The Word is Love

I always find it amusing in a sad sort of way, that so many women I have known have met some man, someone they consider to be mister right, someone whom they love, someone whom they plan to marry, and as soon as they do marry him, the spend the next several years working on changing him. And then, once they change him, they complain that he’s not the man they married. You don’t really know anybody until after a few years, do you? My kung fu teacher, my sifu, says that you don’t really know anybody until you’ve known them ten years, and while that seems like an awfully long time, there’s a certain amount of truth in that I think. And then there are the people who don’t turn out to be what you thought they were.

When I was a child of eight or nine, I used to watch a children’s show every afternoon hosted by a man we affectionately called Engineer Bill. He used to wear a train engineer’s suit, and the theme of the entire show revolved around trains. Engineer Bill showed cartoons and talked to the kids and encouraged us to drink our milk. He had a game called green light go. He would tell us all to go get our glasses of milk, which we all dutifully did, and then he would say, “Green light, go!” We would all drink our milk, and had to keep drinking until he said, “Red light, stop!”. I think I nearly choked to death a couple of times. Engineer Bill was such a kindly, gentle old guy and we all loved him. He had this machine called the way-back machine…no, wait, that was Mr. Peabody and his boy, Sherman. Well, he SOME kind of machine, and we would send in cards and letters. Engineer Bill would draw some lucky kid’s card from the drum, and then he would go to the machine and pull one of the knobs. If the machine made the right noise, the kid got a great toy prize, like an Andy Guard Dump Truck.

One of the great things about Engineer Bill was that he would go around to various shopping centers and we could get a chance to go to the center and meet him, the REAL Engineer Bill. I always wanted to see him. Then one day it happened. Engineer Bill announced he was coming to a shopping center near us. My parents said they’d take us, my best friend, Phil, and me. We were going to get to see the REAL Engineer Bill, my first celebrity. I was so excited. So we went. And we stood in line. And we stood in line, for a long time, for long, long time. We stood in line for a long time, but soon we were getting near the front. Each kid was going to get a chance to pull the knob on the whachamacallet machine. If it made the right noise, we would get a prize, just like the television show. And then it was our turn. We got to the front, and there he was, my hero, Engineer Bill. And then I was standing in front him, looking up at him, with eyes filled with awe and wonder, and Engineer Bill looked down at me from under that engineer’s hat and said, “C’mon, kid. Move along, keep it movin’!.” And I pulled the handle and it made no noise at all, so I got nothing at all, and I kept moving. And I never played Green Light, Go again. I was so disappointed.

I think the people listening to Jesus talk in their synagogue in that story from Luke must have felt the same way. If you remember the story I told you last week, right after his baptism, Jesus goes to his local synagogue and reads from the prophet Isaiah. He reads Isaiah’s prophecy that the blind will see, and that the all those broken and oppressed will be comforted. He says that it is the year acceptable to the Lord. And then, after closing the scroll, he looks at the crowd and says that this prophecy is fulfilled in their hearing. At first, people look at him and are amazed, and then they realize that this is Mary and Joseph’s kid and start to complain. And that is where the story picks up this week.

The men in the synagogue started to grumble at him. Jesus says to them, “You quote the proverb to me, physician, heal yourself. You want me to perform all those miracles you’ve heard so much about. I tell you that no prophet is appreciated in his hometown! Back in those olden times, in the days of Elijah, during those times of drought and famine, God sent his prophet to the pagans, not to you! And back in the day of Elisha, when there were all those people had leprosy, it was Naaman the Syrian that God healed, not you people!” And you know, for some reason, this didn’t assuage their anger. Instead they followed him out of the synagogue with the thought of throwing him off a cliff and bashing his head in. But for some reason, they didn’t. Perhaps it was a miracle of some kind, or perhaps it was just out of respect for Mary and Joseph. We don’t know, the book doesn’t say. It just says Jesus walked through the crowd and they didn’t touch him. But what was it about that message he delivered that pissed them off so much?

