Love as Accountability
Thumbnail image: Reconciliation statue by Josephina da Vasconcellos at Coventry Cathedral; photograph © David Dixon and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence.
Link to Video: https://www.facebook.com/stlukesferndale.org/videos/585319922186597
Clare L. Hickman
St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Ferndale
October 25, 2020—Proper 25A
Leviticus 19:1-2, 15-18; Psalm 1; 1 Thessalonians 2:1-8; Matthew 22:34-46
All the law. And the prophets. Every last word of scripture must be able to pass this test: does it lead us into love of God and neighbor? This is the crux of it all. So we are compelled to ask: What is love?
This is not just the question of a thousand pop songs, it is the work of a spiritual lifetime: exploring the mindset, the action, the attitude of love. It is this, and this, and this. And in many ways, it is NOT this, or this, or that. Scripture, in its richness and wisdom, gives us boundless room into which we can expand our hearts and our practice. Love looks like leaving the corners of your fields for the hungry to feed their families. Love looks like refusing to spread gossip. Love looks like giving the best part of your attention. Love looks like washing someone’s feet.
And today, in Leviticus, we are invited into yet another aspect of love: Love requires us to be accountable to each other, calling and allowing ourselves to be called to
be holy people. Kingdom people.
“You shall not hate in your heart anyone of your kin,” it says. “You shall reprove your neighbor, or you will incur guilt yourself. You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Lev 19:15-17).
Please note: the passage takes for granted that you will WANT to hate other people. It even suggests that you will have good reason to hanker for vengeance, or to nurse a grudge until the day the Lord returns on clouds of glory. There is nothing here that relies on human nature being anything other than what it is: people will do things that chap our very hide. And we will desperately and completely naturally want to curse their name, cut them off, or strike them down.
But that’s not love.
Not according to the Bible, anyway. Which we might resent and wish weren’t so … until we remember something: That we too (all the time, even when we’re trying our best not to … let alone the times we’re skipping toward it gleefully) we too will do things that offend someone else’s sense of what is right, decent, fair, patriotic, sensible or hygienic.
We will. And they will. And what love demands in this very human world is not that we pretend it doesn’t happen or it didn’t matter. And not, on the other hand, that we declare each other worthless or beyond hope. It is that we hold each other accountable. That we reprove each other, and allow ourselves to be reproved. That’s what love looks like: that kind of reciprocity. It means a willingness to be open, and strong, and vulnerable. It means caring enough to speak, to listen, to hold, and to respond to the ways in which we have all fallen short of the divine image within us.
This weekend, Nora and I both attended a workshop that explored the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. And it was breathtaking, as ever, to hear Archbishop Desmond Tutu speak of the power of making space for people to speak of the terrible damage they had suffered, and the terrible damage they had done. Of what happens when people can tell their stories and be heard in a space made safe by the voluntary renunciation of the right to revenge.
This concept of reconciliation is not “fair.” It doesn’t look like any kind of justice I know of. Then again, much of what we call justice does almost nothing to repair or transform what has been damaged in this world. Whereas this work is grace-filled: by refusing to return violence for violence, it makes confession possible. And by making confession possible, it opens pathways to repentance that lead the wrong-doer to seek ways to repay and restore at least some of what was taken or broken.
That is holy love. Whether at the level of national race relations, the family dinner table, or your local congregation, a strong and loving relationship requires the ability to admit the harm you do to each other. We can perhaps learn from what sometimes happens in a marriage: there comes a moment in a fight, no matter how ugly it has become, when you remember that your desire to stay in relationship is bigger than your anger. Something softens, and you apologize, even though you weren’t the only one in the wrong. And what you’re really saying is that the relationship is more important than being right … which allows you to admit the ways in which you were wrong. Trusting that the other person will now be able to do the same. Trusting that you will then, perhaps eventually, be able to forgive each other.
Love requires that kind of courage. That kind of trust. That kind of humility. It calls us to holiness by asking us to be accountable to each other, and (this is important) to make our circle of accountability large enough that we are not simply re-affirming each other and then yelling across some divide at the “other.” That’s not accountability, and it won’t lead us to any kind of transformation or reconciliation!
Our community of accountability needs to be large enough to include people who will challenge us, needs to be large enough to require trust. That in turn will build trust, and strengthen our muscle for the work of reconciliation. Which is to say that it will deepen our love for each other, love which will support you even as you dare to reprove someone and maybe fumble the words. And love which will support you when they do the same.
That’s the strength and the power of love: love for our neighbor, that reflects God’s love for us: A love that calls us forward, that pulls us deeper into holiness. A love that loves us exactly as we are, but never stops forming us into what we were made to be. On such a thing hangs all the law and the prophets. May it be strengthened within us! Amen.