I’ve been spending some time around high schools the last two weeks. I was up at a Broadwater last week for a scrimmage and got to see some of our Franktown Vikings in the field. Over at Northampton I saw in the gym the girls volleyball team gearing up for action. And, out on the field and in the band room, the marching band has been logging a lot of rehearsal time.
All of that is happening because school is getting ready to begin and playing seasons are ready to begin and all of these students are trying to get their minds and bodies ready for action. I was a basketball player in high school and I remember summers where I spent hours just trying to put together the mechanics of a layup. It’s not as simple as it looks. At least it wasn’t for me. An efficient layup involves timing, coordination, and awareness of what’s going on around you so that you can make split-second adjustments.
It also involves body memory. It just takes doing the thing over and over and over until your muscles and your mind can do it without thinking. They just know what to do because of the training. That’s why all of these sports teams are out there on the practice field. That’s why the band is out there. So that when the time comes to perform, most of the stuff that you have to do will be so second nature that you won’t have to think about it.
Your Christian life is no different. It takes practice to be a Christian. It takes regular exercise of the muscles that you use to be Christian. And it takes a great coach who keeps reminding you that you can do it. That we can do it.
The letter to the Hebrews ends with a kind of coach’s pep talk to the community that the author was addressing. The verses we read this morning feel like a kind of laundry list of things the community ought to remember to do. And maybe they seem like a pretty obvious list to us. Of course, these are things that we ought to do. We take it for granted that this is what Christian life looks like. But you know what happens when you get off your training for a few days, a few weeks, a few months. You lose your muscle memory and it takes a lot of work to get back to where you were.
We shouldn’t take this list from Hebrews for granted, though. First of all because we’re not doing all the things that this list commends. But secondly because we can’t assume that these values, which we think of as human values, will continue if they are not practiced.
“Let mutual love continue.” That’s the heading under which this whole list of practices comes in the 13th chapter of Hebrews. But what does that look like? We all have our own pictures for that. Like that comic strip in the newspapers that has the heading “Love is…,” every day it can be filled in with some new example. But Hebrews has some very specific ways to illustrate this.
The first command is to hospitality. “Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it.” Radical hospitality is something we have been talking about a lot over the past two years here at Franktown. We recognize it as one of the primary ways that churches remain vital because they are constantly welcoming new people in.
One way that has been happening through this summer is at the community dinners on Wednesday night which have been sponsored by the Word Up group. It is more than a free meal that has been happening. It has been outreach through food and new community being built over food. And it is causing problems. Good problems. There is a strong sentiment from a lot of folks that we’d like to see this continue into the fall. But that means that Wonderful Wednesday will have to look differently. Can we sustain a free meal? Can we maintain our kitchen staff consistently? Can we live with a more simple menu? The feeling is that we can if we take our mission seriously. If we see this meal as more than a meal…if we consider that we are entertaining angels through our hospitality…then something radical can happen.
The second way that Hebrews commands us to mutual love is through remembering the prisoner and the tortured. In the day when this was written, those prisoners and tortured persons were likely other Christians who were suffering for their beliefs, but Jesus urged his disciples to visit the imprisoned, too, without qualification. However they got there, there is a need for transformation and good news in prisons as well.
When we were doing our survey on our new mission statement earlier this year, a few of you wrote that ministries in our jails might be an area to explore. The Vision and Design Team has been looking at that and we have discovered that there do seem to be some real needs among prisoners here on the Shore that are not being addressed. Maybe God is calling some of us to get involved. Maybe all of us should keep the prisoner as a constant in our prayers.
“Let marriage be held in honor by all.” This is another area we have been talking about in the Vision and Design Team. What does marriage mean in a day when so many marriages are broken, when the definition of marriage is being stretched, and when more and more young people see no need for marriage? Honoring marriage means more than giving it lip service – it means developing practices to keep it strong. It means regular time together. It means shared experiences. It means spending time in the marriage bed that Hebrews talks about. It means mutual respect. Christians should be saying something to the world around them through the quality of their marriages. There is the potential for a lot of pain in our marriages. When we open our lives to others we are always vulnerable. But there is also the potential for deep joy and so we pray for our marriages.
The final command in this section is to stay free from the love of money and be content with what you have, something that also deserves its own sermon. In a culture where so much of meaning is built around the desire for material objects, this may be the most counter-cultural thing Christians are called to do. But Hebrews goes on to say that our living free from the love of money is a way to express our reliance on God. If we do not put our trust in money, then we are free to trust God for the things we need.
Those are the things that Hebrews calls for, but there is something deeper I want to get at. I said that these values can’t be taken for granted and they can’t be. They are not so natural to us that they can’t be lost. They could easily be replaced by an alternative story or an influential movement. In fact, those stories and movements are out there. There are plenty of Hollywood movies that have no room for mutual love. Your average action/adventure hero is a loner motivated by revenge and all too willing to use violent means to secure it. Marriage is suffering from a number of things, the most important of which is that those who support it have trouble saying why it is necessary or even what it is. Living simply is troubled by every advertisement we see. Mutual love is not a given in human life.
I’ve been haunted this year by a book written by David Bentley Hart called Atheist Delusions. In it he traces the Christian revolution back to its earliest days in the Roman Empire and says that our modern notions of compassion and the sanctity of individual lives can be credited to the message of Christianity. “Conscience, after all, at least in regard to its particular contents, is to a great extent a cultural artifact, a historical contingency, and all of us today in the West, to some degree or another, have inherited a conscience formed by Christian moral ideals.”[i] And what sustains that conscience? What keeps our understandings of mutual love from fading away? What keeps our culture from falling into new bad habits and ways of being that may make a mockery of things like hospitality, solidarity, fidelity and simplicity? Nothing but practice and a grounding in Jesus who is the same today, yesterday, and forever.
I never excelled in basketball, but the little bit of proficiency I got was due to those hundreds and thousands of layups I did on the driveway of my house with the basketball goal. If Ben Holland throws a touchdown pass it will be because he’s thrown a thousand passes in practice. If Jordan LeCato spikes the ball for a point it will because she has learned though hundreds of rotations and set-ups just where to be. If we are going to create a place in which mutual love can continue it will be because of the countless hours we have spent in worship, in fellowship, in prayer, in study, in homes, in jails, in face-to-face encounters with others – doing the quiet, sometimes boring work, of loving. God will ultimately bring about the new day. Christ will come regardless. But what will we say when we are asked what we did to let mutual love continue on this earth? What the world needs now is that kind of love. Thanks be to God.
Hebrews 13:1-8 [NRSV]
Let mutual love continue. Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it.
Remember those who are in prison, as though you were in prison with them; those who are being tortured, as though you yourselves were being tortured.
Let marriage be held in honor by all, and let the marriage bed be kept undefiled; for God will judge fornicators and adulterers.
Keep your lives free from the love of money, and be content with what you have; for he has said, "I will never leave you or forsake you." So we can say with confidence, "The Lord is my helper; I will not be afraid. What can anyone do to me?"
Remember your leaders, those who spoke the word of God to you; consider the outcome of their way of life, and imitate their faith. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever…Through him, then, let us continually offer a sacrifice of praise to God, that is, the fruit of lips that confess his name. Do not neglect to do good and to share what you have, for such sacrifices are pleasing to God.
[i] David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies, [Yale University Press: New Haven, 2009], ebook location 2250.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment