Prisoners for love
Commentary
In a scene from the current hit Broadway show, The Producers, a chorus of
convicts sings about being prisoners of love and how even when locked up that their
hearts are always free when they are in love. The refrain expressing this is sung by the
jailhouse chorus in hopes that it will catapult the lead characters, Leo Bloom and Max
Bialystock, back to the legitimate theater. This speaks of Christian experience. It seems
that Christianity is all about love, love, love, but it seems that the love that Christians
practice has a way of getting folks into inescapable tangles.
The three texts for this Sunday show how complicated love can be. The passage from Acts is the crowning conclusion of the entire tenth chapter. While Leo and Max sing about blue skies above that comes with being a prisoner for love, in this chapter from Acts, the sheet that falls from the sky in Peter's dream contains a variety of creatures that we will inescapably meet up with in life and that we are obliged to call clean; though many of our friends, family, and neighbors have their doubts. What is worse, not only are we to treat them as a part of us but it seems that God wants these creatures to be a part of the church on an equal par with us. "Can anyone withhold the water for baptizing these people who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have?" (Acts 10:47). It is one thing to accept "them" whoever they might be and quite another to see God legitimately at work in the lives of others who are quite different from us. The circumcised believers, astounded at this turn of events, must have wondered just what kind of situation they had cast themselves into. Is the Holy Spirit really leading us to loving people that eat like that, raise their children like that, and bring so little respect for the niceties? If the Holy Spirit, to top the whole thing off, then expects folks to sit down to common meals with that lot then we have some issues. "Hearts in love are always free!" according to Leo and Max. Perhaps this is why Christians found that prison cells have never been a complete hindrance to the spread of the gospel. As Thoreau's and Martin Luther King's lives witness to, some of God's best work is done in a prison cell. Christians early on found themselves freed when they were engaged by the inescapable clear direction in which the Holy Spirit was going. Christians have found true freedom when they have found themselves bedding down with bunkmates not of their own choosing: prisoners for love.
The Gospel Lesson for this day also suggests how people might feel more incarcerated than liberated by love. Perhaps it is not without significance here that a common derogative term for a spouse is "the ball and chain." "If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father's commandments and abide in his love" (John 15:10). Here Jesus says that as a result of obeying his commandments you will abide or dwell in a place of his love. It is ironic that the people of John's church were finding it increasingly difficult to dwell in a house of love. John's people are living out the separation of Christianity from Judaism that was dividing families, friends, coworkers, and, if they had them, chess clubs, soccer teams, and the gardening club. Folks must have found their dinners imprisoned in stony silence, their emotions caged, and their conversations confined to the safe and familiar: prisoners for love.
Now you would think that John's people would, after an experience like that, create a veritable love feast of a church once they had gone through the difficult work of accepting the distance that would now be between them and many of the people with whom they had shared their lives -- a distance they would have to live with for the rest of their lives. That is not exactly what happened. The letter of John addresses yet another split that John's community is facing in its own ranks. We seem to have here a church community that, like many families, is imprisoned in a dysfunctional pattern that it cannot help but repeat. "We know that we have passed from death to life because we love one another. Whoever does not love abides in death" (1 John 3:14). When you read a thing like that you expect that some of your folks are not on board with the program and that there has been a very big elephant in the room.
Love, love, love -- it is never as easy or as smooth as you expect or hope for. Where the Holy Spirit takes folks seems to be the very places where people commonly say, "Don't go there." Unlike the board game, we do not receive a "get-out-of-jail-free card." If anything we seem headed toward a place where we will be bunking down with some interesting mates who are not of our own choosing, dwelling in places where you might find yourself with a case of lockjaw if you do not know how to speak the truth in love. I like to think of myself as a free spirit. A good way to get me to do what is not good for me is to command me to do what is good for me. I find it too confining, too suffocating, and too imprisoning: none of this prisoner-for-love business for me. Yet, like Leo and Max, the producers are on to more than they realize: locked up, keys lost, but knowing freedom lies in a heart full of love.
Perhaps the prison metaphor seems a bit over the top, yet on the street it seems that there are a lot of serious parallels. In prison you do not get to choose your roommate, most prisoners deny they are guilty, and why they are in is usually not a topic of dinner conversation. Sounds like church to me. In their own way, each of these texts deals with these dynamics. All of them hold out that these prisoners of love will, as the first letter of John has it, conquer the world through the faith that believes that such prisoners are truly free.
