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Its Late and its a Saturday Night, well technically its Sunday Morning @ 2:30 and I cannot sleep. I cannot sleep because my mind quite simply wont let me. I was talking to my friend Elizabeth and I jokingly said that its times like these when I feel like God has something for me that God wants me to see. That there is something here that wont let go until I wrestle with it and so after thinking and reading and thinking so more I have given in and thus I have decided to write.
One of the lectionary texts for this week is 1 John 5:1-6 in case you would like to read it. I will quote from it in certain places but it is my inspiration if you will, for this note. There was a time when I was younger where I felt as though I lived two separate lives or in two separate worlds. Growing up after my mom married my step dad I was in a weird place. I didn’t exactly like the idea of change and was very attached to my grand mother. I would spend the week days with at home and would spend just about every weekend at my grand mothers. This had always been the case even before my mother remarried but became different at this point in my life. I also spent much if not all of my summer with my grandmother. I felt as though I had two lives, the one with my parents and the one with my grand parents. I the same token I felt like I had two worlds that I lived in, the one where I went to school and the one where I went to church. Seeing as how I didn’t go to church in the same town i went to school these two were seperate. I had a group of friends for school and a group for church.
The people at church knew that I wanted to become a minister but the people that I went school with didn’t as much. Its not really cool when you are in high school to tell people you want to be a preacher, doesn’t really send the girls flocking to you. But I always felt at home in the church, it was quite literally my sanctuary. It was where I felt comfortable and where I went when I wanted to feel closer to God, when I wanted to make sure that God heard me. It wasn’t until i was older that these two worlds started to come together. I think going to Lon Morris College (a methodist junior college) maybe this possible. I was in a mixed environment of secular (for lack of a better word) and religious. In this environment I was able to merge the two worlds and become comfortable with who i was and who I would become. being around others who wanted to go into ministry gave me both a feeling of comfort and a feeling that I wasn’t alone. There was a strong sense of community at Lon Morris College and I attribute so much of who I am to the teachers and ministers that taught me and became my friends.
I feel like I was blessed because I was given an opportunity to mold my two worlds together into one world. Or more precisely I was allowed to let the part of me that was real and true to what God had created me to be, to shine through no matter where I was. There is a problem in the church that has become the church, and it is the problem of the two worlds. It is the idea that there is the world that we speak of inside the walls of the church, often times seen as idealistic and the world outside the church that is more realistic. Something happens to us when we leave the church and all the worries and problems of the world take over our lives and the idealistic parts of who we are and what we can accomplish get pushed aside. Being a political science major I seem to always revert back to political science but I see this so often in the way we view politics. I will use this example only because it is relevant to the topic at hand and not to get into a debate over who knew what but we look at the issue of torture. Inside the walls of a church the idea of torture is inconceivable in my mind. The idea that we would, even for safety, torture other human beings is completely incompatible with the teachings of Christ. Yet when we step out into the real world the issue becomes foggier. Its not quite as easy a decision for us. Another issue is War, it is incompatible with the teachings of Christ but outside the walls of the church we see it as a necessary evil at times.
Along with these idea we often times find it burdensome to take on what we are charged to do in church. We find it difficult to find the time to feed the poor or help the needy. We find it difficult to squeeze in the time to visit someone and if we do find the time and actually do it we feel sometimes as if it is a burden of sorts, one we may gladly bear but one all the same. The reason that I cannot sleep is because I feel inspired to say at this point in time two things. First that the ways of Christ are not burdensome they are a gift and if we are living in two worlds it is time to stand up and say enough.
