Salty Christians (sermon on September 27, 2009)

Mark 9:38-50
Psalm 19:7-14

Last week at our outdoor service I preached on the passage from Mark’s gospel that comes just before the text we heard today. At the end of that passage, Jesus tells the disciples that whoever welcomes children welcomes him. What that meant was the disciples were to reach out to those people who have no dignity or respect. In Jesus’ time, that included children.

Today’s passage picks up where that conversation left off. As soon as Jesus got those words out of his mouth, the disciple John spoke up. You see, he and the other disciples had been wondering about just that question: who they were supposed to welcome into their community of Jesus followers. Just the other day they had been walking along the road, minding their own business, when they stumbled across an exorcism taking place right there in the middle of the street. And the person doing the healing was shouting to the demon, “In the name of Jesus I command you: come out!”

But here’s the thing: the disciples didn’t even recognize the guy! Here he was, healing someone in the name of their teacher, and they’d never even laid eyes on him. They were determined to put a stop to his unauthorized activity. Actually, when it came right down to it, the disciples weren’t so interested in whom Jesus wanted them to welcome; what they wanted to know was: who could they reject, who could they forbid from acting in Jesus’ name, from being a part of their community.

There’s really nothing like reading the gospel of Mark to make all of us feel better about the many ways we fail to understand and practice Jesus’ teachings. I mean, the disciples actually got to spend time with Jesus in person and they were still hopelessly thick-headed. “Welcome the children,” Jesus teaches them, and not two minutes later, the disciple John is talking about how they can forbid another believer from doing good deeds in Jesus’ name.

Of course, we really shouldn’t be surprised. After all, in last week’s passage, it wasn’t two minutes after Jesus predicted his suffering and death that the disciples got into a heated debate about which of them was the greatest. So is it really any surprise now that the disciples are suddenly concerned with drawing boundaries around their community? They want some guidelines here, they want to be able to identify who is in their group and who is out and what questions they can ask to separate insiders from outsiders. They want their club to be password protected...because their biggest concern is preserving their own position as the followers of Jesus, the disciples, the ones chosen by Jesus, hand-picked to be his followers. They felt special at least in part because they knew they had something other people didn’t.

Hasn’t just about every community of believers since the first disciples done what the disciples try to do here: figure out some criteria, some standards by which to measure who’s in and who’s out? Don’t we all want to feel that we know the ways Jesus really wants us to act and think and be, and that those who don’t aren’t in the club? For some churches it’s a particular social issue that draws the boundary -- abortion, gay marriage. For others the defining lines -- even if they’d never actually be defined -- are race or socioeconomic status. It’s no secret that we all feel most comfortable around people who are like us, so no matter how much we may insist that we welcome everyone into our church, there is still a subtle feeling among those who are different that they just don’t belong.

Well it turns out that when it comes to who’s in and who’s out, Jesus’ standards are shockingly lax: “whoever is not against us is for us.”

If we take Jesus’ saying seriously -- whoever is not against us is for us -- then we can find many examples of people living out the gospel without even knowing it, examples of God at work in our world...and, like the disciples, these people might actually have a thing or two to teach those of us who identify ourselves as Jesus’ followers.

One such person is Chuck Collins. Collins is the heir to the Oscar Meyer fortune. He is very, very wealthy. About a year ago he started a nonprofit called Wealth for the Common Good. This is a group of very wealthy people who actually want the wealthy to pay higher taxes. They believe this would move the country toward stability and financial health. It would also provide a significant portion of funds needed for healthcare reform. Collins and his supporters believe that giving a higher percentage of their earnings to the government is one way to bring economic justice to this country. They may not quote Jesus, but they certainly could. After all, when the rich man wanted to know what he needed to do to inherit eternal life, Jesus told him, sell all that you have and give it to the poor. Whoever is not against us is for us.

Here’s another example: in 1988, Chris Waddell, a competitive skier, broke his back in a skiing accident and lost the use of his legs. Within two years, he was named to the US Disabled Ski Team and he went on to become the most decorated male skier in paralympic history. Chris is attempting to become the first paraplegic to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania unassisted, using only a four-wheel handcycle propelled only with arm power. His goal is not just to prove that he can accomplish this incredible feat; what he really wants is for people all over the world to gain a new respect for the disabled -- and for those who are disabled to see what they are capable of. He also plans to donate wheelchairs and handcycles to the disabled citizens of Tanzania, who often don’t have access to such necessities. Waddell may not be physically healing the disabled, but he is certainly offering healing for their hearts and hope for their souls. Whoever is not against us is for us.

