Just Love

by Sharon Marr

(Based on Mark 12:28-34)

‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, and with all your mind and with all your strength‘, that’s what He said is the first commandment of all, ‘and love your neighbour as yourself‘: simple commands telling us all we need to know. All we need to know about God, ourselves, our relationships, the meaning of life, and the world we live in, and I can hear the saints gone before, and my mum, and the Ann Goodhews* of the world say – so … just do it … and right now.

Oh, for everything to be so black and white.

However, in these very troubled times this costly love that Jesus commands us to, with so many struggling with anxiety, fears and bewilderment over what is going on around them, the Covid virus and all its ramifications, the millions in Afghanistan threatened with starvation, Sudan with another war imminent , China raising its fist, and, of course, climate change – the single biggest threat in the fight against poverty and inequality – is not easy or simple, is it?

You can’t legislate for love, we know, but here God through Jesus (in this reading) does command us to love.  A royal decree you might say.  Discovering the difference between what God can and does achieve and what our laws and the sheer might of the world cannot achieve, is one of the great wonders of being human and of being a person of faith.  Discovering the difference between the love commonly witnessed in the world, one that says if you are the person I want you to be I will love you, and the love God has for us that says, I love you just as you are. 

I have one tiny funny example of how love can get a little distorted.  All my granddaughters have at one stage or another watched with great interest, and participated in, me putting on my make up – so much so that early on, I took to singing a little ditty as we did it:

Put on your happy face
Chase away the blues
I can’t help myself
I love you true.

When Shauna was about four she joined in with me singing our little ditty, but she sang, instead of I love you true, “I love your shoes”. And she did, she played in them constantly making happy clip clop noises on the vinyl floors. 

A trite example, but it does show what is utmost in our hearts can become what we determine love to be.

Do you love me – that is, your fellow human being, also created and loved by God – just for myself alone? Or do you love my shoes – that is, the part of me that makes your life happier, safer …. easier …. more comfortable?

What does love really mean to you? 

Debie Thomas of the Journey with Jesus website draws our attention to Jesus’s answer to this, in his response to the Pharisees’ question in today’s wonderful reading.  “Remember,” she says, “at this point in the story, Jesus’s crucifixion is just days away.  Death is literally breathing down his neck, and he is rapidly running out of opportunities to communicate the heart of his message.  But when he is asked what matters most in a life of faith, Jesus doesn’t say, ‘Believe the right things.’  He doesn’t say, ‘Maintain personal and doctrinal purity.’  He doesn’t say, ‘Worship like this or attend a church like that.’  He doesn’t even say, ‘Read your Bible’ or, ‘Pray every day’ or, ‘Preach the Gospel to every living creature’.  He says, ‘Love.’  That’s it.  All of Christianity distilled down to its essence.  Love.  Love God and love your neighbour.”

And note, Jesus doesn’t say, “I sure hope love happens to you.”  He says, “Love is the greatest and first commandment.”  Meaning, it’s not a matter of personal attraction, feeling, or preference.  It’s not a matter of lucky accident.  It’s a matter of obedience to the one we call “Lord.”

What would it cost us to take Jesus’s version of love seriously?  To practice and cultivate a depth of compassion that’s gut-punching?  To train ourselves into a hunger for justice so fierce and so urgent that we rearrange our lives in order to pursue it?  To pray for the kind of empathy that causes our hearts to break?  Do we even want to? To become vulnerable in authentic ways to the world’s pain?  Those things are hard.  Hard and costly. And yet this is the call. 

We have a God who, first and foremost, wants our love — not our fear, penitence, or piety.  And we have a God who wants everyone else to also feel loved.  By us. 

As I was writing this I found myself humming again and again an old favourite from the 60s: Burt Bacharach’s What the world needs now.  Remember it?  Well I looked up the lyrics and it continues with these words,

 Lord, we don’t need another mountain
There are mountains and hillsides enough to climb
There are oceans and rivers enough to cross
Enough to last ’til the end of time

What the world needs now is love, sweet love
It’s the only thing that there’s just too little of
What the world needs now is love, sweet love
No not just for some, but for everyone.

Hear the cry? Please no more obstacles in our way. There are just so many obstacles in life. (Remember the 60s, with the real threat of nuclear war, with the Cuban missile crisis? People were really frightened and powerless.) Just give us love, and not just for some but for everyone.
Not judged. Not shamed. Not punished. Not chastised.  But loved.

__ . __

We cannot love ourselves or our neighbours in any meaningful, sustainable way if that love is not sourced and replenished in an abiding love for God.  
The love God shows us in Jesus is one that is primarily interested in the good of the other person, rather than one’s own.  It does not attempt to possess or dominate the other. It allows genuine space for the other to be; and that love is superabundant, such that it can be offered without reserve. 

