Shady
Grove Presbyterian Church
January
18, 2015
Preface
to Worship:
I am becoming convinced that it is not nearly so important
what we do or what we leave undone that matters most in this life. What matters
most is that we are loved. No matter what we do or what we leave undone, we are
loved deeply and steadfastly. Whether we are right or whether we are wrong;
this is of no consequence to love. We were created because it pleased God to
have us here—just as we are. Each one of us is an expression of God’s love. In
fact I am becoming convinced that love is the only thing that really is.
Everything else is an illusion we have created.
Sermon:
John 1:
43-51
Harriet Tubman was born a slave in Dorchester County,
Maryland, in 1822. Historians are not certain about the year of her birth
because accurate records of slave births are not always available. But it is
certain that she grew weary of her life, trapped and abused by the whims and
demands of a white slave-master. At the age of six she was given her first job.
Her master rented her out to work for a poor white farmer, Mr. Brodess and his
wife. She recalled one morning being beaten five times before breakfast.
In 1844, Harriet married John Tubman, a free African
American. When she learned that she was to be set on the auction block and sold
to slave dealers from Georgia, Harriet decided to run. She told her husband
that she planned to escape and when he said, “It’s too dangerous to run for
freedom,” Harriet replied, “There are two things I have a right to in this
life: liberty and death. If I can’t have the first one then I’ll take the
second.” She ran for liberty, risking everything, headed for Pennsylvania where
slavery was against the law.
“I felt like I was in heaven!” she said about her first deep
breath of freedom. Lawmakers in Pennsylvania had made the state a good place to
learn and work for runaway slaves. Harriet got work as a servant and a cook in
private homes. She earned money and saved money. And she could have remained
safe and free in her new life. But the taste of freedom lost its luster when
she thought about her friends and family back home.
Freedom wasn’t freedom unless she could share it with those
she’d left behind. So Harriet Tubman went back where her life was not her own
so that she could keep it—so that she could live it freely and abundantly,
courageously leading group after group out of the awful grip of slavery and
into the light of liberty.
She first had to taste the sweet refreshment of freedom for
herself, discover that she could find her way there, and then she discovered
how much she had to offer to others.
She became convinced that she had particular gifts, strength
and courage to be used for the good in the world she knew. She was convinced
that love knew her, claimed her and called her to set others free.
In today’s scripture (John 1:43-51) Jesus finds Philip and
says, “Follow me.” Apparently there is something adequate enough in what Philip
sees and experiences of Jesus that he immediately becomes convinced that Jesus
is the Messiah, the one he has been looking for, praying about and hoping to
know. Then Philip finds Nathanael and tells him the good news. “We have found
love and it came to us from Nazareth!”
“Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”
A good question. The question reveals more about Nathanael
than it reveals about Nazareth. We can see the man’s opinions and prejudices.
Love has to do an awful lot of hard work and stage multiple miracles to get
through our set opinions and our deeply ingrained prejudices. Once we learn and
become convinced that a place, a town, a neighborhood is bad news, we rarely
change our minds about that. Once we learn and become convinced that people are
not to be trusted, it takes a heap of miracles to undo the attitude. Once we
become convinced that only the strong survive it takes something like an awful
injury followed by a miraculous healing to make us consider the value of
vulnerability and admitting our weaknesses. Once we learn and become convinced
that people who look like us and live at the same level of economic security as
we do are the only ones we care to know and befriend, it takes some kind of
local disaster and a period of miraculous rebuilding for love to be revealed
and recognized in the face of the different, the “other.”
Always there, always at work, love tries to break through
the dense fog of our misconceptions and illusions to let some light in, to set
us free. Because we’re never free and we can never really allow others around
us to be free until we know ourselves as an absolute expression of love in this
life. There’s so much useless baggage to shed, so much meaningless weight we
carry around while we avoid or deny the light of love that comes from our very
soul.
Jesus lets Nathanael know that he sees the light of love in
Nathanael. Jesus sees and knows what’s real in Nathanael-- underneath the man’s
opinions, prejudices, cultural training. Jesus is love and so he can see
beneath the resistance and fears that defend Nathanael. Being known is miracle
enough to turn Nathanael’s world upside down. He leaves his world and opens
himself, following Jesus to see with new eyes, to hear with new ears, to taste
with a new expectation, to touch and be touched with an openness to love in
every fingertip, every hand shake and hug. Love knew him and he let go of his
culturally influenced reality long enough to know love. His life became a life of love, devoted to
loving himself and others, setting himself and others free. A true disciple.
Sometimes all we need is an open window, just a crack in our
defenses, to see there’s so much more than what we had thought or believed, to
be convinced that life has more to do with love than we had ever before
imagined.
“You will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending
and descending …”
I went to see the film, “Selmer” this week. I highly
recommend that you see to it too. The camera shows close up and fiercely the
faces of people who have allowed their fears to harden into rigid, seething
hate. We all recognize ourselves in
those faces. I mean, it requires that I be fearlessly honest to admit it. But I
have been so hurt and so afraid of people or a person that I have hardened the
love right out of my perception of them, made them into lifeless, loveless
objects and given myself permission to hate the objectified frame. Maybe you
have too. Maybe you know that experience and can admit how much damage it has
done to your soul.
I have been known to close the door on anything other than
hate, nurtured a thirst for revenge and a deep desire to erase the one I see as
my “enemy.” I saw my own face in the face of Selma’s sheriff. I may not have
participated in the same level of physical violence against the other as some
participants in that story- but I have felt the hunger for violence that can be
awakened in any of us. It is part of the illusion we live with in our world.
Dr. King and his wife, Coretta lived with the constant
threat of death’s reality in their home, at the table and in their bed and in
their children’s beds. Dr. King’s nonviolent strategy was shining the light of
love full blast into the faces of hate—inspiring absolute rage. While at the
same time, the light of that love was inspiring tremendous courage and hope in
the hearts and lives of Selma’s African American people. They were seen, recognized
and called out by Dr. King as people of great worth, people with a proud
history. They were people with so much to contribute to the world around them
if only they were free to give, free to vote.
So they got together with all that courage, strength,
collected gifts. And other people were attracted to the light of love in Selma.
People came from all over the world to join them. Love led the way in the march
from Selma to Montgomery.
Dr. King gave everything he had and all the light within him
to set the people of Selma free—not just the African Americans but—more
miraculously—the ones who had closed up and shut down their vision because of
the opinions and prejudices that had blinded them to the best thing that life
offers to any of us…love, love that lives deep within our souls.
Love brings us into this world and, for a time, that is all
we know. But as life happens to us and we get hurt, we find ways to defend
ourselves from love. We create barriers and defenses that distance us from our
own soul and prevent us from recognizing, valuing and sharing our love with the
soul of others. We find ways to trap and abuse ourselves in slavery to all
kinds of illusions.
Until something happens, until some Savior comes into our
town, until some relationship surprises us with its unexpected goodness, until some
book or film or sermon awakens our hunger to return to what we once knew and
trusted about love.
Then we start becoming convinced that love is the main thing.
We recall that it is the real thing, the only reality, the thing that can set
us free and give us the courage, strength and gifts to turn around, go back and
set others free.
Amen.
