Holding on to Love

Memorial Service for Patrick Leonard

April 9, 2018
1 Corinthians 13

Holding on to Love

I didn’t have the honor or the privilege to know Patrick. From all accounts, he was loving and giving and generous. A true friend…like a brother.

And I know that he will be deeply missed by friends and family.

Death brings up all kinds of emotions for us…if we will let it

--feelings of sadness and grief.

--feelings of regret.

-- feelings of anger.

-- feelings of confusion.

We spend our whole lives in a culture that avoids meaningful engagement with death.

The culture idolizes youthfulness. We’re obsessed with millennials.

We have eye creams and lotions and hair color to make us look and feel younger—and umm, thanks, Dave for bringing me a stash of that stuff.

We promote diet and exercise as if they are the fountains of youth.

And we have built whole industries around care for the elderly that have the terrible reputation for not being any good at their task.

And if we let it, death begs big questions.

--Questions about the meaning of life

--What we are accomplishing

--What happens to us when we die.

These are the questions that make us anxious and bring out our insecurities about not being good enough or being lazy or undeserving.

They are questions we will never find answers for, but if we can put our anxieties and judgments aside, wrestling with them will make us better human beings.

They will help us grow.

But the only to put our anxieties and judgments aside is to invite those questions into our hearts with a spirit of love.

One of my all time favorite passages from the Bible is 1 Corinthians 13. The apostle Paul is writing to the Christian community in Corinth. And they are struggling with a lot of in-fighting.

There are these prima donna religious folks who think that they have It all figured out.

They can speak in tongues.

They can preach like nobody’s business.

They are full of wisdom and know the truth.

They are so dedicated that they would face death.

But the truth is that none of it means anything if they are not loving to one another.

They could have the best theology. Or be absolutely certain about right and wrong. Or think they have all the answers to the mysteries of faith. (I'm sure you've never met anyone like that!)

But it means nothing if they do not have love in their hearts.

I think Patrick got this. I think it’s why he was still Catholic. Even though the church fails—and fails big time. And not infrequently. At the heart of the message of the gospel is love.

Jesus came to bring healing to those who were sick and lost and lonely. To bring those in the margins…those not even on the page…back into the fold. To bring food to those who were hungry. And to bring love to a broken world.

And it was controversial. He disrupted the established power structure in the Roman Empire and the cozy relationship between the Empire and the religious authorities. (Hint: religious authorities are always getting it wrong.)

            And that is what got him killed.

Ali and Zade told me story after story about times that Patrick showed up with kind words and thoughtful gifts and rolled up sleeves to offer love to those around him.

And he built a family here in Northern Virginia with you all. And he welcomed anyone and everyone to be part of this family.

            This is a huge loss.

I hope you will honor Patrick’s memory by truly grieving his death even as you find joy in celebrating his life.

Even though our culture urges us to avoid pain and sadness. To just be happy all the time. I hope you will take a few moments here today to be sad.

To let the hard questions bubble up in your soul.

And I hope you will remember. Remember the good, the bad, and the ugly. And share it in word or on canvas today.

But know that you are not alone in it. You can be comforted in the knowledge that you are surrounded by this family that formed around him…

a family of people who are grieving and celebrating as well.

You are surrounded by the cloud of witnesses, so many queer folks who have gone before us.

And you have the Holy Spirit—Jesus own presence here with us who will accompany you along this journey of grief and big questions and celebration.

The beauty of this moment is that we are in the Easter season.

We are celebrating the risen Christ, the one who was killed shamefully and gruesomely by the state. And yet still he loved.

Even in our own collusion—intentional or unintentional—with a culture that tries to alienate us from our bodies, from our family, and from God,

God loves us still and draws us close.

The power of the loving God is greater even than the power of death.

We can be assured that in life and in death, we belong to God.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

How will you be a witness?

Arlington Presbyterian Church

April 15, 2018

Easter 3B, 1 John 3:1-7, Luke 24:36b-48

It’s funny how setting your mind on something brings it up in your life in lots of places. As we’ve selected at theme of the beloved community for the next few weeks, I’ve been wrestling with what it means to be engaged in community. I’ve been part of a number of communities in my life.

