by Marjorie D. Grevious
Click here to watch the sermon recording on YouTube.
Last week was what the UofMN calls Welcome Week. It is focused on new incoming students to the U. It centers around students moving to campus, many of them away from home for the first time. There are flurries of scheduled activities to get students engaged in campus life along with a home football game to kick off the fall season. The week is anchored by College Day where students are divided by one of the eight colleges such as the College of Liberal Arts, or the College of Biological Sciences, or the college where I work, the College of Education and Human Development. On College Day they wear the college-identifying t-shirts given to them earlier in the summer during orientation and registration. As academic advisors one of our duties on college day is receiving these students after a swirl of morning activities. We greet our assigned group of tired, overwhelmed first year college students who are hungry, thirsty and confused as they’ve just walked across campus on an always very hot day. We each take our group to our assigned spaces right before they can enjoy the free lunch, ice cream, and free branded swag at the block party. We have them for an hour or so for even more ice-breaker activities and fun team building. I don’t really do that with my group, instead I offer them an open session of anonymous questions and respite from the never ending ice-breakers. Nothing is off limits. They can ask ANYTHING, like personal life advice as they step into adulthood, or they can ask about university life getting insight from the upper classmen co-facilitating the session with me.
This year the questions were pretty tame centering around school geography and resources. But a couple of questions stood out for me. One was ‘How do I make friends on such a big campus where I don’t know anyone?’ I asked the fresh-faced bunch of 18 year olds if they had any advice for this anonymous classmate. Blank face stares is what I received in response. I walked up to a young man who appeared the very opposite of me in every possible way with his overly long body awkwardly folded into a standard classroom desk. He was white, tall, very blonde, bright eyed and quite engaging in comparison to his more bored or terrified-looking classmates. I walked up to him, extended my hand and engaged him in a brief conversation about himself, the family history of his unique name, where he was from, and why he chose the U. The room looked on quietly until I abruptly stopped our conversation and said, ‘you see how that’ s done’. Another question asked how to find their place and people on campuses that stretched across three distinctly different locations. I told them to find connection and community by going to an event or club where they would find like-minded people or at least those with similar interests. It would require some discomfort on their part to find places of comfort on a Big 10 campus in this startling new chapter of new found independence in their life. Those two questions from nervous first year students highlighted a fact we discuss a lot at the U, student mental health and well being-which is often grounded in a sense of belonging. Both college students and elderly seniors are plagued by the same thing at the same rate: over 50% report being lonely. This leads to high rates of depression and anxiety in both demographics (How can this be??)
I teach a class called the First Year Experience writing course for the incoming class. It is to help them with the transition from high school into college life. I design my class to help foster engagement, connection and vulnerability as they evolve into their adult selves and begin to make decisions that will affect the rest of their lives. We do class sessions on values, identity, meaning, and becoming. One identity exercise asks the students to move around the room by identifying certain demographics such as: race, gender, religious beliefs, socio-economics, location, ability. My starting question is: what part of your identity is most important to you? Last year over half the class went to religion. When I asked one of them to explain, the student stated that being a Christian was central to who they were and how they move through the world. The other students excitedly nodded their heads in fervent agreement.
How can that be? If, according to Gallup polls, and the Pew Research Center, about 70% of Americans identify as Christians, mirroring the students in my class, then why are so many of us lonely? How are our elders, the keepers of life wisdom, so disconnected from the emerging young adults who could benefit from such profound knowledge and insight? Today’s epistle in Romans reads in part: Owe no one anything, except to love one another; for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. The commandments, “You shall not commit adultery; You shall not murder; You shall not steal; You shall not covet”; and any other commandment, are summed up in this word, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law. Love is not an idea or a thought it is an action. Just as you rise each day and care for yourself, how are you caring for one another? How are we loving our fellow human beings? Are you extending yourself beyond the bounds of your comfort zone to love as Christ loved?
If we, my Christian siblings, make up such a majority, then why are we so very lonely? Is the failure in loving ourselves enough, to have love to give our neighbors? Is the pursuit of our own personal successes keeping us from noticing our neighbors? Is it our confusing healthy boundaries with avoidance? Paul’s words echoes Jesus’s own at the Last Supper when in John 13:34-35 he says, 34 I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. 35 By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.’
Technology today allows us to talk to someone on the other side of town, or the other side of the world in seconds, with great clarity we can be face to face with them, or voice to voice and yet loneliness abounds. Young people today don’t know about paying for long distance calls, when you were careful and concise when you made phone calls outside of your area code. Sometimes those calls crackled with static and questionable audible quality, but the connection with a loved one was so precious and valued. Everyone in the home would take turns saying, Hi!-just to reaffirm the loving commitment of caring for another. When I was a young girl, my mom made it a regular practice to just drop-by a relative’s home for just 15 minutes to just let them know they were loved and somebody was thinking about them. At least twice a week we would drop-by my great aunt’s home, great-grandmother’s house, my godmother, and my grandparents all in the same trip.
