Grace Church in New York

The Twenty-Second Sunday after Pentecost

October 29, 2023

Let me paint a New York City scene for you: You’re on the subway. You’re lucky enough to have gotten a seat. It’s one of the cars with the light blue seats, and you’re on the edge, against the silver arm rest and rails by the door. It’s nice, you can kind of lean your head to the side and rest for a second. But then the train starts to get crowded, taking on more and more people at every stop. People are tripping over your feet, their scarves are dangling over your phone. And then someone jams in the door at the last second, the back mid-section of their body now protruding slightly through and against your face.

“Get out of my space,” you think. You look up at the back of this interloper and think, “Do you not realize there is someone here?” Every little thing they then do becomes fodder for your increasing annoyance and anger towards them. Ugh, you can hear the music through their headphones and it is awful. Their backpack, thrown on the ground, is perilously close to leaning against your leg. “You are the worst of humanity,” you think.

Now here’s another familiar subway scene: You’re waiting and waiting and waiting on the platform. You were about 3 minutes late when you left your apartment, but then you remembered you forgot your umbrella, so then you were 7 minutes late, and then you just missed a train. So now, all of a sudden, you’re 17 minutes late for work and maybe you know your boss will not be happy about that ….

The train finally comes 3 minutes later and now you’re 20 minutes late and the car is also crowded. So you sneak in the best you can, sidewise, so you’re leaning against the side rail next to a seat. You take your backpack off because you’re a good subway rider and put it on the ground wherever you can find a spot and put in your headphones to try to get a little peace of mind but every single person around you is driving you crazy. If people would just move in there would be enough space. And if this person who is so lucky to have a seat behind you would just stop leaning against your backside. “Ugh, you are the worst of humanity,” you think.

Who is the worst? You’ve probably figured it out by now, you are both people. Have we not all been both people?

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”

Jesus has thrown up a flare here today: this is the thing to pay attention to, this is the one. Of all the other things in all of scripture, this is the most important and the second most important thing to know, this is the Great Commandment, all you really need to know: Love God. Love your neighbor. Amen. Sermon over. What else is there to say?

Well, it’s not easy is it? And my little opening example is just the tiniest, most simple, banal example of a situation that plays out over and over every day in slightly bigger or much bigger or nastier or even systemic ways—we do not love our neighbors, we do not love ourselves. And if we do not love our neighbors or ourselves, how are we loving God? We aren’t, we can’t. What does this love look like? What does it really mean to love God with all your heart and soul and mind, and to love your neighbor as yourself? What does love like that look like?

My youngest son Gus is now almost 2 years old. As far as I can tell, nearly two-year-olds think they are fully functioning humans, but in reality they can barely walk. They want to run free, but they tumble over every 20th step. They want to talk, but their words are mostly babble. Yesterday, we went to the Balloon Museum—a new experiential art exhibit over by the east river. Hundreds of New York City toddlers and their parents snaked through dark rooms filled with balloons—what could go wrong? One of the rooms was a ball pit the size of an Olympic swimming pool. All Gus wanted to do was jump in, and he would do it, and then disappear fully for a moment into a sea of black plastic balls. To love Gus was to throw him in the ball pit and then trust that I would be able to pull him out. “Again!” he would say. “Again!” And he would laugh.

Whether or not you have your own children, there is a universal truth about each and every one of us, about every single person here and every person on earth! You were nearly 2 years old once. You tried so hard to talk, you laughed at the sound of your own voice, and you relied on someone to take care of you. Someone, somewhere had to let you go and then pick you back up again or you would not be here. Follow that love, see what that love looks like. The scholar Cornel West often reminds us in his teaching “You are who you are because someone loved you, someone attended to you.” In the world around us, loving God means keeping track of that love. That universal love that keeps the world moving. Reaching deep into that well within you and giving thanks. To know that to God, you are still nearly two years old, and God is always chasing after you, brushing you off, taking joy in your laughter.

“That is the greatest and first commandment, to love God with all your heart and soul and mind. And the second is like it, you shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

Cornel West says another thing about love, I like to think of it as aligned with the second part of this commandment, the loving your neighbor part. Dr. West says “and never forget, justice is what love looks like in public.” Love is felt at the individual level, but when it’s put together, this network of love, it’s going to show up as justice—a just society. When there is injustice, we know the love is missing, something is broken.

Dr. West expanded on his famous quote, if justice is what love looks like in public, what does justice look like? He says: “We need the courage to question the powers that be, the courage to be impatient with evil and patient with people. In many instances we will be stepping out on nothing, and just hoping to land on something. But that’s the struggle. To live is to wrestle with despair, yet never allow despair to have the last word.” This is the core of our faith as a Christian people.

I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately since October 7, when the Hamas terrorist attack broke the dam of conflict in Israel & Palestine.

I can—and I just did—tell you a cute story about the subway or how we were all adorable when we were babies, and how love is the answer, but the whole notion—the “power of love” —can feel pretty anemic in the face of global violence, in the face of war, and in this case, war in a place that is central to our faith, our shared story as God’s people.

To make sense of this current moment, I have been looking back in history. The theologian Johann Baptist Metz was a teenager in 1944, close to the end of the second world war. But he turned 18 with just enough time left for him to be drafted into the army. “In one searing incident,” his New York Times obituary wrote, “he was sent from his unit to deliver a message and returned to find all the other members, boys his own age, dead from an attack.” The memory of the trauma remained with him in his life and shaped his future work.

In his theology, he would go on to introduce the concept of “dangerous memory” —that is the idea that remembering the pain of history correctly should “call into question our tightly-sealed identities.” You see: Metz was born in Germany, was a teenager in Germany. When he was drafted into the army, it was the wehrmacht. Metz was, in fact, a Nazi. And the trauma that changed his life was the death of fellow Nazis.

Metz spent his life grappling with the reality of what he had been a part of. He saw the terrors of National Socialism in Germany—the deaths of 6 million Jews and 5 million from other persecuted groups, their existence in concentration camps and their deaths—Metz saw these terrors as an inflection point for faith everywhere. In the dangerous memory of the holocaust, how can we love God? Where was God? Or as he said: “The theological question after Auschwitz is not only ‘Where was God in Auschwitz?’ It is also ‘Where was humanity in Auschwitz?’”

When we forget again and again who we are, when we overlook trauma in the past, we run the risk of carrying out the same trauma. What can end a cycle of violence? As Christians, we have the cross; a suffering, tortured, crucified body is at the center of Christianity. This is a historical encounter, a true thing that happened once, but which requires us to take into account the history of all crucified bodies. This is our dangerous memory which we cannot forget.

And yet, in the history of Christianity, many have seemed to forget, as Christianity became aligned with empire and colonialism, from Constantine, to the crusades, to the British Commonwealth. If we who are Christians are truly committed to our baptismal covenant, to living in a world where society respects human dignity, we must take the dead with us. We need to remember the people who died on the path to justice and peace.

Our role is both to remember histories of suffering by disrupting injustice in our own time and also to acknowledge the existence of suffering in all people—we are all siblings in our suffering—our dangerous pasts—but we are also linked in our reaching forward, in our hope that we can do better. To live, to be Christian, is to wrestle with suffering and despair, yet never allow despair to have the last word.

Is this all sounding very easy or very hard? Very inspiring or very overwhelming? Well, there’s a trick—or a key that unlocks the whole thing, right there in the scripture. And we’ll call this the RuPaul Charles trick; yes that’s right—the queen of drag and host of RuPaul’s Drag Race, who always says to the assembled contestants on this show: “If you can’t love yourself, how in the hell are you gonna love somebody else? Can I get an AMEN?” That’s right, the trick is hidden in those important commandments: love God and love your neighbor of course, but as you love yourself. You’ve got to love yourself.

That’s the thing about the subway story, of course—you were both people. That’s the thing about Johann Baptist Metz, who was a Nazi and an anti-Nazi theologian. He was both people. You’re always both people. So if you find yourself being really hard on the other person, it’s probably coming from a place deep inside. Love yourself, then you love your neighbor the same way.

The gift of our faith is that you don’t need to do any of this alone. That’s why you are here this morning, together, in community, gathering around a table to be fed. To do that first commandment loudly and in chorus, to love God and worship God in the beauty of this place, in the beauty of these prayers and songs. To let God chase you up to the altar, brush you off when you tumble, catch you when you are descending into the pit. What are we at Grace jumping into together? Where will love lead us? And not anemic love, but love in the shadow of the cross. Where will an encounter with God’s love today take you when you leave this place? Love God, with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind, as a parent cares for their child, as a parent is changed by their love for a child, just as God loves you. And love yourself. Then may that love pour out upon our neighbors and our neighbor’s neighbors. May the dangerous memories of humanity’s past lead us into new life governed by this love.