Acts 10:44-48
You don't get to choose whom your roomies are in prison and neither do church folks get to choose who it is that will be a part of the faith community. Often we like to think that we choose. We often believe that the creeds, dogmas, social stance, political activity, and neighborhood will do a sufficient job of doing the sorting and sifting needed to establish a comfort zone of uniformity. However, in my ministry, I am continually, hugely, impressed by the level of diversity I find in my congregation. Perhaps it is attributable to being a lifelong member of a mainline church, but on a Sunday morning the sheet that falls from heaven is stretched by the push and pull of card-carrying Unitarians rubbing shoulders with former High Church Episcopalians who, in turn, often outdo their Roman Catholic brothers and sisters in seeking to have their liturgical needs met.
On any given Sunday, congregational shoulders that believe in the high biblical notion of once-a-quarter communion bump up against folks who, though they have made the move into a new tradition, still feel that they have not had church if they have not partaken in the heavenly banquet. On most Sundays, we are a combination of people who swoon to white, northern European, dead composers and those who find praise music the only musical expression worthy of their deepest feelings. Now I know that in such moments, the author of Acts reports "for they heard them speaking in tongues and extolling God." Well, that is not exactly how these diverse communities characterize each other's liturgical and musical approaches. While they do not always hear fighting words in each other's prayers and music, they still don't understand each other as extolling God in their approaches to worship. As the Gospel of John has it, "You did not choose me but I chose you" (John 15:16). Such choices might not amount to the ones that we would make to "conquer the world." Most who have taken a shot at conquering the world have done so through a disciplined, uniform army that marches in lock step. I suspect that your congregation does not look that way.
Indeed, as I look out on my congregation I see a community of people that is composed of those who have issues, those who have children and raising them is priority one, those have grandchildren and are facing mid-life issues, and those who have great- grandchildren and are dealing with end-of-life concerns. This continuum of folks often finds its members speaking in strange tongues to one another.
Any preacher to this congregation runs the danger of finding themselves tongue-tied as they try to speak to this broad spectrum. As a matter of fact, there are days that we would not choose this assembly and in which we might find ourselves fighting the notion that we are chosen for this ministry of potential mayhem. From the very earliest, the church has struggled with how this will all hold together. Though this might not be our choice, Peter and the rest of the church must face the hands-on physical evidence that a choice has been made by the Holy Spirit in bestowing its gifts upon the Gentiles. I suspect that what was now obvious is something that had not been entirely obvious before. I do not believe that Peter is saying the Gentiles are talented, competent professionals that will make great committee members because they really know how to run a business. Who could deny that? Remember these events take place in Caesarea. This was Caesar's town and who could disallow that you were in the fast lane of talented, gifted people in such a place? Yet, precisely in the midst of such a town and after Peter had preached, the Spirit comes and people are touched. At one of the centers of the empire, people were reachable.
Perhaps the ties that bind are woven around the notion that we are all reachable. This changes how I look at myself and at others. In what regard we hold others goes a long way toward determining how things will hold together in the church. That we are all reachable by the same Lord ought to cause us to reach out to each other in ways that might give new meaning to conquering the world.
1 John 5:1-6
Often the church, as it has faced its diversity, has chosen the easier path of sectarian splits. Frequently in our struggles, we seem to find ourselves dominated by the secular model of how we can keep it all together. Some suggest a sort of commercial, entrepreneurial model in which we provide different services for various constituencies. Others rely on a political model of vote taking and Robert's Rules of Order. Paul in his New Testament letters chooses an organic model where the parts are named as part of the body of Christ.
I have watched enough prison movies and viewed enough episodes of television's Law and Order to know that the conventional take on prison life is that almost all prisoners deny they have committed their crimes. Perhaps more than denial is at work here. If they have any chance at cutting their sentence or beating the rap it will come through dogged determination in maintaining innocence and finding a loophole somewhere in the system through which they can escape.
The letter of John takes a pretty dim view of this approach for the prisoners of love that we call the church. "If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us" (1 John 1:8). Busted: there is no jailhouse, "Philadelphia" lawyer that is going to get us out of this one.