We certainly don’t have to go all the way to Tanzania to find people who are doing God’s work in the world even if that’s not what they might call it. In 1935, right here in Akron, an alcoholic named Bill Wilson sought the help of a physician and fellow alcoholic Bob Smith. The two ultimately co-founded Alcoholics Anonymous, which has helped millions of alcoholics around the world. In Akron alone, there are 400 AA meetings each week, many of which take place in churches, including ours. Whoever is not against us is for us.

At times I think those of us who are already inside the church can become overwhelmed with all that we are called to do as we follow Jesus, just as the disciples following Jesus seemed to frequently get overwhelmed by his teachings: reach out to the poor and marginalized; give generously and joyfully of our time and talents; help care and support one another in good times and bad; deepen our own faith through Bible study, small groups, and worship; work for justice and peace in our community, city, and world; love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself. No wonder we feel overwhelmed! But there are times that all we need to do is open our eyes and bear witness to the ways others are bringing love and grace to the world, whether or not they are followers of Jesus. Whoever is not against us is for us.

What this saying of Jesus also teaches us is that we don’t always have to wear our religion on our sleeve in order to do what we are called to do. You all know this already -- in September alone you have reached out to the elementary school across the parking lot with bags of supplies for the teacher; you have visited the mentally disabled at Hope Homes, bringing laughter and love into their lives; you have prepared and served dinner to over one hundred people from the local community and sent the leftovers to the Catholic Worker, which provides free hot meals; then you served one another and joined with another congregation at the church picnic last week. And now that preschool is back in session, our church provides the space and resources for families with young children to begin their children’s education away from home. You do these things because you are part of this faith community, which means you do them in Jesus’ name. And it’s perfectly okay if we don’t always advertise that fact.
What follows Jesus’ response to John’s question is a series of harsh sayings about those who make it hard for the “little ones who believe in Jesus.” Some commentators think that “little ones” refers again to children; others think it refers to new followers of Jesus, those who are still figuring out who he is and what it means to follow him. Either way, Jesus’ remarks about dismemberment show that the work of discipleship and how the disciples treat others is very serious business.

Then Jesus says a strange thing: “you will all be salted with fire.” This is strange, because salt and fire are typically seen as opposites: salt preserves while fire destroys. But what salt and fire have in common is that they can both be used to purify.

Recently I have been reading Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder with my daughter. This book is set in the 1870s and follows a pioneer family through the joys and challenges of life on the frontier. This family, who must hunt and then preserve all of their food for the long, cold winter, relies on two things: fire and salt. Salt allows them to preserve meat by drawing water out of it and making it inhospitable to bacteria -- thus purifying it. Salt is used to cure pork, venison, and fish so that they can have meat to eat throughout the winter. In this way, salt ensures their survival. Of course, without fire, that salt would be useless. They need fire for warmth, for cooking, for melting lead to make the bullets necessary to kill the animals they will eat, and for smoking the salted meats. Fire and salt are integral to the processes of transforming raw food into food that human beings can consume -- which is why these two elements changed and shaped human development throughout history.

Of course, salt itself can’t actually lose its flavor, as Jesus suggests here. But in his day, salt was often mixed with other minerals, so that if it got wet, the salt would dissolve and other tasteless minerals would remain. And just imagine for a moment how our recent meals together would have tasted if the salt we had used in the spaghetti sauce or potato salad or even in the pie crust had been nothing but tasteless crystals. (1)

Jesus is calling us to take discipleship seriously -- to quit bickering about who’s the greatest or who gets to be a part of our Jesus club. Taking discipleship seriously means we are going to struggle as we seek to understand Jesus’ teachings and then act on them. But that struggle is part of the necessary process of purification and preservation, of becoming more like the grace-filled, faithful people Jesus wants to be so that we can take share that saltiness with others, and so that we can support others -- especially those new to the faith -- as they confront the challenges of a living faith. The hard work of discipleship requires painful self-sacrifice because of what that work allows us to achieve by the fire of the Holy Spirit: a community where people support one another, put aside their differences, welcome everyone who walks through the doors, and then go one step further and support them as they endure the challenges that confront all of us who seek a meaningful relationship with God. This is serious business, indeed, serious business with the potential to bring to the church and the world the peace we so desperately need. Amen.

