Love's Expectations

“OK, God,” I thought, looking over the readings for today, “Here it is, our fall kick-off Sunday, the perfect time for a nice, short, happy, inspirational sermon, and what do you give me to work with but your strange, cryptic Name and the scary demands that we care for our enemies and take up our Crosses! I wrung my hands for awhile this week, until I looked at our reading from Romans with teachers’ eyes. When I was an elementary school teacher, at the beginning of every school year, we had to sit down with each class and talk about how we were going to live together as a group that year. We had to haul out the big chart paper and talk about classroom expectations, carefully writing them down, having the kids sign their names, and posting them on a prominent wall in the classroom. “We will listen while others are speaking,” we wrote. “We will keep our hands to ourselves at circle time. We will arrive in class on time” and so on.  I think that our reading from Paul’s letter to the Romans can be seen today as our “classroom expectations” for our life together as a parish. The verbs in this list of commands from the apostle Paul are plural verbs, not singular ones. Paul is telling us how Christians should behave with one another in community, and he is giving us very specific guidelines, more specific than the vague “love your neighbor” that we find elsewhere in the Bible. So what are we signing onto this year as we come together as a Christian community?

Our list of “community expectations” is definitely written with the ink of love. The word “love” comes up again and again throughout the passage. Indeed, for Paul, it is God’s raw, torn-open, bleeding-on-the-Cross-kind-of-love that sustains us as we pursue the Christian life, and it is even what allows us to discriminate between good and evil. God’s love gives of itself no matter what; it stops at nothing; it pours itself out upon all creation, never holding back. It is this kind of love that Paul wants to see reflected by the Christian community: Love without pretense, love that is not used to gain power or status, love stripped bare of all play-acting, false projections, and cowardly disguises. Such a true, genuine love somehow turns away instinctively from evil, abhorring what is not life-giving, shrinking back in horror from all that harms and destroys. At the same time, Christian love clings instinctively to what is of God, holding on with all of its might. It implies passionate commitment to others, a commitment so desperately strong that weariness or fear or laziness or timidity cannot stop it for long. Christian love bubbles and boils with the Holy Spirit, so effervescent that it cannot be contained, overflowing into service to God.

          I think that I am safe to say that we have all felt—and shared—this kind of miraculous divine love, if only for fleeting moments. We have seen it in Christ on the Cross; we’ve felt it wrap its arms around us in times of despair, we’ve felt it flow over us in prayer and bubble up in us in times of great joy. We’ve felt its instinctive horror in the face of human hatred and oppression and its insistent pull in us toward the good. It is our experience of this amazing love that keeps us coming back to church, despite all of the church’s imperfections. It is joyful glimpses of this love that sustain us in our never-ending search for God. In appealing to our experience of love, Paul’s list of community expectations is written to speak to our hearts, rather than to our minds. It isn’t just a cold list of “shoulds” and “oughts,” but it asks us to open ourselves to the genuine love that we receive in Jesus Christ and to let ourselves respond in compassion, overflowing with blessing, hope, patience, prayer, and peace.

Some of the places where love leads us seem obvious. We can check them off of our list of community expectations as a done-deal. Rejoicing with each other in good times, weeping with each other in our sorrows—we can do that! I see that here at St. Thomas every week. Praying regularly, keeping our hearts open to God’s voice—we’re pretty good at that here in the church. Enduring through hard times in the parish—we have certainly done that before. Then there are the more difficult expectations: Keeping hope alive, sharing our material goods with the needy, welcoming the stranger among us, loving and respecting our brothers and sisters even when we disagree with them …. Well, these are all things that we know we should do, and we work at them. They are good to have on our list. But what about  the dangerous times, the times when evil seems to surround us, the times in which we feel threatened to our very core? What do we do then with all of this talk about blessing the people who persecute us? About refusing all revenge? About caring for our enemies and using only good to confront evil? Do we really want to put these on our list of community expectations? Aren’t they just for martyrs in far-off times and places?

          I just saw the movie, The Help, this week. For those of you who have not yet seen it, it is about a group of white women and their black maids at the very beginning of the Civil Rights movement in Jackson, Mississippi. One of the young white women, nick-named Skeeter, decides to write—and publish—the stories of the community’s black maids: the stories of their lives, their joys, their hardships. Since any kind of “fraternization” between blacks and whites is forbidden by law in Jim Crow Mississippi, such collaboration on a book, such uncovering of Truth, is extremely dangerous for both Skeeter and the maids. At first, the maids refuse to be interviewed. After all, why should they jeopardize their lives and their families’ lives so that a white lady can publish a book? How could a book—or anything, really—make any difference to the daily injustices and humiliations of their lives?

          But one of the maids, Aibileen, a devout Christian and church member, hears the preacher one Sunday telling us to care for our enemies, to overcome evil with good. Aibileen has suffered greatly, more than most, at the hands of the white people of Jackson. She has looked Evil directly in the face. At the beginning of the movie, in her unguarded moments, one sees pain and even despair in her eyes. After listening to the sermon in church, though, she goes to Skeeter and tells her that she wants to be interviewed. When Skeeter asks her who convinced her to change her mind, she rolls her eyes heavenward and answers, “God.”

          Indeed, the African American church community plays a persistent part in the movie, as I remember, more so than in the book, as images of the supportive worshipping community appear regularly. In the church scenes, the love of the community is palpable, as is the difficult command to love one’s enemies. It is clear that God’s demand for radical love on our parts, regularly repeated by the pastor, goes hand in hand with community support and love, with singing and joy and friendship.

          After one of their church members is brutally arrested for stealing, all of the maids from the church scene, accompanied by their pastor, decide to share their stories with Skeeter and to let them be published in the book. As they share the truth of their lives, as they make themselves vulnerable to one another, as they risk their lives for good, one slowly watches the women-- both the maids and Skeeter--gain strength and power. They become free from the evil of racism that surrounds them, even though they still live in its midst. At the end of the movie, after the stories have been told, enemies have been bound together in love, and truth is out in the open, the evil of racism is seen as the ridiculous thing that it is, and evil is overcome by good.

          What Paul tells us and what The Help shows us, is that we dare not leave the hard parts off of our list of community expectations this year. While we might no longer live in the Jim Crow South or in the persecutions of ancient Rome, there is plenty of evil that is still to be overcome in this world. In the presence of hatred and selfishness and greed, in the presence of intolerance and the refusal to compromise, in the presence of lies and cover-ups--we are blessed to have a community that both sustains us and challenges us, and a God who uses us as a vessel for His unquenchable love, pouring God’s love into us and through us every time we give him the slightest chance. This year, may we walk hand in hand outside of our comfort zone, supporting each other as brothers and sisters who follow Jesus on the way of the Cross. Shall we sign our names, and put it on the wall?