Dear Friends:
“Life,” “justice,” “love,” and “death” are words that roll easily off our tongues. Heard on the evening news, they weigh about as much as “Tide,” “McDonalds” and “Ford.” The local headline announces a traffic tie-up, a murder, 85 degrees tomorrow, the Redskins win. Concern for poor people in St. Louis or malnourished babies in Somalia is quickly replaced by snacks and shampoo; meaning sucked out, neutered.
But when someone close to you dies, the word “death” fills you up, sloshes around inside of you, overflows, and splashes all over your life with deep personal meaning; their death an irreplaceable loss, and a fleeting shadow of your own mortality.
The Bible is words. Sermons are words. The liturgy is words. What counts is not just how intently philosophers study the meaning of the words “love” and “justice,” how often we repeat them, or whether they are presented in the liturgically correct manner, but how we live them out in daily life.
Love is hard. It may begin with a gush of feeling, but at some point we learn that really loving is hard. To love well, we have to know something about the object of our love. Loving takes a certain internal discipline, especially when it comes to the stranger, the outcast, the fallen. Jesus says “Love your neighbor as yourself,” but not all neighbors can be loved in the same way and it takes a certain discipline to discern an appropriate approach.
The meaning of Biblical texts and liturgical tropes cannot fully be grasped in theological tomes. The meaning is not a thought, an idea, but a motivation, and a strategy leading to action. It‟s not “yes, I should love my neighbor as myself,” but working at Gaithersburg HELP, building a HABITAT home, giving more to Lutheran World Relief than you would have preferred before you thought seriously about human needs abroad.
I was taught that the word “liturgy” comes from the words “people” and “work.” The liturgy is the work of the people in response to the words of the priest, and thus, by extension, toward God. The Catholic Encyclopedia (online) says that the original meaning of the word “liturgy” was “a public duty, a service to the state undertaken by a citizen.”
Worship is a public act, as distinguished from private devotions, and public acts have public consequences. We say the words “love” and “justice,” but the words are only precursors to meaningful acts of love and justice. And, when the acts do not follow, the words are empty of meaning, whether uttered in the kitchen or before the altar.
Our fall social justice series in the adult forum will be a lot of words. The matters at hand are complex, and opinions about them are divided. It is my prayer that the work of the people in wrestling with the deepest of human social realities will lead to deeds of love and justice and that someday people will refer to CTS as “that justice church in Montgomery Village.”
Pastor Hoehn
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