Friday night and Saturday most of the Session, those leaders you have called and installed to serve as the spiritual leaders in this congregation, gathered for a visioning retreat. We were lead by a pair of consultants from the Center for Healthy Churches and one of the ways we got started was with some feedback about what the consultants, Michelle and Reggie, had learned about our church from a series of documents we sent them in preparation. Michelle was actually familiar with at least one of them because she was the consultant who helped us draft it a few years ago, but that was just one of the 10 documents representing six studies, reports, and analyses our church has produced over the last 11 years to better understand ourselves and our mission field.
Without judgement and with some amusement they and we sat with that a bit. Ten documents over eleven years. I mean, come on. That’s just a little funny. And it says a little bit about us. Michelle taught us that it is a characteristic of a congregational archetype known as the magi church. Magi like the wise men or the sages or the philosophers who came from the east to see Jesus after his birth. The magi were learned people, people who studied the stars and the times. People who were curious, who liked to know things and understand them, to see how they fit together, how they work, what they mean.
And magi churches are similar. They like to study – the Bible, theology, spirituality, their communities, themselves. They like to learn. They like to grow. They like to seek. They like to ask questions. All wonderful characteristics!!! And like all archetypes magi churches could take these wonderful characteristics to an extreme, revealing a shadow side of the symbol. Magi churches can sometimes get caught in a spiral of learning, of gathering information, lots and lots of information, with the idea that when we know it all, or at least when we know enough, the data will tell us the exact one right answer to the question, “What should we do?”
A magi church might see itself in the lawyer questioning Jesus.
If that makes you bristle a little it might be because the church has a history of over-villainizing the people and groups who question Jesus in the gospels – particularly the Pharisees and the Sadducees. Like the audience watching and old silent movie we’ve been conditioned to boo and hiss when they appear on screen in a story, at least internally although maybe even externally if you had a 4th grade Sunday School teacher like I did. We’ve become accustomed to seeing them as the legalistic, hypocritical foil to the spiritual, trustworthy Jesus, and not without some assistance from Jesus’ own words, even those that follow this very passage.
But in doing this we ignore the credibility that Jesus gave them by engaging in their debates and discussion, honoring their appetite for discovering. The Pharisees and Sadducees are people of Jesus own faith family who are doing exactly what the law and the prophets ask of them – trying to help the Jewish people follow God faithfully. Lawyers in this tradition don’t exist for the kinds of prosecuting or defending we associate with lawyers today. A lawyer in the Pharisaic tradition is more like a professional theologian, whose job it is to study the scriptures and help people understand how to be faithful to the covenants and commands within them.
We’ve painted them as zealous sticklers, but if we try on the idea that we are magi church, we probably have more in common with them than we have been willing to admit. They and we want to know how to do this right. Out of this whole thick of book of a lot of words and directions and guidance, we want to know the most important ones to pay attention to, to internalize, to pattern our lives around. And sometimes we might even want to test Jesus to see if his favorites line up with our favorites so we can know whether or not he’s really one of us. We want to know the right things to think and do, believe and pray, because we have an earnest desire to be faithful to God.
Magi churches, our church, our own history shows, like to ask questions – a lot of questions. We like to dig deeper to try to know and understand both God and ourselves with the idea that if we know more we might know what is more right, what is more faithful, what is the direction in which we should go, what is the thing we might do, what is the most important commandment to follow Jesus faithfully in the world.
And knowing is not a bad thing.
And that can’t be the only thing for a people and a church who have been told the greatest commandment is this:
‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind….’ And ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’
Knowing is an important part of loving. Loving is patient, love is kind, we are told. It’s not envious or jealous or arrogant or rude. Love means paying attention. But love is about more than knowing or paying attention.
We know this in our familial relationships and friendships, right? Let’s use that pop-self-help phenomenon, The 5 Love Languages, as an example. It may not be the scholarly or data-based psychology; it’s got some problematic aspects to it, particularly in its commentary on traditional gender roles, but for our sake the parts that ring true are helpful. The idea is that there are five general ways people feel and show love, and each of us have one that is particularly dominant or effective for us, our default in showing and receiving love. Therefore we can better communicate love when we know what makes someone feel loved.
So it’s great to know your family member feels loved most when they hear words of affirmation to them. But knowing isn’t enough; you have to actually speak the words for them to know your love. It’s not enough to know they appreciate acts of kindness; you love by actually committing do kind acts for them and doing them. Right?
