The Reign of Love

A sermon preached at All Hallows by Sheena McMain on 23 November 2008
(Christ the King)

• Audio (listen to this sermon online) — sorry, audio files not yet available

Readings:

Ezekiel 34:11—16, 20—24
Psalm 100 or Psalm 95:1—7a
Ephesians 1:15—23
Matthew 25:31—46

For the last two years I have had on my kitchen table this ceramic candle holder. I came upon it at a time when I was feeling painfully alienated from myself and from others, a time when everything seemed lost and broken. It represents a South American tradition which says that when a circle of friends light a fire and join hands round it they will be friends for ever. It’s a model of relationship.

Today is the last Sunday of the Kingdom Season and of the church year, when we celebrate the reign of Christ the King. We can get complicated about what that means, but I am going to stick with the simple statement of Julian of Norwich, who said ‘Love was his meaning’.

Love was his meaning.

Today we celebrate the reign of the King of Love.

And so I’d like to think about relationship.

Our relationship with ourselves, with each other and with God.

The Bible is big on relationship: it’s gracious evidence of our human struggle with commitment, responsibility, acceptance and forgiveness.

It’s one massive love letter from God. It honours our longing to know this love and to make living in trusting relationship to him our priority, and it shows us how God honours and redeems even our most deliberate resistance.

So take heart. We are in good company.

The first thing I notice about this circle of friends is that they are all of equal height.

The second is that that are all linked by two layers of joined hands at the shoulder and the hip.

And the third thing is that they are all facing the centre.

They are all of equal height, they are all linked together and they are all facing the centre.

Let’s keep that image in mind as we think first about our relationship with ourselves.

I don’t know about you but I have a lots of different parts to my self:

There’s Dr McMain, a capable and decisive part of my self,

There’s Sheena, Warrior Princess, passionate about unfairness, feisty and tenacious,

There’s Sister Scholastica, studious and focused, inclined to be a bit religious.

I happen to quite like these three.

But there’s also Mrs Blobby, who feels unattractive and overweight,

and Screaming Sheena who feels lonely and abandoned.

I like these a lot less.

The parts I like are on display, and the parts I don’t like I have spent a lot of energy hiding from myself and from other people, pretending they are not there — I even try to get rid of them by diversion caring for others, caring for appearance, social outings and even therapy.

And of course each of them in their turn has another side.

The warrior princess can be intolerant and unfair, and Mrs Blobby might hide a beautiful siren.

We cast out parts of ourselves at our peril.

I want to be all the things I think are ok. But the truth is I am a messy mixture.

Our judgment of ourselves is deeply flawed. We can’t tell the sheep from the goats.

So today’s Gospel reading challenges me when I read the words of the pioneering psychologist Carl Jung: ‘but what if the “least of these” that Jesus talks about turns out to be part of our own selves?’ The parts of ourselves that are sick and homeless and hungry and thirsty and naked.

In the reign of God we are called to love ourselves in our entirety: to honour every part of ourselves — not just our strengths but our manifold weaknesses. Even our anger and despair and doubt.

In the reign of God we are called to accept all in ourselves that we have abandoned and hidden or denied or undervalued, to drop the pretence and posturing we adopt to make ourselves acceptable, to reconcile our inner conflict and division against ourselves, judging ourselves harshly and badly, neglecting ourselves — to love ourselves as we are loved by God.

In the reign of God we are called to face our true centre, to resolve to live out of the selves that have been loved since the foundation of the world, to stand united and free and whole in the light.

In the reign of God we are called, too, to love one other as we love ourselves.

Indeed, how we love ourselves may determine how well we can love the other: we are all made in the image of God.

So who do we find most difficult to love? Aren’t they people who remind us of the parts of ourselves we fear or dislike?

Dr McMain can be a bit intolerant. Guess what? I hate intolerant people.

Richard Rohr says this in his book Everything Belongs:

‘Jesus pushes it back to the edge … can you even see the image of Christ in the least of these brothers and sisters?

He uses that as his only image of the final judgment.

Nothing about commandments, nothing about church attendance, nothing about papal infallibility, simply a matter of our ability to see.

Can we see Christ in the least of our brothers and sisters?’

Mahatma Gandhi said ‘if you cannot encounter God in your neighbour, you are very unlikely to encounter him at all.’

We are called to love each other in our entirety. Even the parts, especially the parts, we would prefer to ignore, deny or overlook.

We are called to value each other equally. We are one body, after all, like it or not, hand, foot, eye and armpit.

And we are called to love even those we make the outsider, who represent the things that we have banished.

In the circle of friends, the light is the centre and all the circle are focused on the centre, not each other.

