Sermon for July 7, 2019 - Proper 9 - The Rev'd Jeffrey W. Mello

Isaiah 66:10-14: Galatians 6:7-16: Luke 10:1-11, 16-20

If you were to ask me to narrow down what it means to be a follower of Christ into one line, it would be this third line of the sixth chapter of Galatians:  “Bear one another’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ.”  

Though we have made it abundantly complicated in the 2,000ish years since this letter to the small group that made up the church in Galatia was written, the truth remains that our chief duty, loving God and loving each other, is expressed quite simply in this exhortation to bear one another’s burdens.

We hear this reading once every three years, and usually on the Sunday closest to the Fourth of July.  I love that on the weekend spent celebrating our independence as a country, our scripture calls us back to our core identities as siblings in Christ, citizens of God’s country, made to be not independent, but wonderfully and sacredly inter-dependent. 

Paul’s continued argument about the world of the flesh and the world of the Spirit, the demands of the world and the demands of God, is meant to remind the Galatian church community and remind us that the world expects us to do it on our own, carry our own burdens.  But in the dream of God, all burdens are able to be carried because we carry one another’s.

This counter-cultural way of being was the only marker that set early followers of Jesus apart from the other communities around them.  “See how they love each other,” the Romans would exclaim when they witnessed these odd groups of Jesus-followers.  Before there were crosses worn around necks, or churches with steeples and certainly before Creeds and schisms and denominations, there was only this; 

Radical, self-giving, mutual love without ceasing.

Of course, that kind of love can be exhausting.  And that’s why we do it in community. That’s why Jesus gathers the 40, sends them out in pairs and tells them to love abundantly, to live vulnerably, dependent on the love and mercy of strangers, but to draw healthy boundaries should that love and vulnerability not be returned.

But even healthy, boundaried love can be exhausting.

Just this week alone, I have been pushed to the edge of my capacity for mutual love.  The pictures from the detention camps at our country’s southern border have broken my heart and turned my stomach.

The juxtaposition of those images with images of fireworks and cookouts created in me such a cognitive dissonance that it was hard to spend time looking at either.  And then not one, but two earthquakes in Southern California where friends and loved ones and people I don’t know and will never meet confronted the fragility of this earth on which we live.

And it’s not like anything of the other, already heart-wrenching needs of the world have resolved.  War and disease and greed continue to ravage.

It’s enough to make us retreat into a permanent state of self-care, a life-time with the TV off, the news not read, the Facebook account closed.  

It all makes complete and total Independence sound like a really, really good idea.

But those children screaming on the border are our children.  No matter your politics, no matter your take on the immigration disaster in this country, there is no argument I can find in the law of Christ that justifies or even tolerates what is being justified or tolerated each and every day at our border with Mexico.

But what to do, short of getting on a bus and feeding them myself, holding them, loving them myself.

Well, maybe that’s exactly what God is calling you to do.  Get on that bus, or that plane and let those children know that they are not alone in carrying the burden of a country’s political warfare in which they are pawn and sacrifice.

Or write a check.  Write a letter; to a politician, to a child, to a newspaper.  Let your voice as a follower of Jesus be heard. Let the world know that your love of God compels you to love the stranger, no matter why they are in need, only that they are in need.

Risk making things awkward at the family gathering, or the water cooler, or the sermon, where “not talking politics” means not challenging our government to be a vehicle of compassion, justice and mercy. 

Pray without ceasing.  Look at the pictures. Find a child’s face and pray for that specific child until you find your heart bound to theirs.

Or find a child closer to home whose burden you might bear.  Stand with someone suffering under the weight of a system that keeps them from knowing their Dignity as beloved children of God.  Visit the sick, feed the hungry, visit those in prison. Join the Prison Ministry, volunteer for B-SAFE, work a shift in the Food Pantry.

I wonder, sometimes, if there is a Satan with the horns and the pitchfork and the tail, whether or not the greatest threat this beast has against the power of God’s love in the world is patience.  Whether this beast is playing the slow, long game of waiting until those working for the dream of God in this world will simply get tired, give up and stop caring for each other.  

In this dystopian fantasy, we all retreat into our own corners, become unaware of another’s suffering until there is simply no one left to care for one another.  In God’s dream, in Christ’s Law, Independence will be our downfall.

The church in Galatia sounds familiar to me.  What sounds like an argument about circumcision is actually an argument about which followers of Jesus were the “good ones”; the ones that followed Jewish Law on their way to finding Jesus, or those who did not.  While everyone is focused on figuring out who the Good and Right ones were, there is a fatigue entering the community. There is a reluctance to love those with whom they disagree. The community appears on the verge of a retreat into bitter Independence.

So writes Paul, “Let us not grow weary in doing what is right, for we will reap at harvest-time, if we do not give up.”

In the midst of their divisions, their arguments and their fatigue Paul writes with a simple reminder and call to return to follow the only Law that matters; the Law of Christ; to bear one another’s burdens.  And he promises, if they do that, at the end of the day, they will reap a harvest of God’s abundant grace, and love and mercy.

It is a reminder I know I need.  My disagreements, my fatigue, my inclination to retreat from the demand and need in the world, God understands them all.  God knows them. God in Jesus lived them, too.

Healthy boundaries are critical, as Jesus himself tells us in Luke’s Gospel, but boundaries are meant to keep us healthy in order that we can remain open, generous and loving.

Vacation, retreat, Sabbath are not only good ideas, they are commanded by scripture.  But they are meant to renew and restore us for the work ahead. they are not meant to be ends in and of themselves.

We are made to be irrevocably bound to one another without regard to ideology, theology, citizenship, denomination or any other distinction we might create to protect us from feeling responsible for the care of those with whom we disagree, don’t like,  don’t understand, don’t know. Even when we feel helpless and unsure how to respond.

It is exhausting work the apostle Paul encourages us to continue, that God needs us to continue.  It is how we are to follow the Law of Christ. And it just might be the best possible way to celebrate freedom; the freedom some of us enjoy, the freedom for which some of us long; the freedoms that have been won and the freedoms that remain aspirational.

For, though not all of us are yet free in this world we are, all of us, Free in Christ to Love as God first loved us, to be loved by one another as God loves us, to bear one another’s burdens until the day we might celebrate the harvest of the grace, love and mercy God promises us.

Bear one another’s burdens, and in so doing, you will fulfill the law of Christ.

May you have a blessed inter-dependence day.

AMEN.

© 2019 The Reverend Jeffrey W. Mello