In undergrad, I was part of the community of the Presbyterian Student Association at Clemson University. We gathered each Sunday evening for dinner and to wrestle with what it means to be Christian in the world around us.

It was that community that led me to spend a summer in an intentional Christian community called Jubilee partners, located in the small town of Comer, Georgia. There, they worked to resettle refugees from around the world. They taught English as a second language and living skills for their eventual placement in homes in Atlanta. It is there that I learned about the struggles for justice against the death penalty, against homelessness, against violence.

I was part of another intentional Christian community in Cleveland, OH, as a young adult volunteer in mission. We each worked in some area of ministry in the community. We gathered each evening for dinner together, and we wrestled together with what it meant to be community…with struggles of mental illness and alcoholism and indifference. We wrestled with how to create healthy boundaries with one another, how to ask for what we needed, and how to give one another space.

In New York, I was a part of Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church, where I prepared for seminary. After a difficult break-up, I wondered if I would still have any community or if everyone would choose my former partners. I was pleasantly surprised to still have friends.

And at Union theological seminary, I was part of a short-lived community of folks who wrestled with how to live in resistance to racism in our country. We explored how different people of different races are taught differently about race. We explored the ways that race is defined in our country and tries to define us in certain ways. We wrestled with how to break out of those definitions and to grow spiritually in order to live in resistance to that powerful construct in our society.

And while I’ve been part of those communities throughout the years, I’ve also been a bit of a nomad. I haven’t deeply committed myself to one particular community to call home. I think part of that has to do with my childhood and my mother. We moved a lot until I was in the 3^rd grade and we settled in Charleston, SC. But my mother never considered Charleston home. West Virginia was home—where her mother was, where she was raised, where generations of her family lived.

But she was also afraid to get close to people. She had friends, but never really any close friends. She was always afraid of how they would judge her. And the sad thing is that it keeps her from experiencing God’s overwhelming love in the context of community. I will note that as we have gotten older, my family has gotten closer and closer and there have been lots of opportunities for us to share that love with one another.

The beloved community that Martin Luther King talks about is the result of working through non-violent methods to restore relationships between God’s children so that justice prevails. It takes a deep engagement in community. And I fear that I have kept community at arm’s length in order to avoid the vulnerability it takes to show up.

Sometimes, I feel like the disciples. Bewildered and confused, unsure about how to move forward. As they are sitting there listing to the two disciples who have encountered Jesus on the road to Emmaus, Jesus just shows up offering them peace. He offers them his hands to see his flesh. He sits and eats with them at the table.

And what does he do with them, he shines light on the scriptures so that they can understand why things went the way that they did. And he invites them to be a witness to these things—actually, he doesn’t invite them. He says that they are witnesses to these things. And as followers of Christ, we to are witnesses to these things.

In a commentary I read, Caroline Lewis argues that we witness in our very being. It’s not about what we say or what we do. It’s about who we are as children of God, as followers of Christ.

She writes,

I suspect that for many of us, hearing that we are witnesses is not necessarily good news. We remember how often have we declined our identity. We remember how often we have deferred testimony to others. We remember how often we have determined that our witness wouldn’t make a difference anyway, so why bother? But, in doing so, we deny the truth of who we are and who Jesus needs us to be. We give up avowals about God that not enough people get to hear or experience. And we forgo the fact that we are never NOT giving witness to God.[1]

For me that’s the rub. But as I buy a house and start to put down some roots here in DC, I wonder what it might look like to lean in a little more to claim this city as my home. What does it mean for a place to be home?

The 1 John passage claims that we are all children of God. It’s a little black and white in its articulation of who is with and without sin. But it illustrates dramatically the tension between grounding one’s witness in the resurrection and grounding one’s witness in the world. The purpose of the book is to urge the community to be unified in bearing witness to the resurrection of Jesus, the messiah. It calls the community to know God’s love and to share it with one another. In the next chapter, there is the famous text, Beloved, let us love one another because love is of God and everyone who loves, is born of God and knows God. And anyone who does not love does not know God, for God is love. 

In his speech in Memphis at Mason Temple Church of God in Christ, addressing the sanitation workers and the community in Memphis, he also says that we are all children of God and that the movement is not one of divisiveness and hate, but a movement grounded in love seeking to ensure that all of God’s children live in security, are able to eat 3 meals a day, and able to live with dignity. In King’s beloved community, people who are divided by race engage conflicts in loving, non-violent ways that lead to justice. This way when the conflicts are over, the people can live together peacefully in a spirit of love.  

This is the hard work. It has ramifications with the way I engage my neighbors in my new neighborhood. It has ramifications for how I engage in the political process. It has ramifications for how and with whom I spend my time. And where I put my energies. It has ramifications with the way I show up as a witness to the gospel of Jesus Christ—one who sought a holistic reconciliation between God and humankind. 

I don’t really have any answers I suppose. In some ways I’m being hard on myself. I have showed up many times in real ways in the communities which I have been a part. 

At the same time, we all have growing edges.

It’s not the same for all of us here. Maybe your story is like mine. Or maybe it’s completely different. But where are your growing edges? How might your witness be more aligned with the Kingdom of God? Where might you be holding back just a little thinking that someone else would do it better? Or that you’re not ready? Or that you’re too busy? Or overwhelmed or scared or tired?

The good news is that we don’t have to be perfect. In my yoga class yesterday, I was reminded of this. I kept falling in the flower pose. And the instructor said, don’t worry, you’re just finding your edges. It’s ok to fall.

We have this amazing witness to God’s love for us in the scriptures. We too can turn to the scriptures to find better understanding as Jesus did with the disciples in that room when he showed up out of nowhere. We too can gather together to read and discuss. It’s an opportunity not only to know God better, but to understand ourselves as children of god. So that we might go into the world being the best witness to the gospel that we can.

Thanks be to God.

Amen.

---

[1] http://www.workingpreacher.org/craft.aspx?post=5126

The Beloved Community

Arlington Presbyterian Church

March 8, 2018

2^nd Sunday of Easter Year B

Psalm 133, 1 John 1:1-2:2, Acts 4:32-35

Last Wednesday marked the 50^th anniversary of the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. There were events around the country commemorating his time in Memphis at Mason Temple Church of God in Christ with the sanitation workers the night before his death at the Lorraine Motel. COGIC and AFSCME gathered at Mason Temple on the evening of the 3^rd and at the Lorraine Motel, now museum, on the 4^th to remember his life and his death. 

There was an ecumenical worship service here in town at a Greek Orthodox Church and then a march and rally on the national mall on Wednesday. I went to the rally in the afternoon. It was interesting to be there with faith leaders who were active in the civil rights movement and younger leaders who are bridging the gap between with the young people’s movements today.

It was a descent size for a Wednesday after Easter and just weeks after the March for Our Lives. But I was telling Derrick that I was disappointed that I hadn’t been more involved given the importance of Dr. King on my own spiritual journey.

But the tensions between the groups who felt a stake in remembering and celebrating Dr. King along with the challenge of making connections between the civil rights movement and the current movements for justice, whether it’ BlackLivesMatter or the march for our lives or the struggle for queer and trans people’s equality under the law.

I was struck, however as I was reading this for this morning. The book of Acts and the books of 1, 2, and 3 John are communications from people who were there with Jesus during his life, his mission, his death, and his resurrection. They have person encounters and experiences of Jesus that bring them into fellowship with God. And in the 1^st John passage, the author is inviting the new believers into that same fellowship and communion with God though the community together.

This element of community is central to the lives of the followers in the early church. And it was central to Dr. King’s own theology.  He argued that through God’s love for us, we too can transcend the barriers of evil and hate and injustice to love those we might perceive as our enemies. He believed that by reconciling the natural conflicts in our world through non-violent means, that we could achieve the beloved community. A community grounded in God’s love that runs through us to love those around us.

He believed that through cultivating relationships with love, addressing conflicts in a non-violent practice, that it is possible to challenge the systems of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism. Racism, that defines people not by the content of their character, but by the color of their skin. Materialism fools us into a scarcity mentality that drives us to ignore those who suffer from hunger and poverty and homelessness. Militarism which values dominance and violence to keep the peace instead of a peace built from non-violent resolution to conflict.

