Reflection by David for June 26, 2011

Some years ago I was at a conference about love. The question was "how do we live love in this modern world?" Various speakers were offering their ethical and theological thoughts about how we respond to the violence and evil—in the broadest sense of the word—in our world today. The basic question was "how can love overcome hatred, fear and violence so prevalent in the church today." This conference took place almost 20 years ago when I was still in Ontario.

What intrigues me is that this question is still very much alive. What difference can love make in our world? There are several routes one can take when assessing this question. One can take the route that Barack Obama has taken, a route that is based on an influential 20^th century theologian and philosopher by the name Reinhold Niebuhr and is known as Christian realism. One can take the cynical viewpoint that love doesn't make much difference and so we should enjoy life as much as we can today for who knows what will happen tomorrow. A third response is that of fundamentalism, whether that is a religious or political fundamentalism. The fourth response is the response taken by the likes of Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Oscar Romero and more contemporarily, Rigobertu Menchu, Stanley Hauwerwas and Jean Vanier; this is the school of pacifism or more broadly the school that holds that love does make a vast difference in the world and indeed is the only way of combating evil. You can probably tell which school of thought I belong to!

Reinhold Niebuhr was a rising star in the 1920's theology and academic scene of the Church—albeit not a big scene. He considered himself a pacifist after witnessing the horror of World War I. By the 1930's Niebuhr, watching the rise of Nazism and the change in other world politics, became a Christian realist. He argued that sometimes violence needs to be met with a measured violent response, always based on forgiveness and always as a last resort. He would argue that the evil of Nazism had to be met with a measured response that required the use of arms to bring about justice. Niebuhr wrote about just war theory. Obama is a current practitioner of this school of thinking. There are now more US troops in Afghanistan than Bush had, which ultimately Obama believes will bring about change in that country. Obama sanctioned the death of Osama Bin Laden as a realist way of thinking. In recent speeches to religious types, Obama has cited Niebuhr. This is one route that has a strong following in our world today, and that many followers believe has its roots in the Christian way of life and in Jesus' teachings.

The second and third routes that I named above, the route of cynicism or getting what you can today for tomorrow is uncertain and the route of fundamentalism—political and religious—was witnessed by the world in Vancouver and Belfast these past couple of weeks. The anarchists—political fundamentalists who want to bring about change through a fundamentalist political agenda—had a part to play in the Vancouver riots, albeit apparently a small part. The religious fundamentalists began the riot in Northern Ireland this past week and are still flaming one another. The cynics or the live-for-now kinds of folk are the ones who take advantage of a situation and get caught up in the mob and perpetrate violence or destruction, or who steel something caught up in the moment, but who are usually contrite afterwards. We are seeing this both in the Northern Ireland and Vancouver riot aftermath.

The fourth route in responding to evil in the world is the route that is most difficult and perhaps the most dangerous. This was the route chosen by those who tried to stop the rioters and looters in Vancouver and Belfast. This was the path of non-violence that Gandhi chose and Martin Luther King, Jr. This was the path that the people of Nasreen's Secret School chose. I believe that this was the path that Jesus walked, the way of life that Jesus chose and lived. And of course, he paid the price, giving up his life for this way of praying for one's enemies, loving one's enemies, turning the other cheek, practicing a welcome that was rooted in forgiveness and grace, and embodying the deep, abiding and transforming love of God.

We don't know how we will react in a difficult situation until we are in that situation. I think we hope that our response will be just, fair and full of love. But what I do know is that living a spiritual/religious life is like training for a marathon. In order to finish the marathon, you have to practice; you start slowly and build up your endurance. The religious/spiritual life of love is the same. We have to practice. We have to practice the kind of welcome that Jesus advocated in Matthew's Gospel. We have to realize that that the word welcome used in Matthew's gospel is actually receive. We are called to receive the other as if the other were an agent of the one who sent the person. That was the ancient belief in Jesus' day: if one was sent, you were the embodiment of the one who sent you and you were to be received in that fashion. So, as Jesus taught, we are sent by God into the world to live and to love; when we receive each other, we literally receive God embodied in the other. "The Spirit in me greets the Spirit in you" is one way of expressing this. To welcome the other is to welcome the embodiment of God, quite literally.

And we practice in small and large ways. We learn to see God in each other. We learn to see ourselves as living embodiments of God. We practice how we receive one another, especially in the face of our differences. And we practice loving; we practice forgiving. We practice giving the other a cup of water on a hot day. We practice for in practicing we are living. And when we are called to respond in any given moment—a big moment like a riot or a revolution—we will know how to respond. We will know how to run the marathon. We will know how to receive the other.

To do otherwise, to turn our back on love, is to give in to the way of death and destruction. We practice and in practicing, just like exercise, we get stronger and healthier, and thus we can engage in acts of life and love that have radical and far-reaching implications around the world. We are part of a religious tradition that seeks the way of peace, and we share this Way with others in other religions or spiritual or political paths that are committed to a Way of openness, reconciliation, forgiveness and seeing in the other the embodiment of all that is holy and sacred. This, in my estimation is the Way of love that creates Life in our world.

This is Wisdom for the Church and food for thought as we contemplate our purpose statement after worship this morning.

Amen.