Sermon from Sunday, August 31, 2014

Scripture:  Matthew 16:13-26
Sermon:  All he wanted was to love all people with God's love

All he wanted was to love all people with God’s love.  This is what it cost him.  Still, he says this is the only way to really live, and share real life with others.

 

The call is still the same.  As is the cost – at least, there are times when it can be.

 

In 1988 from across the country delegates gathered in Victoria to serve as General Council of the United Church of Canada.  One of the questions on the agenda was whether to affirm full participation of self-declared homosexual persons in church life, including the possibility of their being called and gifted by God for ordained ministry.  Many of the delegates went with the expectation – in their minds, as well as in the minds of the congregations they served and the presbyteries that selected them that they would vote against the ordination of self-declared gays and lesbians – that this was and always would be God’s revealed will.

 

But something happened when they met as General Council.  They discussed the issues in open forum and small groups, they read and studied and prayed, they met and talked with honest and faithful persons on all sides of the question, and many delegates found their mind and heart changed.  They came to believe that full affirmation is the only way to express and be faithful to the revealed will and love of God.  They voted in the majority to affirm homosexuality as no barrier to full participation in the life of the church, including ordained ministry.  In their hearts and minds they knew it was the good and godly to do.

 

But then there was the return to their home congregations and presbyteries, the anger felt there at the outcome, and the need to explain why they voted as they did.  For many of the returning delegates, the conversations they had and meetings they attended felt like crucifixion.  It took some a long time to recover.  Perhaps some never did.

 

I wonder if this is why many congregations today still practice a don’t-ask-don’t-tell approach.  We’re not opposed; we hope people will know we are open and accepting.  We just don’t want to go out on a limb, and be crucified for publicly taking a stand and saying so.

 

To be fair, it’s not always easy to know and be certain of God’s will and how God loves.

 

Beginning in the 1870’s the Christian churches of Canada and the new federal government teamed up in what they thought was a good plan of care for the aboriginal peoples of the country.  Together they established a network of residential schools where the children of First Nations’ communities would be taken, housed, educated and assimilated into mainstream white-European Christian society.  It cost the churches and government a lot in time and money.  But it seemed like a good, faithful thing – a way of living out God’s love for the First Nations’ children.  So they bore the cost.

 

We now know what the real cost was to the children and to First Nations’ culture and society in general.  We hear the painful witness of the survivors, and we have grown in our understanding of how God loves and is known among all cultures and peoples, including the First Nations of Canada.  So in 1986 our General Council approved and offered a formal apology to the First Nations for the way we treated them and the harm we inflicted.  We also committed a great deal of time and money to repair what was done, to support the recovery of the survivors, and to seek reconciliation and new growth together as separate and equal people in the good will and love of God.  

 

It was – and still is a great amount of time and money required to make the apology real, and some still worry it may help kill us as a church.  But what is it he says?  That our only job ultimately is to love all people as God loves them, and that regardless of the cost it’s the only way to really live and share real life with God and with others.

 

In the reading this morning – in Matthew 16, Jesus calls those who follow him to the work of binding and loosing.  It’s a reference to the work of the rabbis to interpret and apply the revealed will of God so the people can know what God is for and against in their time, and people are then either bound – tied to their sin and unacceptability and kept out of the community of the righteous, or are loosed – set free from false guilt and shame, and openly welcomed into the holy circle.

 

Binding and loosing – keeping apart and publicly welcoming with open hearts and arms, is still the work of all who know and love God. 

 

I know how important it was for me over the winter while I was away on leave, that a small community of people – trained therapists as well as other people with me in treatment, committed their time and energy, and skill and compassion to help set me free of things that bound me – learned attitudes and behaviours that created unnecessary stress and shame, that inhibited free and open relationship, that made me a prisoner of my own life-story.  Being loosed is a real experience and it happens when other people care enough to help make it happen.

 

How many people around us live in bondage of different kinds – are imprisoned in ways that are not always obvious, but are real and deadening to them?

 

I could probably try to answer that question – to try to name and list different ways in which people around us are bound to their sin and past mistakes, to shame and a feeling of unworthiness, to loneliness and isolation, to addictive and self-destructive behaviour, to the prejudices and unmerciful un-forgiveness of others, to anonymity, abuse, poverty, hopelessness, fear.  But that would be only my list, and it would only be partial at best.

 

What’s probably important is how each of us answers the question in our own lives, and how all of us together answer it as a church.   And we know how to do it.  Sometime we do it well; sometimes not so well, or not so boldly.  Sometimes we get afraid of the cost, and like Peter try to hold back a little.  

 

But especially now as we look ahead to a new year of ministry and mission together as a church and in our own lives, I wonder whose bondage and imprisonment we will be touched by, and how we will make real to them what we understand of God’s revealed will and love – what public and private binding and loosing we will engage in as followers of Jesus – just how we will love all people with God’s love, regardless of the cost?  

 

And is it as we answer that call and live it out, that we also are more completely unbound and set loose to really know God’s love ourselves?  He does say it’s the only way to really live.