So what is the sin of your church? This can invite more venting on the part of the preacher than is desirable. Yet, if our starting point is wrong, we are going to miss the opportunity to clean up our act. All churches have their sins. I am persuaded that our sins as churches are most often centered on our models of what holds things together. We often hold too tightly to the past, hold out too much for the latest programming fad, hold out for the idealized candidate for pastor, and hold up the preacher to the standards that we have seen in the latest mega-church we have heard about.
I think that most churches would recognize the sin of John's church. "Those who say, 'I love God,' and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen" (John 4:20). This sin was expressed in the theological understanding that misread the meaning of the incarnation. "By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God. And this is the spirit of the antichrist, of which you have heard that it is coming; and now it is already in the world" (John 4:2-3). John's people seem to have failed in loving folks in their fleshiness. Often our flesh crawls at differences rather than loving those who in the flesh have issues, are shaped by generational differences, or who are living out in the flesh a different stage in life. The text from this letter for the sixth Sunday of Easter reminds us that Jesus "came by the water and the blood." In other words, he came in the flesh. When we rub shoulders we may generate more heat than light if we do not love people in the context of their flesh: flesh that jumps with the enthusiasm of youth, flesh that sees the world through the lens of certain issues, flesh that crawls at all the changes it has had to endure, flesh that needs to be soothed from the ravages of age. Love seeks to know the other, risks being known by the other. Love appreciates the gifts that folk bring with them in the flesh and sympathizes with the weaknesses of the flesh. This conquers the world. It conquers distance, despair, and resistance. "For whatever is born of God conquers the world. And this is the victory that conquers the world, our faith. Who is it that conquers the world but the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God?" (1 John 5:4).
John 15:9-17
Time and time again in the movies and on television, I have seen one prisoner ask another, "What are you in for?" only to be greeted by an icy stare. I don't know to what extent this conforms to actual prison practice. I do know that a counter theme of the prison saga is that no one's personal history remains a mystery for long. How else could they beat to death the child molesters? I do know that where the "prisoners for love" gather, that when asking what you are in for is also greeted with an icy stare. It is a look that conveys and asks right back, "Who wants to know?" or "What is it to you?" Given that American religion tends to be such a private matter, talking about "what you are in for" does not come easily in all the dwelling places where we can abide in his love.
The Gospel Lesson comes clean as to what Jesus is in for. "I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete." In the fourteenth chapter of John, Jesus says, "Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father's house there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also" (John 14:2). We don't like being in a place where what counts is less our choice than the one who has chosen us to dwell with roomies not of our own choosing. We are put off by being in a place where everyone is guilty, us included, and where we might find our place on the continuum of human imperfections and limitations. For the most part our culture does not relish being caught dead or alive in such places. We think we can find our freedom by being in other places. However, Jesus is saying that if we are in it for the joy, then it will be found in the place of limited choice and recognition of our limits. We can be locked up, we can lose the key, but our hearts, in love, stay always free. In the place prepared for us where we abide in his love we know the joy of being truly free.
Application
I suspect that many will resist the prison imagery as, shall we say, too confining. By and large, our society is driven to define joy in terms of unlimited choice. The gospel bumps up against the cultural norm when it claims that true freedom comes not in making choices but in being chosen. Others may object that most of the folks who read these words have no more than a passing acquaintance with prison. Yet the Christian testament makes clear that the end result of Christians being labeled "disturbers of the peace" would be that much Christian ministry would be prison ministry from the inside out. The place prepared for us has been a Birmingham Jail; a Concord, Massachusetts, prison cell; and an offshore island prison in South Africa among others. From such places have come love, joy, hope, and the kind of presence that makes us truly free: prisoners for love that make us truly free. Can we in good conscience avoid the places that Jesus has prepared for us where we might abide in his love?
Some will find it difficult to admit to the fleshiness of the church in all its diversity. Yet seeing such diversity does not lead to division. Rather, masking the diversity behind pleasantries and denial lead to miscommunication and a failure to fully love one another. Such a failure means that we have not responded with faith in Jesus when he says, "This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you" (John 13:34).
An Alternative Application
Acts 10:44-48. I often begin the work of preaching by asking myself what words in the text set me off. Like Mark Twain, it is often the parts of the Bible I do understand that bother me more than the parts I do not understand. Often it is the clearest words or phrases that set me off, not because I do not understand them but because I cannot stomach them. In the Acts passage, it says that Peter ordered the Gentiles to be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ. I do not feel comfortable with military images and chain-of-command thinking. Yet can I completely throw overboard the warrior archetype? I must ask of myself if my ministry is impoverished because I have not been fully honest about those places, some good and some not so good, where I do expect alignment and people to get in line. If I am going to abide in God's love and dwell in the place prepared for me I need to consider what orders I have given, what orders need to be rescinded, what sense of orderliness I have counted on in my life.
