In a Mirror Dimly

I Corinthians 13:1-13, Luke 4:21-30

January 28, 2007

Rochelle A. Stackhouse

“Love is patient, love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude.” Too bad Paul had not written that yet when Jesus spoke in the synagogue in his hometown of Nazareth. Too bad Jesus could not have lived out that kind of love Paul says is what we need to build a healthy community, or he might not have been so nasty that day in Nazareth. Look at it from the point of view of those hometown folk. They’d been hearing about their local boy doing some amazing things. Joseph’s son, Mary’s son, the one who had always been a little different, but no one expected this sort of thing. They were, on the one hand, skeptical, because they knew his people and, while very nice neighbors, they were nobody special. On the other hand, as Jesus started to attract a following and do miracles, they were eager to be known as FOJ’s: Friends of Jesus. “Yeah, I used to play with him when we were growing up, boy could I tell you some stories! Yeah, me and Jesus were like this [crossed fingers] as kids.”

So when Jesus came back home and startled everyone by making the true announcement of his mission right there in their little synagogue, many of his hometown folk were ready to sign on as groupies. “Boy, you’re right, Jesus! Let’s go out and get those Romans and do what you said: free the prisoners and get them to stop taxing us so we’re not so poor! If you lead the Revolution, we’ll follow!”

But instead of mobilizing an army to attack the Romans who everybody knew were the enemies, Jesus makes this bizarre little speech. First he tells them he’s not likely to be doing miracles here because they are not open to receiving them; they want to make him in their image and not truly listen to what he has to say. Then he really irritates them by reminding them of two other prophets, Elijah and Elisha, who did some of their greatest miracles with those considered to be enemies, including one, Naaman the Syrian, who had raided their villages and captured their children to be made slaves! “So what’s his point?” the people of Nazareth would say, “Is he saying that he is going to ignore us and go do miracles with our enemies, with the Romans? Is he going to give good news to some foreign poor people? Release some foreign captives? Heal those who are not the chosen people? Find some other oppressed to free? Hey, we took care of this kid when he was in diapers; why is he dissing us now? Doesn’t he know he’s supposed to be on our side?” So if it appeared Jesus was going to be on the side of their enemies, it would be better to get rid of him now, and so the mob carried him to the edge of the cliff, at which point, perhaps, his family or the calmer heads in the village intervened, and he walked away.

So was Jesus being arrogant and rude with the hometown crowd? Or was he, perhaps, reacting to their arrogance, the arrogance of those who assumed they were due special favors simply by virtue of having lived in the same town as Jesus. Was he reacting to their arrogance, as had John the Baptist, in assuming that because they were the chosen people, the children of Abraham, that they automatically were the ones who God would help first. Was he reacting to their penchant to insist on their own way and to rejoice when something bad happened to their enemies? Was Jesus trying to say to them that the picture is more complicated than they could possibly understand, and if they are unwilling to be open to the possibility that God is bigger than the box in which they so neatly had packaged God, then there’s no point in further conversation?

We can only speculate, because Luke does not give us more information than what Joanne read for us. The more I read the story, though, the more I think that the part of the chapter on love in First Corinthians that Jesus would draw to the attention of his hometown folk, had it been written, was this: “For now we see in a mirror dimly.” Remember that mirrors at the time of Paul were not the highly polished affairs we have now; they allowed, at best, dim reflections, where features were distorted and detail hard to pick out, where you couldn’t be sure exactly what you were seeing. The metaphor leads us into admitting that we do not have all the answers, that we do not have all understanding, for, as Paul says, we know only in part; about anything!

The greatest enemy of love, from Paul’s point of view, is not hate, but absolute certainty about anything. The greatest enemy of love is our predilection to say, “my side is right and yours is wrong.” The greatest enemy of love is the creation of enemies.

