The Love Nut (Sermon 2/3)

In every generation, there is another picture of Jesus. In every generation, there is another aspect of who Jesus was, who Jesus is, that our society lifts up and points to. It becomes an ideal for us. Around the turn of the 20th century, we saw the Muscular Christian movement, which promoted physical strength as a Christian virtue, and gave us everything from the Boy Scouts to crucifixes with bulky, stacked Jesuses. Jesus as bodybuilder.

                In the early 1900s, a Christian Socialist named Charles Sheldon coined the phrase “What Would Jesus Do?”, and kicked off the Social Gospel movement, lifting up Christianity as the solution to the social and economic problems of the world. If you just do what Jesus would have done, the Social Gospel says, then you would eliminate injustice and poverty on earth. Jesus as social reformer.

                There have been a ton of these trends, even in the couple hundred years. In fact, it’s funny that the “What Would Jesus Do?” movement began so long ago, because it really came into its own in my childhood, something like fifteen years ago. That was when the “What Would Jesus Do?” culture really exploded, and you saw WWJD everywhere, on every billboard, t-shirt, and wristband.

Then there’s radical Jesus. Some of you may remember the Jesus Movement from the sixties and seventies, that strange merger of hippy counterculture and traditionalist Christianity. Calling themselves “Jesus People”, living in communes and speaking out against authority, all in the name of this radical Jesus. Other hippies called them Jesus Freaks, a term that’s grown to the point of becoming cliché.

                For these Jesus People, Jesus could be best understood as a radical, a strong personality speaking out against the empire, railing against the religious establishment, against the patriarchy, against all things accepted and status quo. Jesus as Weirdo.

                So many Jesuses.  Jesus as bodybuilder, as social reformer, as weirdo. Not to mention the standards – Jesus as Lord, Jesus as the Word, Jesus as lamb of God. All sorts of Jesuses. Each one with a different picture of God, and each one pointing to a different way to be follower of Jesus.

                This problem – which picture of Jesus do I behold, which path of Jesus do I walk? – is not a new one. Indeed, it’s one of the oldest problems in the Christian story. I mean, really, we start out with not one nor two nor three but four biographies of Jesus in the Bible; that should tell you something right there.

                The early church saw this problem, and tried their best to work through it. In one of the earliest Christian communities, the church at the town of Corinth, it was starting to become a serious issue. So Paul, the missionary who founded all sorts of churches throughout the Roman Empire, Paul who founded this church in Corinth, when Paul sees what’s going on there, when he sees these Corinthians struggling and dividing themselves over the “Too-Many-Jesuses” problem, he has to put a stop to it. So he writes them a letter, the first of two letters he would write to them, which we church-people in our infinite wisdom and subtlety call “First Corinthians”.

                So hear with me now a few words from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. I’ll be reading from chapter 12, verse 27 through chapter 13, verse 3, from a modified reading of the New Living Translation. If you have a Bible, feel free to follow along, or follow along on the screens; or feel free to close your eyes and let the whispers of God settle into you. May these words shine a light into all who seek the Lord.

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                ²⁷ All of you together are Christ’s body, and each of you is a part of it. ²⁸ Here are some of the parts God has appointed for the church:

first are apostles,
second are prophets,
third are teachers,
then those who do miracles,
those who have the gift of healing,
those who can help others,
those who have the gift of leadership,
those who speak in unknown languages.

²⁹ Are we all apostles? Are we all prophets? Are we all teachers? Do we all have the power to do miracles? ³⁰ Do we all have the gift of healing? Do we all have the ability to speak in unknown languages? Do we all have the ability to interpret unknown languages? Of course not! ³¹ So you should earnestly desire the most helpful gifts.

But now let me show you a way of life that is best of all.