Let us look to Jesus, our centre, to hold us and guide us as we seek to love each other.

In the café a couple of weeks ago Bob and Steve were in conversation about how policemen and soldiers manage to stand still for long periods of time, always keeping their muscles moving, even though their bodies are stationary.

It seems to me that’s how it is in our circle of relationship, a state of dynamic tension:

Hands on each other’s shoulders, building each other up in joy, peace, patience, kindness and self-control.

Hands on each other’s hips, holding each other steady in honesty, compassion, mercy and forgiveness, with many stops and starts and swaying about.

If Love is revealing to someone else their beauty, then we are called to honour and affirm it in each other.

Jesus goes further than this: He tells us to love even our enemies.

There is an animal called the bharal, the Himalayan blue sheep, which looks like a sheep, acts like a sheep, is named as a sheep … but is actually genetically a goat.

That reminds me that things are never as they appear, just as in the parable of the wheat and the weeds. It also reminds me that judgment is probably best left to God.

We know only in part and we see only in part.

We can be reasonably sure that the judgment we imagine is probably not like the judgment of God. We like to label right and wrong, in and out, ok and not ok, to assert our moral superiority, to be in control. We can’t help it, we are human.

But God tells us that his ways are not our ways and his thoughts not our thoughts.

So in the Reign of Love, let’s abandon judging each other. We’ll only get it wrong.

Jesus said he came into the world not to condemn it but to save it. That suggests to me that God’s judgment will be finer and more searching than ours. And that it will be ultimately about love, not punishment.

Jesus calls us to love God, love our neighbour as ourselves, without distinction: relative, friend, outsider.

He went even further than that, and told us to love our enemies.

To love as forgiven and forgiving people challenges us to see others not as rivals, constantly comparing ourselves with each other, generating envy, hatred and greed and getting one up on one another to make ourselves feel better and somehow in control, but as equals, equally beautiful, equally broken, equally fallible and equally loved by God. Marvellously made in his image.

That’s scary stuff … and to step into real forgiveness may often feel like agony.

Christ our King, naked and vulnerable love, homeless baby and reviled man on a cross, holds the tension of our broken world in his broken arms, forgiving, reconciling, transforming and healing.

Dostoyesvsky in his novel The Brothers Karamazov says this:

‘Love people in their sin, for that is the semblance of Divine Love and is the highest love on earth.

Love all of God’s creation. The whole and every grain of sand of it.

Love every leaf, every ray of God’s light.

Love the animals, love the plants, love everything.

If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things.

Once you perceive it, you will begin to comprehend it better every day.

And you will come at last to love the whole world with an all-embracing love.’

Jesus came to bring good news to the poor, release to captives, recovery of sight to the blind and to let the oppressed go free.

Love was his meaning.

Let it be ours.

Amen.

Copyright © 2008 Sheena McMain

Audio

This sermon was recorded. If you wish, you can listen to the sermon online. Just click on the appropriate link below:

*Notes on the audio formats

• MP4 format
  MP4 format is a multimedia container format standard. Audio MP4 files can combine high compression with very high quality. Many media players can play MP4 files, including RealPlayer, QuickTime, iTunes, and recent versions of Windows Media Player (you may need to download a codec from www.free-codecs.com/download/3ivx.htm).
• Windows Media Player format
  Windows Media Audio is the native format of Windows Media Player, which is installed as part of Windows. If you have an earlier version, you can download version 9 (for Windows 98SE, Millennium and 2000) or version 11 or later (for Windows XP, Vista or Windows 7) from www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/download/AllDownloads.aspx?displang=en&qstechnology. These are quite large downloads [~ 10 MB or larger], so if you have a dial-up connection you may prefer to ask Phil for a copy of the installation program on CD.
• MP3 format
  MP3 is a commonly used audio format using lossy compression. Most media players can play MP3 files, including RealPlayer, QuickTime, iTunes, Windows Media Player and many others.
• RealAudio format
  RealAudio requires RealPlayer (or the older RealOne Player) to be installed. A free version of RealPlayer can be downloaded from http://uk.real.com/player/ (choose the free player on the left of the page) — but again it’s a large download [~ 13 MB], so if you have a dial-up connection you may prefer to ask Phil for a copy of the installation program on CD.
  
  Alternatively, you can install Real Alternative, which will allow you to play RealMedia files without having to install RealPlayer/RealOne Player. Real Alternative is free, and works well with all major browsers; it is also a much smaller download (5.7 MB). Get it from http://www.free-codecs.com/Real_Alternative_download.htm.

This page was last updated on Tuesday, 19 February 2008

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