Friday, July 13, 2018

Mark 12:28-34 "Creative Compassion"

         “Up in the Air” is a 2009 film starring George Clooney.  There is a scene in it in which a young man is having second thoughts about getting married.  On his wedding day, no less, he is just not sure he can go through with the ceremony. George Clooney’s character is sent to talk to him.
         The groom says, “I don’t think I’ll be able to do this.”
         Clooney’s character asks, “Why would you say that – today of all days?”
         The “by then freaked out” young man replies, “Well, last night I was kinda like laying in bed, and I couldn’t get to sleep, so I started thinking about the wedding and the ceremony and about our buying a house, and moving in together, and having a kid, and then having another kid, and then Christmas and Thanksgiving and spring break, and going to football games, and then all of a sudden they are graduated and getting jobs and getting married and, you know, I’m a grandparent, and then I’m retired, and I’m losing my hair, and I’m getting fat, and the next thing I know I’m dead. And it’s like, I can’t stop from thinking, what’s the point? I mean, what is the point?”
         I mean, seriously, what is the point?  What is the point of living out our days?  What is the point of life itself?  What is its purpose? What makes it worthwhile?  What matters most? 
         Or, as the young scribe asked Jesus, “What is the most important commandment?”
         It was the most serious question Jesus had gotten all day.  You see, he had finally come to Jerusalem, the Holy City, after three years of preaching in the rural towns and villages across Galilee. 
         By the end of the week, he would be hanging from a cross between two thieves, one of whom had been found guilty of something along the lines of stealing a loaf of bread to feed his family.  They would all be strung up at the garbage dump outside the city walls, their bodies left to rot as a sign to the rest of the population not to cross Pax Romana,
         But today Jesus was in the temple atrium, answering question after question posed by the Sadducees, all of whom looked down their noses at this illiterate rabbi wannabe and his merry band of fisher folk, tax collectors, stray peasants, and whores.  The temple hotshots had been grilling Jesus for hours now. 
         “Do we have to pay taxes?” “What belongs to Caesar, and what belongs to God?” “If a woman is married more than once – say seven times to seven brothers – when they all died, and on the last day when the dead are raised, whose wife will she be in the resurrection?”  
         And, as Christopher Moore wrote in his wonderfully iconoclastic book entitled Lamb:  the Gospel According to Biff:  “A man dies and leaves no sons, but his wife marries his brother, who has three sons by his first wife.  When the Sabbath ends, and they are able to resume (their road trip), adding on the thousand steps allowed under the law…and the wind is blowing southwest at two furlongs an hour….How much water will be required for the journey?  Give your answer in firkins.
         “Five,” Jesus said, as soon as they stopped speaking.  And all were amazed.
         The crowd roared.  A woman shouted, “Surely he is the Messiah.”
         “The Son of God has come,” said another.
“You didn’t show your work, you didn’t how your work,” chanted the youngest of the priests.
         The long and short of it was that the bean counter Sadducees had been trying to trip Jesus up, but so far he had outwitted them all.  I label them as bean counters because I just know they would have relished the scholarship of the medieval Jewish philosopher, Maimonides, who managed to count all the rules and regs in the Torah, that sacred repository of the laws Moses had long ago outlined for the ancient Israelites. 
         Mainmonides came up with 613 in all – 365 negative ones (“Thou shalt not”), which incidentally coincides with the number of days in the solar year, and 248 positive commandments, the number ascribed at that time, interestingly enough, to the number of bones and main organs in the human body.
         And then, in the midst of all the pointless questioning, heated arguing, and tireless debating, a young scribe spoke up.  He had been listening intently, weighing the declarations of the temple elders over and against the statements and responses that Jesus was making.  He was quite impressed that Jesus was more than holding his own against Jerusalem’s best and brightest.  Maybe this illiterate rabbi wannabe had something worth listening to.
         And so the young scribe spoke up when he was able to get a word in edgewise – and asked a genuine question, one that was really on his mind.  “Of all these 613 commandments that Moses left for us and that are written in the Torah, in Holy Scripture, which one is the most important?” he queried.
         Jesus began his answer as any good Jew would.  He even started off his response with the words of the Shema, the prayer that folks – from peasants to priests - said to begin and end each day, the centerpiece of Jewish religious services. ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, 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,” Jesus continued.  No surprises there. Nothing revolutionary.  After all, Jesus was a good Jew. 
         But Jesus did not stop there.  He continued.   The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’  There is no commandment greater than these.”
        You could have heard a pin drop.  There was absolute silence:  not so much because Jesus had so blatantly pulled out the neighborliness card.  As Christians, we may think we have a corner on the market of loving one’s neighbor, but that really is not so. 
         After all, at least one of those 613 laws of Moses was, in fact, to love your neighbor.  It is right out of the Biblical book of Leviticus. 
         It is just that Jesus combined loving God and loving neighbor into one commandment, tacking on that little postscript about loving oneself on the back end.  Put together, Jesus told the young scribe and the Sadducees who still were shocked by what they had heard, that love of God, love of neighbor, love of self, well, that is the point, that is the purpose, that is where the meaning of all of life will be found.
