2018-01-05
Brooke Strong
Scripture: Psalm 89:1-4, 19-26
Priority. A word, we know, that means first in time or importance. It’s something that is to be given special attention. Priority. It’s a word that’s been around for some 600 years. But only in the last 100 years or so has it been used in its plural form. Around 1900, people began to talk about “priorities.” Now you could have more than one priority. Which is sort of a contradiction in terms. Something is either prior or it isn’t. How, then, is it possible to have two, three or four things all rank first?
It’s a symptom of our times, though, isn’t it, that several things can all be ranked first. We live with crowded plates, with endless demands, with hordes of tasks and opportunities all crying out to be first. Doug Wysockey-Johnson, who has led several retreats here at Federated over the years, says this “is just the way we live our lives, as if we can have many things that are most important to us. Not to mention our continual attempt to be in two places at one time, both mentally and physically.
“Which leads us,” he says, “right into the time of year known as ‘the holidays.’ This is the season where we have multiple priorities while trying to be [in] multiple places, all while multitasking our way into exhaustion. It is a good time to think about prioritizing, if by that we mean doing the hard work of saying one thing is more important than another” (Lumunos, Vol. 9, No. 3, 2017, p. 2).
Determining that one thing is more important than another: not so easy to do. Maybe you have a work project that has to be finished by year’s end. There’s Christmas shopping, including the present you forgot to get for Aunt Millie, that you will need to take care of this afternoon. There are seasonal parties that expect your presence. The house needs to be cleaned. You can’t not have your favorite family Christmas dishes, and they take gobs of time. Not to mention calls and cards and exercise and yoga and prayer and you name it. Many things cry out to be done. And all of them are important, maybe even urgent. Priority singular? Hardly! It’s multiple priorities. And they all matter.
So maybe the very first task that faces us is this: breathe. And the second task is to remember that it doesn’t all fall to us. Underneath it all, God is sustaining us and enabling us to succeed. As I have mentioned before, Pope John XXIII, whose given name was Angelo Roncalli, often fretted about the enormity of the task that faced him as pope. And he used to comfort himself at bedtime by asking himself, “Who runs the church? You or Jesus? Go to sleep, Angelo, go to sleep.” There were certainly things he had to do. God wasn’t going to run around accomplishing all the Pope’s tasks. What he meant was that sustenance and inspiration for these tasks was going to come from God. The same is true in your life and mine. For me, it’s Christ’s heart that’s to be at the center of every sermon. It’s Christ’s presence that accompanies every suffering member and friend of Federated. I, along with many of you, do these things. But it’s Christ’s Spirit that animates them. Rest easy, Hamilton, and trust the risen Christ, who is “all in all” (Colossians 3:11). I realize this may be easier to say in my position than if you’re running a steel factory or practicing legal cases or teaching vulnerable little children. There are always things that really do have to be done, in your life and in mine.
At the same time, though, it’s Christ who gives us the strength to do them. Not only that, but the third thing is it’s crucial to remember that we can’t do everything. There are certain demands that have to go unmet, certain duties that will have to wait for another day. In our driven, whirlwind world, some goals and tasks simply have to be relinquished if we are to live with any kind of wholeness. In the first church I served in Vermont, a much-respected church elder said to me not too long after I arrived, “You know, there are three major dimensions of life—family, work and community involvement—and you can only do two of those three things well. You can’t do all three well. So you have to make some choices.”
Now you might quibble with the specifics in his list of life’s various categories, but you’d be hard-pressed, I think, to quibble with his larger point, that you can’t do everything well in life, that there are various tasks and demands that you simply have to relinquish.
So the first task is to breathe. The second is to remember that Christ enables us to do more than we could ever ask or imagine. The third thing is to remember that there are facets of life that we simply won’t be able to do well, and that means a constant letting go of some of those apparently pressing needs. And undergirding all of these is the priority, the sole priority—singular—at their root, which is to live in the love of God—to take up our residence there, to make our bed there. Our first and only priority is to dwell in the house of God’s love.
In every case, that means—always—that we be first of all in a receptive place, a place in which we open our arms and our minds and our hearts to the love God is showering on each and every one of us every day, every moment. Three times in the psalm we just heard, the psalmist talks about God’s “steadfast love.” Sometimes English versions of the Bible call this quality God’s “mercy” (KJV) or “lovingkindness.” I want you to take a moment now to recall a time in your life when you felt incredibly cared for and treasured. Maybe it was your mother cradling you when you were hurt. Maybe it was your father smiling at you with tender affection. Maybe it was a spouse or partner who has understood you as no one else has, or who has forgiven you some terrible slight or injury. Picture it. Feel that love again. . . . That’s what God’s love is like, times 100 billion billion. He adores you. She delights in you. You! Not just everybody else. You! You matter to God. God looks at you with the fondest affection imaginable. You! God’s steadfast love, God’s mercy, God’s lovingkindness: it’s for you!