Preaching The Psalm
Psalm 98
Anyone who has made a long road trip with children singing "99 Bottles Of Beer On The Wall" can support the notion of "singing a new song." Children love the repetition of singing the same song over and over. Parents or youth group leaders who have been in this situation can identify with the need to sing a new song.
It's difficult to admit, but beyond the well-worn familiarity and comfort, songs do get old. They lose their punch and immediacy through time. We may like that old chestnut, but those who have come into life through a different set of experiences don't necessarily see how wonderful that old song is to some of us. Perhaps it is time to learn a new tune.
Yet how difficult that is for us. Across hundreds of different faith communities the so- called worship wars rage. Contemporary versus traditional, young versus old, modern versus old-fashioned, and on and on it goes. Sing a new song? That is just about as hard as switching from "trespasses" to "debts" in the Lord's Prayer.
It isn't that we don't have reason to sing. Look, after all, at what God has done for us! God has done "marvelous things." God has won the victory for us and vindicated us. God has remembered the people and loved them well. At some level we do know this. But still, that strange tune, and those new words?
One is led to wonder if our problem with singing the new song isn't about style or cultural differences, but rather about our heartfelt experience of God's vindicating and healing love. If we as a people truly experienced God as vindicator and steadfast lover, how could we not sing a new song? If we, for even a moment, opened our collective mind and hearts to the power and wonder of this God, singing and praising would simply erupt spontaneously.
As it is, we are caught up, not in new songs sung to God, but in arguing over which music we like best. To God, this sounds like "99 Bottles Of Beer On The Wall" when you're on bottle number 83. Let's be candid. Our old songs are great. Our familiar ways of experiencing God are wonderful. The bottom line, however, isn't what we like in terms of music or style or tone. It's not about us. It's about God. It's about bringing as many people as possible into contact with God's amazing love for us in Jesus Christ. Is it possible that our old songs hinder that process?
What would it take for us to stumble into a new experience of the holy? What steps would we take, what disciplines might we practice? How might we let go of what we like and spend a little effort learning that new song? It's easy, really. Just hum a few bars and let others follow along.
The three texts for this Sunday show how complicated love can be. The passage from Acts is the crowning conclusion of the entire tenth chapter. While Leo and Max sing about blue skies above that comes with being a prisoner for love, in this chapter from Acts, the sheet that falls from the sky in Peter's dream contains a variety of creatures that we will inescapably meet up with in life and that we are obliged to call clean; though many of our friends, family, and neighbors have their doubts. What is worse, not only are we to treat them as a part of us but it seems that God wants these creatures to be a part of the church on an equal par with us. "Can anyone withhold the water for baptizing these people who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have?" (Acts 10:47). It is one thing to accept "them" whoever they might be and quite another to see God legitimately at work in the lives of others who are quite different from us. The circumcised believers, astounded at this turn of events, must have wondered just what kind of situation they had cast themselves into. Is the Holy Spirit really leading us to loving people that eat like that, raise their children like that, and bring so little respect for the niceties? If the Holy Spirit, to top the whole thing off, then expects folks to sit down to common meals with that lot then we have some issues. "Hearts in love are always free!" according to Leo and Max. Perhaps this is why Christians found that prison cells have never been a complete hindrance to the spread of the gospel. As Thoreau's and Martin Luther King's lives witness to, some of God's best work is done in a prison cell. Christians early on found themselves freed when they were engaged by the inescapable clear direction in which the Holy Spirit was going. Christians have found true freedom when they have found themselves bedding down with bunkmates not of their own choosing: prisoners for love.
The Gospel Lesson for this day also suggests how people might feel more incarcerated than liberated by love. Perhaps it is not without significance here that a common derogative term for a spouse is "the ball and chain." "If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father's commandments and abide in his love" (John 15:10). Here Jesus says that as a result of obeying his commandments you will abide or dwell in a place of his love. It is ironic that the people of John's church were finding it increasingly difficult to dwell in a house of love. John's people are living out the separation of Christianity from Judaism that was dividing families, friends, coworkers, and, if they had them, chess clubs, soccer teams, and the gardening club. Folks must have found their dinners imprisoned in stony silence, their emotions caged, and their conversations confined to the safe and familiar: prisoners for love.
