Be Love – Br. Lucas Hall
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John 6:1-21
In today’s Gospel reading, Christ miraculously feeds a crowd of hungry people. The people recognize him as a prophet, and gather to bring him to Jerusalem to proclaim him king. Jesus responds by fleeing to the solitude of the mountains.
Let’s rephrase this telling. A crowd of people, living in a country beset by political strife, gather to march on the capital. They are eager to replace their corrupt, ineffectual, incompetent ruling classes, who spend more time arguing about the minutiae of law than they do responding to the hunger of the people for bread and for justice. They have just seen a man whom they regard as a leader, one with power and legitimate claim to authority, and they long for him to lead their movement, to lead them in their resistance to the evils of their day.
Perhaps this telling hits close to home. Gazing out on the political landscape of this country, how many of us long for justice in the face of leaders embroiled in cruelty, corruption, self-importance, and outright malice? How many of us locate in Christ the supreme example of leadership, and, comparing him to the afflictions of our country now, how many of us channel Jesus in our protestations of this state of affairs? Before I came here, I used to want to work in politics. I even ran for public office. The political environment we face at present has awakened a long-held desire of mine to enter the fray, and the convictions of my faith highlight to me just how much injustice, just how much falsehood, we currently face. If the opportunity presented itself, I too would long to crown Christ.
But Jesus refused the crown. Christ comes to us, apparently, uninterested in leading us in our own movements. Jesus would rather return to the mountains, to solitude, than accept our efforts to enthrone him for ourselves.
This can be disheartening. Equally then as now, we are left with the question, “Why?” We see Christ, the performer of great miracles, wondrous acts, deeds of power, and, justifiably, ask why he doesn’t perform them for us. O Lord, why do you tarry? Why does your justice wait? We look with disbelief, disquietude, frustration, even anger. Why did you feed a crowd for an afternoon, and refuse to feed a nation for a lifetime? Why?
When we look to Jesus, we do see a great worker of wonders. We, like the crowd he fed, see a man capable of great accomplishments. But how did Jesus approach these acts? He often approaches them with hesitation. He seems unwilling to perform them unless moved by great compassion. He laments the faithlessness of a generation that asks these miracles of him. Afterward, he often implores the recipients of his miracles not to tell anyone.
There is one miracle in particular that sticks out to me as not fitting this trope: Christ healing the bleeding woman. The Synoptic Gospels all recount the story. Jesus is traveling to the house of a man whose daughter is deathly ill, to perform a healing. On his way, there is a great crowd pressing in around him and his disciples. In the crowd, there is a woman, who has suffered from constant internal bleeding for years, spending all she has on medical help that has not yielded any results. Unbeknownst to Jesus, she approaches him and touches his clothing, immediately feeling the bleeding stop.
This is not a deed of power, not a wondrous act, in the sense of most of these instances of healing. Jesus didn’t even know it was going to happen until it took place, and after being touched, he asked his disciples “Who touched me?” They’re incredulous, as they’re walking in the middle of a crowd; everyone is touching everyone. But Christ knows something has taken place. The woman comes forward, fearful and trembling, and makes her presence known, telling Jesus of her suffering. His response is this: “Daughter, your faith has healed you.”
The woman approached Christ not as a performer of miracles, not as a doer of great deeds, but as someone whose presence itself was healing. She does not ask Jesus to accomplish some work, but rather, she trusts that an encounter with him will restore her to health. This is the faith that Christ sees in her, the faith that causes Christ to wonder.
We can look to other examples in the life of Jesus to see this theme. Christ comes as a revealer of God the Father, but so too is he revealed by the Father. The two most prominent examples of this are at Christ’s baptism and his transfiguration. Both involve the direct words of the Father from heaven. What is revealed about Jesus in these episodes is not his actions. God does not proclaim Jesus as a performer of miracles, a bringer of justice, a doer of things. Instead, he proclaims Christ’s identity, his being: “This is my Son, my Beloved.”
Jesus reveals this about himself, as well. Famously, he asks a blind man, “What do you want me to do for you?” It is an instance of the remarkable sensitivity, concern, availability, and love with which Christ approaches us. But more frequently, more sensitively, more lovingly, he asks of the people around him what or who they’re looking for. These sorts of questions mark major points in his life. When he calls his first disciples: “What are you looking for?” When he is arrested in the garden: “Who are you looking for?” When Mary Magdalene is so distraught outside of Christ’s empty tomb that she does not realize that she is speaking to her resurrected Lord: “Who are you looking for?” These are not questions of action, but of identity.
Jesus goes further, peppering his public ministry with “I am” statements. They sometimes look innocuous to us, but these are deliberate references to the name of God revealed to Moses, Yahweh, “I am that I am.” This points to a deeper mission. Christ comes to save us, to heal us, to feed us. But more deeply, Christ comes to us revealing to us his being and his Father’s being, the eternal existence that is Love itself.