Rowan Williams**, preaching on this very passage, says that God’s love for the world is extraordinary. It is without cause, absolutely free, absolutely, overwhelmingly unreasonable.

“And that’s the kind of the love we are invited to become part of as his friends. Before we belonged to anything, before we did anything, before we achieved anything – even before we believed anything, God was loving us.

“From the beginning, we were there.
And, of course, since we were there with God, in God’s mystery, in the eternal utterance of the Word and the Spirit, before time began, we are bound up in the immense mystery of God’s outpouring of Himself in creation and in redeeming love.”

And this outrageous love is for all.

Only God’s love is inexhaustible. If we cut ourselves off from the flow of God’s compassion, we will quickly run dry.  In other words, the motion of our hearts must be cyclical — love of God making possible and deepening our love of neighbour; and love of neighbour putting flesh and bones on our love for God. 

__ . __

So what is it that we are called to do?  I believe it is to follow in the footsteps of the one who declared love to be the be-all and end-all.  The call is to weep with those who weep.  To laugh with those who laugh.  To touch the untouchables, feed the hungry, welcome the children, release the captives, forgive the sinners, confront the oppressors, comfort the oppressed, wash each other’s feet, hold each other close, and tell each other the truth.  The call is to love. 

I conclude today with a prayer poem from Steve Garnaas-Holmes

God,
help me this day to add love to the world.
Not fear, not obstacles, not anxiety
about what I owe or am owed, but love.

Help me know my freedom —
not to do what I please,
but to fulfil my call to love,

my only goal, not that I prevail
but that others receive love.

In calm interactions,
or in moments of anxiety or conflict,
let me contribute love.

In silence or in confrontation,
in public endeavour or quiet prayer,
in heroic action or mundane chores,
let me add love to the world.

O God of Love,
let your love overflow:
fulfil your love in me.

Amen

* Ann Goodhew was a former church administrator of St Francis Church, and a founder of the church’s Op Shop.
** Archbishop of Canterbury from 2002 to 2012.

Everywhere Present, Specifically Here

(Sixty years of worship in the church building, Tairua)

by Bruce Gilberd

(Based on John 10:22-30; I Kings 8:27-30)

The readings today have several converging themes.

  • Sacred space and the worship of God
  • God’s presence everywhere, and also focussed in particular places and people
  • Jesus’s startling claim while teaching in the Temple
  • The humility and insight of Solomon
  • The nature of the one true God: real, accessible, forgiving, …
  • Continuity of the Church in history

I recall when praying beside the 3000-year-old foundations of Solomon’s Temple, in 1982, placing a prayer for world peace in a crevice there.  The so-called ‘wailing wall’ has attracted pilgrims from the nations ever since the Temple was destroyed by Rome in 70AD.

Today we celebrate sixty years of history in this building.  We also celebrate the story of the people of faith, the fellowship of Christian believers in Tairua – going back to at least the 1860s.

These are our key themes today:
  • Places of worship and those who gather there
  • God’s presence everywhere, and in particular places
  1. Place – sacred space and places.  These have always been important in the history and present practices of the church.
    Jesus was familiar with both local synagogues and the Temple – where people gathered for worship, forgiveness, teaching and fellowship.  He taught in the open and in both the synagogues and the Jerusalem Temple, and as we heard in today’s Gospel reading, walking in the Temple’s Solomon portico, he confronted those gathered – daring to claim equality with the Father – Israel’s Yahweh: “The Father and I are one.”
    The hearers were outraged, and tried to arrest and stone him.

    Places are made sacred because of who was/is there, and because of what happened/happens there, and over many centuries believers have made pilgrimages to them.
    – to the Holy land
    – to Iona and Canterbury
    – to Assisi and Taizé, and
    – to Oihi and Parihaka

    We call this building a church, because the Church, the people of God, meet here and offer heartfelt thanks and worship to God, whom Jesus revealed to us.  This, St Francis Church, is a sacred place.
    Here in Tairua, and New Zealand, we need to appreciate that we the church can usually gather unhindered, and not persecuted, as many Christians are across the globe.

    Place and people – both sacred.

  2. Now to the second point:  God’s presence:
    Everywhere, and also in particular.  He is indeed “beyond and in our midst”.

    Solomon, dedicating the Temple 3000 years ago, prays, “But will God indeed dwell on earth?  Even heaven and the highest heavens cannot contain you, much less this house that I have built!”
    Yet Solomon then draws on God’s promise:  “My name (= I am) shall be there – in the Temple.”

    – The author of the cosmos,
    – The creator of this solar system,
    – The source of this planet earth and all its life …
    is willing to be especially present in a Place, for that is his promise.

So we, the privileged present people of faith here, the Church here, gather week by week, as did the first post-resurrection church, to praise God and to “devote ourselves to the apostles’ teaching, and fellowship, to the breaking of bread, and the prayers” (as Luke puts it in Acts Chapter 2).

