“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?”
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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