Now you would think that John's people would, after an experience like that, create a veritable love feast of a church once they had gone through the difficult work of accepting the distance that would now be between them and many of the people with whom they had shared their lives -- a distance they would have to live with for the rest of their lives. That is not exactly what happened. The letter of John addresses yet another split that John's community is facing in its own ranks. We seem to have here a church community that, like many families, is imprisoned in a dysfunctional pattern that it cannot help but repeat. "We know that we have passed from death to life because we love one another. Whoever does not love abides in death" (1 John 3:14). When you read a thing like that you expect that some of your folks are not on board with the program and that there has been a very big elephant in the room.
Love, love, love -- it is never as easy or as smooth as you expect or hope for. Where the Holy Spirit takes folks seems to be the very places where people commonly say, "Don't go there." Unlike the board game, we do not receive a "get-out-of-jail-free card." If anything we seem headed toward a place where we will be bunking down with some interesting mates who are not of our own choosing, dwelling in places where you might find yourself with a case of lockjaw if you do not know how to speak the truth in love. I like to think of myself as a free spirit. A good way to get me to do what is not good for me is to command me to do what is good for me. I find it too confining, too suffocating, and too imprisoning: none of this prisoner-for-love business for me. Yet, like Leo and Max, the producers are on to more than they realize: locked up, keys lost, but knowing freedom lies in a heart full of love.
Perhaps the prison metaphor seems a bit over the top, yet on the street it seems that there are a lot of serious parallels. In prison you do not get to choose your roommate, most prisoners deny they are guilty, and why they are in is usually not a topic of dinner conversation. Sounds like church to me. In their own way, each of these texts deals with these dynamics. All of them hold out that these prisoners of love will, as the first letter of John has it, conquer the world through the faith that believes that such prisoners are truly free.
Acts 10:44-48
You don't get to choose whom your roomies are in prison and neither do church folks get to choose who it is that will be a part of the faith community. Often we like to think that we choose. We often believe that the creeds, dogmas, social stance, political activity, and neighborhood will do a sufficient job of doing the sorting and sifting needed to establish a comfort zone of uniformity. However, in my ministry, I am continually, hugely, impressed by the level of diversity I find in my congregation. Perhaps it is attributable to being a lifelong member of a mainline church, but on a Sunday morning the sheet that falls from heaven is stretched by the push and pull of card-carrying Unitarians rubbing shoulders with former High Church Episcopalians who, in turn, often outdo their Roman Catholic brothers and sisters in seeking to have their liturgical needs met.
On any given Sunday, congregational shoulders that believe in the high biblical notion of once-a-quarter communion bump up against folks who, though they have made the move into a new tradition, still feel that they have not had church if they have not partaken in the heavenly banquet. On most Sundays, we are a combination of people who swoon to white, northern European, dead composers and those who find praise music the only musical expression worthy of their deepest feelings. Now I know that in such moments, the author of Acts reports "for they heard them speaking in tongues and extolling God." Well, that is not exactly how these diverse communities characterize each other's liturgical and musical approaches. While they do not always hear fighting words in each other's prayers and music, they still don't understand each other as extolling God in their approaches to worship. As the Gospel of John has it, "You did not choose me but I chose you" (John 15:16). Such choices might not amount to the ones that we would make to "conquer the world." Most who have taken a shot at conquering the world have done so through a disciplined, uniform army that marches in lock step. I suspect that your congregation does not look that way.
Indeed, as I look out on my congregation I see a community of people that is composed of those who have issues, those who have children and raising them is priority one, those have grandchildren and are facing mid-life issues, and those who have great- grandchildren and are dealing with end-of-life concerns. This continuum of folks often finds its members speaking in strange tongues to one another.