We give thanks for this sacred space, and all who have nurtured it.
We give thanks for our life together.
We give thanks that the Creator of the Universe encounters us here, in this specific place, face to face, whenever we gather.

Spirit of the Living God,
Fall afresh on us;
Take us, break us, recreate us.
Spirit of the Living God,
Fall afresh on us.

Forgive, O Lord, what we have been,
Sanctify what we are,
And order what we shall be.

What we know not, teach us;
What we have not, give us;
What we are not, make us.

Through Jesus Christ our Lord,

Amen

Geniuses 5

This person’s genius settled on my perception slowly, partly because my church friends were disparaging his work as ‘devilish’.  Almost literally, because Andrew Lloyd Webber gave us a shrieking Judas, and a barely more peaceful Jesus, and my friends struggled to swallow that.  So it was only after some time, and with the sense that maybe I was accessing something heretical and evil, that I first gave Jesus Christ Superstar a hearing.  It was stunning, and, in a way not recognised by my friends, inspiring.  I’ve listened to it many times since then (over fifty years, actually, because it opened on Broadway on Oct. 12, 1971 – fifty years ago last week), and I still find its soaring passions inspiring, moving.

I learnt that, although this was his first big hit show (in collaboration with lyricist Tim Rice), it was not their first rodeo.  It was their third.  His first musical, about the establishment of the Barnardo charity homes, written (also with Rice) when he was seventeen, didn’t gain much traction; his second, Joseph and his Coat of Many Colours, also commenced as a seventeen-year-old, was produced for a local school, and was only fifteen minutes long!  It was such a success though that it climbed all the way to London’s West End, and New York’s Broadway, by which time it was more than two hours long.

After a couple of hearings, and as I began to marvel at the intricacies of Webber’s Superstar score, another one came out – Evita. One of life’s lump-in-throat memories is watching my disabled three-year-old daughter dancing to Don’t Cry for me, Argentina in the aisle of Hamilton’s Founders Theatre.

And down the years Webber has gifted us twenty rock operas of various stripes, including the better known Starlight Express, Cats, and Phantom of the Opera; with his latest, Cinderella, now playing in London.

Is Webber a genius?  Many readers will say no; and there have been other great composers in recent times – Rogers and Hammerstein (Sound of Music), George Gershwin (Porgy and Bess), Leonard Bernstein (West Side Story), Lerner and Loewe (My Fair Lady) and Schonberg (Les Misérables) among them.  But none was as prolific as Webber.  It’s a tough industry, and his twenty-fold portfolio alone elevates him above the others.  And, as already referenced, the intricacies and musical arrangement of his compositions, to my ear, set him apart.  Does he rank with Newton, Shakespeare and Beethoven?  Or even Curie or Edison or Einstein or Goethe or Churchill or Banksie?

Maybe no, but to me – without a doubt.

One final note of mystification: how could a non-Christian pairing (in 1971, when asked if he was a Christian, Webber told the New York Times he was an agnostic, although he saw Jesus as “one of the great figures of history”) write such perceptive religious and (arguably) Christian material?  A head-shaking mystery to me.  Although, perhaps it’s telling that his Jesus stayed unresurrected and it was Judas who came back to life; and perhaps my church friends were more perceptive than me after all.

Whatever, Andrew Lloyd Webber: in my opinion an unalloyed genius.

Ken F

Everything is Possible

by Barry Pollard

(Based on Mark 10:17-31; Heb 4:12-16)

So many times in the gospels we hear Jesus questioned by people who are trying to trick him into giving himself away. In today’s reading I’m pretty sure the man asking the question of Jesus is sincere – he genuinely wants to know what he must do to have eternal life, to book his seat in heaven.
His approach is respectful and he is attentive to the answers Jesus gives him. On the surface it appears to be an honest exchange. But when Jesus looked at him he knew that there was something that the man was not acknowledging in his quest for eternal life. And, as we hear, the man did not get the answers he wanted.

You know, this man could be any one of us! I imagine that we all come before the Lord reverently, keen to hear His words for us and, if you’re like me, expecting to have our wishes and will confirmed. But do we admit all that we should when we are in the presence of the Lord? Do we hold back in our confessions? Are there issues we’d rather not talk about? And how many times have we been disappointed, walking away from the encounter in the same way as the man in today’s gospel reading.

The man in question is recognised as a rich man, a man with many possessions. Jesus saw that the man did not acknowledge where his heart really lay, and His instruction to him to go and sell the possessions and give the money to the poor turns out to be too big of an ask. He simply couldn’t do it, and left in sadness.
We don’t hear any more about him but I suspect he probably continues to live his life in the same manner he had been, prior to the encounter with Jesus. The disciples looking on and hearing the explanation offered by Jesus, that it is very hard indeed to enter heaven, are ”astounded”, and ask “Who then can be saved?”