Endnotes:
1. Scott Hoezee, This Week in Preaching, http://cep.calvinseminary.edu/thisWeek/viewArticle.php?aID=331.

Sunday Update

The psalmist says it like this:

When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars that you have established;
what are human beings that you are mindful of them,
mortals that you care for them? (Psalm 8:3-4)

Have you ever looked at the beauty and majesty of the natural world and been struck by the depth of God's creativity and love? The extraordinarily beautiful weather we have been having in Ohio these last few weeks has certainly been an occasion to experience and express gratitude for the world that surrounds us. On Sunday, we'll have an opportunity to worship outdoors when we gather for our annual worship service at Tadmor Temple. Our friends from Allenside Presbyterian Church will join us for worship followed by lunch. Hopefully the beautiful weather will persist, but no matter what the forecast this is a unique opportunity to remember that "the earth is the Lord's and all that is in it; the world and all who live in it" (Psalm 24:1). Hope to see you Sunday!

Bible-Order Bride (sermon, Sept. 13, 2009)

Proverbs 31:10-31

Ephesians 5:25-33

The television drama Mad Men is about an advertising firm in Manhattan in the 1960’s. Watching this show it’s impossible not to reflect on how much has changed in this country in fifty years. For one thing, the characters -- men, women, and pregnant women alike -- smoke and drink almost constantly, whether at home or at work. The clothes and hair styles, of course, also look different. What were you all thinking, by the way?! Now maybe I’m just a Gen X-er, raised on a steady diet of feminism, but what continually surprises me in this show is the roles and relationships of men and women. All of the advertising executives in the firm are men, and all of the secretaries are women. One of the main characters is a new secretary who has just joined the firm and -- simply because she is new, young, and attractive -- she receives constant attention from the men in the office. The best of them at least engage her in conversation; the worst just leer at her as they pass her desk.

So for someone like me who missed out on the fifties and sixties, the office relations on Mad Men are remarkable, but the relationships between the men and women get really interesting when we meet the wives of the wealthy ad execs. For the most part, the married women on the show are stay-at-home wives and mothers. In one scene a newly-married ad exec is on the phone with his wife the day he returns to work after his honeymoon. His wife wants to know what he’d like to have for dinner. “What do I want?” he asks, surprised at her question. But he quickly comes up with an answer: “Rib-eye. In the pan. With butter. Ice cream for dessert.”

At that point my husband turned to me and said, “I’d sure like a wife like that.” “Yeah,” I responded. “So would I.”

*****

And yet even those seemingly perfect wives of the past pale in comparison to the woman we heard about in our passage from Proverbs. This list of attributes possessed by the so-called “capable wife” is long, extensive, comprehensive, and to be honest, a bit exhausting -- this woman does everything from gathering food to making clothes to buying property. I’m all for the empowerment of women, I certainly believe women can do anything they set their minds to, but the list of things this woman accomplishes would be impossible for any one human being to achieve on her own.

Which begs the question: is this for real? Are we really supposed to live up to this? And who is “we” -- wives only, or all women, or women and men, married or unmarried? After all, a lot has changed since this was written, and now that we’re enlightened about equality and sexism, we’re not supposed to ask women to take this text seriously...are we? Or, at least, if we are going to ask women to take it seriously, then we’re also going to ask men to take it seriously too, right? -- after all, shouldn’t the Bible be an equal opportunity employer?

There are many occasions when we read something in the Bible that seems so outdated, so different from our current cultural norms that it is tempting to simply disregard it. There are plenty of texts in the Bible -- texts filled with violence, texts that demean women or children or foreigners, texts that simply don’t make any sense to us -- that we’d like to do away with, to never read or contemplate. For me, at first glance, this is one of those texts. As a working wife and mother I struggle every day to live up to my own ideas of what a “capable” spouse and mom looks like. I suspect many of you do, too. And believe me, my ideas don’t come anywhere close to the list in Proverbs. Hearing that list read makes my standards seem hopelessly low, even though most days I struggle to attain them. After all, the word capable sounds like it’s describing the minimum. Most of us would probably say we are at least “capable.” The wife described here deserves the label “superwoman.”

