Tag: love

Heresy and our wild, untamed God

I shared this tweet in my Instagram story yesterday, and I got some interesting pushback from a handful of folks that I want to respond to.

Heresy is a word created by humans. It doesn’t occur in the Bible. People created the idea of heresy as a way to designate, in the long running theological battles over any number of issues, who is in and who is out. Its a human construct that serves a role in debates over orthodoxy. It is not a God-ordained marker about any particular belief.

So, when I share something like this, I’m saying that if someone wants to label me a heretic over a particular theological belief I hold, that I can live with that. The claim heretic is subjective; its someone’s opinion about a particular situation.

And frankly, when someone wants to wield the word heretic around the act of expanding our understanding of what God’s love encompasses, it really makes me want to turn that accusation around and throw it back. Because I truly, deeply believe that if you do or say or promote anything that tries to limit God’s love, that tries to put God in some kind of man-made box or make God smaller than God could be, that’s real heresy.

Here’s why I don’t think any of this is actually heresy, or wrong in any way. The Bible says, in 1 John, “God is love.” When we say that, we can only ever approximate the reality of love that is God with our language. We can’t really wrap our head, or our words, around the capacity or the depth or the magnitude of the kind of love that is God. So, to try to limit the reach of God’s love towards human beings – to say, this person is out for this reason – is to put a limit on God, is to stand in God’s place in making a determination about where God’s love does and does not reach. We are not here to make that call, as Paul reminds us. We are simply here to live into God’s cruciform love via our imitation of Christ, and leave it up to God to make any judgments.

Same goes for just how just God is (Deut 32:4), how liberating God is (Psalm 146), how unexpected God is (2 Peter 3), or how inclusive God is (Gal. 3:28). Our language cannot comprehend the attributes of God, it can only make vague gestures in that direction. So let us beware placing limits on the good things about God and God’s love for us and God’s desire for the world and for us. Always, always, always err in the direction of more love, more justice, more inclusion, more mercy. Always, in all things you do.

We should always remember that when Jesus tells us to do things like love our enemy, or to turn the other cheek, or to eat with tax collectors and sinners, or to judge not (all of which were deeply radical and countercultural statements in their context, something we forget because of their familiarity two thousand years later) it is always meant to challenge our comfort and our boundaries, and to remind us: this God we worship is boundless, is abundant, is wild. The only heretic is the one who tries to tame God.

don’t be significant or effective

Some of my critics were happy to say that my refusal to use a computer would not do any good. I have argued, and am convinced, that it will at least do me some good, and that it may involve me in the preservation of some cultural goods. But what they meant was real, practical, public good. They meant that the materials and energy I save by not buying a computer will not be “significant.” They meant that no individual’s restraint in the use of technology or energy will be “significant.” That is true

But each one of us, by “insignificant” individual abuse of the world, contributes to a general abuse that is devastating. And if I were one of thousands or millions of people who could afford a piece of equipment, even one for which they had a conceivable “need,” and yet did not buy it, that would be “significant.” Why, then, should I hesitate for even one moment to be one, even the first one, of that “significant” number? Thoreau gave the definitive reply to the folly of “significant numbers” a long time ago: Why should anybody wait to do what is right until everybody does it? It is not “significant” to love your own children or to eat your own dinner, either. But normal humans will not wait to love or eat until it is mandated by an act of Congress.

Wendell Berry, “Feminism, the Body, and the Machine” in What Are People For?

One of my favorite lines of thought within good Christian theology is a critique of the desire for efficiency and significance in modern culture. I based the entire first series of my essay project at The Radical Ordinary on this critique. For Wendell Berry, it is an on-going critique as well, and he states it so well in this essay. The world conforms itself to the demands of economics, of numbers and dollars and cents: everything must be efficient, streamlines, frictionless.

But, as Berry reminds us here, love is not efficient. Love is not significant, at least not in the way the world would view significance. It does not contort itself meet the needs the invisible hand of the market, but instead, moves things out of its reach. As Christians, and as the Church, questions of efficiency must always be pretty far down the list of priorities in making decisions about the use of our time, resources, and love. Other things must come first.