3.¹ If I could speak all the languages of earth and of angels, but didn’t love others, I would only be a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. ² If I had the gift of prophecy, and if I understood all of God’s secret plans and possessed all knowledge, and if I had such faith that I could move mountains, but didn’t love others, I would be nothing. ³ If I gave everything I have to the poor and even sacrificed my body, I could boast about it;^[a] but if I didn’t love others, I would have gained nothing.

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                These are Paul’s words to a church divided, his words to a community of people who were all passionate for Jesus. A group of people gathered from all walks of life by the single idea of following Christ and the God that sent him, but who find themselves breaking into cliques and subgroups, each with a different Jesus on the wall, each with a slightly different understanding of how to follow.

                Muscular Christians. Social Gospel Christians. WWJD Christians. Jesus Freaks. Methodists. Catholics. Disciples of Christ. Disciples – like the original ones, the Twelve. Disciples. Apostles. Prophets. Teachers. People who speak in tongues, understandable or otherwise. Healers. All of them, nuts for Jesus.

                And the weird thing is, they all seem to be valid pictures of Jesus, at least a little bit. Valid ways to follow Jesus. Paul uses this imagery of the body of Christ, that we are all parts of a larger whole. That whoever in the whole bunch represents the hands is no less in Jesus and of Jesus and with Jesus than the bunch who represents a spleen. People that I don’t like quite so much, people that I disagree with, even about major, important things? Body of Jesus.  I don’t know what the cutoff is, how different from me you have to get before you’re off the body. If there is a cutoff at all. I don’t know.

                But, Paul is telling the Corinthians, that’s not the whole answer. It’s all well and good to say, “I know you’re splitting into different groups, but that’s okay. You’re all doing it right,” but the fact is that it’s clearly tearing apart this community. So Paul reminds them that their diversity is only possible because of the thing that unites them. The most comprehensive picture of Jesus. The most complete and unifying philosophy of and gift from Jesus.

                In the translation I read today, Paul says, “So you should earnestly seek the most helpful gifts.” A more literal translation from the Greek says something like, “Yet be boiling for the best effects of grace, and still I’ll show you a higher way.”

                 Paul is saying – Look, remember Jesus? Remember the stories you’ve heard about him? He was a complicated guy, with a lot of angles, and his followers are a complicated people, with a lot of angles, but there was one thing at the core of Jesus that powered him. We serve God and follow him in a lot of good, true ways, but we can’t lose sight of the one thing at the middle of Jesus’s life, his teachings, his way of serving God. The kernel of what it means to follow Jesus. That piece inside of Christianity that makes it what it is, the seed inside.

                If we are nuts about Jesus, then Jesus is a nut for love. Everything else about following Jesus, every worship practice, every creed and covenant, every rite and ritual is built upon love. All of it.

                “3.¹ If I could speak all the languages of earth and of angels, but didn’t love, I would only be a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. ² If I had the gift of prophecy, and if I understood all of God’s secret plans and possessed all knowledge, and if I had such faith that I could move mountains, but didn’t love, I would be nothing. ³ If I gave everything I have to the poor and even sacrificed my body, I could boast about it;^[a] but if I didn’t love, I would have gained nothing.”

                Whatever our creed, whatever our faith, whatever our practices and our traditions, they are good inasmuch as they are built upon love; they are valid and true for precisely as long as they show love to others. We experience the love of God, the love taught to us by Jesus Christ, the love proved and vindicated in his death and resurrection, and we reflect it outwards towards all the word. We reflect the light of God’s love to the places where love is needed most. We do that in charity and works of tangible good. We do that in preaching and teaching and speaking. We do that in prayer and in healing. We do that in being disciples.

                I don’t know what creed you proclaim or what faith you follow. I don’t particularly care. I don’t know if you know your path yet. But if you live your life in love, seeking love, feeling love, and spreading it around… you will be following the path of Jesus.

                I’ll close by praying the words of writer and monk Thomas Merton – a fellow Kentuckian –

MY LORD GOD, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it. Therefore I will trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.

Amen.