The Acts text this morning gets to the heart of Dr. King’s philosophy of the beloved community. A colleague of mine writes this about the opening lines of the passage.

Acts envisions the community as intrinsically belonging to one another, such that we can’t separate ourselves from those in need. Acts 4:32 tells us that “the whole group of those who believed were of one heart and one soul.” The Greek phrase “one heart and soul” (kardia kai psyche mia) refers to the entire essence of one’s being. It recalls the command in Deuteronomy Deuteronomy 6:5 to “love the LORD your God with all your heart (kardia), and with all your soul (psyche), and with all your might.” Deuteronomy means that we should love God with our whole selves—with everything we’ve got. In the same way, Acts 4:32 means that we belong to each other with everything that we have—heart and soul, we are as one. The community belongs to each other as though we share one heart and one soul. We are one entity, inseparable one from the other.

Thus, for the earliest believers, sharing what you had with another wasn’t understood as an act of charity. It wasn’t a deed of kindness from one person to another. Rather, sharing what one had was tending to one’s own life, which could not be separated from the lives of others. The community thrived or suffered as a whole. It succeeded or failed as a whole. Each belonged to the other, and, as such, their material goods belonged to the whole and not to any individual among them.[i]

This is what Dr. King meant when he said “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” ― Martin Luther King Jr., Why We Can't Wait.

We enter our relationship with God not solo, but connected through those who have encountered Jesus Christ. Whether that is the disciples literal encounter with the risen Christ showing new believers that same love and service as Christ showed them…leading them to their own encounters with Christ. Or generations and centuries down the line of people who have come into the fellowship of Jesus Christ to have their own encounters and share that love and service with those around them.

We are called to fellowship—to community. And this fellowship and community is not just for a chosen few, but for all of the world. We encounter this in the way that we treat our selves, the way we think of ourselves and whether we experience God’s love.  It gets expressed in our personal encounters with those with whom we are in fellowship in our daily lives. But also in the public square. We are intricately connected, with one heart and one soul.

This leads us down a path of evangelism through resistance. Resistance to the values inherent in racism, extreme materialism and militarism define our sense of self and others, contorting the image of God inside each of us, so that we feel like we have separate hearts and souls and that the others don’t carry the image of God.

We are called to resist by being true to the self God created in us and searching for that same true self in those around us. By staying present in the conflicts that arise, even when we want to run away. It calls us to remember our history and the history we are making with clear and honest eyes. And it calls us to take loving and nonviolent action to disrupt the powers of evil and death in the world.

This is what evangelism looks like—the spreading of the beloved community. It is a demonstration of the love that we encounter from the risen Christ. And the truth is that all of this is possible because we are an Easter people. We are a people defined by a love that is more powerful than death or racism or materialism or violent militarism. And we can be comforted in the knowledge that in Christ’s death and resurrection, forgiveness is available when we get snared by these.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

---

[i] Rev. Dr. Robert Williamson, Jr. https://robertwilliamsonjr.com/the-economic-imperative-of-the-gospel-acts-432-35/

Palm Sunday Litany

At Arlington Presbyterian Church, we experienced a whole-hearted Lent. Each Sunday during Lent, we answered questions about what keeps us from experiencing and sharing God's love. We wrote our answers on heart shaped pieces of paper and hung them on a small tree in the sanctuary. For Palm Sunday, I gathered all of those words and formed them into the Litany that follows. (Many thanks to Susan Etherton for her edits.) During the offering, we put cross stickers on the hearts and added those to the tree. 

Lenten Litany

Great God of every blessing, we enter Holy Week, waving palms and laying our coats on the ground, welcoming you with honor and praise.

Yet we forget what a dramatic subversive political act this is—ushering in a king, a herald of peace wrought by the commitment to love without ceasing. A king who challenges the violent power of Empire.  

L: We forget all that has brought us to this day. Your voice came from the heavens and named Jesus your Beloved, the one with whom you are pleased.

R: And immediately the Spirit drove Jesus into the wilderness. And we followed, ready to face the wild beasts living inside us.

