Mark 12:28-34
We are officially in stewardship season. Our theme this year, to be a beacon of hope, challenges our congregation to share the love of Christ beyond our walls, while nurturing a community of welcome and hope for everyone.
We have seen incredibly powerful ways this has been happening this fall. Our Sunday evening services welcome new people from the community into our worship, while giving our own church members who can’t make it on Sunday morning a chance to worship with us. Next week in worship, we will hear about people we have touched through our grants and mission work; the incredibly powerful witness of God’s love through these grants and the energies of our deacons has been one of our brightest lights shining through this community.
Our children are being nurtured through music and acting, learning the Bible, and having fun together on Sunday evenings, but it’s not only for children of our members; it is for the children of school families, the children of people out in the community who are coming into our doors, experiencing the gifts of this place.
We are shining our light by making stronger connections with our neighboring communities of faith, like Park Ave. Synagogue. I’ve connected with the rabbi there, and Adam, through his work, has engaged our youth with their youth and youth from other congregations as well. We are also reforging and strengthening our connections with Church of the Heavenly Rest. I had lunch with the new rector last week, and she was as excited as I was to think about a community Thanksgiving service and exploring mission work in partnership with one another. We are strengthening our ties to our sister Presbyterian congregations. We are going to learn how we can pray for them, how they can pray for us, and how together we can multiply our efforts to forge God’s Kingdom of equality and abundance for all in New York City. This is just the merest retelling of all that is being done to be a beacon of Christ’s light.
But the strongest, most powerful light that we have is not institutional, it is you. God has grafted a divine light inside of you. It’s all too often we forget how important it is to stoke the fire within us, to treasure that fire, and to give thanks for it.
We are to be stewards of that light, so for the next several weeks we will explore how we can:
shine our light,
join our light to others,
and stoke our light.
Before we can have sufficient BTUs to warm the world with Christ’s love, we have to ourselves be ignited. And that means being a steward of the blessing that is you.
There is so much, sadly, in our religion and in our society that leads us to have a negative self-image; that leads us to believe we are inferior, and that feeds us the toxic message that there is something fundamentally wrong at the core of our being. Tragically and horrifically, the church was complicit in telling whole categories of people that there was something broken,disturbing, and inferior about them, whether it was because of the color of their skin, their gender, or their sexual orientation.
Thankfully, the church is finding ways to move past this condemnation of classes of people. But the church still has not sufficiently spread the message that there is something incredible about you, something unique in the whole of history that will never be repeated in another person, ever, and this something didn’t happen by chance; it happened purposefully from the master Potter who shaped you and molded you. Furthermore, the Bible tells us that because of who you are and to whom you belong, you are worth being loved.
Jesus explained that the very heart of our religion is love, love of God, love of neighbor,and love of self. And the truth of the matter is, if we don’t love ourselves, we will have a terrible time loving others. In the church, we talk much about loving others but rarely about the importance of loving ourselves as Jesus instructed.
A few provisos before we dive into the blessing of self-love:
Self-love is not self-obsession.
Self-love is not self-importance.
Self-love is not about pampering yourself to the extent that you fail to be generous with your time for others.
Self-love is not avoiding tough choices that are morally complex.
This is not self-help;
this is self-awareness.
Some religions focus on how miserable people are. And yes, we are, each of us, broken,but there is a greater, more powerful truth about you and about me. You have a destiny, to be a citizen and saint in the household of God; through Jesus, you are a part of the divine family.
The Bible has much to say about why you should love yourself.
First and most importantly: you are the handiwork of God.
“For you created my inmost being;you knit me together in my mother’s womb.I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;” (Psalm 139)
The Psalmist describes not a mass production of the human race but the attentiveness of an artist who treasures what they have created. The Psalmist realizes there is something amazing about the nature of their soul that leads them to awe and praise of God.
Next, the Bible tells us that God did not just make us and forget us; but that we are the apple of God’s eye (Psalm 17:8), and because of this, Isaiah tells us that we are God’s beloved children. Jesus himself tells us of the incredible, tender care with which God watches over all of us:
"Indeed, the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Don’t be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows." (Luke 12:7)
And finally, of course, as God’s creation we have gone astray, but God so loved us and wanted to restore us to the amazing creation that we are that God sent His only son because God so loved the world.
So, God created you with the utmost care; you are the apple of God’s eye; you are God’s beloved; God went to every possible length so that you might have abundant life. If God knows best and God knows all, then clearly, you are worth loving. Let your light shine so that others see the authentic you and see your good works, they will give glory to God in heaven. But without loving ourselves, our light will not shine.
Think of a masterfully crafted lamp. When it came out of the fires of the furnace, and its shaping was complete, it was beautiful, resplendent, and glorious. But over time some dents and dings tarnished it, its ability to shine light decreased. That lamp was made for this purpose: to bring light so that others may see. You are that lamp, and you must burnish that which has tarnished it; hammer out the dings and dents that life has set up on you because God believes you are worth it. If you do, the light you bring to others will be brighter than you ever thought possible.
There are days in our lives when we should be hard on ourselves, but I suspect most of us entertain way too many of them, and we don’t spend enough time, as the Psalmist did, considering how fearfully and wonderfully we are made.
One of the key parts of loving yourself is not only accepting who you are but embracing it. At least that is how it was for one young teacher I knew. She grew up in a home where it was important that young ladies should be respectful, modest, and meek. And she never felt comfortable in that role; it wasn’t who God made her to be.
She was in her late twenties and taught in a very challenging environment. As you might imagine, a meek, mild, and modest approach was wholly ineffective. But eventually, frustrated, she allowed her true self to emerge; she embraced the person God made her to be. And she got angry. She said:
There were moments as a first-year teacher...“I have students with drugs, in gangs, who have their only meal at school; they try you and try you each day. I should feel for them, but you are angry, but then the anger reminds you...THAT IS THE REASON YOU ARE THERE.”
She realized God had placed her in this school with the challenges of drugs and preteen pregnancies, and the stark reality of broken lives, not because she was meek or modest and gentle, but because she was a feisty, sometimes angry, hardheaded, determined person with a fierce sense of justice and love who wouldn’t cave in, who wouldn’t give up, who would love these students with the fierce passion of God. She embraced the self that God made her to be, and suddenly, this light she had been hiding under a bushel became a conflagration—burning hot flames of passion to be present, to be persistent, to be tenacious.
She shared with me her sense of her love of who God made her to be. Not that she would’ve expressed it this way, but in our conversation, she concluded that that’s why God has her there. Because if it was easy anybody could do it.
Jesus commanded us to love our neighbors as ourselves. This presumes that we love the person God made us to be in order to effectively love others. Let us all be a beacon, stoking the fire within so that all may feel and see the blinding glow of the light of the world. Amen.
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