I saw this story on social media that touched my heart, where a young woman in her late 20s, maybe early 30s moved to a new city where she knew no one. She was in a lower level apartment with a very noisy neighbor above her that drove her crazy. After some weeks she couldn’t take it anymore and went upstairs to confront her neighbor about the noise. After knocking on the door she saw that her neighbor was an elderly woman, who lived alone. The noise was her navigating her small apartment with a walker where she occasionally bumped into furniture and walls. The young woman learned her neighbor had few visitors and would go weeks without seeing or talking to another person. The young woman was so moved she began making homemade meals to share with her neighbor a few times a month. Over time they grew to have a special bond commenting that once they got to know one another it felt as if they had always known each other, even in a lifetime before this one. A lonely young woman confronts a noisy, even lonelier elderly neighbor and finds love by showing love.
I met a bright young woman at the university three years ago. She was so excited to start college and got chosen as part of a special bridge program that brings first generation college students to live on campus in summer so they learn what it’s like to live in the dorm and be in community. This young woman felt so disconnected and lonely even though she was surrounded by classmates and staff. Her homesickness drove her back home to her family after just one night in the dorm. She made the commitment to live on campus for her incoming fall semester even though her desire to be home with her family was strong. I recently saw her as one of the student ambassadors helping to show new students their way around campus and helping with registration. I asked her how she did it and she beamed saying, ‘I met my best friends here’.
As sweet and idyllic as these stories are, loving like Christ can be hard work, that’s why it’s the law. The definition of law is: a system of rules created and enforced by a government or community to regulate human behavior, keep order, and resolve disputes. What makes it hard is that love requires discomfort as it asks us to be open and share our most vulnerable self with another. Not just care for them, but share with them. Jesus is well aware that such love creates connection, community, and conflict. In today’s gospel from Matthew 18, he outlines instructions on how to settle conflicts within the church community. This passage ends with this verse: Again, truly I tell you, if two of you agree on earth about anything you ask, it will be done for you by my Father in heaven. For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.”
When we create meaningful connection and community, not only are we enacting the love that Jesus shows us, his divine presence is there with us. We are creating sacred connections, building blessed communities and upholding the spirit, heart and true meaning of the law. As a proud person from the south, we are known for our hospitality. You are constantly greeting and being greeted by people you pass in the grocery store, striking up real conversations in customer service lines, or learning whole life stories complete with the context of family dynamics in a bus ride home from work. It is common practice to end these brief but meaningful connections with ‘You have a blessed day now’, as if now that we have fulfilled the law and shared love, go and be blessed, and be a blessing to someone else. One of the most shocking things for me when I moved here and that family experience when they come for a visit is how northern folk don’t speak to one another and seem startled when you speak to them.
Doing the work of the Lord, being a good Christian disciple, and following in the steps of Jesus to love as he loved is not always complicated work. It is not always fighting systems of oppression, it’s not just tirelessly caring for those in need, or always doing the heavy lifting up. Sometimes a kind word, a soft expression, and real eye contact goes a long way to show someone you care and can be a whole ministry in and of itself. Many years ago there was a cashier at our local target named Nancy. She was so personable and bright of spirit that even if other lanes were open her line was always long as people waited for her and the 2-5 minutes it took her to ring them up as they basked in the glow of her sincere kindness. When was the last time you spoke with someone you don’t know,not just spoke to, I mean really spoke with them? Asked their name, how they were doing, where they are from, where they are going, and what’s the last great thing they ate, saw, heard, or experienced. Father Craig doesn’t know it, but today’s sermon has an immediate assignment that will take us 2-3minutes. During the passing of the peace, I want you to take the time to meet someone you don’t know. Turn to someone next to you, in front of you, or behind you. Share names, pleasantries and the last good thing you ate, or plan to eat for Sunday supper later today. At nearly 70%, we and our fellow citizens who identify as Christian, we out number them. ‘Who is them?’ You ask, Those that don’t know that Love is The Law. I hope that you, like I, are working on being a law-abiding disciple of Jesus Christ. Fulfillment of the law begins with a little discomfort that looks like this ”Hello, how are you doing this morning? My name is Marjorie and I plan to go home and cook some eggplant curry from my own garden bounty. You cook? What you having for supper today?
I want us to show love, give love, receive love, be love…
Amen! Love is the Law
