Spirit of Love: Loving Your Neighbor
This week, we continue to explore how it is that the Spirit draws us forward each day into a way of love as we move through the world.
I have been grappling with the fuzziness of this concept in McLaren’s book. This idea that the Spirit is what animates us toward loving and action. I experience what he is writing about somewhere deep inside of me, but the words he uses don’t always quite describe my reality the way that I would.
Anyone else struggle sometimes with other people’s words? Like you think they sort of describe your experience…but you feel like there are nuances that their description misses or misrepresents?
I’m pretty sure I am not the only one who feels this way at times…
I mean…concepts like Spirit and love are by definition very hard to grasp, hard to nail down, nebulous. And I think that our lived experience is sometimes beyond words.
But I want us to try to understand. I feel like the nebulous concepts of love and Spirit are the guideposts for the rest of our journey through this book.
Remember that on Pentecost, we celebrated the gift of the Holy Spirit, a gift of connection to God and to one another and a gift of common understanding and support.
Then the following week, we explored what it means to build a habit of choosing to be attuned to and move with the Spirit, day in and day out.
Last week, we explored how that accompanying Spirit, if we are paying attention, seeks to connect us more and more to God.
Today, we’re exploring how and why that Spirit might cause us to lean into loving others – loving our neighbors as Jesus taught. We’re exploring how and why we are called to love beyond our tribe and beyond our comfort.
Let’s start with our reading today from Acts 10.
In this story, Cornelius, a “gentile” (or for practical purposes, someone who is NOT a Jew), and Simon Peter, the apostle and devout Jew, are both visited with a message from God.
Cornelius is to seek out Simon Peter for teaching.
Simon Peter, in the midst of a hungry trance, sees a vision of foods all together in one spot, some of which are forbidden by Levitical law. When he argues that he would never eat anything “unclean,” a voice admonishes him – “What God has made clean, you must not call profane.”
Maybe that would have been a head-scratcher all by itself, but while he’s still puzzling over what he’s just experienced, strangers show up at his gate. The text explains that the Spirit actually draws Peter’s attention to the men waiting at his gate. The Spirit tells Peter “I have sent them.”
Once Peter greets them, the travelers explain that they have been sent by Cornelius, because angel appeared to him and told him that he needed to hear Peter’s testimony.
Simon Peter, who has been a devoted apostle, now teaching and nurturing others in the faith, is experiencing a pivotal moment. In a series of connected dots driven by the Spirit, he is being “taught” or shown a new thing.
What is this new thing he is learning?
This work he is doing, this Jesus Christ about whom he can testify, is not just about loving and saving the Jewish people, but about saving all the nations.
Now I assume that Peter could have just written off that vision and stuck to his Levitical law-abiding ways. But then would God’s mission be accomplished? Because ultimately, as an apostle, Peter is on God’s mission, not his own. Perhaps something else Peter is learning or understanding anew is exactly whose mission he’s undertaking.
There is something here about Peter being compelled to a new way of understanding what he is called to do. This is a pivotal moment for the new movement that is unfolding. It is not a movement for just one ethnic group. It is a movement for all those who can hear God calling them.
It is not for Peter or for the Law of his people to be the gatekeeper.
“What God has made clean, you must not call profane.”
In other words, Peter, you don’t choose who to reach, who to serve and who to love.
In McLaren’s book We Make the Road by Walking, he pairs this Acts text with another scripture not read today. It is 1 Corinthians 13. For some, it is very familiar:
If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.
Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.
This explanation of love, often read at weddings as a flowery proclamation, is situated in the midst of a letter to a community that really is not loving very well at all.
It is a community divided by rank and judgement about who belongs at which seat at the table. The letter itself is reproach and course correction. And in many ways, Paul’s proclamation about love here in the midst of it serves not as testimony but as a pivotal moment in his advice to them – He is telling them that love matters, perhaps most of all.
Here’s how Dr. Shively Smith, assistant professor of New Testament at Boston University School of Theology describes the placement:
“…the very placement of 1 Corinthians 13 suggests that Paul may be up to something. He wedges this poem in the middle of his discussion about spiritual achievements. In chapter 12, Paul discusses spiritual gifts and presents his famed analogy of the Church as the body of Christ (1 Corinthians 12:27; cf. 1 Corinthians 10:16; Romans 12:5). This body boasts many gifts and many stations unified under one banner. Yet, these many giftings and functions are not enough to sustain the community. Paul digresses in chapter 13 to talk about love as the hidden ingredient… ”
Love as the hidden ingredient… love as the hidden ingredient to sustain the community.
Love is hard work. It is not self-serving. It doesn’t insist on its own way.
Love is hard work because love is of God. It’s not ours to define or even ours to shape. We bear love to others as God’s mission in the world.
Love is actually the work we are called to. The work of bearing fruit, the work of being the body of Christ, is first and foremost about our ability to see beyond ourselves and love all whom God loves.
And God loves all of God’s creation.
Beloved, there is work before us.
The decision to love as God loves and see as God sees is the pivot that we are all called to.
As bearers of the testimony to God’s love, we have a credibility problem if we do not love others as God loves.
So today, this week, in our shared work,
Let us not call anyone profane or unclean.
Let us draw the circle wide and wider still.
Let us seek to love and not judge.
May it be so.
Amen.
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