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 Sunday, February 14, 2010 Sermon: "Broken Chains of Love" Scripture: 2 Corinthians 3:12 - 4:2 Reverend Larry M. Gerber In Rome, lovers fasten chains around lamppost, lock them and throw the key into the river as a sign of their love. In this week's text, the real goal of love is freedom! Ah, Valentine's Day, a day full of symbols of love. The usual ones, of course, include hearts and flowers, little cupids and those flirty candy hearts with sayings such as "Will you be mine?", "UR4Me", "Kiss me", etc. But if you were in Rome today, you'd be doing your Valentine's Day shopping at the hardware store, not the Hallmark store. In recent years, it's been fashionable for young lovers in the Eternal City to take a romantic walk on the Ponte Milvio bridge, where they profess their love by wrapping a chain around one of the lampposts, securing it with a lock and then throwing the key into the Tiber River. It symbolizes their eternal, undying, locked-together love, perhaps portending the day when both will adorn their lives with a marital "ball and chain," as the unfortunate expression goes. In other words, it seems that lovers need to prove their love to each other and to the world by physical demonstration. Unlike the city of Florence, which banned the practice of lovers chaining themselves to the lamp posts, and promised to fine any moon-eyed couples who dared chain up public property, Rome took the more romantic approach and put iron posts linked by chains on the Ponte Milvi. Lovers may attach their bonds of love there as a kind of rattling monument to love itself. But on this Valentine's Day, we might muse as to whether a chain and lock are really the best symbol for a love relationship. Sure, there's the whole idea of being permanently bonded, which is a good thing when it comes to marriage. But the image of a chain also implies some kind of slavery or prison from which you can't escape. Pop music, for example, seems to see the chain as being more painful than romantic. In the 1988 hit "Chains of Love," Erasure sang, in an upbeat, '80s way, about breaking the chains of love as a good thing. Pat Boone's 1962 ode to "Chains of Love" begins: "Chains of love have tied my heart to you. Chains of love have made me feel so blue." Not exactly what you want on a Valentine's Day card...or chain. But in this week's epistle text, the apostle Paul seems to be echoing more Pat Boone than Ponte Milvio. "Now the Lord is Spirit," writes Paul, "and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom" (2 Corinthians 3:17). For Paul, God isn't about locking us up tight and throwing away the key but about using love as a liberating path to freedom - freedom to be all that we were created to be. In other words, it isn't chains we're looking for - it's Christ. In 2 Corinthians 3, Paul goes about the challenging task of reinterpreting symbols from Israel's past, namely the stone-inscribed law of Moses, as a kind of chain of love that could hold the covenant between God and Israel together only up to a point. Although the law of Moses provided the boundaries for the covenant community, it had become a "ministry of condemnation" (v. 9) and, ultimately, "the ministry of death" (v. 7). The bond of the old covenant had become rusty and broken through Israel's disobedience, having lost the "glory" that had once shone brightly on the face of Moses (v. 7). A new love letter from God was needed, one "written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts" (v. 3). This "new covenant" (v. 6) came in the person of Christ, who taught that the kingdom of God was a revolution of love that would ultimately free the whole creation from slavery to sin and death. Jesus' death and resurrection would usher in the "new creation" (2 Corinthians 5:17), the "permanent" glory that has come and is coming in Christ (3:11). It is this "hope" that enables those who are in Christ to "act with great boldness" (v. 12). What Paul is expressing here is nothing less than God's mission in the world - a mission that's embodied by and finds its climax in Jesus. Thus, the "ministry of justification" (v. 9) isn't simply a kind of theological valentine to a few individuals who have discovered the way to a distant heaven. Rather, it's a proclamation of God's plan of liberation for all of creation. In his book Justification, N.T. Wright says that "God had a single plan all along through which he intended to rescue the world and the human race, and this single plan was centered upon the call of Israel, a call which Paul saw coming to fruition in Israel's representative, the Messiah." The old covenant was necessary so the new covenant would build upon it as part of a missional plan of redemption. Paul makes the point that God's Spirit brings "freedom," but what kind of freedom is it? Well, here's where we have to recognize that while the old covenant has been abrogated by the new covenant in Christ, it doesn't mean we're free to do whatever we want, whenever and wherever we want to do it. The new covenant still has moral, ethical and missional components to it that require our assent and our obedience as a response to God's love and work on our behalf. But, in a counter-intuitive way, obedience is the foundation of freedom. E. Stanley Jones, the great missionary to India in the first third of the 20th century, and author of The Christ of the Indian Road, put it this way: "The first thing in life is to obey, to find something, or rather Someone, to whom you can give your final and absolute allegiance. Where do I bend the knee is the ultimate question. For everybody obeys - money sex, society, self...But [people] do want and do need freedom. How do they get it? The aviator is free to fly, provided he obeys every moment the law of flying. Freedom through obedience. Then total freedom is through total obedience to the total order - the kingdom." Put another way, the more we live into the mission of God, the more we engage the Spirit and allow him to work in us and through us, the more we are freed up to realize our true purpose as citizens of the kingdom and people of the new covenant. Never in the United Methodist marriage vows, but in some other denominations, the preacher would ask the woman if she would obey her husband as he obeys the Christ of his life. Note the "obey as". Most husbands were excited about the first part, but then they heard "as he obeys..." "Let's just skip that part" some would say. On this Valentine's Day we recognize those in our congregations who are expressing 617 years of love for that special people in their lives, 50+ years of individual love, love that is more than skin deep, a love that goes beyond the broken chains of live. God loves the whole world and calls us to love it with the same kind of sacrificial love. We are called to joy-filled and transformational love that God has demonstrated from the beginning. God has set us free in Christ, and it's up to us to use that freedom to participate with God in making the kingdom a reality "on earth as it is in heaven." Transformation is not change. Transformation is forever while change is short lived. We can make a change in our lives, or we can be changed by circumstances - for the moment, but Jesus said that we are to: Be ye transformed by the renewal of your heart. Today is a renewal of marriage vows for these special couples. Today can be a renewal of the heart for those who will be transformed into the likeness of Christ. Are you ready to be transformed, made new, for the sake of the Kingdom of God? Is your love for Jesus more than skin deep? Is your love for the Lord a love of broken chains or is it a love that is linked together with a solid chain of connections?(9:00 service only - Let us stand and sing those wonderful words of life. Let us sing all three verses and then receive the benediction so that our special guests can walk out to The Wedding March. Please give them the opportunity to depart first so that you can greet them and congratulate them during the fellowship hour.) Sources Jones, E. Stanley. A Song of Ascents. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1968. Popham, Peter. "The chains of love and a Roman headache locks." The Independent, August 13, 2007. independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/the-chains-of-love-and-a-roman-headache-locks-461353.html. Viewed August 4, 2009. Wright, N.T. Justification: God's Plan and Paul's Vision. Downer's Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2009. |
