The School of Love

Church of the Incarnation

Sept. 12, 2010

Reflections on Incarnation's One Year Anniversary

Jesus begins his public ministry with a reading from Isaiah 61 at his hometown synagogue (Luke 4).  The arrival of God’s Spirit in his life leads to good news for the poor, freedom for prisoners, sight for the blind, release for the oppressed.  God’s special favor towards those in pain will become visible in Jesus’ own Spirit-powered life.  Jesus came to enact God’s love for those in great need.

Near the end of Jesus’ ministry (Mark 12:28ff), a Jewish bible scholar asks him a question, “Of all the commandments, which is the most important?”  “The most important one,” answered Jesus, “is this: ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord is one.  Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.”

Jesus gathers a community around himself and both shows and teaches them that love is what matters.  After Jesus was crucified and resurrected, the Spirit was poured out on his followers and the first church was born.  Acts 2 tells us that this was a community organized around JC, a community of people learning to love.  From there a number of other churches were started in various cities throughout the Mediterranean.  Starting churches was, and still is, a natural and expected response to the love of God.  Churches are schools of love.  We are here to learn how to love God and our neighbors. 

Basil of Caesarea

Over the next several centuries, churches were started throughout the Roman Empire.  Before long churches could be found in Europe, in Asia, and in Africa.

There is a town in East Central Turkey called “Kryseri.”  During the 4th century it was known as Caesarea, in the region of Cappadocia.  Caesarea was home to a family of wealthy Christians with seven children.  One of them was Basil.  He was educated at home by his brilliant grandparents and parents.  Then went to the best schools in Caesarea, then Constantinople, then Athens.  He taught rhetoric and practiced law.  Then he took time off to travel and visit several monasteries.  After that he moved back home to his family’s large estate and established a new monastery there.  He was eventually ordained as a priest and later became bishop of Caesarea.  

Basil, along with his brother Gregory of Nyssa, and his best friend from college, Gregory Nazianzen, played an enormous role in the cultural developments of the 4th Century.  In a time of intense theological debate, they made brilliant theological and doctrinal contributions in their writing.  But the later 4th century was also marked by an intense economic downturn, drought and famine coupled with rising epidemics of disease.

So Basil sold his sizeable personal inheritance and distributed the proceeds to the poor in the area.  He began raising money from rich Christians in Caesarea in order to build what was called “New City” or “Basiliad” in 370 a.d.  Even though there were four or five churches already serving Caesarea, Basil decided that a new church was needed. It was in fact not just a new church but a mini-city, a beautiful complex of buildings and programs on the outer edge of the city.  In addition to the new church there was a hospital for lepers and for the poor who couldn’t afford medical care at the main city hospital, a soup kitchen (where Basil himself worked), residences for the poor and the homeless, a school, and a job training program.  

Basil’s vision wasn’t political in the ordinary sense.  He wasn’t expecting the Roman state to care for the poor and the lepers.  He believed the care of the poor was the duty of wealthy Christians.  According to Basil, if you as a Christian have two loaves of bread, and refuse to share with someone who is going hungry, you are a thief and have stolen from him.  It was a gospel vision - a vision of world where there’s enough for all as long as God’s people share with one another generously.  Basil’s vision for a new church was driven by God’s love for sinners, and by our great need to share that love with people who are poor or in pain.

Dante

So if someone asks you why you’re involved at a new church like Incarnation, you can tell them about Basil.  Or you could tell them about Dante Alighieri’s early 14th century poem entitled The Divine Comedy.  The poem traces the journey of a pilgrim named Dante through the abyss of Hell, up the mountain of purgatory, then on up through the celestial spheres of heaven where Dante is allowed, in the last lines of the poem, to see God.

It’s a poem about the journey towards love.  No one makes the journey toward the love of God without help.  In his pilgrimage through the circles of Hell, Dante has for his guide the Roman poet Virgil.  But Virgil, being a wise pagan, can only lead him through hell and to the top of Mount Purgatory.  There Dante is given a new guide, the beautiful, smiling Beatrice.  Then at the very end of the poem, Beatrice leaves Dante with Bernard of Clairveaux, a mystical contemplative and a lover of God.  The point of these guides is that Dante needs help.  We all need help traveling into the love of God.

As Dante grows closer to seeing God, his language begins to falter and unravel.  Words don’t do their work when you soar that high.  What he sees is like an amphitheater in the shape of a white rose that opens toward the shining Sun.  And like a swarm of bees, the angels fly from Sun to the worshipers, delivering the sweetness of divine love like nectar to the hungry saints.

The poem ends with Dante finally granted a vision of God.  He longs to explain to us what he saw.  But he admits, “my own wings were not sufficient for that flight.”  He could neither understand or explain what he saw when he saw God.  Perhaps the greatest poem ever written, it ends, “But already my desire and my will were revolved, like a wheel that is evenly moved, by the Love which moves the sun and the other stars.”

Dante’s poem reflects the conviction of medieval Christianity, the early church, and Jesus himself: love makes the world go round.  So is it true?  Is the poem true?  Is love at the heart of everything?  Do you believe that love is all there is?  We are all familiar with the problem of evil: why is there so much evil and suffering in the world if God is both good and powerful?  Dante’s question is: why is there love?  Not everyone has the time or the interest to read Dante’s poem.  But the question - “Is love at the center of reality?” - is unavoidable for every human being.

