Messages from the Body

Here is a sampling of some of the messages that have made a special impact at CCiPH, and that have been transcribed or written in manuscript.

Most weeks in our equipping assembly, at least one man has been asked to prepare a message that will build up believers. Often, the message is taken from the liturgical Gospel reading of the day, or it is a life message that God has been working into the fabric of that man. It is included here to build you up.

Loving On Earth as in Heaven

Message from Ben Gregory on November 02, 2003

Mark 12:28-34

When Ruthie was in the sixth grade she got a note from her friend Nicole in which Nicole told her that they could no longer be friends.  It seems that the “cool” girls had informed Nicole that if she would ditch Ruthie she too could be cool.  So she did.  What do you think that does to an eleven-year-old girl?

There’s a guy at work whom I’ll call John (it’s not his real name) who started at the Home Depot about a year after I did.  He was hard to get to know and not terribly likeable.  In fact, he and I still get a little bristly from time to time.  Come to find out, John’s parents were murdered when he was four or five and he grew up in an orphanage, raised by a television—sixteen or eighteen hours a day, he said.  Every day.  For years.  No human contact to speak of.  No affection.  No hugs.  Just a television.  He’s raising kids of his own now.  What will their children (John’s grandchildren) be like because of a double homicide thirty years ago and an orphanage where children weren’t people.

It happens in a million different forms and in as many different degrees, but the damage we do to one another as we live here together echoes through years and generations in ways that we rarely know about.  Look around this room.  Look at the faces of your brothers and sisters.  Look at the stories that are represented here.  We are none of us who we might have been.  We’ve all been affected by this kind of psycho-emotional heritage and whether we’re aware of it or not, it continues to color who we are and what kind of lives we live.  We’re so mangled by living in a world where people so often don’t love that we’ll never be aware of the lives that might have been.

And Jesus steps into this world and says, “Love the Lord your God with all you heart and soul and mind and strength,” and “Love your neighbor as yourself.”  Tuesday night we looked at some of the parables that Jesus told.  He talked about a servant who wouldn’t forgive.  He talked about a man who went out of his way to help a dying man whom he could justifiably have left to bleed to death in the road.  He talked about a shepherd who was so concerned with one lost sheep that he left the entire rest of his flock to go find it.  And he pointed out that the kind of people whom the Father recognizes as blessed and righteous and standing to receive an inheritance are those who demonstrate love to the people around them, especially the very needy.

Now I hand-picked these teachings for our Tuesday night discussion and I don’t know that they’re representative of the rest of the stories Jesus told (they may be) but they’re at least enough to indicate that people and the way we are with each other are important to him.  We also looked at twenty-one different New Testament passages, one from each letter from Romans to Jude (actually we only had time to look at half of them) and in every letter in the New Testament there’s something like:

“Be devoted to one another in brotherly love.  Honor one another above yourselves,” and,

“Love is patient, love is kind.  It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.  It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.  Love does not delight in evil but rejoices in the truth.  It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres,” and,

“Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love,” and,

“Get rid of all bitterness, rage and anger, brawling and slander, along with every form of malice.  Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other just as in Christ God forgave you,” and,

“Do nothing our of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider others better than yourselves,” and,

“Now about brotherly love we do not need to write to you, for you yourselves have been taught by God to love each other,” and,

“We ought always to thank God for you, brothers, and rightly so, because your faith is growing more and more, and the love every one of you has for each other is increasing,” and,

“Your great love has given me great joy and encouragement, because you, brother, have refreshed the hearts of the saints,” and,

“But the wisdom that comes from heaven is first of all pure; then peace-loving, considerate, submissive, full of mercy and good fruit, impartial and sincere,” and,

“Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God.  Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God,” and,

  “Be merciful to those who doubt.”

Sometimes it’s stated as a negative—as instruction not to do something—but it’s there.  And again I’m not suggesting that this is all these letters talk about, but it sure keeps coming up.

I think I’ve mentioned before that I follow the lectionary (as best as I can figure it out) for these Sunday talks.  Two times ago I had Mark 9 where Jesus tells his disciples that if they want to be first they must learn to serve the people around them.  Then last time it was Mark 10 and it was there again.  He says essentially the same thing, but I didn’t want to get redundant, so I took a different angle.  (Why do I want to get away from it so bad?  Jesus didn’t.  Maybe it’s because I still wrestle with a twisted view of what life in the Kingdom is about.  I suggested Tuesday night that this all might sound too people-centered, and someone—I think it was Dana—said, “So was God.)  And now here I am again and for the third time in a row, there it is.  It’s all over the New Testament letters and Jesus says, “Love God and love people.”  Love God.  Love people. 

Love God.  And I have to confess to you that I don’t know what that means.  He doesn’t need anything.  He’s always with me—it’s not like I can “spend time with him” (like some kind of Date Night with God).  And I don’t get the impression that he’s as emotionally dependent as we are.

When Jesus said to love he was speaking to people who couldn’t pick whom they would marry and who wouldn’t even understand our concept of “falling in love.”  They didn’t hear “love” with all the emotional complications that we attach to it.  The word Mark wrote is agape.  I don’t know what word Jesus actually said; agape is a Greek word and I doubt he was teaching in Greek, but regardless this is not an emotional word.  All that to say that I’m not sure what “love God” means, unless…

Unless the best way for me to love God is to love people.  Unless that’s why Jesus connects them so closely.  Unless that’s why the New Testament won’t shut up about it.  And in fact, what I’m coming to believe is that loving God and loving people are very nearly the same thing.  Jesus says, “If you love me obey what I command.”  And over and over what he commands is for us to love.  It’s what we’re called to—what we’ve been freed for.  Listen to what Paul wrote to the Galatians:  “You, my brothers, were called to be free.  But do not use your freedom to indulge the flesh; rather, serve one another in love.  The entire law is summed up in a single command: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’”  The entire law.

We live in a fallen world, but I’m guessing that I don’t have to tell you that.  The things that other students said to me when I my family moved here from Michigan and I was the new kid at Oak Hills High School have forever changed who I am.

I know a lady who has never, for as long as anyone can remember, been emotionally healthy.  She was raised by the kind of mean father they make movies about.  It affected the way she raised her children and it will affect the way they raise their own.  Why was her father so mean?  Some of it had to do with the fact that when he was little his parents abandoned him to the backyard where they kept him tethered to a tree with clothesline.  For years.  (Put away, just for a moment, your American need for personal responsibility—this stuff really does affect us.)  Why did his parents do that to their son?  I don’t know.  But there was a reason.  And if we had enough information, we could trace it back forever, like some sick family tree—twisted and gnarled by countless decisions not to love.  But what if one of the people involved in this one lady’s life—say 200 years ago—had allowed God to redeem her in Jesus Christ?  What is one of a million decisions had been different?  One.  You and I—all of us—would live in a different world.

Yesterday’s daily Buddhist wisdom said, “Then the Buddha said to his monks, ‘walk over the earth for the blessing of many, the happiness of many, out of compassion for the world, for the welfare and the blessing of gods and men.’”  And Jewel said, “Please be careful with me; I’m sensitive and I’d like to stay that way.”  You don’t have to know the answer to be aware of the question.  We live in a fallen world full of people who are vulnerable and in pain—anyone who’s paying any attention at all can see that.  And Jesus calls us to love, not as one more rule that we’d better keep if we want God to like us—all of that has been taken care of—but in order to participate with him in the redemption of the world.  One person at a time.  So keep it up.

History of Us

by Emily Saliers

I went all the way to Paris to forget your face

Captured in stained glass, young lives long since passed

Statues of lovers every place

I went all across the continent to relieve this restless love

I walked through the ruins, icons of glory

Smashed by the bombs from above

Chorus:

So we must love while these moments are still called today

Take part in the pain of this passion play

Stretching our youth as we must

Until we are ashes to dust

Until time makes history of us

Jeu de Paume’s full of faces knowing peace, knowing strife

Leisure and toil, still it’s canvas and oil

There’s just no medium for life

In the midst of the rubble I felt a sense of rebirth

In a dusty cathedral the Living God called

And I prayed for my life here on Earth

Chorus

There are mountains in Switzerland, brilliant cold as they stand

From my hotel room, watching the half-moon

Bleeding its light like a lamb

And the town is illumined, its tiny figures fast asleep

And it dawns on me the time is upon me

To return to the flock I must keep

Chorus