Love Is… Complicated!

Sermon

Good morning, Westminster Presbyterian Church!

Since I have the floor, I want to begin by thanking everyone for your support of the work I’ve been doing in a remote corner of Ethiopia where my parents went under the United Presbyterian Church when I was five years old. I went back five years ago and started the only nonprofit organization that addresses the needs of 35,000 people in that district. With your generosity in the capital campaign, you have restored safe water to over 5000 people; we put solar on the regional hospital to give it power—it serves that district and several others. You brought light into over 500 dark homes with solar lighting kits and into another 800 homes with solar lanterns given to the poorest children so they can do their homework. You provided start-up grants to women’s co-ops and paid tuition for Bible school to five church leaders. The things you funded with your capital campaign contributions have changed lives. Thank you.

You have shown generous love to people you don’t even know in Ethiopia.

And speaking of love! The famous love chapter in first Corinthians is often used in weddings and quoted on wall plaques. But it’s not a hearts-and-flowers poem. The apostle Paul wrote this message to a church tearing itself apart. People were offending each other. They were harming each other. They were wandering off into strange theological dead ends and fighting over them. They were a mess. Things were so bad, Paul was afraid to visit because it would stir up so many awful feelings. There are many instructions and entreaties in this fifteen-chapter letter, but in this passage, Paul gets to the heart of what needs to happen. They need to clean up their work, and it’s going to take hard-working, gritty love.

Community is hard work. We offend each other. We hurt each other. Partnership brings us to our knees, whether in our marriages, our businesses, or our churches. We’re celebrating World Communion Sunday today. Celebrating that around the world, we are family with people beside us in the pews, and far away, whose lives we can barely imagine.

I lived and worshipped with Christians in partner churches in Ethiopia, Kenya, and South Sudan for twelve years. And by partner churches, I mean partner denominations. And by partnership, I mean gritty and hard. I mean we have offended and hurt each other. And the only answer is to make love our aim.

Presbyterian Church of South Sudan has over a million members. My husband and I worked for three years with the moderator and lead pastors of the church. They had fled to Kenya and were trying to survive there as undocumented immigrants. The cultures of South Sudan are deeply patriarchal. There are no women elders, much less pastors.

On one of my trips into South Sudan with the denomination’s education director, he asked me to preach the Good Friday sermon at a church in what remained of a burnt out, bombed out village. He said, They need to see a woman elder. Church met under a tree. In the middle of my sermon, goats came through, foraging for the blossoms that had fallen. I had plenty of time as my sermon was translated thought by thought to wonder if I had anything to offer to these people who were clinging to hope and faith in such extreme circumstances.

But that didn’t mean I got along with the denominational leaders back in Nairobi! In one meeting I accused them of misusing funds for women’s development and they accused me of being a spy. Mark and I were called to work with them because they were using funds according to cultural norms, not according to accepted accounting procedures. It was a mess. In the end, the church leaders fired Mark. Love is patient and kind. We all failed, over and over, as we tried for four years to live out our church partnership.

The decisions being made about fifteen years ago to ordain gay pastors here in the PC(USA) didn’t just roil the church in the U.S.A. I watched our partner church in Ethiopia struggle for years with how to remain partners with the PC(USA) even though they were deeply uncomfortable with gay ordination. The PC(USA) had a couple, Michael and Rachel Weller, who had been in Ethiopia for decades and who had deep relationships with church leaders there. Michael, especially, studied and prayed and discerned this issue with the moderator and other church leaders. The Ethiopian culture is deeply homophobic. But together they were finding ways to understand each other, to affirm being family. To grow together sensitively and openly.

Then the PC(USA) moderator visited Ethiopia. In her conversations with the moderator of the Ethiopian Mekane Yesus denomination, she said, “You are an immature church. When you mature you will see that we are right.” She said this to leaders of a church that was watered by the blood of martyrs during the Communist era. She said that to leaders of a church that is full of youth, that is growing, that is probably twice the size of the PC(USA) by now. She said it without thinking of the many centuries that Africans have suffered under the cultural assumption that race is a thing, and that European-heritage people are smarter and wiser and deserve to be more powerful than Africans. Love is not arrogant or rude.

After that, the moderator of Mekane Yesus stopped meeting with Michael. Relations were broken, and the PC(USA) no longer has a presence in Ethiopia. Except for some sneaky people like me, who work outside the church.

During those turbulent times, I heard someone say, “Those African churches are so culture-bound!” The man had no sense that he was also culture-bound. We are all culture bound, and our cultures invade our theology. That’s because we’re human. Our family of origin cultures invade our marriages and cause problems, for pity sake! That’s why we need Paul’s reminder of the gritty, hard work of love.

I come to church on Sunday to worship with you because I need that reminder. I need to remember that I see in a mirror dimly—in Paul’s day, it was like looking into a polished spoon to see your face. I only understand partially. And I need to be assured that someday I will see those South Sudanese church leaders face to face and understand them fully and compassionately.

And today that’s what we celebrate, sharing communion with our global family. In my time of working for the PC(USA), I met people who worked in Iran in the ’50s and were still traveling back to encourage and teach Christians there. A young PC(USA) couple was ministering in Tajikistan. A man who left India went back after a career in Sacramento in order to take the gospel to his people, an untouchable caste. The PC(USA) partners with two denominations in Egypt.

There are Christians meeting today in every visible and invisible corner of the world. People whose own religious traditions had left them restless, and who have welcomed the news of a God of love, a God who says, “Fear not!” A God who promises to be present in whatever they are facing.

Those untouchable-caste Christians in India started taking communion twelve hours ago. As the earth spun its way around the sun this time, Sudanese and Ethiopians began gathering for worship and sharing communion while we were still asleep. And now it’s our turn. Thanks be to God!