Perhaps part of it was that they all knew him, as I mentioned last week, and that they didn’t appreciate being preached at by someone they knew. But one thing Jesus says gives us a clue. Jesus says they want him to perform the miracles he performed in Capernaum and some of the other villages around. This suggests that he was already famous. As I said, Mark places this story much later on in Jesus’ ministry. Luke moves it towards the beginning. The people of Judea had a very specific idea in mind of what the Messiah was supposed to be. They wanted a king, a military leader, who was going to kick the Romans’ collective asses and return their land to them, along with all its wealth. They wanted someone who was going to free them from Roman rule and taxation. They wanted to be a great nation again, as they were in the times of King David and King Solomon, a thousand years earlier. Instead, this son of a carpenter tells them about freeing the oppressed, serving one another, loving their enemies, leaving behind material possessions.  Not only that, he as much told them, “You people think you’re so special, well, you’re not.  God came to pagans in the past before he came to you!  What makes you think you’re so righteous?!”  People don’t like having their hypocrisy pointed out to them.

This was not the Messiah they expected. More importantly, this was not the Messiah they wanted. Why, this Jesus didn’t even pass his time with the important people, the priests, the scribes, the wealthy, the good, churchy people. He spent his time with whores and pimps, tax collectors and the other refuse of society. He hung around with sick, unclean people, and the poor. They wanted a message of power and glory, or at least, of how to behave; Jesus brought them a message of love. So, naturally, they wanted to kill him. He wasn’t the kind of holy man they wanted, and the kind of God of which he spoke, was not the kind of God they wanted either. Funny thing about God, though (or, again, whatever you want to call that power, I like to call that creative spirit God because…well, that’s the culture with which I grew up, and, more importantly, it’s only three letters). God, being God, will be exactly how S/He wants to be regardless of our expectations. Jesus makes it clear that what God cares about is love. That is the nature of God, love. But what is love?

The people of Corinth, in the days of the early church had a hard time with that, too. And the apostle Paul, sent them a letter in which he tells them all about love. And the love he is talking about is not that romantic love we feel toward our partners, but the love which permeates the universe, the love we are called to be. Paul says, “If angels speak through me, but I don’t have love, then I’m nothing but a bunch of noise. If I can see the future, if I understand everything, all of life’s mysteries, if I have enough faith to move mountains, but I don’t have love, then I have nothing. If I give all I have to the poor, and even give my life for the cause, but don’t have love, then I gain nothing.

Love is patient. Love is kind. Love is not vain. Love is not conceited. It is not rude. It is not selfish. It is not quick-tempered. It does not hold grudges. Love rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails. Everything else will pass away. Only faith, hope, and love remain. And the greatest of these is love.” (official Big Daddy translation)

So many people choose this to be read at their wedding. I know we had it at ours. And every time I read it, it brings me to tears. If only I could live my life that way. I want to. I really do. But I fail all the time. But then, it’s good to have something to work towards. This is how I want to live my life. And all those churchy people who spend so much of their time judging the rest of us might want look at this again. It is my greatest hope that if people could just look at what the message of Jesus was, that their hearts might be touched, and we could see a rebirth of the kind of faith and love that could bring our world back from the edge of disaster. Because there is nothing in that message about rules, or laws, or obligations, or with whom we share our beds, or even who the true God is.

The message is simple. Love one another. Serve one another. Righteousness and holiness might be all well and fine, but what matters most is how much we love. In the end, that’s the only thing that lasts. Even so many of the people who believe in God spend so much of their time praying for better jobs, and more money, or success. I wonder how many pray to be more loving? When we look at all those attributes we admire, courage, faith, responsibility, power, strength, honesty, kindness, perseverance, intelligence, it’s important to remember, “the greatest of these is love.” The Beatles told us. The word is Love. I don’t know if that’s the God we expect, or even want. But that’s the God we got. I guess God is an old hippie after all.