In the newest issue of Plough Quarterly, there is a story about the Palazzo Migliori, a mansion just off Saint Peter’s Square in the Vatican, that Pope Francis had turned into a home for people with no where else to go. The story contemplates the divine wastefulness of turning such a beautiful and historic building into a shelter for just a few people. In this section of the piece, I am reminded of these conversations I keep having here about effectiveness, and the words of Stanley Hauerwas and Wendell Berry:

Pope Francis dining at the Palazzo Migliori

This place gives Anna a story that bends toward peace and rests there. Something about its over-the-top-ness: the carefully painted crests on the ceiling, the terrace overlooking Saint Peter’s Square, the unnecessarily good food. The visitors who know your name and your favorites and your good and bad habits, who know you need to put that cream on your foot and will banter with you until you do it. Above all it is knowing: that this place could have been a posh hotel; that some might call its current incarnation a waste; that you are not being given the bare minimum.

When we love someone, we are not thinking of how to do so efficiently; we are thinking how to do it well. Think of new parents preparing a beautiful nursery: they may buy things the child never uses, and perhaps some of that money and effort might be better used elsewhere. But we are not surprised when loving parents put more thought and work into preparing a place than is strictly necessary.

There are certain things that we know make a good place for anyone – shelter from the cold, a quiet place to sleep, a warm stew, a clean place to wash up, art, song, softness – and we can prepare these things even before we meet the recipients. Once we meet, there begins the work of making it a good place for them in particular – for Astriche, who loves chamomile; for Lioso, who is so much more tired than hungry and just wants to sleep; for Ajim and his appetite; for Anna the teller of tales.

https://www.plough.com/en/topics/justice/social-justice/princess-of-the-vatican

The mindless drive for efficiency and significance is a depersonalizing drive. Love is not depersonalized. It requires intimacy, connection, and a knowing of the other we are called to love. You can build a generic homeless shelter, sure. But you can’t build a home, or a relationship that way. And only those relationships of love are what save lives and make the world a better place. And remember, you don’t need permission to act this way, or to develop a strategic 12-point plan to figure out how. Just ask, how can I show love today, or in this situation, or in this specific encounter, and then do those things. Don’t worry if it is the most effective use of your time. Don’t worry about whether it will undermine some bigger Plan. Don’t run a cost-benefit analysis. Just love, and be loved, as God wants us to be.

Love in action

What does love look like in the world?

It can’t just be declarations. You can’t keep saying that you love gay people or black people or poor people or immigrants but then do things to them and support policies towards them and vote for people who hurt them. To love someone, to practice love, requires you to be loving. Love requires more than flowery Bible verses, carefully cherry picked from 1 Corinthians or the Psalms. Love requires more than public declarations (preferably on Facebook) about how much you love people, and want what is best for people.

Love requires sacrifice. You must be willing to give up your comfort for others. If you aren’t willing to do that you aren’t willing to practice love. You simply want to be seen as a good, loving person with having nothing actually asked of you. That’s not love. That’s hypocrisy. That’s Bonhoeffer’s cheap grace.

Love in public is justice. Love put to work in the world requires the healing of wrongs, the ending of injustice, the establishment of fairness and justice. What love doesn’t look like is policies that separate families at the border, that criminalizes and punishes people for who they love, that continues to oppress and murder people of color, that make wealth inequality larger and larger, that disenfranchises people from their rights as a citizen in a democracy. Love in public means you probably shouldn’t be supporting politicians who are cruel and callous.

Love in public has to extend a lot further than just unborn babies.

Love is not safe. Love is not easy. Love is not comfortable. Love won’t preserve you in your easy life.

Love – real love – will challenge you. It will push you. It will shake up your comfortable existence. It will ask a lot of you. If it doesn’t do anything of these things –

then it’s not really love.

Christian love is wildly irresponsible and illogical and irrational and also beautiful and boundless and the cure for everything that ails us. I don’t want to hear responses to this along the lines of, “but that would require me to give something up,” or “somebody will take advantage of me.” My answer to that is,

“So?”

Sometimes, that’s what love –real, messy, consequential, Christ-like love – takes. Sometimes, it asks us to be vulnerable, to be willing to take a risk, to be willing to extend love to those we’d rather not. Sometimes love means the recipient won’t return that love, at least not right away, and we might get hurt. This happens in personal love and public love.

But, as Christians we should be willing to give up anything for the sake of love. Including our possessions. Including our safety. Including our family. That the example of Christ. Christ was willing to die for the sake of love. The least we can do is sacrifice a little bit of our creature comfort for the sake of somebody else.

What love is, is our deep, enacted concern for others. It is our willingness see the striving for humanity in others and not see it as an affront to your own humanity. Love has to be –has to be- recognizable as love for it to be, you know, love. Love that looks like hate, or anger, or dislike, is not – stick with me here- actually love. It’s just hate, or anger, or dislike.

I’ve said a lot here. Maybe Scripture can say it better: “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”