March 18, 2012 – Ephesians 2:1-10; John 3:14-21
Ephesians 2:1-10; John 3:14-21
The Call of Love
Fourth Sunday in Lent – March 18, 2012
First Lutheran Church – Winnipeg, MB
I can say without hesitation that the remarkable film Of Gods and Men is
one of the finest Christian pictures I have ever seen.
And I encourage you all to see it.
It’s very closely based on the true story of the Trappist monks of Tibhirine in Algeria.
a small group who lived together in a monastery in the Atlas Mountains in the 1990s.
It takes place at a time of civil unrest in Algeria, when Muslim extremists
seek to overthrow the democratic French government and establish a
fundamentalist government.
The extremists are intolerant of foreigners and early in the film we see them kill
a group of Croatian Catholic workers.
So we know the lives of the monks are at risk from the beginning.
The monastery has been in this rural region for some time.
Indeed, a village of Muslims grew up around it long ago.
And the life of the Christian monastery and the Muslim village have been
intertwined ever since.
The monks provide medical care and footwear for the locals.
They make honey and sell it at the market.
They help Muslim women with their passport applications and
offer friendly advice and counsel to all.
The monks participate in village life and attend parties for the children of their
Muslim neighbours.
These men gave up their lives back in France long ago in order to give their lives to
these people and their country.
The very first thing we see in the film is the monks at worship,
And their very first action is to make the sign of the cross on themselves.
Some of us do this in worship at First Lutheran Church, and perhaps more of us should.
Each time to we do it, it defines who we are and the path we are to take in this life,
the way of the cross.
Certainly this action defines the identity of the monks for the rest of the picture.
They belong to the One – they are defined by the One – who gave himself on a cross out of
great, great love.
On Christmas Eve we hear them singing, Nothing exists except love; God has prepared earth like a cradle for his coming. Nothing exists except the child of Divine life.
Throughout the picture we see them at worship.
Everything they go through is punctuated by worship of Jesus,
just as everything we go through is punctuated by our weekly worship of Jesus.
They are not defined by the violence and fear that spirals out of control around them,
even though they do experience great fear.
What defines them above all is the worship of the one who gave his life out of love for
a very dark and disordered and violent world in order to save it and heal it and redeem it.
Jesus in the Gospel of John today defines the greatness and mystery of God’s love for us and
for this world.
Martin Luther calls this passage in John “the Gospel in miniature.”
For God so loved the world.
And the world in John’s Gospel is not an easy place to love.
It is filled with violence and darkness. It is a dark place this world that God so loves.
And there is risk in God loving it and there is great risk in God sending Jesus to it to love it.
But the measure of love is in the sending and in the giving.
And God doesn’t stint in loving but gives us Jesus.
God gives us all of himself in Jesus.
In order that we might know that we are God’s beloved children now.
In order that we might know that this whole dark world is beloved of God right now.
In order that we might know that even our enemies are beloved right now.
And that God seeks to transform all things through this great and mysterious love.
It’s so easy to take this love for granted.
It’s easy sometimes to forget what a difference it makes.
Indeed, that it makes all the difference.
This week I received an e-mail from Kelly Speak who is currently representing our
synod in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in the Cameroon.
Kelly is one of a team of people who are working to empower women in a region where
women frequently are treated as second class citizens.
Where women are frequently the objects of violence, even within marriages.
Where even some churches teach that women are to be subject to their husbands and
do whatever their husbands want and even suffer abuse silently from them.
But this week Kelly met a young woman who has learned to speak out against
the violence and humiliation that she and so many women like her suffer.
She has learned to speak confidently, forthrightly, and truthfully about
the violence she has suffered and about the dignity she possesses.
Kelly was awe-struck by her and asked: Where did you learn this?
Where did you learn to speak like this?
And where did you learn to respond to violence like this?
And the woman said, My faith taught me this.
My faith teaches me that I am entirely and wholly loved and not created to receive violence.
As the writer of Ephesians says this morning, this love, this grace, it is a great gift of
a good and loving God.
We are beloved. There is healing in this. And life. And this fact changes everything.
It’s why Lutherans celebrate it.
It’s why we can never simply take it for granted.
There is life in this realm of love, the writer says.
Without it there is death.
Our baptisms transfer us from the realm of death to the realm of life.
Our baptisms are a call from this love to come, to follow, to live in its life.
Our baptismal lives are a continual struggle to answer the call of this love.
In a lovely scene in the film, an old monk responds to a question from a young
Muslim woman about love.
How do you know you are in love, she asks.
Your heart beats faster, says the monk, you think only of your love, he says, and so on.
She takes all this in and then asks, “Have you ever been in love?”
“Oh yes,” he says, “many times, but then I encountered another love, even greater,
and I answered that love.”
Much of the film depicts the struggles of the monks in answering that love.
Should they leave the place where their lives are threatened?
Some think they should as they could continue to live and do good elsewhere.
Others think they should stay.
Many of them, no matter what they think, are afraid, and we are allowed to see that.
But we continually see them, too, at worship, immersing themselves in a love
much much larger than themselves.
These monks do not take up weapons and they refuse to fight.
The only struggle we see them engage in is the struggle against their own weakness,
their own temptation to turn aside from the call of love on their lives.
The real drama in the film comes because of this call upon them.
As the critic Ken Morefield notes, the film “celebrates their faith because of what it
empowers them to do rather than celebrating them for what they did for the faith.”
(quoted at http://www.cardus.ca/comment/article/3101/of-gods-and-men )
The film celebrates the gift of God’s great love for them and what it enables them to do.
In the end, they decide to stay.
They answer the call that love has upon them by
showing the kind of love that they had been shown.
They stay out of love, out of the kind of faithfulness they had been shown in Christ.
As the final, unanimous decision to stay is made,
one of them who had feared staying the most says,
“Let God set the table here for everyone, friends and enemies.”
As the violence escalates they resist it by continuing to do their duties,
day in a day out, cooking, healing, counseling, singing,
worshipping, caring for one another, even caring even for their extremist enemies.
In the end, seven of them are taken away at night, although it is unclear by whom.
They are finally led out through the snow to be killed and disappear into whiteness.
We come to see that there is healing and life and community and reconciliation in
the cross that defines them and madness and destruction and chaos and death in
the violence they resist.
For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son.
For love of the monks who are shown to be far from perfect and who confess complicity in evil.
For love of their enemies who are shown to be all too human too.
For love of us in all our weakness and in our own failures to answer to the call of love laid on us.
For love of the beloved precious and often fragile people of this neighbourhood we worship in.
God here sets a table for us all. A great love is calling us.
And as we contemplate the footsteps of these monks that disappear into the snow towards the
cross that awaits them, the question we are left with is: will we follow them?
Will we respond with our lives to the love that is given us?
Will we answer the call of love that is so gently and mercifully laid on us?
Will our worship of the One on the cross define us as it defined these monks?
God willing may it be yes, and yes, and yes. So together let us say, “Amen.”
Pastor Michael Kurtz
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