Sermons

READING ~ Ancient Text – Matthew 22:36 – 40
36 “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” 37 He said to him, “ ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ 38 This is the greatest and first commandment. 39 And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ 40 On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.”
 

A Tale from the Jewish Talmud

On another occasion it happened that a certain non-Jew came before Shammai and said to him,
‘Make me a convert, on condition that you teach me the whole Torah while I stand on one foot.’
Thereupon he repulsed him with the builder’s cubit that was in his hand. When he went before
Hillel, he said to him, ‘What is hateful to you, do not to your neighbor: that is the whole Torah,
the rest is the commentary; go and learn it.’

 

READING ~ Pavlovitz, John. If God Is Love, Don’t Be a Jerk (p. 67). Presbyterian Publishing Corporation. Kindle Edition.
We all have an aspirational theology, a best-case-scenario belief system that we’d like to have in a perfect world—and tend to imagine already exists. That’s the steadfast faith and expansive love we glean from the songs and the prayers and the doctrinal statements. The problem is, we don’t always embody that love as well as we’d like or assume we do—which means we are usually a lot less sure and kind than we tell ourselves we are. Not only that, but it might be our very theology that needs alteration in order to make us more loving.
 

SERMON

The opposite of faith is certainty.

The opposite of certainty is wisdom.[1]

John Pavlovitz, our inspirational person for today, is a Christian living in a time when “normative Christianity” in America seems to have left Jesus and God and Love far behind.  Hence, the title of his most recent book: “If God Is Love, Don’t Be a Jerk.”

On a personal level, John Pavlovitz made the faith journey from the Roman Catholicism of his childhood to being pastor of a mainstream megachurch to being a religiously liberal (progressive) blogger, speaker and writer.  With each stage of his journey, he realized a few consistent things about his own faith.

His story about God was too small for his evolving understanding of faith.

Even though he (and we) know perfectly well that as followers of the Hebrew tradition or Jesus, there is really only one job he (we) are given to do in this life and he (we) keep screwing it up.   That job is Love.
“For as long as human beings have been declaring devotion to a God of love, they have been gloriously screwing it up by being hateful in the process. The Bible doesn’t shy away from that, and neither should we. If we’ve been paying attention, we know that for as much as religion has bent the arc of the moral universe toward justice,[2] it has just as often pulled it into inequity. For whatever liberation has come via the people of Jesus, we have collectively engineered bondage and fortified supremacy as well. It’s good to admit this as we try to fashion something better from what has been. It’s necessary to see the ugly things in the shadowed places of our nation and in our faith tradition as we work to let a little bit of light in. That isn’t going to be as easy or as neat or as comfortable as we’d like.”[3]
No, it is not going to be easy or neat or comfortable.

It is necessary to critique our own attitudes, thoughts, words and behaviors about religion and religious people – Unitarian Universalist and otherwise.

We may not quote the Bible as being the MOST important source of what love is, but we often say that Love is the doctrine of our faith or that Love is the spirit of our faith.  So, yes … if it’s all about Love, let’s not be jerks!

We have experienced the thrill of victory AND the agony of defeat as we have tried to live these affirmations of love.

So, while it is important that we critique and challenge and unmask the lovelessness of a whole swath of American Christianity, let us not fall into being jerks ourselves by not being reflective about and repentant of our own failures to demonstrate the Love we profess.  Humility is a necessary companion to our staunch opposition to those who claim Jesus as Savior and then behave in ways that seem completely opposite to his teachings and example.

Amen?    Amen.  Yes, thank you.

Alright, let me talk about the concept of too small a God.

For anyone who does not relate to or appreciate the use of the word God here, please know that what we are talking about is the spark of divinity that is in each human being – the chee, the life-force, the inspiration of our very first breath of life.

John Pavlovitz calls this mystery of life our God Box.  We put God in a box so we can understand God and contain God.  As we grow and expand our understanding of the breadth and depth of the interdependent web of all existence, our box becomes a tighter and tighter place to stay. The box we once thought just right is now too small.  Our understanding of the Divine has grown and gets bigger with each new understanding we gain.