Any preacher to this congregation runs the danger of finding themselves tongue-tied as they try to speak to this broad spectrum. As a matter of fact, there are days that we would not choose this assembly and in which we might find ourselves fighting the notion that we are chosen for this ministry of potential mayhem. From the very earliest, the church has struggled with how this will all hold together. Though this might not be our choice, Peter and the rest of the church must face the hands-on physical evidence that a choice has been made by the Holy Spirit in bestowing its gifts upon the Gentiles. I suspect that what was now obvious is something that had not been entirely obvious before. I do not believe that Peter is saying the Gentiles are talented, competent professionals that will make great committee members because they really know how to run a business. Who could deny that? Remember these events take place in Caesarea. This was Caesar's town and who could disallow that you were in the fast lane of talented, gifted people in such a place? Yet, precisely in the midst of such a town and after Peter had preached, the Spirit comes and people are touched. At one of the centers of the empire, people were reachable.
Perhaps the ties that bind are woven around the notion that we are all reachable. This changes how I look at myself and at others. In what regard we hold others goes a long way toward determining how things will hold together in the church. That we are all reachable by the same Lord ought to cause us to reach out to each other in ways that might give new meaning to conquering the world.
1 John 5:1-6
Often the church, as it has faced its diversity, has chosen the easier path of sectarian splits. Frequently in our struggles, we seem to find ourselves dominated by the secular model of how we can keep it all together. Some suggest a sort of commercial, entrepreneurial model in which we provide different services for various constituencies. Others rely on a political model of vote taking and Robert's Rules of Order. Paul in his New Testament letters chooses an organic model where the parts are named as part of the body of Christ.
I have watched enough prison movies and viewed enough episodes of television's Law and Order to know that the conventional take on prison life is that almost all prisoners deny they have committed their crimes. Perhaps more than denial is at work here. If they have any chance at cutting their sentence or beating the rap it will come through dogged determination in maintaining innocence and finding a loophole somewhere in the system through which they can escape.
The letter of John takes a pretty dim view of this approach for the prisoners of love that we call the church. "If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us" (1 John 1:8). Busted: there is no jailhouse, "Philadelphia" lawyer that is going to get us out of this one.
So what is the sin of your church? This can invite more venting on the part of the preacher than is desirable. Yet, if our starting point is wrong, we are going to miss the opportunity to clean up our act. All churches have their sins. I am persuaded that our sins as churches are most often centered on our models of what holds things together. We often hold too tightly to the past, hold out too much for the latest programming fad, hold out for the idealized candidate for pastor, and hold up the preacher to the standards that we have seen in the latest mega-church we have heard about.
I think that most churches would recognize the sin of John's church. "Those who say, 'I love God,' and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen" (John 4:20). This sin was expressed in the theological understanding that misread the meaning of the incarnation. "By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God. And this is the spirit of the antichrist, of which you have heard that it is coming; and now it is already in the world" (John 4:2-3). John's people seem to have failed in loving folks in their fleshiness. Often our flesh crawls at differences rather than loving those who in the flesh have issues, are shaped by generational differences, or who are living out in the flesh a different stage in life. The text from this letter for the sixth Sunday of Easter reminds us that Jesus "came by the water and the blood." In other words, he came in the flesh. When we rub shoulders we may generate more heat than light if we do not love people in the context of their flesh: flesh that jumps with the enthusiasm of youth, flesh that sees the world through the lens of certain issues, flesh that crawls at all the changes it has had to endure, flesh that needs to be soothed from the ravages of age. Love seeks to know the other, risks being known by the other. Love appreciates the gifts that folk bring with them in the flesh and sympathizes with the weaknesses of the flesh. This conquers the world. It conquers distance, despair, and resistance. "For whatever is born of God conquers the world. And this is the victory that conquers the world, our faith. Who is it that conquers the world but the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God?" (1 John 5:4).
John 15:9-17
Time and time again in the movies and on television, I have seen one prisoner ask another, "What are you in for?" only to be greeted by an icy stare. I don't know to what extent this conforms to actual prison practice. I do know that a counter theme of the prison saga is that no one's personal history remains a mystery for long. How else could they beat to death the child molesters? I do know that where the "prisoners for love" gather, that when asking what you are in for is also greeted with an icy stare. It is a look that conveys and asks right back, "Who wants to know?" or "What is it to you?" Given that American religion tends to be such a private matter, talking about "what you are in for" does not come easily in all the dwelling places where we can abide in his love.