But I don’t think this poem -- or any of the texts we struggle with -- is in the Bible to make us feel badly about ourselves, any more than a show like Mad Men is meant to make us nostalgic for the good old days which were generally only good for a select few. Instead if we stick with today’s biblical text and others like it that make us uncomfortable, if we struggle with them, even argue with them, I believe we will ultimately be blessed by them.

*****

So let’s start by placing this poem about “the capable wife” in context. Chapter 31 is the last chapter in the book of Proverbs. This book is one of several books in the Bible known as “wisdom literature.” It is a collection of sayings, poems, essays, and even riddles that offer advice for living a good and faithful life. Proverbs is essentially the collected wisdom of ancient Israel, addressing one’s relationship with God, parents, children, and spouse.

Because ancient Israel was a patriarchal culture, many of the instructions are more relevant to men than to women. The book opens with a father giving advice to his son. There are several characters in the book; one is Lady Folly, a seductive adulteress. The father essentially warns the son, “Steer clear of that one!” Lady Folly is contrasted to Lady Wisdom, the personification of wisdom and faithfulness.

In the first chapter of Proverbs, there is a verse that reveals the secret of wisdom: “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,” it tells us. So we discover early on that Lady Wisdom fears the Lord. This doesn’t mean she is afraid of God, it means she respects God, she stands in awe of God, she seeks in all things to honor God and to honor her relationship with God, which is the most important relationship in her life.

Just as that theme shows up right at the beginning of Proverbs, it also reappears at the end, in today’s passage. Chapter 31 verse 30 says that this wife is a woman who fears the Lord, meaning her faith is more important to her than anything else -- more important than looks, than wealth, even more important than perfectly behaved children or a spotless house.

And so, from beginning to end we discover that Proverbs addresses a topic from which we all can benefit -- men, women, adult, child, young, old, married, single -- and that topic is simply our relationship with God and how that relationship informs our lives and our interactions with others. Just as we look at the secretaries in Mad Men who hide their intelligence in front of their bosses and think they are hopelessly misguided, we can look at some of these attributes of the capable wife and conclude that they too are outdated. Yet much of the advice in Proverbs -- including this poem about a wise and faithful spouse -- still speaks to us today as a reminder that we are all called to seek wisdom, wisdom that begins with fearing, respecting, honoring our Creator.

*****

Where is it that we gain this wisdom, that we learn how to fear, respect, and honor God in all things? Well, for most of us, it is in the church. In church we come together with people who are all trying to figure out what it looks like to follow Jesus. Maybe that is why one theme that runs throughout the Bible is God’s people coming together to form a community. In the Hebrew Bible -- our Old Testament -- that community is the people of Israel; in the New Testament it is first the disciples, then the newly formed church. In the Bible, both Israel and the early church are referred to metaphorically as God’s bride or, in the New Testament, as Christ’s bride. God’s people -- whether Israel or the church -- has a unique relationship to God, a covenant relationship, a relationship that is not unlike a marriage.

So if we look again at this passage in Proverbs, how can we understand our role as a church, as the bride of Christ, in light of the many attributes of the capable wife? One thing that strikes me in this litany of talents is this wife takes care not just of the members of her own family -- her husband and children -- she also opens her hand to the poor and reaches out to the needy. As a church isn’t that what we are called to do? To take care of one another, yes, but also to be constantly concerned with the plight of the poor and needy, to care for them as if they were part of our beloved family, to reach out to them and welcome them into our church, just as Jesus welcomes them.

In the passage we read from Ephesians, the author is comparing the marriage of two individuals to the marriage of Christ and the church. Because the church has earlier been described as the body of Christ, the author extends that analogy to suggest that as Christ cares for the church, which is his body, so a husband should care for his wife in the same way he cares for his own body. The apostle Paul writes extensively about what it means that the members of the church together form the body of Christ: it means that every person in that community has a crucial role. It means that it takes an interconnected group of people working together for that community to thrive, just as it takes a group of organs and appendages to create a functional human body.

