Jack Hardaway
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When love is easy it is so easy.
When love is hard it is so hard.
It is the stuff of songs, and poetry, and story, and dance, and art.
It is the hard wood of the cross, and the soft flesh Jesus, nailed together, bleeding and splintered.
We are students of this.
We study love.
Life is the school of love.
The church is the school of love.
The world is the school of love.
Creation is the school of love.
It is the meaning of existence.
Evelyn Underhill, an Anglican mystic from the last century, called this “the school of charity”, faith drawing us deeper into the mess of life rather than an escape from pain and complication.
Study this.
Be students of this.
Spiritual abuse forgets this, or it even dismisses and degrades the school of love.
Spiritual abuse is like any other abuse, physical, emotional, political, institutional.
The abuser feels entitled to be abusive, and they always blame the victim.
And it is often contagious, the abused become abusers.
Spiritual abuse uses God to hurt people, there is always a reason and excuse to justify it, a spiraling logic of bad ideas that is so hard to escape from.
Abusers are trapped and blinded.
The school of love breaks and is breaking us free from this cycle of sanctified violence.
Spiritual abuse takes Jesus name in vain and turns it into something dirty.
It is so prominent in American Christianity that spiritual abuse is considered to be not just normal but required.
It is hard to let go of a bad idea.
They tend to own us.
We are reluctant to speak Jesus name because we have heard it used so poorly.
It is time to learn to speak Jesus name again, to speak his name in the way that brings liberation not slavery.
We are being taken back to school to start over.
The holiness of God is freeing the world from this prison of self-deception that has taken the Lord’s name in vain, justifying horrible thoughts, words and deeds: reminding us that the devil is an expert at quoting scripture.
We hear this morning a reading from Leviticus, the origin of the command to love our neighbor that Jesus names as the second great commandment. Jesus places it alongside the first great command to love God with everything we got, quoting from Deuteronomy. The Law and the Prophets, the settled scripture of Jesus’ day, depend on these two commands. To read scripture is to study love.
Jesus is telling us how to read scripture the right way.
Leviticus is about God’s holiness and the conundrum of faith: that we be holy as God is holy, even when only God is holy.
Part of the particularity of Judaism and Christianity is that who we are to be depends on who God is.
Most religions have deities that do as they please and command people to do as they say, fickle and dangerous, the faith of abuse.
Leviticus shows God to be different than that, God’s holiness defines who we are to be, to be like the One who is like no other.
And that holiness is the freedom that is love.
God’s holiness is all about love.
And in Jesus we see that love in the flesh, the manners of love, the gesture, the inflection, the words, the movements of love.
The love that suffers for, the love that serves, the love that heals, the love that sets us free from all those bad ideas that justify horrible things, the love that connects with the mess of life, through which we see everything.
We are being taken to school, we are being learned.
Make God’s holiness visible and known in this world, in this life, and on into the next, it never stops. It is the vocation of creation, the calling of humanity, the faith and trust that reaches beyond death.
Love is stronger than death and love has risen from the grave.
Proclaim this.
The Holiness of God.
The freedom that is love.
Speak Jesus’ name with that love.
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