Peace in Troubled Times 5

This week passed the anniversary of the tragic events of October 7, and the widening conflict in the Mideast is as frightening as it is inhumane.  On every side, innocent people have suffered incredible atrocities.  Terrorist organizations hide behind families and children, the Israeli military targets them with weapons our government provides, and most of us feel helpless to influence the actions of the people in power.  I am grateful to people in our congregation and to others I know who provide ways for us to increase our understanding and act for peace where we can.  We have to pay attention to what is going on, even though we would rather think of something else, because God’s children are suffering.

The devastation of the hurricanes adds to the dismay; most of us know someone who has lost something, or everything, and so many are scrambling to survive.  We cannot get to them, while emergency workers keep giving their all; and for the most part we continue in our patterns of consumption that warm the planet and increase the severity of these storms.  And I am grateful to all of you who pray not only with hands folded but with hearts and wallets open, eager for our mission funds and our hands and feet to do what we can to help.

I said I found it difficult to write this week.  I find myself in this whiplash between these horrible realities and not only the demands of daily life, but the good things that still deserve to be celebrated.  Today the congregation is recognizing my 10 years of service in this congregation—I don’t know who planned it but I understand that is the focus of the Welcome Hour today.  I have been blessed beyond measure in my ministry here.  What would be more ungrateful than to brush aside your kindness and insist that we spend the whole day in mourning.

We have other things to celebrate as well.  Earl Rivers turned 80 this week even as he continues in his 50th year making music among us.  I’m grateful that our Mission Committee collected items for the needy at a tailgate yesterday, and hosted a second criminal records expungement at Third Church, and on Thursday invited us to learn about the Mideast peacemaking work of the Pilgrims of Ibillin.  This week I spent time in my ministry talking on the phone about education needs in our city with Knox Elder Jim Crosset, who has come out of retirement to serve the School Board; and Friday I joined Knox Elder Evan Nolan at the announcement of his appointment to the City Council; these are just this week’s examples of the ways members of our church step up and give of themselves for the welfare of others in our community.  And so many more of you have done so much, and will step up in the week ahead; you will perform similar acts of service that are just as selfless and loving, even though they will not make the paper—or even the Knox Enews.  There is so much good to be thankful for.

How do we hold it all together, the bad with the good, in our hearts and minds and spirits?  How do you go to an exercise class when someone else’s body is threatened by an airstrike?  How do you weigh your choices in an aisle with dozens of breakfast cereals when millions cannot eat?  I found myself this week humming the words of an old Dave Matthews’ song “Funny the Way It Is.”  In the song, he tries to understand how “one kid walks ten miles to school while another is dropping out” and that “someone’s broken heart then becomes your favorite song.”  Funny the way it is, he sings.  I’ve always liked Dave Matthews, but I need more than the song.  There has to be some greater wisdom; these things can’t just be, “funny the way it is.”

When I find myself feeling so lost in these questions, what am I to say as a preacher?  It is wrong, and also arrogant, to imagine I will come up with some new way for us to understand, let alone to fix these things.  That is far beyond my capability.  Thank God there is wisdom much older than me to guide us.  Do not get too excited for I am not about to share with you something you have not heard before.  But the reason we come to worship over and over is because the troubles and struggles of life keep coming; so over and over again, our faith gives us reminders of how to live in the midst of the struggles.

Even Jesus looked to the past when it came to navigating life’s big questions, his foundation was in tradition.  So here’s his unsurprising lesson for today:

One day Jesus is approached by a scholar, hoping to trip him up by asking a big question before a crowd of people, “Which commandment is the first of all?” he asks.  Jesus answers not with his own judgment or innovation but by drawing upon wisdom handed down to him in the scriptures, he quotes Deuteronomy 6 and Leviticus 19 stating “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength,” and the second is this, he says, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

This ancient wisdom, still important today, comes not in merely quoting the scriptures, but in applying them.  It is a daily and real challenge to live not just one of these commandments, but both of them at the same time, and to do so in tangible ways, every day of your life.  Loving God is about spiritual health, personal growth, inner peace; and peace is only found if we are loving our neighbors, because you cannot ignore the suffering of others and expect to find peace with God.  The opposite is also true.  Loving others is the very essence of what it means to follow God; but the needs out there are far too great, endless and complicated for any of us to stay the course, unless we draw upon God to give us strength, and we have to do so daily.

This wisdom—to love God and neighbor—it is so ancient, transformative, and important that it resides in many traditions.  Jesus is drawing upon Jewish law in his articulation of it; the five pillars of Islam say much the same thing:  they require on the one hand prayer and declaration of faith, and on the other hand, charitable giving, and fasting as a reminder of the needs of others.  When Simran Jeet Singh visited with us last month, his Sikh faith reminded us of the shared light of God, ik oankar, found in every human life; that light is discovered through seva—service to others.  Love God and love your neighbor.  The world only gets better when people love and serve one another, there is no peace without it; and to see the light of God in others, we also must be able to find it in ourselves, so we must love God (See Singh, The Light We Give).