Many observers have commented in our current situation about the similarities between fundamentalisms of all kinds in our world. If there is such a thing as what our President calls “Islamo-facism,” then there is certainly the Christian equivalent of that. Anyone who claims to know for sure who God is and what God wants of us, and therefore can easily label anyone who thinks differently as “heretic” or “apostate” and therefore outside all possibility of redemption has forgotten that we see in a mirror dimly. Jesus would caution us, I think, as he did his neighbors in Nazareth, reminding us that God has stepped outside the box on numerous occasions to love those we think God can’t love because they are our (and therefore, we assume, God’s) enemies. If you remember the story of Jonah and the whale, the reason Jonah was in that whale was because God wanted him to go to an enemy city and help them change their lives to build a loving community. Jonah didn’t want that for his enemies; he wanted them to get zapped so he could rejoice in their wrongdoing that resulted in their elimination. When God looked at Nineveh, God saw something different, and when God looks down on the descendants of the Ninevites in Iraq today, I imagine God sees something different than we do, something different even than the competing factions within Iraq do. God sees, I imagine, a community again in need of love and of learning to love.

It is not only those in groups we would call religious fundamentalists that have these attitudes that mitigate against love, however. All of us can fall into this easily when we are sure we are right about something and forget that we don’t know everything about anything. Before I was a parent, I could be a real critic of people with kids. I couldn’t believe how many bad parents there were wherever I went! Once I became a parent and got to know other parents from a different perspective, I began to understand the wisdom of Socrates when he said, “All I know is that I know nothing!”

This same pattern becomes true on the larger issues of the day as well. I don’t know how this church moved through the process to declare itself Open and Affirming (which for our guests is the UCC phrase that indicates we are open to and affirming of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered folk), but I walked with the UCC church in Norwell, Massachusetts through this process and found myself consistently humbled by what I didn’t know. At first I couldn’t understand how anyone could NOT want to be Open and Affirming; didn’t they know gay folk were children of God, seeking to faithfully live out their lives in love and service just like the rest of us? How could anyone read the Bible carefully and not know God loved everyone! Of course, on the other side were people who looked at me and said, “How can you read the Bible and not know this is wrong?!” Fortunately, our process was led by a professional mediator, who took us through some amazing evenings of conversation where we did not lay out positions but told each other our stories that shaped our attitudes on this subject. As we all laid aside our certainties, we began to look more closely at ourselves, at each other, and at God in that mirror, and discovered much we had not understood. A few people changed their positions, most did not, but what did happen is that our attitudes toward one another changed as we began to see that our individual experiences were not necessarily normative nor should they shape policy for everyone else.

During the last Presidential election campaign, Bill Clinton preached at Riverside Church in New York while the Republican Convention was being held in midtown. He called on his listeners to attend to the words of Paul that we see through a mirror dimly, or, in the old translations, “through a glass darkly.” He said that because this is true, because we do not have all knowledge or understanding, “we have no choice but to have a charitable attitude toward each other.” In his choice of words, he harkened back to the King James Bible translation of this passage, in which the translators chose to use the word “charity” instead of love. Our understanding of the definition of “charity” has changed so that now when people hear that they tend to think of giving money to help someone. But Clinton’s connection of the word “charitable” to “attitude” helps revive that old meaning. When we approach each other, when we approach those we or others have named our “enemies,” or just those with whom we disagree or whose actions have irritated us (the person who cut you off in traffic, for example) with a charitable attitude because we do not have all the information we need to judge one another, it changes how our community functions. To be charitable in attitude means to constantly be giving others not money, but the benefit of the doubt, out of love for them and in admission of our own ignorance. That’s what Paul hoped would happen in Corinth.

One of the foundational principles of the UCC is this: “In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; in all things, charity.” Although commonly attributed to Augustine, this saying actually came out of the Protestant Reformation from a now unknown Reformer named Rupert Meldenius who was desperately trying to bring peace to warring Christians, each sure they had a corner on truth. In all things charity. Remember that this week. In the words of a lovely song, “Ubi Caritas et Amor, Deus Ibi Est: Where charity and love are, there is God.” Amen