Luke
6:20-36
“On
Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and
precipitated five travellers into the gulf below.” So begins Thornton Wilder’s
great novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey. It
tells the story of Brother Juniper, who was haunted by this tragedy and decided
he would make sense of it. He spent years researching the life stories of the
five people who perished, believing they must have been terrible sinners being
punished by God or people so good that God called them to heaven early. But all
his inquiries failed to give him any easy answers. They were human beings, both
beautiful and broken, and he could discern no reason why they in particular
should have suffered such a fate. Br. Juniper fails in his search for meaning,
but the book doesn’t. There is actually one great theme in all of their lives,
a theme which an abbess, who knows the story, articulates at the very end of
the book: “But soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left
the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and then forgotten. But
the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love
that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the
living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the
only meaning.”
I
have sat with more dying people than I can remember, and I have been to
countless funerals. I have listened to many people reflect on their lives, and
I have listened to many people eulogize the lives of others. And it’s true:
love is the only meaning. Fame, fortune, and success are all secondary at best:
our lives really come down to the love we knew and the love we shared. Even
amassing money and status is for many people just a way to feel loved, or at
least a way to feel like they are worthy of being loved. When Jesus emphasizes
the primacy of love in his life and teaching, he is not making it up or
discovering something new. He is showing us the truth at the heart of reality.
It’s true whether you’re a Christian or not; it’s true whether you’re religious
or not. God is love, and love is the DNA of the universe. The one thing those
five people who died on that bridge had in common was love: their expression of
it, their longing for it, and sometimes their lack of it. If we are to find
meaning in our lives, it will ultimately come down to the love we gave, the
love we received, the love we wish we had experienced.
Today
is All Saints’ Sunday, so let me remind you of what a saint is. A saint is not
an intolerable goody-goody, who never swears, never has a nasty thought, and
really, really likes church services. No, in our tradition a saint is simply
someone who has realized that love is what this is all about, that loving God
and loving others is the key that unlocks everything. And a saint is someone
who sees that this truth applies not only to our family and dearest friends,
but to everyone. A saint gets this Gospel today, a Gospel filled with love and
lacking any trace of sentimentality: Love
your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray
for those who abuse you . . . Do to others as you would have them do to you . .
. If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners
love those who love them . . . But love your enemies, do good, and lend,
expecting nothing in return. Your reward will be great, and you will be
children of the Most High; for he is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked. Be
merciful, just as your Father is merciful.
Nine
African Americans murdered in a Charleston church. Eleven Jews massacred in a
Pittsburgh synagogue. The list keeps growing. Hate crimes are on the rise, as
is the hate speech that leads to them. The poison is all around us: we have
encountered it up close and personal here in Charlottesville. The reflexive
instinct of our broken humanity is to hate back: to despise those who say and
do horrible things until we, too, have joined the chorus of the hateful. That
may feel natural to us, but Jesus says no, it’s not. We were made by love and
for love. And to Jesus, love does not mean passivity: it means actively going
out and meeting hatred with acts of goodness and mercy, going out of our way to
love when those around us are not loving. In fact, Jesus insists that this is
the best way to confront evil and the only way to defeat it. And all the saints
know this. Paul knew it: ‘If your enemies
are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink; for
by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads.’ Do not be overcome
by evil, but overcome evil with good (Rom. 12-20-21). Martin Luther King, Jr. knew it:
“Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive
out hate; only love can do that.” Only love: with all the saints, we need to
know that, too. And we need to live it.
So
if you’re thinking right now of the people you despise, and if you’re saying to
yourself that loving them seems agonizingly hard, I have two things to say to
you. First, “Good morning! I’m glad you’re awake. Welcome to the Christian
faith.” Jesus told us it’s all about love and then commanded us take up our
cross and follow him. He never promised that loving would be easy: he just
promised it would be worth it. Second, of course we can’t love like that on our
own, but we don’t have to. That is precisely why the Holy Spirit has been given
to us: to empower us to love like Jesus. His Spirit of infinite and
unconquerable love abides in each one of us right now, waiting to be unleashed
in our lives.
So
rather than just read the news and fall into bitterness and despair, let’s ask
ourselves: How are we going to unleash the Spirit of love in our lives? What
difficult people are we going to be kind to this week? How are we going to
connect with someone who is different than we are? Who are we we going to pray
for that we haven’t been praying for? How will we show mercy to someone who
needs mercy? Who will we try to understand better? What public policies will we
support with our voice and our vote? In short, how are we — you and I — going
to make the world a more loving place this week, today? Each of us has the
God-given power to make this world a more loving place. One of the most ancient
parts of our liturgy, along with the Words of Institution themselves, is the
dismissal: Let us go forth in the name of Christ; Let us go forth into the
world, rejoicing in the power of the Spirit; Go in peace to love and serve the
Lord; GO! We’re not here to escape. We’re here to be reminded of who we are,
and then to be fed and empowered to go out and be saints, people who know that love is what it’s all about,
people who show that love is the only
way to live well. Yes, Jesus Christ is the Savior of the world — thanks be to
God! — but there is that one nagging little detail: he has delegated much of
that saving work to us. In the power of the Holy Spirit, go and do it.
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