You offered you love,

L: And we were safely wrapped in our distractions of “busyness,” in our technologies, and in our worries about others so that we could not find you. 

R: We were closed off from your love, wrapped in our feelings of unworthiness, trying too hard to be perfect.

L: We tortured ourselves with guilt and anxiety about the future so much that we got lost in nothingness.

R: Fear and anger, resentment, hate and depression darkened our vision. We got lost in the discord in our political discourse

L: Ego, pride, idolatry, and jealousy made us deaf to your loving words. 

Our hearts hardened, closing us off to your love. We were not open to the direction you offered.

R: O God, we are tired. The ghosts of our former selves have haunted our dreams, and we wake up each morning not knowing how to move forward.

ALL: But love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; Love does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in truth.

ALL: Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends. And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.

Then Jesus was drawn to the temple where he turned over the tables and drove out the money changers.

He scolded the people for seeking God in the temple. For they were unaware of the gift you had for them in Jesus himself. He was your presence in the world.

We followed Jesus into the temple, ready to clean out the things from our lives and our hearts that distract us from you. You offered your love,

L: But we went looking for it in the material things that surround us. Our minds were focused on money or health as we grasped for security and control in the world.

R: We went looking for you in the things of the world that scared us and caused concern. We were stuck in the past where we felt more comfortable, when the world was more familiar.

L: We looked for you in our destiny, but only because we thought we could control it. In truth, we were afraid of a future that belongs to you because we’d have to take risks.

R: We looked for you in comfort, in predictability and routine, in others’ expectations, in old ways of thinking and the “important” things we needed to do.

L: And just as Jesus cleared out the temple, you invite us to clear out inaction and over thinking.

R: To clear out our fear of failure, and the clutter around us, and the longing for sanity, and unhelpful bad habits.

L: To clear out egotism, hate in our hearts, fear of rejection.

R: To clear out former agreements and having all the answers.

L: And the camels along with the gnats.

ALL: Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it. If one offered for love all the wealth of one’s house, it would be utterly scorned.

As Jesus prepared for the cross, betrayed by his followers, left alone to die, we followed. We faced our deepest fears that keep us from experiencing God’s love. You offered love,

L: But we were afraid of losing control, of being less than perfect, of not being seen or heard.

R: We were always doing the right thing because we were afraid of making mistakes.

L: We were afraid of not meeting expectations and afraid of failure.

R: Afraid of being yelled at, of being open, of sharing, of talking -- why can’t we just talk?

L: We were afraid of commitments to new relationships and not being good parents.

R: Afraid of the place where we live, of planting roots, for this is for now.

L: Afraid of quicksand.

R: Afraid of gun violence as we’ve seen in Columbine, Sandy Hook, and Marjorie Stoneman Douglas.

ALL: There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love. We love because God first loved us.

Before Jesus’ death, he tells a story of the seed that lives and the seed that dies falling to the ground. The seed that falls on the ground produces new life.

We are called to follow Jesus not only to death, but to a resurrection life.

You offered love, you even wrote your words on our hearts.

L: And we ignored the community’s brokenness from entitlement, from uncertainty about the future, in people who lack support.

R: We forgot the Good Samaritan, instead choosing the roles of the Priest and the Levite.

L: We were too busy to pray for those with needs: abuse, health, housing.

R: And too obsessed with caring for ourselves that we forgot to take care of others in our world and in our community.

ALL: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God and they shall be my people.

Gathering together, the night before Jesus died, he served his disciples, his friends. He washed their feet with care, nourished them with bread, and poured out his love through the cup.

Yet he knew, even after that intimate meal, they would still turn their backs on him, betray him, and deny him. They would protect their own bodies at his expense.

L: We, like the disciples, were certain we would not betray Jesus, and yet day after day, we participated in an Empire system that breaks hearts and souls and bodies.

R: An Empire that tempts us to live in fear and scarcity instead of hope and abundance.

ALL: But the is good news is this: There is forgiveness in the resurrection. New life is always possible. God is still in control.

ALL: For God so Loved the world, that God gave her only Son, so that that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have life eternal.

ALL: Amen