The grace of deviance

Galatians 5: 1, 13-25 (The Message)
New Ark United Church of Christ, Newark, DE
June 26, 2016

Isn’t it a pity?
Isn’t it a shame?
How we break each other’s hearts
And cause each other pain?

How we take each other’s love
Without thinking any more
Forgetting to give back
Isn’t it a pity?

Some things take so long
But how do I explain
When not so many people
Can see we’re all the same?

And because of all their tears
Their eyes can hope to see
The beauty surrounds them
Isn’t it a pity?

This song, written by George Harrison, illustrates how we human beings can take love and make it unrecognizable to the point that we forget who we are and whose we are.

            But we’re not born that way.  A baby knows what communion is in being fed by her mother’s body and blood, a very real, life-giving, life-sustaining relationship.  A baby knows what baptism is in being suspended and then born in the waters of the womb.  A baby knows what love is before she is even born.

            The Hebrew word for compassion, whose singular form means ‘womb’, is often used of God in the Hebrew Scriptures.  ‘To be compassionate as God is compassionate’ is to be moved as a mother is moved in response to her children.  This is what is meant by Paul in his letter to the Galatians when the Greek word agape is used:  to love as in great and tender mercy, pity, to love in a social or moral sense—to have compassion.

            I’d like to have a car magnet that says “Love does not insist on its own way”.  That pretty much sums up what Paul is trying to say to the church in Galatia.  When we take on love, when we inhabit love and allow it to have life in us, to quote another song, “you can’t always get what you want.”  We become slaves but of a different kind.  Fools for Christ.  Suckers for Jesus.  Freedom does not mean that we get to behave any way we want, say anything we want, do anything we want. 

 

The resistance to and rejection of the phrase “politically correct” has been brewing since it was perceived to be an imposition of liberal orthodoxy.  President George H. W. Bush said in a commencement address in 1991:  “The notion of political correctness has ignited controversy across the land. And although the movement arises from the laudable desire to sweep away the debris of racism and sexism and hatred, it replaces old prejudices with new ones. It declares certain topics off-limits, certain expressions off-limits, even certain gestures off-limits.”  Yes, the ones that hurt others and deny their dignity and worth as a human being.

Many of us probably define political correctness a bit differently, depending on where we’re coming from.  As I was writing, as I often do, I asked David what he thought, and he said that to him, political correctness means awareness and respect for another person’s perspective:  their values, morals, ethics, their viewpoint and experience of the world.  Some people object to political correctness because they see it as an intrusion on their own values.  What’s the favorite comeback in the point in the conversation when someone objects to some political incorrectness?  “Hey, it’s a free country”.

But we’re not free to call people hateful, hurtful names.  We’re not free to make others targets of our anger and fear.  We’re not free to discriminate and establish laws against others because of who they love, the color of their skin, their gender or gender identity, their ethnic background, their religion, or because they’ve come to this country for a better life.  We’re not free so we can hate whoever we want.  Is that really the country, the world, the freedom we want to live in?   

If folks want to keep quoting Leviticus, let’s begin and end with chapter 19, verse 18:  “You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord.”  As Eugene Peterson so wisely put it, if we bite and ravage each other, in no time at all we’ll be annihilating each other, and where will our precious freedom be then?  We’re free so we can love and care for everyone as we would want to be cared for and loved.

We’ve seen a viciousness unleashed in a way that divides people, even from themselves.  Earlier this week a man tweeted an invective at a well-known female author, but lovingly announced the birth of his daughter.  An ineffective congress offered its thoughts and prayers once again after a devastating shooting, engaged in a filibuster, and even had a sit-in, but is still getting nowhere when it comes to effective legislation to prevent gun violence.  A nation divides against itself in a vote that may wind up taking it out of a union but wonders the next morning what it did to not only itself but our broken global economy.  The Grand Canyon of anger, pain, and division is everywhere, and we’re choosing sides rather than trying to heal the rift.

Mary Luti, seminary educator and UCC pastor, wrote in a recent devotional, “The miracle is [Jesus] decides not to stand aloof from another person’s pain.  …We heal by the company we keep”.  This is why I believe faith communities and community of all sorts, especially the United Church of Christ, is so needed right now.  More than ever we cannot afford to stand aloof from another person’s pain but to stand with and in another person’s pain, especially if they are alone.  We live in a time when we can isolate ourselves and believe ourselves to be connected all at once.  We can lob insults and injury all the while staying hidden behind what appears to be a curtain of privacy.  

This is why the framers of our country devised not legalism but freedom yoked with responsibility, with self-control.  It’s why in the United Church of Christ we have autonomy, the freedom of a local church, held in covenant, in relationship with the wider church.  We’re going to be human, which means we will want our own way while still wanting to be in relationship, in community with others.  We will still be pleasure-seeking, pain-avoidant creatures who want to belong to each other.  So how do we live without causing each other suffering?  How do we walk with each other, travel together, and not destroy one another but behold one another as beloved, even in our pain?

Frederick Buechner wrote, “It is no wonder that from the very start of [Jesus’] ministry, the forces of Jewish morality and of Roman law were both out to get him because to him the only morality that mattered was the one that sprang from the forgiven heart, like fruit from the well-watered tree, and the only law he acknowledged as ultimate was the law of love.”

The only thing for fear and pain and hate is to be deviant, defiant by having the courage to love and to forgive.  This is what is meant by living God’s way, the way of Jesus, the way of Spirit, the way of the Buddha, the way of Krishna, the way of the human being that seeks the good of all life.  We can’t legislate it; we have to choose it.  When we choose this way, when we deviate from me-first to all-of-us-together, we create more kindness, we are able to restore justice, we become more resilient.  This way is a living way only when we live it.  Community gives us life only when we invest ourselves in it.  It is another great paradox:  We are set free when we become slaves to love.  That’s what it means to be Church.

AMEN.