Loving God and loving our neighbors is easier said than done—the words often become thoughtless platitudes.  These are hard values to live, and they require practice, and thankfully people wiser than myself have offered guidance from their own experience.

We love God by deepening our own spiritual life and health; we do this by spending time with God.  I don’t believe that God needs my love; but spending time trying to deepen my spiritual life is certainly good for me.  So loving God is really a kind of self-care, but that’s a term we have to be careful with.  Self-care is a term that caught on several decades ago, thanks to the work of Audre Lorde.  Gratefully, it began with tireless humanitarian and justice workers who needed reminders to take care of themselves.  Increasingly though, the term is over-used by comfortable people as a joking excuse for self-indulgence.  Don’t get me wrong—rest, leisure, sabbath, these things are important for everyone.  We all need to go on vacations, take in a show or a ballgame, eat ice cream out the container…  Life is not all about work, and leisure makes us better people, not worse.  Simran Jeet Singh reminds us that the test of good self-care, I think, is this:  Do our acts of self-care help us to grow in gratitude, and do they give us the rest we need to get back to lives of service?  Or do they just condition us to be more selfish?  Self-care is real when it strengthens our connectedness to other people, and the rest of creation.  This is love for God.

Just like love for God, loving our neighbors requires careful consideration.  The problem with the command to love our neighbors is that it often remains an abstraction, and that’s not the way it was intended.  Way back in the Book of Leviticus, the Bible warns against this.  The Mosaic Law doesn’t just tell people to love their neighbors, it gives specific applications.  Farmers are told to leave some crops around the edge of their fields for the benefit of the hungry, and grapes in the vineyard for the poor and the immigrant…Laborers should be paid promptly, and no one should take advantage of the handicapped.  Maximizing profit and cutting corners are opposed to the love of neighbor—these specifics are covered in Leviticus.

In our own time and place, loving our neighbors takes so many forms and none of us can do them all.  I applaud the efforts of so many of you, who make much greater efforts than my own to love your neighbors.  Many of you are tireless advocates for the Palestinian people and for the dangers of antisemitism; many of you show up weekly to work one-on-one with children at Third Presbyterian or to pray with prisoners at the Hamilton County Justice Center.  An equal and no-less important need is met by those who show up without fail to teach children in our Sunday School, or who may spend hours each week accompanying our aging members to doctors’ appointments, visiting or making phone calls or writing letters to Knox members who they know to be grieving.  All of these things are important, and there are so many others.  None of us can do them all, and the work will never be finished—which can be very frustrating.

The work will never be finished.  We can never love God enough, nor can we love our neighbors enough; and yet we cannot give up.  That is why loving God and loving our neighbors takes practice and happens in community.  One of the best things you can do for your spiritual growth is to have an honest conversation with God and with someone else about this.  Pray and talk with someone else about how you are loving God and loving your neighbor—and about where you struggle.  Don’t allow it to be abstract.  I really struggled this past week, reading a lengthy and heart wrenching account of hospital work in Gaza, and then realizing I was running late to work on my aching back at a Pilates class.  As I hurried to class I wondered, how do I live with myself?  I often struggle with how I should be spending my time.  We need people to talk to so that we can wrestle with these questions.  It can’t just be funny the way it is.  This is what church community is for.

I’ve decided in recent weeks, maybe I’ve known from the beginning, that my title for this sermon series may be misleading.  We’re not really looking for peace in troubled times; at least not if by “peace” you mean an absence of care or concern.  You don’t find peace in troubled times by learning not to care—by holing yourself up for prayer and meditation while children starve.  Even those who think they are succeeding are eventually haunted by their lack of humanity.  Nor does anyone find peace by being overwhelmed by the suffering of others.  If we cannot find joy in your daily life, if we cannot love our families, our closest neighbors, and ourselves, can we really be of help to people half a world away?  We need God to show us how to keep our balance.

We have to somehow do both things together, nurture our love for God, and love our neighbors.  The peace we seek in following these two commandments is not to arrive at resolution—but to be troubled enough by each kind of love to get up in the morning and joyfully try again.  We have to commit each day to a few more minutes of prayer that’s really honest.  We must commit daily to some kind of action that will leave the world better than we found it, according to what you can do.

The only surefire way to really have no peace is to abandon the struggle; that strategy may serve you for a time, but it will not last.  People of God, we need not agree on the best way to love God and love neighbor; it would be impossible to achieve that, and even if we did, it would be awfully boring.  But the daily quest to love God and love neighbor is a noble one, and is worth the struggle.  And it is worth struggling through this together.  I thank you, people of Knox, for allowing me 10 years of getting up each Sunday and struggling through the things I am not sure about.  Let’s keep going and try to do a bit better today than we did yesterday as we seek to love God and to love our neighbors.  Amen.