I’ve often thought that really rich folk must have things pretty easy, able to indulge every whim and fancy. Their wealth is often the passport to getting things done, and done their way. I suppose that the rich man in the gospel story was like that. But this week I am changing my mind about wealth and easy lives.

I had been praying about how I would approach this reflection and was having trouble getting past the idea that the solution for the rich man, and us if we are to take something away from our reading today, is simply to give generously to those in need.
But a local young man came to mind, a man who came into a fortune, courtesy of a major Lotto win. As I pondered what he did with it, the people who tried to guide and help him, and the endless parade of new toys that were seen around town, I realised that his life was anything but easy. Okay, it was probably fun for the first few years as he indulged himself, but at the same time a procession of loose acquaintances accosted him for attention and a share of the action. Relationships disintegrated all around.

Then, at work in the past week, I dealt with a customer who was outwardly a very successful businessman. He seemed to have all the trappings. A successful business man who was privately dealing with a marriage break-up, a separation of business and marriage assets and liabilities, all the while looking after his children for the school holidays away from their usual family home.
The man was so preoccupied with sorting out his affairs he appeared to have little time for the children, who kept up a barrage of requests for treats and food as they vied for his attention.
Was the marriage break-up caused by business issues? Could the focus on accumulating wealth have been a major factor in the break-up? Whatever the whats and wherefores were, it didn’t look like life was very easy for him and his children. I was left wondering how it will all turn out.

Anyway, after pondering all this I understand that having wealth comes with issues. To be wealthy, in all likelihood, makes life far from easy.

The gospel rich man couldn’t bring himself to give away his money and possessions. But more importantly than that, he couldn’t really engage with Jesus. The encounter for him was really based on his terms. He had already assessed himself and presented as somewhat self-righteous. All of the commandments that Jesus raised, as measures of how to judge a life lived for eternity, the man said he followed. These commandments were, and are, rules to be followed. And for most of us, most of them are pretty easy not to break. The hard part for the rich man was when the focus changed from rule breaking to positive action. At that point the man had no response other than to walk away.

As a youngster I grew up with lots of rules, as I imagine most of you did. In those days compliance with rules was reinforced with punishments and penalties whenever we broke them. We probably learned through avoidance to modify our behaviour to suit the expectations of those monitoring us: parents, teachers, the clergy and so on. Essentially we complied. That compliance probably led us to eventually absorbing those rules into our daily lives and thinking.

Personally, in all honesty, I didn’t really start to consider the effect of my behaviour on others until I reached my teens, late teens at that, I suspect. I generally went along with the crowd, wanting to be in the group rather than outside it, in good and bad. Peer pressure was a reality!
I think it wasn’t until I became a father that my thinking about, and behaviour towards, others really started to change for the better. I started to do things to build up, rather than knock down. I did things to help my children avoid the things that I had struggled with. The focus gradually moved from me, and my wants and needs, to them and theirs.

My behaviour wasn’t controlled by avoiding penalties any more, but more motivated by positively getting on with others. Don’t get me wrong: I was not great at it! But I was trying. And this is about when I realised that I was doing everything in my own strength.
When Jesus reflected, “How hard it is for the rich to enter the Kingdom of God!”, to me he was saying that anyone trying in their own strength to enter the Kingdom of God was going to fail. Eternity isn’t about our efforts. It is about our hearts.

When Jesus responded to the disciples’ question, “Then who in the world can be saved?” by pointing out that, without the divine, the earthly have no show, he was providing the answer for everything that we ponder and have to face.
It is not really possible for us, in our own strength, to do very much at all. When it comes to the most important of things: saving ourselves and getting eternal life, it is impossible. We can’t earn it or buy it and we don’t deserve it. But with the grace of God, things are very different. Everything is possible.

With the grace of God, everything is possible!

God’s love for us is so far beyond what we can imagine that he has given us an assured pathway to eternity. It is as simple as a belief that Jesus is Lord of our lives and an acknowledgement and repentance of our sinful ways. To help us grasp what that means we have his Word. Attending to it will help to keep the pathway open as we journey towards eternity.
Ponder again the words of our Hebrews reading: “For the word of God is alive and powerful. It is sharper than the sharpest two-edged sword, cutting between soul and spirit, between joint and marrow. It exposes our innermost thoughts and desires. Nothing in all creation is hidden from God. Everything is naked and exposed before his eyes, and he is the one to whom we are accountable.”

Whether it is our riches or something else that stands in the way of our relationship with the Lord, we can’t hide it. We need to acknowledge it. We need to know that to Him we are naked and exposed!

And … if you’ve had any difficulty following my reflection today, one solution could be to give generously to those in need from what you have, whether it is your riches or your time or your labour.

Amen