The Hermeneutic of Love

What lens we look through determines what we see.

This, perhaps, was one of the most important lessons I learned and learned again and relearned while in seminary.

Where I stand shapes, well, everything.

I cannot understand what I cannot see.

And there is much I cannot see.

It is a conundrum.

Seeking to look through the lens of love helps greatly.

But I must take care to define very clearly what I understand love to be, to include.

Hence my own list:

1. Love is humble enough to know and freely admit to itself that it does not, cannot, know everything.  Thus even in understanding my own hermeneutic, I must always take care to remember this crucial caveat: I might be wrong. . . about you, about me, about ‘it’, whatever it may be, the simple truth is that I might be wrong.

2. Love is caring and caring requires the time and discipline and effort to do the work – the work of seeking understanding from your point of view . . . the work of listening . . . the work of loving, especially in the midst of conflict or disagreement . . . the work of self-evaluation and understanding, especially, perhaps, when I would seek to tell someone else what they ought or ought not do (which, of course, takes me right back to #1, that old friend and enemy, humility).

3. Love actively seeks to try to see from another’s vantage point, for love knows itself for the captive to self that it is.

4. Love always checks its own motives.  Assuring that I am acting from love, and not from bias, prejudice, self-interest, or efforts to control is hard, but important and necessary work.  Think Paul’s admonition about clanging cymbals here – without love as the motive, the impetus, a seemingly loving act is really nothing at all.

5. Love requires encounter.  I cannot love someone theoretically.  Love always has a locus, an object, a direction.  There is no abstraction in love.

6. Love is a freeing thing.  If what I’m doing is entangling, controlling, desirous of reward or recognition, filled with expectation, it’s something, but it isn’t love.  Pretty simple.

7. If it isn’t about ‘I’ or ‘we’, but all about ‘you’, it’s not love, it’s control.

8. If I cannot see myself in you or your situation, I haven’t looked hard enough (which takes us back to doing the hard work of loving, eh?).

9. I cannot say that I am loving when I ‘love’ one person or group at the expense of another.  (Think here of MLK”s reminder that what he did he did for the oppressor, whom he loved, as much as for the oppressed).  Standing up for one does not mean demonizing another – that is not love or loving.

10. And back to the beginning – the humility of love must recognize that God is doing a work in you as much as God is doing a work in me, stand back and allow you and God to sort out your business as we are sorting out mine.  In other words, I am no one’s god and in loving you, it is not my job to change you.

11. The hardest one of all for me – loving someone probably means not making decisions for or about them when they’re not in the room.  It’s that freeing freedom thing – allowing someone the freedom of their own lives, their own choices.  Even the bad ones.  Hmmm.

I am wondering today what you would add to this list – what are the things you have to remember about your own hermeneutic of love?

Reconciliation: The Fruit of Forgiveness

2 Corinthians 5.17-21: . . . anyone united with the Messiah gets a fresh start, is created new. . . All this comes from the God who settled the relationship between us and him, and then called us to settle our relationships with each other. God put the world square with himself through the Messiah, giving the world a fresh start by offering forgiveness of sins. God has given us the task of telling everyone what he is doing. . . God uses us to persuade men and women to drop their differences and enter into God’s work of making things right between them. We’re speaking for Christ himself now: Become friends with God; he’s already a friend with you.  (The Message)

Reconciliation: The Fruit of Forgiveness

Forgiveness is

1. A gift – it is not deserved or earned.  It is given.

2. A sacrifice – forgiveness costs the giver.

3. A humbling – to receive forgiveness is to be humble.  So too giving forgiveness can be humbling.  Hubris will not do it.  Pride cannot receive it.

4. A work – something we do rather than something we think.

Knowing what forgiveness is – a sacrificial gift humbling to receive, costly to give, the work and the will together, the question remains, what is the fruit, the result, of forgiveness?

We forgive and receive forgiveness, is because God has so commanded.  This is obedience.  Have no doubt about it: if you are refusing to forgive, you are disobeying God.

Next, we forgive because it is in our own best interests to do so.  In his Yom Kippur sermon, a rabbi spoke about the importance of forgiveness – of seeking it and granting it: “Jewish law requires a person to ask for forgiveness three times—it must be genuine, heartfelt and inspired by true remorse. If the wronged individual does not forgive after three sincere attempts, then the person who did the wrong is forgiven and the one not forgiving becomes guilty and now needs to ask for forgiveness for not forgiving.”  Forgiveness is so important, so crucial, to the community of humanity, that to refuse to extend it when asked for is to take on the sin of the one seeking the forgiveness.

We forgive and are forgiven because it is in the interests of the one doing the harm to be forgiven.  It is an act of freeing from bondage and captivity – theirs as well as ours.

Ultimately – the very reason God commands forgiveness, is that we may be reconciled – to God, to ourselves, to the world.

Forgiveness is the agency of reconciliation –  cosmic rather than individual or even collective –  the work of heaven and all creation.