The Gospel Lesson comes clean as to what Jesus is in for. "I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete." In the fourteenth chapter of John, Jesus says, "Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father's house there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also" (John 14:2). We don't like being in a place where what counts is less our choice than the one who has chosen us to dwell with roomies not of our own choosing. We are put off by being in a place where everyone is guilty, us included, and where we might find our place on the continuum of human imperfections and limitations. For the most part our culture does not relish being caught dead or alive in such places. We think we can find our freedom by being in other places. However, Jesus is saying that if we are in it for the joy, then it will be found in the place of limited choice and recognition of our limits. We can be locked up, we can lose the key, but our hearts, in love, stay always free. In the place prepared for us where we abide in his love we know the joy of being truly free.
Application
I suspect that many will resist the prison imagery as, shall we say, too confining. By and large, our society is driven to define joy in terms of unlimited choice. The gospel bumps up against the cultural norm when it claims that true freedom comes not in making choices but in being chosen. Others may object that most of the folks who read these words have no more than a passing acquaintance with prison. Yet the Christian testament makes clear that the end result of Christians being labeled "disturbers of the peace" would be that much Christian ministry would be prison ministry from the inside out. The place prepared for us has been a Birmingham Jail; a Concord, Massachusetts, prison cell; and an offshore island prison in South Africa among others. From such places have come love, joy, hope, and the kind of presence that makes us truly free: prisoners for love that make us truly free. Can we in good conscience avoid the places that Jesus has prepared for us where we might abide in his love?
Some will find it difficult to admit to the fleshiness of the church in all its diversity. Yet seeing such diversity does not lead to division. Rather, masking the diversity behind pleasantries and denial lead to miscommunication and a failure to fully love one another. Such a failure means that we have not responded with faith in Jesus when he says, "This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you" (John 13:34).
An Alternative Application
Acts 10:44-48. I often begin the work of preaching by asking myself what words in the text set me off. Like Mark Twain, it is often the parts of the Bible I do understand that bother me more than the parts I do not understand. Often it is the clearest words or phrases that set me off, not because I do not understand them but because I cannot stomach them. In the Acts passage, it says that Peter ordered the Gentiles to be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ. I do not feel comfortable with military images and chain-of-command thinking. Yet can I completely throw overboard the warrior archetype? I must ask of myself if my ministry is impoverished because I have not been fully honest about those places, some good and some not so good, where I do expect alignment and people to get in line. If I am going to abide in God's love and dwell in the place prepared for me I need to consider what orders I have given, what orders need to be rescinded, what sense of orderliness I have counted on in my life.
Preaching The Psalm
Psalm 98
Anyone who has made a long road trip with children singing "99 Bottles Of Beer On The Wall" can support the notion of "singing a new song." Children love the repetition of singing the same song over and over. Parents or youth group leaders who have been in this situation can identify with the need to sing a new song.
It's difficult to admit, but beyond the well-worn familiarity and comfort, songs do get old. They lose their punch and immediacy through time. We may like that old chestnut, but those who have come into life through a different set of experiences don't necessarily see how wonderful that old song is to some of us. Perhaps it is time to learn a new tune.
Yet how difficult that is for us. Across hundreds of different faith communities the so- called worship wars rage. Contemporary versus traditional, young versus old, modern versus old-fashioned, and on and on it goes. Sing a new song? That is just about as hard as switching from "trespasses" to "debts" in the Lord's Prayer.
It isn't that we don't have reason to sing. Look, after all, at what God has done for us! God has done "marvelous things." God has won the victory for us and vindicated us. God has remembered the people and loved them well. At some level we do know this. But still, that strange tune, and those new words?
One is led to wonder if our problem with singing the new song isn't about style or cultural differences, but rather about our heartfelt experience of God's vindicating and healing love. If we as a people truly experienced God as vindicator and steadfast lover, how could we not sing a new song? If we, for even a moment, opened our collective mind and hearts to the power and wonder of this God, singing and praising would simply erupt spontaneously.
As it is, we are caught up, not in new songs sung to God, but in arguing over which music we like best. To God, this sounds like "99 Bottles Of Beer On The Wall" when you're on bottle number 83. Let's be candid. Our old songs are great. Our familiar ways of experiencing God are wonderful. The bottom line, however, isn't what we like in terms of music or style or tone. It's not about us. It's about God. It's about bringing as many people as possible into contact with God's amazing love for us in Jesus Christ. Is it possible that our old songs hinder that process?
What would it take for us to stumble into a new experience of the holy? What steps would we take, what disciplines might we practice? How might we let go of what we like and spend a little effort learning that new song? It's easy, really. Just hum a few bars and let others follow along.
