Make Love

Make Love

Luke 13:31-35

March 17, 2019

My all-time favorite preacher story was told by a colleague in Pittsburgh recalling the time he’d preached a stem-winding sermon calling on the congregation to join the fight for economic justice. At the conclusion of the sermon, they closed worship singing Onward Christians Soldiers. Then the preacher stepped up to deliver his powerful charge and benediction. He said, “I know we haven’t sung that last hymn for many, many years because of its militaristic overtones and images of war, but today I want you to go out and make war on poverty, make war on racism, make war on injustice, and make love in the name of Jesus Christ!”

Can I get an amen?

At least that one Sunday he sent lots of folks home wanting to make what he’d told ‘em to make.

So often we’re just confused about that central question: what do we make? What do we make of our lives? Of our time? Of the gifts we’ve been given?

Sometimes the question gets skewed into political diatribe. Remember the dust-up back in the 2012 campaign when President Obama said “if you’ve got a business – you didn’t build that” in the middle of a long riff on how all of us contribute to making the American economy including teachers and construction workers and sales people? His opponents accused him of, well, who cares at this point?

The point is, the question of what we build, what we make, is central to understanding ourselves. Essentially related, of course, is the question of who gets the credit for what gets made.

Ronald Reagan had a plaque on his desk in the Oval Office that read, “There is no limit to what a man can do or where he can go if he does not mind who gets the credit.”

Luke’s gospel is all about who deserves the credit. From beginning to end, the gospel of Luke narrates the confrontation of the corrupt power of Herod’s family by the good news of the gospel of Jesus, the Christ. Throughout Luke’s gospel, the good news is generating a new world, a future otherwise for the victims of corrupt and abusive power.

At the same time, Herod and his family are intent, throughout, at claiming power and taking all the spoils that come with it, including credit for controlling a community roiling in discontent.

The whole story is about what Jesus is making and how the powers and principalities are threatened by Jesus’ creative actions. If Jesus casts out the demons, then what of the demonic power that keeps the people in their place?

The demonic power, throughout the gospels, is represented by the cross and the crucifixion. That’s a powerful image, to be sure, and in the minds of Jesus’ contemporaries it was way more than symbolic. The crosses that lined hillsides outside of Jerusalem were a constant reminder of the brutal power of the occupying empire that ruled Jewish lives.

To cross the empire was to risk winding up on one of their crosses.

Herod’s family was thoroughly enmeshed in the violence of the empire, and would think nothing of condemning you to hang on a Roman cross. Remember the grizzly story of the beheading of John the Baptist? That played out in Herod’s courts, and resulted from his fear that John was stirring up resistance to Herod’s rule.

At the end of Jesus’ life, Herod will say, in essence, “I’ve been wanting to see you, Jesus, to see if you can do some amazing sign for me.”

But, as Princeton New Testament professor Eric D. Barreto puts it, casting out demons and healing the sick “are not a show for the empire but an embodied rebuke of its arrogations.”[1]

The empire has claimed for itself power that it does not have – power over every aspect of people’s lives and deaths. The cross is one sign of its power. The coins of the realm – on which Caesar’s image appears along with the inscription Caesar Kurios, or, Caesar is lord – are another.

If Caesar can claim power over all of your life – and in a system that allowed Herod’s family to steal your land and your livelihood in the name of the emperor it surely must have felt that way – if Caesar can make that claim, then  Caesar can label you “an invader” if your family happens to have moved across some arbitrary line in the sand, then Caesar can label you “an outsider and a threat” if you don’t look like everybody else on your block, then Caesar can call you “a heathen, and a terrorist” if you don’t pray like the majority of your neighbors, and if you can upset about any of this, then Caesar can also label your anger “demon possession” and threaten to remove you from your family and community – to have you chained in a cave in a field overrun with pigs if we are to take seriously the story of Garasene demoniac just a few chapters prior to our text this morning.

Recall in that story Jesus casts the demons out of the man and into the nearby swine who then run off a cliff into the sea and drown.

In that single story, Jesus claims the authority to restore a demon-possessed man to his family and community, and he destroys a herd of pigs – food for the soldiers of Rome because they would clearly not be food for the Kosher-keeping Jewish inhabitants of the countryside.

Do we begin to see what’s at stake here?

Jesus is making something completely different than Herod and his ilk make and maintain.

Jesus is making a commonwealth in which the people can aspire to wholeness, to healing, to justice. Jesus is casting a vision of a future otherwise, and, through his actions, is inaugurating the beloved community, the commonwealth of love, the kindom of God.

One might say he is realizing love in the world, or, simply, Jesus is making love.

He’s also calling us to do the same. Go out, then, and make love in Jesus’ name.

I could just leave at that and send you home happy, but that wouldn’t actually be faithful to the story, or the Jesus’ call and claim on our lives. Because that call is really about confronting everything that stands against love in our own time.

In other words, that call is about justice.

So what are the powers that threaten justice in our time and our community? We don’t have to look very far to see that economic injustice – massive inequality – is a hallmark of our time, and if things like Amazon coming to town are not yet demonstrably a cause of further economic inequality in Northern Virginia, they are certainly a symptom of massive political inequality that undermines fundamental notions of democracy across the country these days.

Unchecked corporate power, concentrated economic power – these are among the demons of our day. The call of Christ in our time compels us to ask how we cast them out.

In other words, how can we reclaim the power to build communities that shape and nurture lives capable of making love the most important value of them all? Following the way of Jesus in the world is ultimately about making love matter most. So, go out into the world and, well, make love in Jesus’ name. Amen.

---

[1]