The Way of Love has become the guiding vision of the Episcopal Church or, as Presiding Bishop Curry has reframed it, the Episcopal Branch of the Jesus Movement. Its seven steps–turn, learn, pray, worship, bless, go, and rest–are intended to take our attention off the church as a structure and on to the ways Jesus is moving in our lives and our communities.
I’m prone to feeling overwhelmed by all the practices in the Way of Love, which made this week’s Gospel lesson from of Mark all the more remarkable to me.
I’ve always loved Mark’s Gospel for its breakneck speed, expressing the compressed urgency of Jesus’ brief three years of ministry. So it doesn’t really surprise me that where the Way of Love sends my churchified brain spinning down the road of long-range visioning, mission and outreach plans, Mark’s Jesus just goes out and gets the whole thing done in the 42 verses of the first chapter.
The Gospel opens with John the Baptist, who is, of course, all about turn. Jesus faces and turns away from temptation in the desert shortly afterward. He then heads to the synagogue in Capernaum and amazes people with the authority of his teaching, nailing learn and worship in just two verses. Before he even leaves the synagogue, he’s blessing others by expelling and silencing demons, then heads off to new disciple Peter’s house to heal his mother-in-law, who immediately catches the refrain, rising from her sickbed to bless her houseful with food and a place to rest.
It’s good that Jesus has a little time to eat because as the sun sets, the entire town gathers outside the door and, once again, Jesus blesses, healing the sick and exorcising demons. He needs, maybe, to work on the practice of rest because after just a few hours of sleep, he’s up and off to a deserted place to pray. But before long the disciples (as the Common English Bible puts it) track him down (the Rev. Mark Davis translates it as stalked him!). I imagine the panic in their voices as they tell him that everyone is looking for him. Instead of returning, though, he completes the circle of love’s way, saying, no, we need to keep moving–let’s go. And in the last verses of chapter one, he’s off, teaching and healing throughout Galilee.
I’m exhausted just retelling it. But point made that even if we don’t move as quickly as Jesus, the Way of Love is one of constant circling, constant movement, and getting mired or overly focused on one or two of the practices that come most easily to us is not what it takes to bring in the Kingdom of God.
The other readings this week make it clear that when you’re not Jesus, this stuff is hard! Today’s Isaiah reading is from the second of the three Isaiahs that make up that prophet’s book in the Bible. First Isaiah prophesied in a time when God’s people had completely strayed from the Way of Love. They were warring with their neighbors, oppressing the poor and needy in their midst, and neglecting the ancient practices of worship that defined them. The catastrophe that the first prophet kept telling them would come their way finally did, and they were carted off to Babylonia to live for 70 years in exile.
It’s here, at their lowest point, that Second Isaiah slowly starts to lead them back to YHWHs Way of Love, patiently offering them the comfort of God’s blessing and re-teaching them the ancient traditions and understandings of God that they had neglected. Today first lesson comes from that period, reminding them that YHWH is “he who sits above the circle of the earth…its inhabitants…like grasshoppers” the one “who brings princes [even Babylonian princes] to naught.” In captivity, the people of God practice the Way of Love by learning and by opening themselves up to accept the blessing of the One who gives “power to the faint and strengthens the powerless.”
Third Isaiah is also the setting for today’s psalm. In both, the people have been returned to Jerusalem and given the opportunity to rebuild both their city and their temple. Psalm 147 echoes Third Isaiah’s full-on activation of the Way of Love. Now that they are home, Isaiah insists it is time for God’s people to turn from their past mistakes and revive their practices of prayer to YHWH, the one true God, “who counts the number of the stars and calls them all by their names.” It’s time to bless and comfort one another as YHWH has blessed them, serving and remembering the weak and needy and living in peace with their neighbors. It is the time to go, particularly to rebuild the temple. so that the people again have a place learn and worship. The people do slowly rebuild, but the way is not easy. The temptation must have been great to avoid the uncomfortable work of remembering how to be God’s people, especially in a land now filled with strangers with whom it would have been easier to just blend.
In today’s second lesson, Paul is writing to a community who worship together in Corinth about fifty years after Jesus’ death. The Corinthians are full of prayer and learning. They are, in fact, maybe a little too full of all of that, full of themselves, because they seem to be falling down when it comes to going out and blessing others. They spend too much time arguing about who has the greater spiritual gifts and considering how much better they are than the Jews and Gentiles around them, rather than going out and serving others where and just as they are. As Paul reminds them and Bishop Curry reminds us, God’s Way of Love means continually turning from our comfortable lives and our complacent selves to cross boundaries we’d rather keep in place, to bless and serve where we are least comfortable and most needed.
With God’s people in the time of the Isaiahs and the early Christians of Corinth, I’m good at practicing some of the Ways of Love and lousy at others. For example, I love learning, studying Scripture and especially the Gospel. I also like the service that is part of blessing and going–even crossing boundaries and getting uncomfortable. Weekly worship helps me think about those things I’ve done and left undone and do my best to turn. But praying and resting–that is, quietly listening to God and seeking God’s peace and restoration–I neglect on the daily. And yet without that connection to God, studying Scripture can become an intellectual exercise and blessing others more about feeling good about myself than, in Paul’s words, doing it “all for the sake of the gospel, so that I might share in its blessings.”
So what about you? Riffing off the Godly Play question: where do you see–and where do you NOT see –yourself in the story that is the Way of Love: turn, learn, pray, worship, bless, go, and rest?
Sunday Morning Words 