One of the characteristics of Unitarian Universalists is our refusal to be bound by a single story or one version of truth.  We claim that our preferred or comfortable spirituality is just that – our chosen spirituality.  No choice of spiritual belief or practice is the only right way.  I might be Jewish or Christian or Buddhist or rationalist or pagan, but I cannot be just that and I won’t ask you to be more like me. I benefit from all the spiritualities and philosophies of life that make up our congregation and our human family.

Another way of saying this is that our welcome table must get longer and longer and longer with each phase of our own awakening.

To neglect to expand the box or lengthen the welcome table to include everyone is, frankly, being a jerk.

What we want is a faith that makes us better human beings and a small faith, a restrictive or conditional faith can’t do that.  We must shy away, no, we must run away, from anyone or anything that seeks to contain our faith in a too-small box.

We see all around us the horrifying result of self-proclaimed pious people who are right now, even as so many of them are sitting in church pews hearing the word of God preached from on high, trying to force everyone into a God Box that is so tiny that even just the shadow of Jesus cannot fit in there.  Yet, they push and shove and scream and holler and even try to legislate everyone into their small box and in the process, they will snuff out the breath of love in a nano second.

These folks are not evil.  They have a God that is too small.  Too small even for the God they proclaim.  It can make them behave like jerks.

Let me share an obvious example of this from John Pavlolitz.

Pro-Life.  Good heavens, we can hardly hear the word without cringing.
“It’s difficult for people outside of organized Christianity to fathom how so many believers reconcile this prevalent inconsistency or justify such fierce loyalty to a politician or party with such contempt for so many iterations of humanity—all in the name of protecting human life. The abortion issue has been named by millions of self-identified religious people as their moral deal breaker, their hard line in the sand, their singular hill to die on—but their lack of a consistent pro-life ethic regarding diverse sentient human beings who have already exited the birth canal is something that a generation of faithful, once-faithful, and faithless people alike cannot make sense of or peace with. They rightly cannot reconcile how so many followers of Jesus are seemingly able to place the word “abortion” on one side of a massive moral scale—and have it far outweigh the lives of caged children, mass shooting victims, murdered Black men; or the prevalent threats of generational poverty, systemic racism, and a litany of human rights atrocities that barely seem to register or matter.”[4]
He can get on a roll – like so many of us can……. But, OK, you get the picture.

But it’s not just the hypocrisy of loving the generic impersonal embryo and then hating the actual human being that comes to life.  It’s also about missing the mark with God’s love.  If you remember your Sunday school lessons from long ago – Adam and Eve are in the Garden of Eden.  God specifically and intentionally gifts these first humans with free will.  God creates humans to have agency in their own lives – yes for both good and for ill, but to always live from our own choices.  So, God is adamantly pro-choice.  Boom.

Abortion may not be our weak point.

But there are soft places in our own lives where we are perilously close to being the jerk we so harshly criticize when we see it in others.

Being a jerk can take many forms.  The catalogue of “isms” lies open before us.

Where do we struggle to be builders of a table long enough to seat everyone equally?

There are people who push us to our limits of acceptance and love.  You know there are.  How many of you have sworn under your breath at the sheer stupidity of those who see the world and our obligations to do what is right, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with our God very differently than you do, I mean VERY differently?

I’m not asking for a show of hands – but I am asking each of us to slow down our overactive righteous indignation and consider what it means to love our neighbors – all of them, even the ones who would take away our rights, end our marriages, cancel comprehensive education, deny healthcare to our transgender children and force us to with White Christian Nationalism.

I am not completely naïve, I do know that there are people, lots of people, who are right now this very day and every day working very diligently and intentionally to do all these things.  Do not think for a moment that I am not keenly aware of the fragility of civil rights that can be erased by a legislature or a Supreme Court.  And many of these folks are doing terrible things in the name of the love of God.  I am horrified.  Yet, I do not want to become like the jerk I see in my adversaries.

What does love demand?  John Pavlovitz says, “Love your damned neighbor!”

Gosh, how hard can that be and where do I start – because I am not going to permit my neighbor to take away the lives and rights of me and all our other neighbors.

Proximity.  Do you remember Bryan Stevenson’s advice to get proximate?  Get close to people who are hard to love; the very people who see the world so differently – – –   what they would pursue with all their energy is exactly what we want to prevent with all our energy.

