Loyalty Rooted in Love
Reflections for Pentecost 4
RCL Proper 11C
12 June 2016
Saint Faith’s Anglican Church
Vancouver BC
Click here to listen to the Sermon as preached at the 10.00 Eucharist on Sunday the 12th.
Click here to listen to the Sermon as preached at the 10.00 Eucharist on Sunday the 12th.
On the
night of Thursday, the 11th of June 1981, in the Parish of Saint
Michael the Archangel in Colorado Springs, Bishop Bill Frey of the Diocese of
Colorado used his deep radio announcer’s voice to ask me, “Will you be loyal to
the doctrine, discipline, and worship of Christ as this Church has received
them? Will you, in accordance with the canons
of this Church, obey your bishop and other ministers who may have authority
over you and your work?” And I said, “I
am ready and willing to do so . . . . “
It was very
easy for me to promise to be loyal to the doctrine, discipline and worship of
the Church because I loved the doctrine, discipline and worship of the
Church. It was very easy to promise to
obey the Bishop and other ministers because they, like I, had made the same
promise for the same reason: a love for
this strange and wonderful community of those who have chosen to follow Jesus
as Lord, a love for this difficult and at time cantankerous group of souls who
sometimes lose their way and who work so hard to get back on track.
Over the
years there have been times when I have pondered whether I could keep the
promises that I made thirty-five years ago and have renewed, in one way or
another, many times since then. To be
sure I may have sometimes been tempted to keep my ordination promises because I
was afraid. This life is all that I have
known and I was uncertain what would happen if I chucked it all in. But I can honestly say that, when the fear
passed, I realized that I have remained loyal to the doctrine, discipline and
worship of the Church out of love, love for what we teach about God and being
human, love for the challenge of being in community, love for the celebration
in Word and Sacrament of God’s love made known to us in creation,
reconciliation and renewal.
Poor Ahab
wanted to be a king like all the kings around him: powerful, wealthy and feared by his subjects. Unfortunately he was a king amidst a people
steeped in the law and the covenant God made with Moses. Ahab might wear nice clothes and a crown, but
he was as much a subject to the law as anyone else. Naboth was perfectly in his rights to keep
his land and Ahab had a duty to honour Naboth’s choice.
But people
who want power are always afraid. They
are afraid that they won’t be taken seriously.
They are afraid that their dignity will be slighted. They are unable to see that there are other
ways to exercise authority, but fear leads them to use coercion and to
manipulate people to do what serves their vanity.
And so poor
Naboth, honouring the law by keeping his heritage in the family, must go. Ahab does not want a loyalty inspired by
love; he wants an obedience motivated by fear.
On the road
to Damascus Paul’s understanding of how God was at work in the world was dealt
a major blow. He prided himself on his
observance of the commandments of the Law of Moses. He treated them as the terms of a contract: if I, Paul, follow these rules, then you,
God, will consider me righteous. Whether
this was ever how God intended the Law to be understood is the subject of
another sermon, but it is the way that Paul and many of his contemporaries
understood the Law. Loyalty to the Law
was the mark of a real Jew; it marked those who obeyed as among God’s favoured
ones.
But God
pricked the bubble of that conceit in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. The loyalty God seeks, Jesus taught, is a
loyalty based upon love, love of God and love of neighbour. Jews were asked to follow the obligations of
the Law out of love for what God had done for them by bringing them out of
Egypt and into the land of promise. Now,
through Jesus, God was inviting the loyalty of Gentiles by asking them to
trust, to have faith, in the life of Jesus of Nazareth and lead transformed
lives out of love for that gift.
22.34
When the Pharisees heard that [Jesus] had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered
together, 35 and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test
him. 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 neighbour as yourself.’ 40
On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” [1]
These words
of Jesus are not his invention; they are deeply entrenched in the rabbinic
tradition. Love God. Love your neighbour. Then ask how your loyalty to God is shaped by
your love of God and neighbour.
When the
woman enters the home of Simon the Pharisee to wash and anoint the feet of
Jesus, Simon only sees a woman who conduct violates the commandments. But Jesus sees a woman whose loyalty is based
upon the love she has witnessed in Jesus.
She is prepared to go beyond the limits set by the social expectations
of the community because she knows that true loyalty is based upon God’s love
and our response to that love.
I am
grateful that our society has changed over the last thirty-five years. When I was first ordained, being a
‘church-goer’ was often an expression of conformity to cultural expectations. It’s now possible in the eyes of our society to
be a ‘good’ person who is ‘spiritual but not religious’. You and I, ‘spiritual and religious’, are
here because of love; our loyalty to the Christian community is an expression
of our love for God and our love for our neighbours. When we invite others to join us and to share
the life we have found here, our message is one of love not fear, God’s eternal
‘yes’ to our yearning to find places of help, hope and home.
All of us experience
moments when our conformity is motivated more by our fears than by our
love. Becoming Christ-like, our life-long
task, means finding a community such as Saint Faith’s where we can grow in love
and cast God’s light in the corners of our lives where fears linger. And then we find the perfect freedom of
living in the service of God’s mission.
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