Photo by Tyler Nix - Unsplash
Karen Hollis | June 16, 2024
Indigenous People’s Day | Celebrating Joyce | Father’s Day
1 Peter 4:7-11 Indigenous Translation The end of all things is near, so think good thoughts and be single-minded in your prayers. Above all, never stop loving each other, for like a warm blanket love covers a great number of broken ways. Open your homes to each other and share your food without grumbling. Each one of you has been given a gift, so use it to serve one another, as a good manager of the many kinds of gifts Creator gives. If your gift is speaking, then your words should come from the Great Spirit. If your gift is serving, then serve with the strength Creator gives you. In this way, the Great Spirit will be honored by everything you do through Creator Sets Free (Jesus) the Chosen One. To him belongs all power and shining-greatness to the time beyond the end of all days. Aho! May it be so!
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be reflections of your word to us today, in Christ’s name we pray. Amen
On this otherwise ordinary Sunday in the middle of June, we are invited to be with the complexity of the human condition. In this container of worship we observe Indigenous People’s day, where we celebrate the culture, practices, language of the First People of this land and acknowledge the wounds past and present caused by colonization; we observe Father’s day and thank the fathers in our midst, those who have fathered us, and touch into the ache and pain that is present for some of us on this day; we lift up Joyce’s ministry and acknowledge with her the gift and vulnerability of saying yes to God’s call . . . and going out in the world to serve. I invite us for a moment to just breathe into this myriad of truths. This is part of being human . . . to be in the intricacies of life and then get up tomorrow and do it all again.
Peter was no stranger to the challenges of humanity. He is the same Peter who dropped his fishing nets to follow after Jesus, who tried to walk on water, who sat for 3 years under Jesus’ teaching, asked questions while trying to reconcile this new way of seeing with the cultural norms around him; he is the same human who challenged the leadership of women, rebuked Jesus for saying he would be killed and raised on the third day; who denied Jesus three times and ran straight into the empty tomb to see for himself, who sat on the beach with the resurrected Jesus and was commissioned by Jesus to serve. He’s not necessarily the one we look up to as the model disciple, rather the one we look to and say, if he was called to serve, there’s definitely room for me too!
I have to say, given the messiness of his faith journey, as described in the gospels, I was surprised by the vision he casts in this morning’s passage. It’s possible he actually wrote it, though the evidence suggests that it was more likely written perhaps by someone in his Roman community who was communicating the spirit of Peter’s theology and the values and practices of Peter’s community there. Either way, the message shows a deepening of character on Peter’s part.
This section of the letter begins with an acknowledgement that the world is changing . . . this is the end of the world as we know it. In their day, the Temple in Jerusalem has just been destroyed, so the Jewish community everywhere is not only reeling, but trying to figure out how to be Jewish without a temple. Most followers of Jesus at this point are still Jewish, though they share the unique perspective of their future as a collaboration with the risen Christ. They learned from Jesus that they have some agency in the way the future unfolds . . . the same is true for us today. It’s a different time, similar theme in a post-covid world with a climate crisis, a call for reconciliation, safety and dignity for all people. The world we knew is gone and we are collaborators with Christ in the one that is unfolding. The themes are so similar, we can probably talk about this morning’s text with one ear in Peter’s day and one ear in our own.
In these times of big transition and complexity, Peter’s community says to love one another – this alone sounds very much like Jesus – but they say it in a strange way: “never stop loving each other, for like a warm blanket love covers a great number of broken ways.” Is Jesus in the business of covering up or covering over our brokenness? That doesn’t sound quite right. The lines that come after thankfully give us some more context . . . and they invite us to make love a verb, an action, beginning with hospitality, by opening homes to each other and sharing food without grumbling.
It makes me wonder how people are faring in the time of transition. If the reminder to have a good attitude when hosting their siblings in Christ needed to be written down, perhaps they are habitually agitated or unsettled or disrupted. These huge cultural transitions impact us on such a personal level that they can shape the way we approach our loved ones and navigate our days.
Confronted with deep upheaval one might want to isolate or distract ourselves . . . but Peter’s community instructs followers of Jesus to remain focused on a prayerful way of being and choices that bring us together with our siblings in Christ, while offering our gifts in service of others.
I am not proud to admit it, but I have a tendency to cancel plans when feeling unsettled or my emotions are activated from any number of things. In seminary, I cancelled on one of my friends and her 3-year-old son one too many times, and one day she refused to let me off the hook. She said, we love you and we miss you and we want to see you. And so I went.
What happens when we show up and connect with our community, even when we’re not up for it? What is possible when we show up in our messiness? I don’t remember what happened that day, but in such a context, my feelings might start to overflow and be witnessed. Agitation then has a pathway for expression in the company of understanding humans who are available for witnessing the feelings and insights that follow.
We’re often afraid to let ourselves be seen and heard in this way, to be vulnerable and messy. This path does take a certain amount of courage and faith in our siblings in Christ to love one another so fiercely that we are willing to be in the mess and support one another’s healing.
This reminds me of the Zulu word Ubuntu, which means “I am who I am because we are who we are” . . . affirming that community is essential for our personal and collective way forward.
Peter’s community shares this vision of a collective movement of healing and transformation through our gifts of service to one another. In this collaborative effort to show up and serve one another, even when we don’t feel like it, and to have courage enough to allow the stuff creating that resistance to come to the surface in the presence of our community . . . we make love a verb . . . and give love a context to find its fullness in action. In this way, we only offer our gifts to one another, but we move toward our collective healing and wholeness. What a vision for the church.
The church needs a big vision like this today . . . because these days are not easy. We live within the layers of complexity in our changing world, our cultural norms are shifting as we learn truths that were hidden away, and God continues to call us to new ministries and new ways of serving, like our sister, Joyce.
What does our collective healing and wholeness look like here? Think for a moment about the spaces of connection for you within our community of faith – perhaps in a small group or other regular gathering or a person or a place in the liturgy – think about a space where you can tell the truth. What would it look like to be a little more vulnerable? To trust the love present here with little more courage? If community is for anything, it’s a place for love in action, love in its fullness. Can you imagine that our small acts of courage and vulnerability are able to bring about our collective healing? Imagine our part in bringing about a more compassionate world around us? If anything can create that kind of world, it is love in action. I give thanks this morninng for Peter and his community for reminding us of our power to co-create in Christ the world that is emerging around us each moment.