Understood this way, we find that it’s okay if none of us can be the kind of wife described in Proverbs 31 -- it’s even okay if we can’t even live up to today’s standards of the perfect spouse, parent, grandparent, uncle, aunt, daughter, son, or sibling. It’s okay because before we are any of those things, we are first children of God, and as children of God the most important thing we can do is seek the kind of wisdom that comes from respecting and honoring our Creator. When we gather together under this roof, in the house where Jesus sits at the head of the table, we remind each other that only when we combine our particular gifts, the gifts God has given each of us, do we become -- together -- an adequate partner to Jesus. And sitting around this table with him, we must also recognize that our table, our house, is not yet full, there are many empty spaces and there are people outside these walls who need to be in here. They need to be here because we need them here, because they have gifts and knowledge and talents that we do not but that are key components of the body of Christ. But they also need to be here because they need to know the love and peace and mercy of God, they need to know that their identity as God’s beloved child is what truly defines them, not the images of perfection we see in the media, not the impossible standards we exhaust ourselves trying to live up to.

The older we get the more it may seem like cultural norms are changing. Women are CEOs, men are stay at home dads, gay couples marry and raise children, an African American is president. It would be easy to regard most of the Bible, and especially a text like today’s, as no longer relevant to the world we live in. But the reason we still take the Bible seriously, in spite of all its contradictions and inconsistencies and anachronisms, is that it points us to an unchanging truth: wisdom, true wisdom, the kind that gives life meaning and satisfaction, begins with seeking to understand our origins: who we are and, most importantly, Whose we are. Together, as the church, we are the bride of Christ, we are God’s chosen people. May we come together in that role, each contributing our own unique gifts and talents, and may we invite others to the empty seats around the table, that we may all honor the one who shows us the way of true wisdom. Amen.

The challenge of forgiveness

“Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else;

you are the one getting burned. ”

~the Buddha

I recently heard a story about an eight year-old boy whose mother caught him in a lie. Horrified, the child ran up to his parents' bed room, got under the covers of their bed, and stayed there for nearly two hours until his father came home. Under the heavy blankets, sweating in the dark, the boy wallowed in his guilt and shame. When his dad found him there, he pulled the covers off his son and pulled him onto his lap, where the boy cried and cried. "There is nothing you can do to make me love you less," the father said over and over again. "There is nothing you can do to make me love you less."

Even when grace comes to us like it came to that boy, like a long drink of cool water in a parched desert, the work of atonement is not over. We have to confess, apologize, seek forgiveness. And while the human beings we have hurt with our words and actions may not readily forgive us, we can take comfort in the fact that God is always running toward us with open arms, ready to pull us close and say over and over, "There is nothing you can do to make me love you less."

Forgiveness is indeed powerful. It can also be elusive, difficult to give and at times even more difficult to receive. Starting this Sunday, September 13, we will embark on a study of forgiveness during our Adult Education at 11:15a.m. We'll begin with a showing of the documentary "The Power of Forgiveness." This film examines some of the most challenging situations in which people have extended and received forgiveness: the conflict in Northern Ireland, the Holocaust, and 9/11, to name a few. Come to worship at 10a.m. and stay for the movie. And may you know that God is always ready to forgive you and to guide you in forgiving even those who have hurt you most.

Tending God's Garden (sermon, August 30, 2009)

Song of Solomon 2:18-23
James 1:17-27


While I was on study leave, I had three goals: to read a book of theology, to read a book for pleasure, and to attend as many worship services and lectures as possible during our week at the Chautauqua Institution. I was ready to receive, to be spiritually fed and nurtured.

During our week at Chautauqua, Tony Campolo, a well-known evangelical preacher delivered a sermon each day in worship. The first day, I showed up eager to be comforted by a good sermon...and to my dismay, right off the bat, Campolo made it quite clear that he was not there to make us feel good. He was not there to make us comfortable. He was there to get the message across that if your faith is just about your personal relationship with Jesus, then you are missing the mark, because Jesus was all about helping others, especially the poor. He told story after story of visiting impoverished inner cities and developing countries and getting personally involved in the lives of the world’s neediest people. One of these stories continues to haunt me. One morning, he told us, he rode on the back of a truck through the streets of Haiti. The men he was with would stop whenever they saw a group of children sleeping on the streets; not an unusual sight in this poor country. They got off the truck and shook the children awake. If a child did not wake up, they picked up the lifeless body and put it on the truck. When they returned to the starting point they threw the corpses onto a bonfire and burned up the bodies of these children who had died during the night from hunger and exposure.