Proximity.  Share a little space – a very little if necessary.  We may never agree with their sense of religion or their understanding of love, but can we begin to see them as human beings with the same basic wants and needs that we ourselves have?

Each of us is the same incarnation of divine energy. Each of us is a once-in-history, never-to-be-repeated reflection of the image of God.

John Pavlovitz says it this way….
“In this way, we might begin to understand God as the sum total of eight billion extraordinary fragments stitched together. I suppose that if God is love and if love is universal, then a universal God is the only accurate understanding. It would be the height of arrogance to say to a Muslim or a Jew or a Buddhist or a Sikh or to anyone of any authentic, sincere perspective, “Your story may be meaningful and life-giving to you, but it’s wrong.” How small am I making God when I do that? How open am I to being led to a deeper and wider place? How big of a jerk does that make me?”[5]
Ultimately, we begin with ourselves.  To find today’s failure to practice perfect love – well, shall we all try looking in the mirror?  So often we fail to see the intolerance in ourselves while being perfectly happy and justified in shining a bright light on the failure of others.

Perhaps we can soften our harsh words and attitudes and appreciate more the humanity of our neighbors.  We don’t ever need to agree with them nor do we need to like them or invite them into our homes – that is not what love requires.  Love requires us to affirm the inherent dignity and worth of all beings.  Easy to say.  Hard to practice.

I don’t have a magic formula for how we do this hard work.

I do have the teaching and example of people who inspire me.

I hope you do too.

Let me recap the teachings of this month that I have gained and offer you as a possible way forward.

Eboo Patel is a Muslim.  His message is that we are living in an Interfaith country.  This is a fact.  The United States is the most religiously diverse nation in human history – right now.  All that we can accomplish for the good of creation, we can do in this interfaith environment when we join our good will with the good will of people of all faith traditions.  We have more in common than we have in separation.

Margaret Wheatley has a Buddhist practice.  Her message is that we are currently living in the final decline of our civilization.  All civilizations in human history have experienced a lifespan that ends in decline.  We cannot prevent this.  We cannot save the world from suffering.  Therefore, our choice is about who and how we will be in the presence of suffering.  Our faith leads us to choose to do what we can from where we are with what we have to be worthy companions to each other and to reduce the suffering of those who are most deeply impacted by the destruction that lies in front of us.  Love will guide us.

John Pavlovitz is a Christian.  His message is – If you believe in Love, don’t screw it up.  There are always those who seek to limit God and to force their religious understandings on everyone else.  Resist these efforts completely and also – don’t respond by being a jerk.  Expand the box of religious truth and lengthen the table of welcome so everyone has an equal place.

There are many ways to become better human beings – find yours.  And, dear Spiritual Companions, be self-critical. Sometimes the jerk is the face we see in the mirror.

What I can offer you this day is the strength of community, this beloved community, each of you.  Together, we may find that we are becoming better human beings – more like the people we aspire to be.

John Pavlovitz leaves us not with a list of things to do and check off, but with a question.  “Do you care about other people?”[6]

Love is the spirit of our faith.

May we be the embodiment of love even as we work for justice.

May we reach out to those who may benefit from our care.

May we find something worth embracing in every person.

May we resist the temptation to replace faith with certainty.

May our faith lead us toward the wisdom to know that we do not hold all the truth.

May love guide us through the light of all our days and through the darkness of hard nights.

Blessed Be.   I Love You.   Amen.

[1] Words from Diana Butler Bass, American religion scholar and writer.

She is a Christian.

She is confused and heart-broken by the actions and attitudes of thousands of Americans who claim Christ with their words and betray every aspect of the life and teachings of Jesus with their actions.

 

[2] Theodore Parker (1810–60), paraphrased in 1958 by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Theodore_Parker.     Pavlovitz, John. If God Is Love, Don’t Be a Jerk (p. 251). Presbyterian Publishing Corporation. Kindle Edition.

[3] Pavlovitz, John. If God Is Love, Don’t Be a Jerk (p. 16). Presbyterian Publishing Corporation. Kindle Edition.

 

[4] Pavlovitz, John. If God Is Love, Don’t Be a Jerk (pp. 165-166). Presbyterian Publishing Corporation. Kindle Edition.

 

[5] Pavlovitz, (p. 193).

[6] Pavlovitz, (p. 169).