We started this church a year ago because love makes the world go round.  Back behind and underneath and in the middle of our existence is the love of God for us poor and needy creatures.  I believe that is true, but I also need help believing it.  I need help experiencing it and living it and sharing it with others.  Most of us need a school of love to help us say YES to the love of God.  Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner says that all our lives from birth to death is a saying yes or a saying no to the love of God.  Our lives, in their arc from birth through death, is a lived response to God’s love.  We can put aside the myth that some people are religious and others are not.  Everyone’s life is a response to divine love.

Dinner Party:

I attended a dinner party recently hosted hosted by two friends of ours, a married couple.  The menu was amazing, and reflected the Swedish traditions they inhabit.  Two kinds of herring (cream and clear broth), wasabi crisps with cream and smoked salmon (amazingly good), tiny little twice baked potatoes, swedish meatballs (better than Ikea’s!), lobster rolls topped with salty caviar, various kinds of cheeses, vegetables, and deviled eggs.  For dessert there were mini berry tarts, lemon curd tarts, and brownies with mint.  All of it delicious, and arranged beautifully. 

We talked about the food of course.  And about restaurants we like (they’re all foodies).  We talked about new plays (I knew a few).  About politics (of course all progressive and left). About where everyone has been spending their leisure time this summer (they vacation as energetically as they work).  Luckily, my work as a pastor didn’t shut down the conversation.  There was even some religious conversation.  We talked about orthodox Jews wearing heavy dark clothing in the heat of summer.  We talked about the different ways of keeping kosher.  In a private conversation, one man mentioned to me his strained relationship with the church because he’s gay.

It was a room full of New Yorkers - most had lived here a long time.  They were witty, well-read, culturally savvy, intensely devoted to both their work and their play, generous and kind and socially aware.  They are interested in spirituality and meaning but not aligned tightly with any institutional forms of religion.  Faith in God, the church or synagogue going kind, is for them a quirky throw back.  Religious people wear long black coats in 100 degree weather.  Church is for people who don’t like gays.  Gather that same crowd tonight, no doubt we’d be talking about the minister from Florida with the great idea of showing God’s love by burning a pile of Korans.

I couldn’t help thinking, Incarnation will be a great place for these people. They will find it refreshing and inspiring that we are far more interested in experiencing and sharing the love of God than we are in being “right” about any particular issue.  The simple fact that this is a community to which we can invite our friends, confident that it might be a good match, is a rewarding sign.  Lots of New Yorkers are just like you and me -- they want a place that will help them explore how to love God and our neighbors in the progressive, messy bustle of the city.

Conclusion:

Our goal - a year ago - was to start a new congregation that would itself be a kind of goodness.  We also want to be a community that generates goodness for others, and during this first year, we have started to do that.  But first things first.  Before we can become a community that is able to bless others, we have to take root in rich soil and begin to grow ourselves.  We have big dreams about ways we can serve and bless others.  But the first step is to establish and nurture a healthy, growing congregation that matures towards sustainability.  My challenge for this community today is simple: if you have experienced in this place the love of God and neighbor, then find ways to invite others into the community so that they too might experience God’s love, and give financially as generously as you can so that we can continue to do the work God has called us to do.

Writer Fredrich Buechner says in his autobiography Now and Then: “I write my own story in the hope of encouraging others to do the same - to look back over their lives, as I have looked back over mine, for certain themes and patterns and signals that are so easy to miss when you’re caught up in the process of living them.  If God speaks to us at all other than through such official channels as the Bible and the church, then I think that he speaks to us largely through what happens to us . . . I hope my readers may be moved to listen back over what has happened to them - for the sound, above all else, of God’s voice.”

“Listen to your life.  See it for the fathomless mystery that it is.  In the boredom and pain of it not less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.”

So what do we hear when we listen to our lives?  What do we hear when we listen back over the past year of this community?  I hear God reminding us to focus on his goodness and sufficiency and not on our own ups and downs.  In the grand scheme of things, this little community isn’t interesting.  God is interesting.  God’s fresh and surprising grace in Jesus Christ is interesting.  Miroslav Volf gets it right when he says, “I am not a Christian because the Church is a such a wonderful thing.  It most definitely is not.  I am a Christian because God has been good to me in Jesus Christ.”

I hear God urging us to continue to taking risks, not worrying about failure.  (We have failed at a number of things, and I hope we fail at more in the coming year.).  I hear God prompting us to open our lives even further to the pain of our own lives, the pain and poverty of our neighbors.  I hear God reminding us that a year isn’t a very long time, and that learning to love will take a life time.  

Can I state the obvious?  God doesn’t need us.  There are plenty of people here in the city that God is using to get done what God wants done.  There are all kinds of communities that are instruments of God - and not just churches or other faith communities, but non-profits and neighborhoods and friendships and industries.  We are the ones who are lucky to be a part of God’s work to create a world of love.  We are the ones who are lucky to be invited to this table, where God offers to us the gift of his own life and love in the body of JC.  May God sustain us as a community and richly bless us as we grow in our love for God and our neighbors.