Hoping to balance Campolo’s proclamation with a word of homp, I turned to my book of theology. The book, Saving Jesus from the Church by Robin Meyers, offers an explanation why, in a world with so many people who claim to believe in Jesus, a man who constantly reached out to help the poor and marginalized, why there are so many Christians and yet still so much poverty and suffering in the world. Meyers says it’s because we Christians have become more concerned with theology, with who Jesus is and what we believe, than with following Jesus. He says we’ve become more concerned with believing in Jesus than with imitating his actions, actions that poured out God’s love for others, especially those rejected by mainstream society.

Fortunately, my pleasure reading was a wonderful book of nonfiction called Three Cups of Tea, co-authored by Greg Mortenson. The book tells the story of Mortenson’s promise to build a school in a tiny, impoverished village high in the mountains of Pakistan and how that promise grew into a non-profit foundation that has now built hundreds of schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan, seeking to bring peace and prosperity to that region by ensuring quality education for its children and especially its girls.

But by the time I finished this book, I was more disheartened than ever. Here was a man who, although raised by Christian missionaries in Africa, didn’t ever talk about his faith. Instead Mortenson works tirelessly, sacrificing material comforts, time with his family, and often his own life, to bring the gift of education to Central Asia’s poorest and remotest regions. Apart from describing Mortenson’s missionary parents, the book says nothing about Jesus, and yet here is a man who lives a more faithful Christian life than many of us who attend church every Sunday and who claim that our identity as children of God and followers of Jesus is the most important part of who we are.

Then, after all that, I read the lectionary passage for this week from James: “Be doers of the word, and not merely hearers who deceive themselves.” Then this: “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.”

That’s when I decided I’d had enough. I just didn’t think I could stand here before you and tell you to live up to these words. I mean, we’re in a recession, we’re all doing the best we can to get through the day, to take care of our loved ones and pay the mortgage. And, of course, in ways big and small, we do act out our faith here at Firestone Park Presbyterian -- we run a food pantry, contribute to Good Neighbors, reach out ot our local elementary school, and contribute to global mission organizations. Can we really be expected to do more right now? I don’t know about you, but for me, going to Haiti or Pakistan or Africa just isn’t an option at this point, even though I really do care, even though I sincerely believe that following Jesus means that we have to care for the poor and marginalized, the widows and orphans of the world.

There’s an old Calvin and Hobbes comic in which Calvin says to Hobbes, “Do you think our morality is defined by our actions or by what’s in our hearts?” Hobbes replies, “I think our actions show what’s in our hearts.” In the next frame, Calvin stares ahead blankly and says, “I resent that.”

Well, just when I decided I resented all this talk about not just believing but living out our beliefs among the poor and needy and marginalized, I read the Old Testament lectionary passage from Song of Songs, the one time in the three-year lectionary cycle this book appears. Yes! I thought. I’m off the hook. I don’t have to preach about Jesus’ command to serve the poor. I don’t have to tell people that the only way they can truly express their identity as followers of Jesus is to reach out, literally, to the needy, unsavory, rejected members of our community. I can just preach a sermon about sex!

*****

There’s really no way of getting around it, even though plenty of scholars have tried. The Song of Songs is a book about love, the mutual, carnal love between two human beings. Yes, it’s a book about sex, but not the kind of sex we usually see in our culture -- sex sought after and craved simply for the physical satisfaction it offers.

What these sensual poems are about is the self-giving, self-sacrificial love between two people who love each other and who are passionately committed to each other. This is a love defined, not just by passion, but by faithfulness and mutuality. There is no hierarchy in this relationship; in fact, in the whole of the Song of Songs, the woman speaks more than the man. At one point she even reverses the punishment in the garden of Eden, when God tells Eve that “your desire shall be for your husband and he shall rule over you” (Genesis 3:16). In the Song of Songs, the woman declares, “I am my beloved’s and his desire is for me.”1

The very fact that this erotic poetry is in the Bible, even though God is never once mentioned, is a reminder to us that there is nothing in our lives that is outside of God’s creation. God created us with the capacity for physical pleasure through many means -- including eating, playing, exercising, and yes, having sex. Reading this book of the Bible reminds us that, as with any of God’s gifts, sex can be distorted and used in ways that are harmful to ourselves and others or it can be used in such a way that it is life-giving, satisfying, and deeply meaningful. Here we see a love in which two people are passionately committed to the welfare of the other -- and one of the ways they provide for each other’s welfare is by enjoying God’s gift of sexuality.

