Brad
Sullivan
Proper
25, Year A
October
29, 2017
Emmanuel,
Houston
1
Thessalonians 2:1-8
Matthew
22:34-46
The Most Powerful Force In the World
Becca Stevens is an Episcopal priest and the founder and
president of Thistle Farms which she stared 20 years ago with five women who
needed healing, survivors of abuse, trafficking, and prostitution. She started with five women in a house called
Magdalene, and there these five women found the healing power of love as they
lived together, cared for each other, and loved their way back to
wholeness. After four years, Becca and
the women of Magdalene House realized they also needed women to become
economically independent to fully get their lives back, and so they stared making
candles, oils, and other healing products.
Thistle Farms began, and the women who were survivors of the worst that
humanity has to offer began operating this business, Thistle Farms, learning
about running a business, while being healed themselves, and while generating
revenue so that more women survivors could come and live in one of the houses
for the two year program and also be healed.
In the twenty years that Thistle Farms has been healing
women and sustaining itself through the healing products they make and sell,
Becca Stevens has found that “Love is the most powerful force for change in the
world.”
That sounds a bit like what Jesus taught, doesn’t it. Love God, and love people. That is the only religion Jesus is really interested
in us having. When Jesus said the
greatest commandment is to love God and the close second is to love people, he
was talking to the uber religious Pharisees.
They were like the extreme high church people of our day. If there was a law, a rule, a rubric about
their religious practice, they followed it absolutely to the t. There was nothing particularly wrong about
that except for what was in their hearts and the reasons why they were
following the law absolutely to the t.
See they were following all of their religious practice
rules because they thought doing so made them righteous in God’s eyes. They really wanted God to be pleased with
them and they wanted to look good before God and others. In other words, their extreme religious
observance was mostly selfish and done with a misunderstanding of who God is
and what God desires for us. For a
timely example, they’d basically turned God into Jobu.
For those of you unfamiliar with Jobu, he was a small voodoo
idol statue guy who made his cinematic debut in film Major League. In the movie,
the Cleveland Indians baseball team were dead last in Major League Baseball and
they had a rather rag tag group of players, plenty of talent, but a little
rough around the edges. Pedro Cerano was
their big heavy hitter and could hit a home run off of a fastball just about
every time, but he couldn’t hit a curve ball.
So, he kept this little statue named Jobu in his locker, and he prayed
to Jobu to help him hit the curve ball.
Not only that, he tried to please Jobu by leaving him offerings of
cigars and rum, and as he told his teammates, “It’s very bad to drink Jobu’s
rum; it’s very bad.” Of course Jobu
didn’t actually help him hit the curveball and in the end, he decided he would
just hit the curveball himself.
The Pharisees had turned God into Jobu. “Yea for us,” they thought, “We’re offering
to God all of our proverbial cigars and rum; we’re following every religious
practice, every single one, so that God will be pleased with us.” They were even instructing others and even
scaring them into trying to do the same so that God would not be angry with
them. In other words, “it’s very bad to
drink Jobu’s rum.” The Pharisees had
forgotten that the point of the law, the point of all of their religious practices
was not to please God, but rather to help heal their own hearts so that they
might be better able to love others.
God doesn’t care about our religious practices. As much as the law of Moses said that people
had to sacrifice animals to atone for their sins, the prophets said over and
over again, “Would you stop with that animal sacrifice stuff? God doesn’t want it. God doesn’t care. He just wants you to treat each other well,
to take care of each other, and to live lives of love.” That’s like the new ultra-revised standard
international version, but that was the message. “I don’t care about this stuff. I don’t care about these religious
practices. Just love each other.”
Love God, and love people.
If at any time, obeying a rule of the law forces you to act in a way
that is not loving toward God or people, then break the law. If at any time heeding the words of the
prophets forces you to act in a way that is not loving toward God or people,
then do not heed the words of the prophets.
So, if God really isn’t all that into religion, why do we
have religion? Why do we have these
rituals and routines and ways of life?
Well, again I’ll turn to Becca Stevens with Thistle Farms. The point of the ritual and the religion is
to help us love God and love people. In
her book, Love Heals, Becca writes
about the healing power of ritual. She
writes about her morning ritual including prayer which took years to work out
what truly helped heal her heart each day.
She wrote that keeping this morning ritual got her ready for the day and
helped heal her heart each day so that she could be more loving toward her
family and everyone else she saw during the day. She wrote that “[Keeping these rituals] might
mean dinners are simpler, clothes don’t get folded as often, and you miss out
on other activities, but for folks like me who can spin out and lose focus,
morning rituals are grounding and essential.”
“We need some good old-time religious practices,” she wrote, “to infuse
our lives so we can use the most powerful force - love - to heal our communities.”
Personally, I’ve found healing in old time religious
practices, particularly in the last month or so by praying morning prayer each
morning. For years, my practice was to
pray morning prayer by myself with a cup of coffee, and before having kids,
this daily practice worked out pretty well, and there were a couple of years
that I found healing every morning through these prayers. Enter children, and I just couldn’t do it for
a while. Still, that was my practice, morning prayer every morning, and I
rarely followed that practice.
Then there was Harvey and praying Compline each night via
Facebook life, and those prayers and rituals and the community praying
together. One of our vestry members
asked if we could do Morning Prayer as well, so the next morning I began
praying Morning Prayer Monday through Saturday at about 6:00 each morning and
inviting others to join via Facebook Live.
There has been a change in my life with this newly rediscovered ritual,
especially because I’m getting to pray with others, even if they aren’t present
at the time and they join in by watching later.
If that particular routine isn’t going to work for you, and it’s not
going to be healing for everyone, then find another routine, some other
old-time religious practice that does heal your heart. Time to breathe, time to center in prayer,
letting all that is pass by and simply be in the moment. Look at the beauty of the earth, the trees,
the sky, the beauty of the people around, giving thanks, feeling our connectedness,
noticing the daily gift of the sunrise and sunset. Breathe, be still, light a candle to cast out
the darkness, pray through scripture and the words of Jesus. Join with others in prayer.
Having routine and practices, religious rituals is a
wonderful, healing way to live, not because God cares one whit if we pray
morning prayer, but because these rituals help to heal our hearts, to reconnect
us to the source of all life and love, the God who created all that is. Then, with our hearts healed, we can live out
that love toward others. God cares about
our healing and our love for one another quite a lot. That’s why God would be pleased with our
religious practices, that these rituals may heal us so that we will be better
able to love.
If we don’t follow religious practices, God’s not offended. God is not Jobu upset that we didn’t offer
him rum. Rather, God offers us religious
practices and rituals because God knows we’ll find healing by connecting to him
each day, because God is love, and “love is the most powerful force for
[healing and] change in the world.”