And if this is the way God is—and it is—we know, don’t we, that this is the home we’re to live in, as well. It’s the home in which love is the priority, the single priority, the only priority. Not making money. Not pleasing family. Not rising up the ranks at work. Love. The priority.
We Christians always have challenges if we’re to get our arms around God’s kind of love. We have to put aside the notion that love is a sappy movie in which romance conquers all. We have to get past the notion that love is something that always makes us feel good. We have to enter that house where love is not centrally a romance or a feeling, but first and foremost a loyalty, a devotion, that’s a reflection of what God gives to us.
“A group of Christian business executives was once engaged in a mission tour. They had come to a squalid city homeless shelter, to view firsthand the work among the poorest of the poor. There they came upon a nun, feeding an elderly, emaciated man. The man was obviously quite ill, and his body was covered with ulcers. With infinite patience, the nun was spooning a thin soup into his mouth and carefully catching the drops as they ran down the gray stubble on his chin. One of the men in the group remarked, ‘I wouldn’t do that for a million dollars.’ Hearing him, the nun looked up and said with a smile, ‘Neither would I.’
“That’s Christian [love]: doing a thing not because we get something for doing it, but because it’s right, and it needs to be done—and because we love the person we’re serving, for Christ’s sake” (Proclaim Sermons, Nov. 25, 2017, https://www.proclaimsermons.com/illustration.asp).
When we’re honest about it, like the business executive who wouldn’t be caught dead doing that sort of service, we know love is demanding and sometimes draining work. It’s not always pretty or appealing. It can be drudgery. It may entail cleaning up after an aging and declining spouse. It may require being patient with a child whose testing of limits seems never to stop. It may expect walking a path of grief or failure with a friend whose moods and demands stretch us to the limit. In every one of these cases, love is challenging. And it’s the priority.
In the book Why This Jubilee? that a number of us at Federated have been reading this Advent, the author, James Howell, picks up on a line in the song “O Holy Night”: “his [Christ’s] law is love.” We tend not to think of love as law, as something that can be commanded. “Love,” says Howell, though, “is not a mood that flares and subsides but a commitment we make even to people nobody else will go near, to our enemies, to the ones who have hurt us” (p. 111).
This call to love stretches us not just personally, but as a church, too. Sometimes the call to love causes friction and bumps one set of values into another. In every case, we are prodded to wonder what Jesus might do and to seek to live in his light. In a culture that’s so mired in vitriol and armed camps, this sort of love might well mean finding what binds us together beneath the differences. It might mean not reflexively criticizing and taking pot shots at each other. It almost certainly means expanding our sense of where the boundaries to the community lie. Even a cursory reading of the gospels reminds us that Jesus was always pushing the limits, welcoming people whom others despised, including people who had been pushed to the margins. He ate with tax collectors and sinners. He told stories about shockingly forgiving parents and generous Samaritans. He opened his arms wide to people who had previously been excluded and left out.
If this is who Jesus was and is, this is who we’re called to be, as well. An unnamed church somewhere in this country has this sign on its front lawn: “Love thy neighbor: thy homeless neighbor; thy gay neighbor; thy Muslim neighbor; thy black neighbor; [thy white neighbor;] thy immigrant neighbor; thy Jewish neighbor; thy addicted neighbor; thy Christian neighbor; thy atheist neighbor; thy disabled neighbor. Jesus didn’t make exceptions. We don’t either!”
We all know that some of those groups, or others that aren’t named on that sign, may test our love. But that’s exactly what the love of Jesus does: it stretches us; it asks us to get out of our comfort zones; it prods us to look at every single person with the tender eyes and warm heart of Jesus.
Today we baptize little Wesley. The wonder of baptism is that God declares him to be a “child of blessing, child of promise.” In Wesley the fullness of God’s love is pleased to dwell. Our role, our only priority, is to create the space here in which he will discover just how incredibly he is loved by God, and indeed it’s to create the space in which he will be moved to reflect that love to everyone. Our only task is to be the ones who embody that holy love for him in this community, today, tomorrow, and always. Our single priority? It’s to live in God’s love. And it’s to love Wesley and each other with everything we have.