Today's Sermon

 

“Beloved Community: On the Road Revisited"

 

1 Corinthians 13:1-7
If I speak in the tongues of humans and of angels but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers and understand all mysteries and all knowledge and if I have all faith so as to remove mountains but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions and if I hand over my body so that I may boast but do not have love, I gain nothing. Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable; it keeps no record of wrongs; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

 

I feel like we should be at a wedding with that scripture being read this morning. It is often read at weddings, and for good reason … what a wonderful description of love. That being said, I want to make sure that we don’t pigeon-hole this scripture just for weddings, or just for romantic love between a married couple, because Paul wrote this passage with a much broader audience in mind. Rob and I have talked before about the different words used for love in the original Biblical Greek. There is storgi/storge – familial love, philia – the love between friends, and eros – romantic love. But the word for love that Paul uses throughout this passage is agape – divine love.

On this weekend that we celebrate and remember the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., it is interesting to note that he wrote and spoke quite a bit about the concept of agape. King defined agape as “purely spontaneous, unmotivated, groundless and creative. It is the love of God operating in the human heart.” In one speech King explained, “When we rise to love on the agape level, we love (people) not because we like them, not because their attitudes and ways appeal to us, but we love them because God loves them.”[i]

Agape was a core value in King’s quest for what he called the “beloved community.” As King spoke out against racial discrimination and economic injustice, he was always working towards building the beloved community – a community transformed by agape. A key point for King was that beloved community was not a lofty, utopian dream that would never actually be achieved. No, King felt beloved community was a realistic, achievable goal that could be attained by a critical mass of people committed to agape.

King died in 1968 – fifty-eight years ago. And we are still far from living in beloved community. Right now, it often feels like we are farther from beloved community than we have been in a long time. As we read together in our call to worship, we are living in fractured, broken, disjointed times. Many of you have told me how frustrated and even scared you are by how we are treating each other in our society today. Agape love is too often absent while hate, bitterness, fear, and antagonism have taken center stage.

Today, I want to spend some time reflecting on beloved community. We are currently in our “On the Road” worship series, thinking about the various journeys that we undertake in our lives. I want to invite each of us to consider what our steps on the journey to beloved community will look like. What might we do today, this week, this month, to foster that community of agape for which King worked so tirelessly?

Dr. Arthuree Wright, who has worked in library sciences for several universities and is also a United Methodist Deacon, studied the writings and speeches of King and put together a list of 25 traits of the beloved community. We won’t look at all of them today, but we will look at several of them. As we read slowly and methodically through this list, I encourage you to consider how well you are doing. Are you working to create the beloved community? Or are you working against it? What might you change, or try for the first time, to do your part in making beloved community a reality?

Wright begins by saying, “The beloved community manifests and protects agape love as its guiding principle and is expressed in the following ways:

• Offers radical hospitality to everyone; an inclusive family rather than an exclusive club
• Recognizes and honors the image of God in every human being
• Affirmation and recognition, not eradication, of differences
• Fosters empathy and compassion for others
• Tolerates ambiguity – realizes that sometimes a clear-cut answer is not readily available
• Acknowledges limitations, lack of knowledge or understanding – and seeks to learn
• Acknowledges conflict or pain in order to work on difficult issues
• Avoids physical aggression and verbal abuse
• Resolves conflicts peacefully, without violence, recognizing that peacefully doesn’t always mean comfortably for everybody
• Focuses energy on removing unjust systems, not destroying persons
• Encourages and embraces artistic expressions of faith from diverse perspectives
• Gathers together regularly for table fellowship, and meets the needs of everyone in the community
• Relies on scripture reading, prayer, and corporate worship for inner strength
• Promotes human rights and works to create a non-racist society
• Shares power and acknowledges the inescapable network of mutuality among the human family

To the last point, the idea of power – who has power and how we use power – was another important issue for King. Dr. Wright also shares this quote by King, “Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.”[ii]

For King, agape is at the center of all. So, too, for Jesus. In the Gospel of John, as Jesus is having his final meal with his disciples, he gives them a new commandment. Just one. Out of all the lessons he has taught, one thing is important enough for Jesus to call it a new commandment. He tells his disciples, “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” If you’re wondering what Greek word is used for love in this passage, it’s agape.

In some ways, it seems so obvious. We just need to love one another as God loves us. But we can’t seem to do it. And by “we,” I mean society as a whole. We really struggle to show agape to one another.

When you arrived this morning, you each received a puzzle piece. I wanted to hand out puzzle pieces as a symbol of how puzzling life is right now. Truly beyond comprehension at times. Why can’t we figure out how to love one another? Why aren’t we living in beloved community? Those are a couple of questions I puzzle over. I know each of you is puzzled by something … likely by many things. Let’s take some time to acknowledge that place of puzzlement. I invite you to hold the puzzle piece in your hand, close your eyes if it is comfortable for you, and spend a moment in silence contemplating what puzzles you about the world today, about what is left yet to do to achieve beloved community. This is not about coming up with solutions. This is simply a moment to acknowledge the uncertainty, the unknowing, perhaps the frustration. You might finish this sentence in the quiet of your mind – “What puzzles me in this moment is ____.”

As you continue to hold the puzzle piece, consider that when we are faced with a puzzling problem, it is likely that we don’t have all the pieces, we don’t have the full picture, we don’t have all the information or tools we need to solve it. This is the bedrock of our need for one another. In this moment, think about someone who has been beloved community for you when you needed help, when you needed something you didn’t have in order to move forward. Take a moment in silent gratitude for the people and communities who help us move toward wholeness.

Finally, each of us is also one of those helpers. We help others move toward beloved community. As you reflect on the traits of beloved community that we reviewed earlier, what stood out for you? What new or renewed efforts are you going to make this week on the road toward beloved community? Take another moment of quiet to make a plan. And then, take the puzzle piece home as a reminder of this commitment.

Let us pray – Help us, O God, to gather the pieces, picking them up until all are found, so that we might begin slowly making connections in ways that heal, not hurt, build up, and not destroy. Guide us and move us to true agape, to creating and living as beloved community. Amen.[iii]

 

[i] https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/agape

[ii] https://www.r2hub.org/library/25-traits-of-the-beloved-community

[iii] The puzzle piece meditation is from Dr. Marcia McFee