We are creatures made to live with others.  God has created all of this in such a way that what we do affects heaven as much as what heaven does affects us.

We are all in this universal boat together.  Reconciliation, the fruit of forgiveness, is the essential grease to the machinery of our lives together.  Without reconciliation, someone’s going to get kicked out of the boat.  Equilibrium is lost.  And the boat sinks.

Sometimes reconciliation looks like two estranged people coming back together into a relationship better than ever before.  Sometimes it means mom and dad stay divorced, but they quit fighting and start caring about the feelings, needs and desires of the other parent as much as their own.

Sometimes reconciliation means visiting the one who murdered your loved one in prison.  Or loaning your most bitter enemies money in order to rebuild their countries, as in the Marshall Plan following World War II.

Sometimes reconciliation means sharing your very best secret deer stand with the brother who never shared a single toy with you.  And being glad to do it.

It isn’t easy.  But it’s necessary.  Our world is crumbling in on itself for the want of some reconciling hands reached out in the hope, the dream, that things might be otherwise.

Beginning with ourselves, recall basic commonalities to all the possibilities of reconciliation:

1. Reconciliation means seeing the other person as a human being who is as loved and cherished by God as are you and treating them – broken, hurt and hurting them – accordingly.

2. It means being open to the possibilities of a new relationship beyond your wildest imaginings – which also means being open to the possibility of being hurt again.

3. Reconciliation means understanding, accepting and even embracing as good that we are all in this boat together and that we are all essential to the boat’s not sinking – none are expendable, not even those who have done me the most harm.

4. Reconciliation means living in to the reality that redemption is the way – the only way – for humanity to survive and thrive on this planet.  As Abraham Lincoln once famously said, “a house divided against itself cannot stand”.  To be unreconciled is to live in a permanently divided house, which is to say, no house at all.

As Paul reminds us in 2 Corinthians, we are made new . . . we have been given a fresh start . . . that start comes with a challenge: don’t bring the old hurts, the old wounds, the old grievances with you into this new life. . .

God has entrusted God’s message of reconciliation to us!  It is an extraordinary gift.

Isn’t it time and past time to drop our  differences . . . roll up our sleeves and get busy doing the work – the work of making things right between us?

That, after all, is why we are here.

Sermon Cliff Note: Claiming Freedom

SCRIPTURE Luke 17.11-19

On the way to Jerusalem, Jesus often finds himself in the in-between places with the in-between people.

That’s the kind of place where these men and the people like them are forced to live . . . in the place where no one lives, because, very simply, in their own cultures, they are no one.

So complete is their exclusion that even when Jesus approaches them, they keep their distance . . . even as they seek his help, they withdraw themselves from him.

Jesus, when he saw them, and in response to their cry for his help, orders them to go and show themselves to the priests.  And they do.  All of them went.  All of them proceeded out of the no-mans land together . . . all of them obeyed Jesus . . . and in their trusting obedience, which, as far as they knew, placed them in the very real danger of being killed by the guards of their borderlands . . . they went . . . and in the going, they were healed, made clean . . .

They weren’t healed by a simple word from Jesus . . . in this case, it seems Jesus wanted them to understand that their healing was their freedom . . . they would know that in their heads, but they had to know it with their feet as well . . .

They had to understand that their being made whole again meant that they were free and that they were free meant they were made whole . . . the lesson of freedom is one that we humans can only know in our feet . . . for our heads will keep us captives every time . . . captives of our old fears. . .

And here, perhaps, is the lesson of the tenth leper . . . the one who turned back . . . the one who actually went back into the no-man’s land of his own captivity, but as a free man . . .

The other nine kept going in the direction that took them as far away from their prison as they could get.  The healing is enough for them . . . and really, who can blame them? . . . they aren’t just healed of a dread disease, they are restored to their community . . . Jesus’ command that they go to the priests is in accord with the law of their time . . .before they could go home to their families, they had to be judged to be genuinely safe to the community by the priests. Who can blame them for not turning back in their haste to get home?

But by keeping on their course, they remained as captive to their disease as if they still carried the sores on their bodies . . .

Only the tenth man knew that he had been freed from all of that . . . only the tenth leper knew he was a leper no more . . . only the tenth man knew he had been freed from the fear and bondage of living in prison . . . for friends, only a free man dares to revisit the site of his own imprisonment and proclaim it to be holy ground . . .

Only a free man turns back to his prison in order to give thanks for the very freedom he now enjoys . . .

Ten were healed, made clean, that day, but only one was made whole . . .

Jesus can heal us, but it remains to us to claim the freedom that healing brings . . .

Jesuit priest John Kavanaugh thinks about it all this way, “And Christ, having healed ten, saw something greater in the one Samaritan who made time to come back, fall at his feet, and praise God. He saw the splendor of a human heart that believes it is loved, that accepts the gift. Such faith . . . is the gift back to God, so enchanting that God would die for love of it.”


God would . . . and God did . . . Let us claim this truth for ourselves and live as the free people . . . the beloved people we are.  Amen.