Let mutual love continue

Sometimes we just don’t get it.

We talk about living the Christian life but we don’t realize what it involves.

I have spent the last six weeks trying to describe the parameters of the Christian life for you, as I understand it, beginning with prayer that process by which God changes our minds and our lives – yet we continue to spend most of our prayer time trying to change God’s mind about things.

Sometimes we just don’t get it.

And then I spoke of security, that sure and steady knowledge that in life and in death we belong to God – yet still we worry ourselves over shadows and rumors and the fears that paralyze us.

Sometimes we just don’t get it.

Then it was faith, the assurance that there are, indeed, so many things that are true and good and beyond our knowing, the assurance that God is working in all of the muck and mess of life to bring a beauty and a joy into being – yet we still focus on the muck and mess and miss the beauty and joy of each day.

Sometimes we just don’t get it.

And Christian living involves change, the process by which God makes us and remakes us and shapes us and reshapes us over and over so that others might be blessed by us – yet we try to cling to yesterdays realities, we try to recapture old glories, we resist and resent the ways that we are called to newness, to change.

Sometimes we just don’t get it.

And last week I spoke of freedom, that intentional decision on our part to be a Christian, to bind ourselves to each other, to this place and to God’s causes in the world – yet we use freedom as a smokescreen to hide our selfishness, our ego-centric decisions, claiming that we are free, so no one, God included, is going to tell us what to do.

Sometimes we just don’t get it.

So I’m not terribly confident about this week’s sermon.

Or at least not about our willingness or ability to get it.

Because what I am going to suggest this week is that the culmination of the Christian Life is this, we live with each other.

Now at first glance this would seem to be the easiest of the things that I have been asking us to do this summer. The other things can easily take us out of our comfort zone and cause us to be different than we are used to being, while today we are simply talking about living with each other.

And that’s not so hard, we’re pretty likable people, we have interesting conversations, we’re funny and entertaining, we wash on a fairly regular basis, you look around at a congregation such as ours and what’s not to like?

So it should be easy for us to live with each other, but is it?

Sometimes, and I think I just did it a few weeks ago, sometimes I will ask you to look around the room and maybe spot someone you don’t know, or realize how much you have appreciated someone you do know and have taken that appreciation for granted, or just marvel at the wonderful work that God has been doing here in this place for 170 years.

But I want to do something different today – and this is going to be a little harder for some of you who are newer to us because you don’t know people quite as well and I apologize if I leave you feeling left out – but I want you to think about the people who are here today and think about someone or a couple of someones who, well, just irritate you, someone who just bugs you because they complain too much or joke around too much or talk too much or seem distant or comb their hair funny or something.

Not that hard huh?

Why are you all staring at me?

No, it’s not that hard to be bugged by people, the longer you know them.

In fact the people who are closest to us are the people who can bug us the most with odd habits and less than perfect lives.

There is no test of our own character quite like that of our closest relationships. I have known, as I’m sure that you have, any number of people who present the world with one image – smiling and jovial and caring – and yet they have little time or patience for their spouse or children. It has been said that the test of a society is the way they treat the weakest members, well the test of our character is whether or not we treat the people in our homes with as much respect and interest and concern as we do the people we work with or strangers we meet.

And few of us ace that exam.

Which is why we need the constant reminder in our families and here in our Church that we need to commit ourselves to loving each other.

Let mutual love continue

And let me call your attention to the word continue, for it implies that the love already exists, that it had a starting point.

And perhaps that’s what we need to keep love going, the reminder of our starting point.

In our homes, when marriages are stormy and the stress between parents and children threatens to snap the ties that bind, that would mean remembering back to the starry-eyed days when a relationship began and a ring and a heart were offered, or remembering back to the that awe-struck feeling when you held a son or daughter and their hand clenched your finger and your soul. Remember and recapture that feeling, that love, and let it continue.

And here in Church as we struggle together to make our way through thickets of disappointment and discouragement and we look at others and we think they’ve got it made, it means remembering that not one of us can know the pains and heartaches that live in every home, the scars that can so easily be reopened on every soul.

So we need to pick out the points where another person lightened our load with a word or a smile or a hug, we need to pick out the ways in which our worship or our work together here made life a little more understandable and meaningful.

And we need to decide that those moments out weigh the moments when someone said the unkind word to us, we need to put aside the things that offend us too easily and remember and recapture the image of the Church not as museum for saints, but as a hospital for sinners, a place to which we all can and have brought our wounds and our disappointments and found healing and acceptance and affection, we need to remember and recapture that feeling, that love, and let it continue.

Let mutual love continue.

And let the word be mutual.

Stop worrying about your place and your status, look after the place and status of others and let them look after you.

That’s counter cultural, you know.

We are suppose to look after ourselves, because if we don’t who will?

And there may be some economic and vocational truth there, it may be true that at our jobs and in our financial dealings we need to be assertive if we are going to be the good stewards that God has called us to be.

However, in our relationships of the heart and soul, in our family relationships and friendships and acquaintanceships we need to be concerned with each other, not ourselves.

Someone once said that the key to a happy marriage is give and take, 80% give and 20% take – on both sides.

That’s mutual love.

The same formula holds for friendships and extended family.

That’s mutual love.

And that same formula holds for our involvement here at Church with each other, are we listening to each others dreams and needs and hopes or are we too busy pushing our own agendas?

Do we have such a deeply ingrained sense of what Church is – based on what it has always been here or what we knew somewhere else - that we won’t allow God to work in our lives to move us to where we should be?

Do we allow others to be as narrow-minded and stubborn and petty and annoying as we know ourselves to be when we stare honestly in the mirror?

Let mutual love continue.

Fortunately, for me at least, the writer to Hebrews did not say “let perfect love continue” so I am free to continue to lead with my heart, to bumble and stumble, to sometimes inspire and sometimes offend, but above all to love imperfectly but enthusiasticly.

And you are free from the need to be perfect, which if that is not a relief to you, it should be, you are free in your homes, at your jobs, in the community and here at Church, you are free to continue to love, to give 80 and take 20, knowing that when the need is there and real God will send you an abundance of the love and protection that you will need.

And we are free to continue to care for each other, to have each other’s back as the saying goes, to promote each other to a higher status, to brag about each other and to love each other. That is how we are called to live the Christian life.

Prayerfully, securely, faithfully, through all of the changes, with a freedom that allows us to reach the highest stage of spiritual bliss and fulfillment: we are then able to live with each other.

Let mutual love continue