This can be confusing. But God’s revelation of himself to us is cause for joy, because that which is true about God’s nature is true of our own, as well. We, who are created in the image of God, who bear the likeness of God, are defined by our being, too: We Are. We are not means to an end. We are not tools used to accomplish something greater. We are not defined by the performing of a function, however good and noble that function might be. We are rooted in God’s eternal loving being, so that we might have eternal loving being too. This is the Love of God revealed most fully; this is the Love of God to which we are called.
This is why Christ does not show interest in being crowned king; Jesus is already a king. He wears a crown of eternal being, not because of what he has accomplished but because of who he is. He comes into the world, reluctant to perform miraculous deeds of power, because he is reluctant to obscure this truth about God. He wants us to know the truth about God, because it is the only way for us to know the truth about ourselves. What Christ does is important, but more important still is the fact that his actions flow from his identity, from his love, from his being.
The most fearful part of all of this, to me, is in Jesus’s statements about the works of God: “Heaven and earth will pass away.” The great works of God, containing all his other work, will pass away. What chance, then, do our own works have? Is anything we do pointless, worthless, condemned? No. God’s fundamental principle, his self-definition, is being, and God’s works demonstrate that Being is deeply intertwined with love and creativity, to the point where God is described, not as loving, but as Love. God is a doer of deeds, a worker, and from Adam’s first moments in Eden, God calls humanity to works of love and creativity that reflect this nature too. We can and should participate in these works with joy. But the works will fall. The works will cease. The works will pass away. For, while they are good, they do reflect God’s loving being, they are not being, they are not love. And this is our ultimate vocation, our fundamental call from God, the crown that we cannot offer Christ but that Christ offers us; not to do, but to be love.
Be love.
I dreamt last night ,of the Johnine picture of Jesus at the last supper, a sort of confusion of the liturgy for Maunday Thursday. Jesus commands us not to be love but to do love. It is in the doing that one grows into being love however inadequately.
Are we not missing something here. Christians hold up a view of God as one but three. God God’s self is always in relationship. Love can only exist between beings. The eternal pre existence of Jesus , the Spirit that brooded over the face of the earth in creation and the interaction between them and the creator is what calls love into being. They are where love comes from. The Spirit calls us through relationship into the circle of love and thus we become and reflect love. This is a constantly endless renewing process. A doing that leads to being forever.
Margo
Thank you, Brother Lucas, for these profound insights and perspective. It touches on many issues I am dealing with right now in both individual and group contexts. Like others who have replied, this is a message I am going to print and put in my Bible to read again and again because these are the kinds of issues that come up again and again in our earthly walks.
Thank you, Br. Lucas. I have listened to this twice, yesterday and today, and I will listen again tomorrow, and the next day…. Yes, I try to do loving things, but to BE love… Something I will to pray on. I’ve always considered that much of Jesus’ power came from what he did, but, hmm, now I will consider that it came from his being–love. What a simple, yet profound idea.
Br Lucas: One word – Brilliant. Elizabeth Hardy+
Thank you Lucas… This is powerful and provocative .. I hear it as an depth invitation for us as follower’ of the Christ . individually and collectively , to BE the change we want to see in the world..
Sorry, but for me this sermon misses the mark. It sounds to me like a theological justification for identity politics. I think it’s time for us white Christians to rethink what we mean when we say it’s not what Jesus does but who he is.
Jesus leaves the mountain and joins with the crowd. His compassion is for the crowd. Again and again he rejects identification with a god of hierarchy that justifies a ranking of human value. He rejects adulation that puts him on a pedestal, and the idea of leadership that puts him above the crowd.
In the double story you explore, the “unclean” woman with the flow of blood is being compared to the cherished daughter of the temple leader. Jesus addresses them both with the same term of endearment–little daughter. He is showing us that the daughter of the street is no less dear to him, no less a child of God, than the daughter of privilege. In a way, the woman, reaching out her hand to take hold of his garment, is calling him back to himself and to his true mission. It causes him to stop in his tracks on his way to see the daughter of privilege; to stop and see the daughter of the street first.
The story is a teaching about the value of the so-called least in God’s economy: how the so-called least matter in the Kingdom of God. And it says something to us about how Jesus responds not only to God’s call, but the call of his sister in the streets.
To me, the story of God calling him at his baptism, was just that, a calling. Jesus hears God calling him, a nobody from Nazareth, His son and His beloved. (He didn’t put the caps on the title, monks did.) Jesus spent enough time in the desert to figure out what that calling did and did not mean and then he headed back out into the neighborhood.
And what did he do after the transfiguration? Did he let Peter put him on a pedestal and build him a shrine with Moses and Elijah? Not at all. He recognized in that impulse the same temptations he had withstood, by God’s grace, in the desert. Instead he led his friends right back down the mountain and into the crowd.
For me, worship is not about putting Jesus on a pedestal, as if he were somehow the pinnacle of being or somehow in his being, born to the ruling class. I think he would–and did–totally reject that idea. He was born and called to be a beloved child of God, in a crowd of God’s beloved children. It was the crowd as much as anything that gave him his identity.