So, it’s not love to simply know that God wants to be in relationship with us and commune with us and work for the healing of the world with us. It’s love to spend time in prayer, to delight in God’s creation, to work for God’s justice in our community.
It’s not love to just be aware that there are children who go hungry over the weekend when the Sheridan Elementary School cafeteria isn’t open to feed them. It’s love to do something about that knowledge – like collect food and pack backpacks to be delivered.
It’s not love to only hear that our neighbors and community are looking for safe and non-threatening places to spend time with their children or opportunities for their kids to be loved and learn in accepting and compassionate classrooms and then do nothing about it. It’s love to offer them fun, safe events like Trunk or Treat, and a preschool where they can grow in knowledge and the love of Christ.
It’s not love to recognize there are people in our congregation who are grieving losses or feeling overwhelmed in the demands of their life and leave it there. It’s love to walk with them, to pray for them, to assist with the needs that they identify, not the things we assume will help.
It’s the paying attention AND doing that fully loves. In fact immediately following these teachings Jesus points out that some religious folk have trouble with this. Sometimes we don’t pay attention and we do the wrong things hoping they are what God really wants. And sometimes we pay attention, but we go in a different direction anyway or no way at all.
That last one – paying attention and going no way at all – is the risk magi churches or magi Christians have to watch out for.
It’s why several months ago, when the session was beginning discernment about the complex issue of the resources represented in our building and property based on the invaluable work of a deeply respected strategy team, the session literally made a vote to not do nothing. I know. It’s OK to have a chuckle. We did, too. At face value that vote hardly sounds like an action item, but at the start of an important journey, in a church that is highly skilled at studying issues, not doing nothing is a commitment to doing something – it’s a commitment to action.
It’s acknowledging that we are paying attention and that we know paying attention isn’t enough. It’s a declaration that we won’t study this to death, but we will take all the information we have gathered and do something with it that facilitates our response to what Jesus tells us is the greatest commandment – loving God and loving our neighbor. We’re not just going to think about loving them. We’re not just going to research the best ways to love. We’re not just going to brainstorm or make plans to love sometime in the future when it feels more stable or we’ve cut our way to an idealized balanced budget. We’re going to take our imperfect selves and live God’s love in the way of Jesus by actually loving God and our neighbors with our resources in a way that is courageous and generous, affirming and nurturing, effective and resilient.
This is also what our whole financial pledge campaign theme has been inviting us all into as individuals and households, as followers of Jesus. For five weeks we have looked at the ways we actually live the love of God we know in Christ Jesus in our very own lives – by sharing, by including, by loving, by proclaiming – and now by dedicating.
In his first letter to the Thessalonians, Paul is talking to the people he met and ministered among in the diverse city of Thessalonica, a port city in modern-day Greece that was at that time under Roman rule. In the portion we heard today, Paul is reminding the people why he had come to them in the first place. It wasn’t in vain, because he wanted fame or glory or a vacation in the Greek isles, he told them. It wasn’t because he was deceitful or full of trickery. It wasn’t to flatter the Thessalonians or because Paul and his companions were greedy and wanted to fleece the new believers. It was because the apostles were so convinced of the truth and the grace and the good news of the gospel, of the love of God in Jesus Christ that they had to do something about it. It wasn’t good enough to know it; they were determined to share it and not just share the gospel, but share their very selves.
That last sentence of reading, verse 8 of chapter 2, it has caught my breath every single time I have read it over the last couple of months of thinking about this series and this theme.
“So deeply do we care for you that we are determined to share with you not only the gospel of God but also our own selves, because you have become very dear to us.” Loving God and loving neighbor. “On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.”
Because of Christ’s love for us, this is what we dedicate our lives and our resources to doing – loving God and loving neighbor by sharing not only the gospel of God but also our own selves. This is what the stewardship of our money and our energy as disciples and our building and our investments as a a church is all about. It’s not a reluctant payment for services rendered. It’s not means to meet a budget. It’s not a token to wipe away guilt or appease a grumpy God. It’s an opportunity to courageously trust God who loves us first. It is an invitation to dedicate our whole selves to loving God and loving neighbors in return. Thanks be to God.
What is one new thing you can do to dedicate your life to loving God, loving neighbors, and loving yourself?