Love

In the teaching last Sunday, Tom used some projection slides with text we thought was worth sharing. The first is a quote:

Our denomination has long-defined itself as a diverse, capacious movement that holds in tension a radical welcome of all people into the infinite love of Jesus and a radical obedience to Christ’s moral demands that flow from the infinite holiness of Jesus. Neither can we adopt theologies that elevate certain biblical themes and denigrate others, or select certain attributes of God while suppressing other attributes. We cannot elevate the love of God over the kingship of God. - from one Christian denomination website

Tom’s response:

Of course we can! That’s exactly what we’re doing. It’s what we all do all the time. Here at Sanctuary, we are privileging a theology upon which inclusion comfortably rests and diminishing a theology that gives rise to exclusion as an acceptable practice. We believe that God, through Jesus, is leading the human community away from its projection onto God of all our impulses to control and oppose, and into love, into I no longer call you slaves, but friends.

And then Tom read from David Bentley Hart’s translation of John 13. Here is that text:

Now before the feast of the Passover, Jesus, knowing that his hour had come—that he might pass from this cosmos to the Father—having loved his own in the cosmos, he loved them to the end: And, as the evening meal was taking place—now that the Slanderer had put it into the heart of Judas Iscariot, son of Simon, that he should betray him—Knowing that the Father had placed all things in his hands, and that he came forth from God and is under way to God, He rises from the supper, and places his mantle aside and, taking up a towel, wrapped it around his loins; Then he pours water into the basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet and began to wipe them off with the towel wrapped about his loins.

Thus he comes to Simon Peter; he says to him, “Lord, are you washing my feet?” Jesus answered and said to him, “You do not yet understand what I am doing, but hereafter you will understand.” Peter says to him, “Most surely, throughout the age,y you will not wash my feet.” Jesus answered him, “Unless I wash you, you have no portion with me.”

Therefore, when he had washed their feet and taken up his mantle and again reclined at table, he said to them, “Do you know what I have done for you? You address me as ‘Teacher’ and ‘Lord,’ and well you speak, for such I am. So if I, the Lord and the teacher, have washed your feet, you are obliged to wash one another’s feet; For I have given you an example so that, just as I have done for you, you may do as well. Amen, amen, I tell you, a slave is not superior to his lord, nor is a messenger superior to the one sending him. If you know these things, how blessed you are if you do them.”