Tough love
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Romans 13:8-14; Matthew 18:15-20
When I was
visiting Kay in the hospital the other day, we got talking about her puppy,
Edmund. She said he needs some ‘tough
love’ to get him out of bad habits and
into good ones. Like his namesake in the
Chronicles of Narnia, he needs to experience some transformation through pain!
But the
tough love I want to talk about isn’t just about redemption. It’s the very nature of the life of Jesus
followers. Love is tough, in the sense
of strong AND love is tough in the sense of difficult.
Both of our
texts today speak to those people who were trying to figure out how to live
together in community as Jesus people…..both are about relationships, being
part of something bigger that themselves.
St Paul sums up all the relationship stuff in the ancient, and modern,
Jewish commandment, love your neighbor as yourself. This church stuff is all about that, love
your neighbor as you love yourself.
Last week Ken shared with us a bit about who IS our neighbor, and then
this week I read that while that one Jewish commandment occurs once, ‘love the
stranger’ occurs much more often…..love people we don’t know, who may be culturally,
religiously, racially, obviously different from us…..it’s tough to love THAT
neighbor.
But here in
this place we get to practice that love, week by week, day by day, together on
this journey. Look around. Lots of familiar faces, lots of
‘strangers’…..here we begin tough love.
And here we get some guidelines from Paul and from Jesus…..
Paul says to
pick up the weapons of light, we might say tools, spiritual practices, and he
has several:
Do no harm
Wake up—be
attentive, intentional about your spiritual life—get practical, get real
Live in
light—keep an eye on what could be, not wallow in what is—be transparent and
have integrity
Put on Jesus—if
you’re wearing a cardigan or a jacket, take it off. Now put it back on and imagine it’s the
example of Jesus and the love of God embracing you….what difference will that
make as you look and act Love?
And Jesus
has another one of his own in today’s gospel.
Live at
peace with one another—deal promptly and properly with conflict. My, that’s love that’s tough. But TL takes
its time, isn’t hasty. TL allows space
for all to share their point of view. TL
encourages us to grow together through tough times. Imagine a world that practiced that kind of
love! Then, as Jesus says, that really
would reverberate through the universe.
THIS can be
a place of Love that is tough strong so we can learn how to love tough
difficult. We know life is tough,
especially for you young parents and families.
But here we can build a place where Love Wins when we share together,
worship together, be together, love together.
Let’s make
it happen, tough as it may be…make this a place of learning to love, so that
beyond this place we can live out love supported by one another.
Do no harm;
in fact work on reconciliation
Do good; love, even when it’s tough
and
wear Jesus; wrap yourself in the example of Jesus and the toughest of all loves,
the love of God.
Communion: “It’s interesting that Jesus chose bread and
wine. They’re two things that once
changed can’t revert to their original form.
You can remove lettuce from a salad, and it’s still lettuce, but bread
can’t go back to being grain, and juice can’t return to the grapes. It’s a total transformation. And in each
case, there’s an agent. Yeast in the
case of bread, sugar in the case of wine.
In the eucharist, I think the agent is the Spirit” (Sister Judith in Atchison Blue by Judith Valente)
the table where we meet for our family meals,
and this table, can be holy places, where we gather not just to take in food,
but to know others more intimately, to share an experience that God has in mind
for the whole world. All are invited, neighbors
and strangers; come today to be refreshed by God’s grace, feasting together so
we know we are not alone, that the agent of the Spirit might transform us into
more of what God dreams for us to be.
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