Porn and God
- Ruth 1:1-18
- Psalm 146
- Deuteronomy 6:1-9
- Psalm 119:1-8
- Hebrews 9:11-14
- Mark 12:28-34
Love God, Love Neighbour.
This sermon title should drive up the hits a bit!
One point in my personal theological journey, one on which I harp over and over again, is the connection of this word, αγαπε agape – love, with its root verb, αγαπαω apagpao – to welcome or entertain. Although it’s used as a command in our passage today, “Love the Lord your God”, we don’t get αγαπε at all, we go straight for αγαπαω. Jesus tells us straight out to “welcome the Lord God” and to “Welcome our neighbour”.
Ride that train of meaning for a while in your throughts.
This past week one of my housemates met two guys on the street who were asking for money to buy food. Instead she invited them back to the house. They said they would come by later, but they needed the money now, so she said the could come by now and help prepare the food… So they did and, when I came home from errands, I found them in the kitchen, all three working hard to prepare supper for me and for our 13 other housemates. These two guys ended up spending a couple of nights with us, sleeping on the guest bed, and they went their way, hitchhiking to wherever it is they are going. Travellers.
The first night I came to supper at the house that was to become my home… an invited guest of one of the members of the community… there was far far too much food (in the eyes of the person who had cooked) and so she went outside to the bus stop and invited in a bunch of folks who were waiting for the bus. One woman was so hungry, so worried about what would happen when she got home, than she was crying for joy at the invite.
Mindful, also, of the Christian teaching of the incarnation and the implications thereof – that welcoming our neighbour is the same thing as welcoming our God – I want to wrap up this preliminary meditation with some thoughts on this quote from Bishop Kallistos Ware (which I’ve blogged before):
The whole person is not just a self-contained, self-centered unity. The whole person is a person who is on the one side open to God, and on the other side open to other human persons. The human being without God is not truly human. We were created to enter into a relationship with God, to be in dialogue with Him, and if that relationship is not present something essential is lacking from our personhood. Equally, we are created to relate to other human persons. It has been said that there is no true man unless there are two men entering into communication with one another. The isolated individual is not a real person. A real person is one who lives in and for others. And the more personal relationships we form with others, the more truly we realize ourselves as persons. This idea of openness to God, openness to other persons, could be summed up under the word “love.” We become truly personal by loving God and by loving other humans. By love I don’t mean merely an emotional feeling, but a fundamental attitude. In its deepest sense, love is the life, the energy, of God Himself in us.
We are not at all a full person without this hospitality. We are not real. So much of our culture is wrapped up in things that “I do because I enjoy doing them”. I had a conversation recently with a friend about horror movies: exciting our body’s flight-or-fight system just for the sheer rush of doing so. We “Cry wolf” to our body at every turn – roller coasters, scary news stories about H1N1 or AIDS or terrorists or “the other political party”. We hype up our systems every chance we get. I suggest the real problem with our culture is our failure to open up: we have emotions now, and hormones, just exactly for ourselves alone. We are in a closed loop – dealing with only our own feelings instead of others. Our culture – from horror movies to political commentary – one of onanistic enjoyment of our hormones in which all other things (including people treated as things) serve as pornography.
This is the opposite, I would suggest, of our commanded hospitality.
