Love overwhelmed

Matthew 21: 1-54
New Ark United Church of Christ, Newark, DE
April 9, 2017 – Palm Sunday

          I started writing this sermon after Syria attacked its own citizens with chemical weapons, after the Syrian missile attack and before embarking on the 30 hour food secure famine with the youth from our church and Calvary Baptist.  But even before then, I had read an online post from November 2015 by John Pavlovitz, a pastor in North Carolina, about those times it is not well with our souls.  He writes, “This jacked-up mess we’re living in doesn’t seem to be love overcoming. It seems like love overwhelmed. And so we too feel overwhelmed.”

            “This jacked-up mess we’re living in” has been going on for some time, long before this last election cycle, long before the Senate waged its little war against itself.  The people who greeted Jesus entering Jerusalem by laying cut branches as well as their cloaks on the road probably felt the same way about their situation.  God’s love wasn’t anywhere near overcoming the Romans.  Jesus didn’t seem to be interested in starting a holy war, even though tensions were high between temple authorities, the crowds, Herod Antipas, and the Roman prefect, Pontius Pilate.  This big entrance into Jerusalem seemed like the people’s last shot at seeing just what Jesus would do when push came to shove.

            And indeed Jesus does some pushing and shoving.  After entering Jerusalem, Matthew’s gospel reads that Jesus goes to the temple—the first place any devout Jew would go upon entering the holy city—and turns over the tables of the moneychangers and the seats of those who sold doves.  Perhaps he’d had enough, he knew what needed to be changed, and he took charge.  Perhaps he was tired of everyone turning a blind eye to this convenience.  Of course this was legitimate business, necessary for the running of the temple, but it was being conducted in the gallery intended for Gentiles, that they might have their own space for prayer and worship.  If God’s house is to be place of prayer, it is for prayer for everyone, even those outside of the covenant of Israel.

            We have our own sacred places in which the space set aside for outsiders is growing smaller:  our legislative halls and courts of justice.  But then we still divide ourselves between insiders and outsiders, with borders between us, rather than as sisters and brothers of a single human race.  When we hear or read the news of a Senate filibuster and the ‘nuclear option’, of bills that will lift clean air and clean water protections, or repeal nutrition standards in our schools, in our feelings of love overwhelmed we are tempted to overturn a few tables, unseat a few Senators, declaring that this house is a house of law and justice and yet it has been turned into a den of thieves.  And yet even as Jesus did this, I’m not sure it changed anything that day, except anger his opponents, ruin a few small businessmen, and cause a commotion.

            All that commotion does nothing to stop those in need of healing in approaching Jesus, calling out to him to save them.  All the commotion and turmoil and violence and conflict these days seem to get in the way of us approaching Jesus for healing, calling out to him to save us.  How can a prophet long since gone, heal us and save us, when that’s exactly what we need—healing and saving?  Our post-modern minds don’t take those miracles stories literally, and the word ‘saved’ leaves a bad taste in our mouths because it’s been co-opted by other Christians as a means of gatekeeping.  And yet, there are days it is not well with our souls.  Our love is indeed overwhelmed.

            During the season of Lent, I invited us all to read Elaine Heath’s book, God Unbound: Wisdom from Galatians for the Anxious Church.  She writes about how churches—but really any group of people—can become anxious whenever there is a systems change, a transition, and often we experience this as upheaval, as chaos, and we create conflict as a means of expressing and controlling our anxiety.  Jesus, in his life’s work to get to the heart of the Jewish faith, to usher in God’s beloved community and preach against power and empire in favor of the vulnerable, created a systems change and a dramatic one at that.

            It was such an anxiety-producing, conflict-creating systems change that the state resolved the only solution was to execute the instigator.  And we still kill the messengers, the prophets, the instigators of systems change among us.  Or we marginalize them, demean them, silence them, imprison them.  We even have more socially acceptable ways, like ignoring them or thinking of reasons why we can’t, rather than deal with our own anxiety, our own fears of large-scale change.

            Instigators of change can often be a flash in the pan if there isn’t something more grounding them than just their opinion that they’re doing the right thing.  Jesus lasted as long as he did because he was a contemplative person, and this is how he can heal us and save us in our love overwhelmed.  

             

         First, being a contemplative person means that we show up in all our relationships.  We actively participate with our family, our friends, our co-workers, our teachers and those who learn from us, our communities; with the earth, with church, with God, and ourselves. 

            Second, being contemplative means that we pay attention: to our emotions, our bodies, our spirit, our desires, our needs.  We pay attention to others; we listen more and talk less.  We notice, observe, intuit, absorb, analyze what is happening within our systems—family, church, work, school, community—and what is happening beyond them.  We pay attention to what God is doing in the world.

            Third, we strive to cooperate, collaborate with God, with the universe as it unfolds, as we receive invitation, instruction, correction, encouragement, otherwise known as “going with the flow”, “remaining flexible”.  It’s what makes the Church nimble and responsive; like any human body we need to stretch.  We seek to be aware of our own resistance to change so we can work through it, thus be able to recognize resistance in the system and speak to it with compassion and understanding.

            Finally, to be a contemplative person means after all that showing up and paying attention and cooperation and allowing ourselves to be guided—after all that work, we do the work of faith and we let go of the outcome.  We allow events to unfold.  We acknowledge that God is God and we are not.  As Anne Lamott puts it, we take our sticky fingers off the control panel.  Earlier this week I posted on Facebook a haiku poem: 

God made our hands for

more than hanging on tightly.

It’s time we let go.

            Ironically, for some of us, what it takes to be a contemplative person can cause anxiety in us.  All that letting go.  Contemplative people themselves can cause some of us to feel anxious because the person is not anxious like we are.  It can seem like they don’t care because they aren’t worried like we are.  And yet we know Jesus was a compassionate person who cared deeply, who lived passionately, who relieved the anxieties of the vulnerable, the poor, and the forgotten. 

            Being a contemplative person or even just engaging in the contemplative practices does not guarantee that we will not be overwhelmed by the demands love brings.  In fact, showing up and paying attention brings us face to face with all that love demands.  The greatest act of showing up Jesus did was showing up to his own execution.  However, in our contemplative way of being, we are shown how to be courageous in the face of our fears, how to be resilient when our love is overwhelmed.  For we learn the greatest lesson Jesus has to teach us: we learn how to love well.  Which is the biggest change we could ever instigate.   

            Amen.