Risk Love

1 Corinthians 13; Luke 4: 21-30

February 3, 2013

When I was a college freshman, in some English class I think, I recall encountering Paul’s words from the letter to the Corinthians, and thinking that they were from some Shakespeare play. True story. In my defense, “love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant” does sound like something that Romeo might have said.

When I became an adult, to borrow from Paul, I put an end to childish readings. Well, at least to some of them, and in doing so I came to understand that, despite the fact that Paul’s words get read at countless weddings, he wasn’t talking about the kind of love that Romeo would have been talking about.

Instead, Paul was talking about a kind of love that finds its sole source not in the vagaries of the human heart, but rather in the heart of God. This is risky love, and it is the heart of what I mean when – borrowing from Martin Luther King – I speak of the commonwealth of the beloved or, in King’s words, “the Beloved Community.”

As my friend, Tom Driver, wrote last week for the Huffington Post, “King was no sentimentalist. For him, love was not just a feeling. It was decision and action.” Love is action – nonviolent action – that leads toward the Beloved Community.[i]

That kind of love-in-action knows no bounds, and it is the most powerful force in the universe.

It’s also what nearly got Jesus tossed off a cliff.

This passage from Luke is one of the quirkiest little stories in the gospels. How can it be that the crowd goes from all speaking well of Jesus to filled with rage and ready to throw him off a cliff in the literary blink of an eye? Surely it can’t be his reading of Isaiah, even with its call to jubilee forgiveness of debts. That might get you tossed off the Rush Limbaugh show, but folks in the synagogue would have been familiar with and accepting of the prophetic vision of justice even if they didn’t actually practice it.

So what’s going on? Understanding God’s love in action in the world helps draw us into the same deeper truth that Paul’s letter points toward.

The love of God, that power that beats from the heart of all that is, is not jealous, it does not insist on its own way, it rejoices in truth, and it does not end. It does not, that is to say, stay inside the lines that we draw around it. It does not pay heed to the limits we erect to it. It risks trespassing every boundary that human beings seek to impose upon it.

Jesus understood this. His entire life and ministry can best be understood as experiments with such risks, such risky love.

In this inaugural sermon in Nazareth Jesus points to the lines and then crosses them. Jesus upset his listeners precisely because he challenged their own self-understanding as the sole recipients of God’s love. As Jim Rice, editor of Sojourners,[ii] puts it, “he challenged their self-identification as the sole participants in God’s covenant.”

Jesus reminded his listeners that “there were widows in Israel in the time of Elijah – in a time of drought and famine – yet God did not send Elijah to them but, instead, to a widow at Zarephath in Sidon. There were also plenty of lepers in Israel back in Elisha’s day, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian."

In other words, Jesus is saying, God’s promise, God’s love is not the sole possession of the people of Israel. In fact, as our own scriptures tell us, sometimes God’s grace and love fall on completely other people.

In reflecting with his friends later, I imagine Jesus might have admitted that these were not the most popular “sermon illustrations” to use when speaking to the people of Israel. It was as if in, say 1956, a preacher in a white church in Alabama or Mississippi or, oh, I don’t know, maybe Virginia, lifted up Rosa Parks as an illustration of God’s powerful activity in the world. Or, perhaps, someone in 1980 preaching on love and justice and lifting up Harvey Milk as an illustration. Or even today, in many Presbyterian churches, using Michael Adee as an example of God’s love in action.

As Rice concludes: “While Jesus is redefining who is the elect [… he is] proclaiming that God's love has no boundaries. That's not a very popular message among those—found in every time and place—with a clear sense of who are the insiders and who are the outsiders.”

God’s boundary-breaking love works its gentle subversions in all kinds of places in every age and culture. Often in the most unexpected, least “religious” venues.

Bob Costas was on the Daily Show one night last week, and he told a simple story about the great Stan Musial, who died last month. Musial was one Costas’ St. Louis childhood heroes, a Hall of Fame baseball player known simply as Stan the Man.

At an All-Star Game in the mid 1950s – less than a decade after Jackie Robinson had broken the color line in Major League Baseball – four great All Stars, each African-American, Ernie Banks, Frank Robinson, Willie Mays, and Hank Aaron, were playing cards by themselves in the National League clubhouse before the All-Star Game. All of the white players were across the room, nowhere near the four black stars. Then Stan Musial, whose major league career began before Robinson’s, Musial –“the longest tenured and most respected of those National League stars” – walked across the room, sat down and said, “deal me in.”

Costas said that Aaron had recalled that story to him just last week at the memorial service for Musial. It had stuck with Aaron for more than 50 years. Aaron told Costas, “I didn’t just like Stan Musial, I wanted to be like him.” In the middle of the era of Jim Crow, Costas said, what did it say when the most respected player among them all did that simple, decent thing?[iii]

Not a “religious” example, to be sure. But, then again, neither is feeding a widow or healing a leper. For that matter, neither is desegregating city busses or public schools, neither is standing for peace in a time of war, neither is witnessing for marriage equality at the county courthouse.

Risky? Perhaps. So risk love. For, you see, the love of God – expressed in and through the simplest of human gestures at baseball games, hospital rooms, around tables – knows no boundaries. When we put God’s love in action in simple, decent, human gestures, it breaks down every barrier.

So I’m wondering, as we prepare to come to a table around which there are no barriers, where in your lives – especially in unexpected moments –have you seen boundaries broken by simple gestures of love?

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[i] Thomas F. Driver, “The Culture of Violence and the Beloved Community,” Huffington Post, January 31, 2013.

[ii] Jim Rice, “The Unlimitable Gift,” Sojourners. From Preaching the Word, (http://archive.sojo.net/index.cfm?action=resources.sermon_prep&item=LTW_980149_CEpiphany4&week=C_Epiphany_4)

[iii] Bob Costas interview from The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, January 28, 2013