1 John 5:3 says this : “3For the love of God is this, that we obey his commandments. And his commandments are not burdensome,” God did not give us these commandments so that we would be weighed down by the burden of try to live this way or that but so that we would be free. To me it seems quite simple, “Love God, and Love your Neighbor as yourself.” I know your thinking well its harder than it seems and it may be but only because of how we live our lives not because God wanted to be burdensome. In fact I feel personally called to live a simple life much like the lives of the people in the early church. I don’t need a big house or a fancy car, the newest this and or the latest that. I have in the past few months come to terms with the fact that I will never live that sort of a life of excess because I personally believe that a life lived in excess is not what I am called to. I feel as christians we are called to a life of simplicity, and that life is not burdensome but yet rewarding and meaningful in a way that is immeasurable. What is more burdensome, tons of credit card debt and loan payments and living above your means or even right at your means, or living a life where simplicity is key and not having debt and trying to “keep up with the Jones’” as my mother would say.
There is something that happens to us when we decide to live a simple life, we are freed from so much worry that we are able to focus on what really matters, others. God’s commandments are not burdensome, they are a gift, a gift so often times view by the world as a burden.
And here comes what I stared at and stared at before I felt as though I got it, this is the greatness of God. “And this is the victory that conquers the world, our faith. 5Who is it that conquers the world but the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God?” 1 John 5:4 I wrestled with this because I had to cut through the war like metaphors to get to the real substance. If you were to read this and simply take it for what it says then you would see that our faith is what allows us to conquer the world, but we think of it as conquering or taking something over, but what if the writer is not say in conquer in terms of taking over but merely breaking the hold. Jesus conquered sin and death through the resurrection and in the same token we can conquer the world through our faith. In our faith we are set free.
Let me clarify, these things that hold us down that separate our two worlds can be joined through our faith, when we allow our faith to become not just who we are inside the church but who we are 24-7 then we no longer have to worry about thinking in two different ways. We no longer see torture in two ways but in one, the way of truth. We are not conquering to take over the world and make it into something else but we are making it so that we are no longer bound by what the world says. It isn’t a fight to force the world to live one way but to say that we aren’t bound in the ways of the world. The world says we need to torture to stay safe, I say we don’t. I say we love God and we Love our Neighbor as our self and if our neighbor is a criminal then we treat him or her with dignity and respect. The world says sometimes war is necessary I say that he who lives by the sword dies by it, well Jesus said that. There are other means such as diplomacy. Is there anyone who feels that if we treated every nation and every person as a child of God and spent our time feeding and clothing the poor and making sure that people had the medicines and basic needs that we have, is there anyone who feels that would make people dislike who we are and what we stand for. If we spent what we spend on war on making sure people around the world had what they needed, is there anyone who feels that the world would be a worse place for it and that we would be seen as arrogant and self serving? The reason we are seen this way is because in stead of doing these things we pick sides and we fight wars, we act only when it is in “our best interests” we do whatever it takes, we torture if we need to as long as it keeps US safe. The reason that we are seen as arrogant and self serving is because we are.
The fact of the matter is that we don’t have to be this way, we have been given the gift not burden of Loving our neighbor as ourselves. We don’t have to live in two worlds, we can live in one world unbound by its societal norms much in the way that Jesus did. We can follow in the footsteps of Christ and be radicals and it all starts with a concept that seemed radical years and years ago and still seems radical in the world we live in, to Love God and Love our Neighbor as ourselves. I promise you that if can take a page from the early churches playbook and simplify it will go a long way to relieving the burdens of the world and allow us to focus more freely on caring for the needs of others. If we can allow our faith in God to become who we are and not just what we say then we can be freed from the greed and self service that is so common in our society and we can focus more on others.
I will close with this idea, I feel we have to take an inventory of our lives and find out what is important. When we look back on our lives will it be consumed with memories of us trying to get whatever we can, the newest this or the latest that, will it be us trying to climb to the top of the corporate ladder so that when we turn 60 we can retire instead of 65 or 70. And if this is what we have devoted our lives to, the real questions is has this stopped us or held us back from doing what we can to make the world a better place? Having money is great and retirement sounds great but if we get there and we have not feed the hungry and clothed the naked, if we have not visited the sick or in prison if we have not cared for the least of these the what have we done with our life. The simple fact is that if we look back and have not done these things, no matter how much stuff or money we have, we have failed, plain and simple.
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