         The Sadducees did not know what to think, so distressed were they at the thought that maybe Moses had only left 612 rules and regs and not 613.  Some of them began counting on their fingers and toes.  Others just stood there, quizzically, with jaws dropping.  
         The young scribe, however, got it.  He clapped his hands, and some of the onlookers followed suit. 
         “Well said, teacher,” the scribe replied. “You are right in saying that God is one and there is no other but God.  To love God with all your heart, with all your understanding and with all your strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself is more important than all burnt offerings and sacrifices.”
            When Jesus saw that he had answered wisely, he said to him, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.” 
         After that, no one asked Jesus any more questions.  The Sadducees went back into the Temple proper, scratching their heads.  Was it not Mark Twain who once wrote, “It ain't those parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do.”  Likewise, the peasant onlookers went home in the hope that there would be bread for supper. 
         The disciples and Jesus also left.  I like to think they hiked up into the hills surrounding the Holy City, set up camp, and built a campfire.  I like to think they breathed in the cool air of the evening, heard the crickets call to one another, watched as the lightning bugs signaled to each other - and understood once again what a wonderful world it was that God had created – and what a blessing that they were a part of the goodness of this creation.
I like to think that they talked about the sacred web that existed between God and their neighbor (whoever that might be) and themselves – a sacred web of blessing. 
         I like to think that it became so crystal clear to them that God must really love the world to have created it with such beauty and diversity, with such awesomeness and mystery, that God must really love them as part of that creation, that they can do no better than to love their God in return, to love their neighbor, to love themselves.  I like to think that they remembered the word for love that Jesus had used in his explanation to the scribe – agape it was, meaning at its root to put the other first, to walk in the other’s shoes for a time.
         That is the foundation of compassion, you know.  That and what Meister Eckhart wrote, and in doing so summed up the best of the spiritual traditions, east and west, north and south:  “Compassion is the first outburst of everything God does.”
          Compassion lies at the very core of creation itself – compassion and blessing.  We are called to compassion when we are called to be ‘sons and daughters of God,’
made in the image of God who is ‘the compassionate one,’ as the Hebrew Bible teaches and as Jesus so well understood.
         This is Creation Spirituality.  And as we continue to explore this theology over the next three weeks, this idea that it all begins with original blessing rather than original sin and that we are all prone to goodness rather than evil, we will discover that compassion – this love of neighbor – is at the heart of it all.  Because God is compassionate, so we are called to be compassionate as well, to practice creative compassion. 
         As part of our focus on Creation Spirituality and our emphasis today on creative compassion, I am introducing a mission initiative – a mini-grant program – the Random Acts of Kindness Grants - that I hope will encourage some of you to be creatively compassionate.  What if you received a mini-missions grant of $50.00 to enact a random act of kindness?   How would you spend $50.00 to make the world a better place for someone?  This could be your opportunity.
         Would you put together a few backpacks for homeless people in Portland with winter hats and mittens?  We could get them to the people that need them through Grace Street Ministry.  Would you bring an afternoon of refreshments, songs, and conversation to the residents of Casco Inn?  Would you pass out gift certificates for an ice cream cone at the Mosquito some warm summer night?  Would you bring food and toys to the animal shelter?  Would you bake 40 loaves of banana bread for the families we service at the Raymond Food Pantry? Would you do something solo – or with your children or grandchildren – or with friends?   What would you do to be creatively compassionate?
         Be thinking of what you might do because I hope that you will apply for one of these mini-grants.  It will be a way for some of us at least to live out our original blessing that calls us to creative compassion.  After all, as Celtic scholar John Philip Newell wrote: “The gospel is given not to tell us that we have failed, (but) to make known to us what we have forgotten, and that is who we are,”
         We are God’s beloved and blessed daughters and sons, created in the image of a compassionate God.  We must always remember our heritage. 
         In a world fraught with fear, in a world where it is too easy to fall into racism, sexism, ageism, all the other negative “isms” in an effort to make our lives simple and manageable,
in a vain effort to make ourselves and our nation great again, we end up straying so far from our roots.  And when we do, all is lost. 
         Yet, with God’s help and with a strong commitment as a faith community to intentionally live out the Gospel message of creative compassion, I know that we will re-discover the meaning of life.
         As John Phillip Newell concludes: “The goodness of God’s image is planted deep within us.”  And that is the point.  We are blessed.  That is the point of living out our days. We are creative. That is the point of life itself. We are loved. That is its purpose. We are capable of loving. That is what makes it worthwhile. Creative compassion: That is what matters most.


 



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