They say confession is good for the soul… so: Last Sunday, just before Corey went up to read from the letter of I John, I made a quick edit or two.
Read this part about love, I said. Then skip over this other part and read here, where it talks about love some more. Glancing at what I had omitted, Corey grimaced in agreement, then strolled up to the pulpit and read: beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God. Everyone who loves is born of God and knows God.
I have many friends in this church who remind me, often, that all of the bible is not so edifying; that some of the bible is too confusing to be understood, even by people with PhD’s in scripture or theology; and that hardly anyone, even people who go to church regularly, read the whole bible much anymore, anyway. So I can probably get away with a little sly micro-editing, Sunday by Sunday, in the service of a coherent spirituality, unless too many of you pick up the pew bibles and start to follow along.
But this week, never mind. The universe paid me back on Tuesday, when, after leaving my home at six am to get to an all day presbytery meeting by nine in Palm Beach Gardens, I settled into my seat to find that the first order of the day was a two hour bible study on ….the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd letters of John….with special attention to the parts I had in Thomas Jeffersonian fashion, sliced out of our corporate bible reading just days before. My little children, we read, it is the last hour!!!! As you have heard that antichrist is coming, so now many antichrists have come!!!! From this we know that it is the last hour. They went out from us, but they did not belong to us; for if they had belonged to us they would have remained with us, but by going out they made it plain that none of them belongs to us. We are from God. Whoever knows God listens to us; whoever is not from God does not listen to us. From this we know the spirit of truth and the spirit of error. (1 John 1:18-19)
Well, then. It’s my observation that there are two different kinds of people, when it comes to entertaining friends. One type cleans the house before you come—all of the house, even the parts you don’t see, and won’t have anyone over at all unless the house is clean. The other type says what you see is what you get, and shoves over a pile of washed laundry to make room for you on the sofa, and pulls leftovers out of the back of the refrigerator, and seems just to be glad you’re there, oblivious to the chaos revealed by their open-door life. If we’re still in confessional mode, I trend toward the former, as my mother did, and still find, occasionally, some forgotten pile of junk that I shoved under a pillow or behind a sofa in order to make order for an unexpected guest. The thing is, the face I thus am presenting to the world is not quite my real one…altogether. So it is with the bible, and especially with most of the little bitty books we hid in the back of the N.T., like dirty laundry we hope no one will notice we have not done, and the smell we have lit scented candles to disguise. The New Testament professor Frances Taylor Gench, who teaches at Union Seminary in Richmond and served on the Theological Task Force for Peace, Purity, and Unity, told us so on Tuesday morning while I sat by my absolute theological opposite in the world and listened to these enlightening words: Everyone who does not abide in the teaching of Christ but goes beyond it does not have God…do not receive into the house or welcome anyone who comes to you and does not bring this teaching, for to welcome is to participate in the deeds of such a person. (2 John 9-10) Remembering how, down through the years of fighting over teachings relating to Christ’s welcome (or the church’s judgment) of homosexual persons, we each had suspected the other of not knowing the bible (or Jesus) if it (or he) had knocked him (or me) over the head in a dark alley, we (or at least I) squirmed. Taylor went on, in her mellifluous southern lady voice, to tell us that the only place in the bible where the “antichrist” is mentioned is in the letters of John…and the only persons to whom that hateful and fearsome appellation is assigned is…a member of the community of Jesus, a member of the family, with whom the Elder who wrote the letters found himself in irreconcilable differences.
It’s hard to work up a head of self-righteous steam about those who have called me an antichrist for my belief system…when sitting next to me is a friend whose positions, and sometimes whose personality, I have secretly—and sometimes not so secretly—denounced as the same. Gench had gone from preachin’ to meddlin’, and I didn’t like it so much as I thought I would.
Here’s the thing: the four books that make up the Johannine corpus—the gospel and the three letters that follow—were written to and about a community, a family, really, that had gone through a painful and difficult divorce. Many scholars agree that the gospel of John, written late in the first century, had such a heavenly, divine view of who Jesus was because that was the issue over which the church had reached irreconcilable differences with the synagogue. That is to say, the church, which had been a part of Jewish life and practice, eventually divorced over their differences about who Jesus was, whether an inspired human teacher, or the divine manifestation of God in human flesh. That family broke up over this issue, and the gospel of John was written to help those who had lost their kin and their home place over it to remember what they stood for, and what it had cost them. And the letters of John which followed….were written, a little later, from that same fraught and frightened place…by an Elder who needed to believe he was right, and whose fear that he might not be caused him to anathematize the friends and family who disagreed with him. So, out of the same mouth that says, beloved, let us love one another because love is of God, also comes the angry and shrill, we are from God, whoever knows God listens to us. (and not to them, by the way). Sometimes the bible’s best teaching is not taking at face value what is said, but in looking at how our convictions about what is most important to us lead us to behave exactly contrary to what we say we value the most. I believe in love, and if you don’t see it the way I do, then, to hell with you. Amen.
This weekend, the Rev. Fred Phelps is in town, picketing some neighboring churches and a school in Key West. Phelps is the pastor of a Baptist church in Kansas that believes that God hates —let me just substitute the word “gay people” for the word he uses—and his church’s mission is to bus around the country and picket churches, the funerals of soldiers who died in Iraq or Afghanistan, or any public venue where he believes tolerance has led God to turn His back on America. He’s an easy, and I mean easy target. Especially if I read only the nice parts of the bible that I agree with and that describe my higher nature….and skip over the parts that show my own (as well as Phelps’) smelly, dirty laundry. I know it’s easier for me to be tolerant of some stranger who says a bigoted thing or supports a wrong headed view of politics or theology…than it is to embrace someone I love, or as Steve Sapp always says, someone I ought to love, who has disappointed or grieved me by not understanding that I am always right.
Some of the bitterest theological battles I have waged have been waged without mercy in my own parents’ living room. Some of the hardest words I have ever spoken have been spoken to my daughter, or my husband, or my little brother, because when those people get under my skin, or fail to support me when I need to know that I am right (and of course that means they need to admit that they are wrong) the only thing I can think of to do to save myself from the hurt is to shove my principled living into the closet and attack. The only people who deserve the title “antichrist,” after all, are those in whom we once saw Christ—that is to say, love—face to face, but in whom now, at least for a moment, we cannot see any good at all.
Well, now I’ve gone and revealed what a mess I am, and probably not a one of you has ever fallen victim, as I have, to what I call baaad love. It comforts me a little to know that the bible isn’t much less human than I am, so that when I fall back or fail to be the kind of Christian, friend, ex- , spouse, parent, and child that I want to be, others have been down the bad love road before me, and still got up and dusted themselves off and went on reflecting the path of Christ, in the end. Sometimes, when the temptation to thunder antichrist!! is the worst, I think about this old story:
Once upon a time, a vibrant community of monks was reduced to five squabbling and cranky old men. Day after day, they went about God’s business devoid of joy and despairing of attracting neighboring townspeople to their work and worship. One day the abbot, in desperation, went to visit an old hermit who used to be the town’s rabbi. “I don’t know what to do,” he cried. Is there not some ancient wisdom that can help restore life and love to our community? “No.” said the rabbi sadly, “but I will tell you this: the messiah is one of you.” The abbot went home, puzzled and confused. “One of us?” He looked at his members and shook his head. No way. He told two of the brothers, and they, too, laughed in disbelief…and began to wonder: which one of us is messiah? On the off chance that one would turn out to be, each brother began to treat the other as if he might be Christ, and as each one both gave and received that honor, the old cranky monks became known for their extraordinary respect and kindness toward others…and thus, the community was renewed.