There is wonderful garden imagery in the Song of Songs -- in this passage we hear about flowers blooming, the fig tree putting forth fruit, and vines with fragrant blossoms. Of course, much of the greatest love poetry evokes the wonders and beauties of nature, because these things are so pleasing to us. But, like true love, nature has to be tended. A garden left untended will be overgrown by weeds just as a relationship left untended will be choked by all the other things in life that occupy our time -- work, daily chores, financial worries. Like gardens, relationships require commitment and hard work to produce the most beautiful flowers and the most delicious fruit.

Do you see what’s happened? Even preaching about sex isn’t getting me off the hook, because it turns out these passages from Song of Songs and from James actually point to the same thing -- the importance of hard work and commitment, not just in our relationships with the people we love most dearly but also in our relationship to God, the God who created us. The God who loves us passionately and unconditionally. The God who calls us to love each other passionately and unconditionally.

In fact, its not just the Song of Songs that uses gardening metaphors. Garden imagery crops up in James when the author writes that we must rid ourselves of all sordidness and rank growth of wickedness -- sure sounds like weeding to me -- and welcome the implanted word that has the power to save our souls.

Did you catch that? “The implanted word that has the power to save our souls.” As I studied this passage I learned that this is the only place in the entire New Testament where this word “implanted” is used.2 It means that something is inborn or innate. What the author is saying is that the ability to be followers of Jesus and not just people who talk about what we believe; to be, in James’ words, doers of the word, not just hearers, this ability is already in us because God created us with this ability. It’s not something we have to go out and find, it’s not something the church will give us in exchange for coming to worship every Sunday or writing the church a check; it’s something we already have. Not only that, but when we use this ability we actively participate in our salvation. This is not works-based righteousness. This is not earning our salvation. This is about the joy we experience when we follow Jesus by loving and serving others because that is what we were created to do. Just as exploring our sexuality in faithful, committed relationships brings us pleasure and satisfaction, so does using our innate ability to serve and love God by serving and loving others.

Tony Campolo now teaches at a Eastern University in Philadelphia. During one of his sermons at the Chautauqua he told another story about a student who, inspired by Campolo’s lectures, felt called to work with the people of inner city Philadelphia. Well, even though Eastern University is a Christian college and even though this student was raised in a Christian home, the student’s father was not happy about how his son was spending his free time. He was so upset about it, in fact, that he came to see Campolo in person, storming into his office in a rage, dragging his son with him.

“Campolo, what do you think you’re doing to my son?!” he bellowed. “You got him into all this with all your radical talk about helping the poor and now he’s out there on the streets giving away his money to pimps and whores and who knows what else. I gave him a good education and look what he’s doing with it. Don’t get me wrong, Campolo, I don’t mind being Christian...up to a point!”

The son looked up at his father and said, “Gee, Dad, could that point be the cross?”

God loves each of us unconditionally, no matter how we choose to live out our faith, but if our faith does not move us to find ways, however small, to help the poor and the marginalized, then it is little more than a mask we wear. As Hobbes put it, it is our actions that show what is in our hearts. So we have to do something. We have to find that point where being a Christian is no longer comfortable for us and we have to go past it...because that point is the cross Jesus said we all must bear. That means we must reach out to strangers who don’t look like us or smell like us or share our values. We have to put ourselves into situations that will make us uncomfortable, situations where we come face to face with the injustice and poverty in the world, like Tony Campolo did in Haiti as the pile of dead children in the back of the truck grew. And frankly, with the internet, there are plenty of ways to fight poverty and injustice without leaving our living rooms. There are many wonderful organizations -- World Vision, Care, the Central Asia Institute, to name a few -- that we can contribute to or volunteer for, especially if we aren’t able to travel to the world’s neediest places. We also must remember that we don’t have to travel far to find people in desperate need of help and of experiencing, in concrete ways, God’s love.

God has created us all to be great lovers -- and not just of the people we personally know and love. As Christians, we believe that every human being on this planet is a child of God, created by God, and so every human being should receive our love. And who among us would not want our loved ones to have -- at the very least! -- their most basic needs met: food, water, clothing, shelter, respect, and the opportunity to learn and to give back to this world. Love is not limited. God’s love is not limited and neither is ours. When we reach out to others with mercy and compassion and help them however we can, we tend the seed God planted within us, and we participate with Jesus in the sacred work of tending God’s garden, the world. May that garden someday be a place where all human beings can live in peace and safety and passionate, joyful, mutual love.