamental task of

2 human life. The whole span of our lives we live with that longing pulling us toward one another. If we re very lucky, we find people who love us and with whom we belong. As creatures made in the image of God who is love, we are made to be loved. It s who we are, but it s only part of what we re for. I believe my calling as a beloved child of God is to learn how to love others well. That s why I m here. I believe in what we re doing here at Plymouth. We understand that our mission is very simple. It s just this: to grow in love of God and neighbor. We take seriously this morning s scripture reading. In it Jesus says the two most important things we can do are love God and love other people. So that s what we try to do here. I love our mission for two reasons, first it s sort of confessional. If our mission is to grow in love, we re acknowledging that we re not there yet. We re still learning how to love and there s a long way left to go. Second, I love our mission because it s ambitious. We re focused on what Jesus calls us to do, not what we like best or what comes most easily to us. Growing in love of God and neighbor is messy hard work. It s the opposite of Christmas catalogues. We re not trying to secure ourselves in a warm cocoon of mutual admiration here we re learning to follow Jesus. And that s a whole different story. Here s the part of the story we hear today. The way Mark tells it, Jesus was talking to a scribe in the temple. And the scribe asks him this question. He asks, Which commandment is first of all? As always, when Jesus is talking to a religious authority, you can assume he s being tested in some way. The establishment is usually uncomfortable around Jesus. So the scribe asks Jesus this question to see if he ll give an orthodox answer or not. And Jesus says the most important commandment is this, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength. And then he pops in with a follow up, And the second is this, You shall love your neighbor as yourself. These are the two most important commandments. Now I don t know about you, but I have a kind of complicated relationship with commandments. I m not a big rules person. I aspire to be an ethical person with moral integrity, but rules don t always line up with what I believe to be ethical. So sometimes I disregard them. I have the parking tickets to prove it. Even so, I do see the usefulness in laws and rules and commandments. They make explicit what might otherwise be unclear. And we usually set them up in a place where folks tend to get out of line. You may have noticed we don t have signs around the church that say No shirt, no shoes, no service. You all tend to show up fully

3 dressed, so we don t have to clarify that point. On the other hand, I firmly spell out our rule about no alcohol in the building when I orient groomsmen and bridesmaids to the church during wedding rehearsals. We put rules in place where people tend to get out of line. When Jesus talks about the most important commandments, I hear him saying these are two places where people tend to mess up. Where it isn t easy to do the right thing. He says love God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength. That s hard to do. Loving God is a life s work not a moment s passing happy thought. Like a perennial garden, we live with God season after season, trimming and weeding and adding richness to the soil. Putting beautiful things to rest when they ve come to their end. Watching frozen barren soil with hope that life will return. I believe that to love God is to love what God loves. Maybe that s why Jesus answers the scribe with two commandments when he d asked for just one. Jesus said, The second is this, love your neighbor as yourself. To love one s neighbor as oneself demands that we regard every person as possessed of equal agency and value as ourselves. That s hard to do. We have so many neighbors. It s almost paralyzing to imagine the full humanity of every person. Every refugee on every boat leaving Syria, the women who butcher our chickens, the beloved children of God whose bodies are marketed on the internet, every one of them is a world to someone. And to God. I believe that to love God is to love those whom God loves. The God who led the Hebrews out of slavery in Egypt, who gave voice to the prophets crying out for justice and an end to tyranny, that is the God who came to us in Jesus Christ and dwelt among us, serving the poor, the outcast and the stranger at the margins of the world s power. And so I believe that to love the God made known to us in Jesus Christ, the one who proclaimed the last shall be first, is to love our neighbors all our neighbors as ourselves. And most particularly, those whom the world doesn t love. Not as objects for the satisfaction of our charitable impulses but as brothers and sisters with a full claim to the abundance of life. This is important. I want you to hear me clearly. To love another person as oneself is not the same as making sure they have a safe place to sleep or enough food to eat. It s not the same as making sure legislation is amended to further protect our neighbors rights. Service and advocacy are valuable practices and Plymouth people do them both well. But service and

4 advocacy quickly drift from their moorings without an anchor firmly set in loving relationship. Growing in love means entering into the difficult, messy interpersonal space where we learn to love. Sitting down for a meal together. Working alongside one another. Sharing worship. In my experience, these are the places where love between neighbors begins. Acts of solidarity and the exchange of gifts may come later, but love begins with relationship. In Lawrence, Kansas I had a friend named Brian. When we first met, Brian was an outlandishly dressed, intoxicated homeless man who tried to sell me a Rolling Stone magazine. I liked him immediately. The second or third time we met, Brian felt comfortable enough to tell me about his housing situation. He couldn t pay rent because he couldn t keep a job. So he had to stay at the downtown shelter. Things were chaotic and violent in the shelter so he spent most of his time on the street. I remember Brian telling me a story, with great flair, about his stint working as a dishwasher in one of the downtown restaurants. He liked the work okay but he hated his coworkers. He said he always felt like a thoroughbred among mules back there in the dish room. Every time we talked I gave Brian the number for the homeless outreach team and invited him to church. Several months later he turned up in worship. It was awkward. He smelled bad. He was kind of drunk, as he always was. But he came. Some of us made a point to welcome him and be friendly. He came again. Then he disappeared for six months. When Brian finally surfaced again he was pale and looked freshly hatched. He d been picked up for public intoxication and involuntarily committed for mental health and substance abuse treatment in Topeka. Brian was sober, but he was also haunted by all the things he d been drinking to forget. He began showing up for AA meetings at church and coming more regularly to worship. The awkwardness sort of faded away and over time he became ours. We became his. That s how it happens. Someone on the margins of society, that place where Jesus loved to spend his time among the forgotten and ignored, becomes part of community where he is valued as himself. Not as object of charity but as a person at the center of community. We were changed by one another. I imagine Brian felt judged and uncomfortable among such wealthy people. I imagine there were church people who were irritated by his presence and afraid for their children. And even so, we moved through the hard, messy space of growing together in love. It wasn t perfect. We didn t get it all right. But we did come a little closer to the kingdom of God.

5 Brothers and sisters, beloved of God, we are the church in this season. I believe we are called together as Plymouth Church for a particular purpose at this time and in this place: to become a church where all are truly welcome; where the outcast and the stranger bear the image of God s face. I am proud to be part of a congregation with the humility and the audacity to dedicate itself to growing in love of God and neighbor. I pray that God s grace will attend us all as we learn to grow in love. Amen. Plymouth Congregational Church United Church of Christ 4126 Ingersoll Avenue Des Moines, Iowa Phone: (515) Fax: (515) vmcoleman@plymouthchurch.com

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