To me, worship is not about putting Jesus on a pedestal on the mountaintop, It’s about following him into the crowd.
Thanks Pam! I hear you in the crowd. Respectfully, Craig K
Br Lucas, words cannot express how grateful I am for the thoughts you shared in this sermon. Thank you so very much.
Thank you for this thoughtful sermon. Much to think about here and to consider in the actions and events of daily life.
Lovely. Thank you Br. Lucas.
Be still and know that I am God.
Be still and know that I am.
Be still and know.
Be still.
Be.
Brother Lucas – i had a dream last night and I woke up angry with God – furious with the pain and suffering that plagues our world. In the dead of the night, I wondered how God could remain silent in a world beset with unspeakable sorrows – and I voiced my anger – how could a “loving” God allow this pain? Oh, I think I understand free will and I do believe in HIM – but I still struggle with a pervasive, unrelenting evil that haunts each day. And then, and then, this morning I listened to your sermon and I found a profound solace.
Beautiful beyond description:
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I can see why you turned from politics to become a monk. I am dancing with these polarities right now. While that divide shows the difference between man and God “writ large,” I don’t believe I should continue to think in those “containers” right now. Reading your sermon made me think of how much one kind word, spoken in love, can influence an individual life; it calls to mind a long-deceased grandmother’s nourishing presence. We are all called to “be love” in our daily actions, to fully see the other as a human being and reflect that. Love spreads in mysterious ways that we do not control. Your sermon makes me think that, right now, that larger question of vocation isn’t on point for me. Rather it is the careful observation and following of the dictum to “be love,” to really learn what that is. We have roles to fill, work to do. Putting more emphasis on the being will lead to the right “doing.”
This was a beautiful sermon, Br. Lucas. It reminded me that in “doing” we are better directed if we are first “seekers”. Thank you for this reminder with such a beautiful delivery!
Wow! What a God we have!
Wow! For six months I have had the gift of reading these devotionals daily. I have shared excerpts by text and email to others. I have posted online.
Today I am posting this excerpt:
Today’s SSJE devotional:
God’s revelation of himself to us is cause for joy, because that which is true about God’s nature is true of our own, as well. We, who are created in the image of God, who bear the likeness of God, are defined by our being, too: We Are. We are not means to an end. We are not tools used to accomplish something greater. We are not defined by the performing of a function, however good and noble that function might be. We are rooted in God’s eternal loving being, so that we might have eternal loving being too. This is the Love of God revealed most fully; this is the Love of God to which we are called. God calls humanity to works of love and creativity that reflect this nature too. We can and should participate in these works with joy. But the works will fall. The works will cease. The works will pass away. For, while they are good, they do reflect God’s loving being, they are not being, they are not love. And this is our ultimate vocation, our fundamental call from God, the crown that we cannot offer Christ but that Christ offers us; not to do, but to be love.
Be love.
Thank you, Br Lucas, for these fine words. One sentence stood out for me in your final paragraph: “God is a doer of deeds, a worker, and from Adam’s first moments in Eden, God calls humanity to works of love and creativity that reflect this nature too.” Even though these works will eventually pass away, they are important in the moment, in the Now. These works give us purpose, satisfaction, and enjoyment. Not that we’re trying to earn anything by them! It’s simply in our nature to be engaged in things. Thank you for articulating this truth in spiritual terms. Sometimes I feel I should be more contemplative than I am. Now I have a your fine comment to ponder, I can be more comfortable in not “Be(ing) still and know that I am God” (Psalm 46:10)!
That was beautiful, Br. Lucas. Thank you for your words.
Br. Lucas, your sermon shows great discernment and examination of your understanding of Jesus, of God, of Love, and it is superbly written. My soul stirred and moved with excitement and connection as I read your beautiful and insightful message. Thank for this gift.
SusanMarie, your response to Br. Lucas’s sermon elegantly expresses my experience of this gift, too. Thanks to you both, and to the God who is Love.
What a great sermon Br. Lucas!
Amen! Amen! Amen! This Word will remain forever in my heart as well as my prayerbook to return to, for when the world being turned upside down, inside out, Jesus says “Be not afraid,” the world of Love calls me to receive Life, abiding in God ~ Love,~ pausing in prayer to refuel for the journey in Being, sharing Love from the One who is Love. I am flooded by the image on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel of the point of contact – the finger of God in Creation touching, communicating humankind, “the vessel”, soaring in the heavens above all to whom God the Creator would give Life – Being- a visible and outward sign of an inward and ever deepening and unremitting call to Life ~ dunamis kindled from the fire of God’s Being. ” This is the way, walk ye in it.” ~ Be ye in Me ~ Love. Ever in gratitude ~
Thank you for so powerfully distinguishing actions from existence
Recently, I wrote a little poem:
EDEN
God
God is
God is Love
Love
Love is
Love is God
HEAVEN
❤️