Making the Impossible Possible

Isaiah 55:1-9

Ephesians 3:14-21

John  15:1-11

At first glance I was knocked off balance by Love Dare© #19 which states "Love is impossible" because there is much we do earnestly "love" - at least in the way we understand love.  So calling "love" an impossible feat had the sour taste of a political campaign ad: somewhere in the pile of manure is a speck of truth, stretched or spun though it may be; yet if we really want to know what that "truth" is, we will have to dig deeper.  It will require effort on our part because it will not fall in our laps.  So reading further, I was reminded that the entire context of the book is within the marriage covenant, and its purpose is to restore and/or strengthen marriages. So being able - and willing - to love within the context of marriage can sometimes seem impossible especially when real life starts creeping in after the honeymoon, when once-cute attributes become annoying habits, and .... well, simply put, when love becomes more a challenge than a practice and a chosen way of life.

In the context of the Church, we have found it easy to "love" our Lord but withhold our tithe, other offerings, or our service, our attendance, and our prayers for the Church.  We have come to believe we can "love" our Lord but still hate someone and feel perfectly justified and unapologetic in doing so.  We have been convinced through a careless pop-culture theology of "cheap grace" and the material prosperity of the so-called "American Dream" that we can love our Lord outside the context of earnest and genuine sacrificial discipleship of service to our Lord with one another.  We believe we can "love" the Lord our God and say nasty things about ol' so-and-so who is seated only a few pews away, failing to understand that "ol' so-and-so" is also of the Lord's beloved - and that by our nastiness we are bringing judgment upon ourselves! 

We have learned over time that abiding love, lasting love cannot come to us or from within us without conditions, without strings.  On our own terms, it makes no sense to bother with loving those who seem intent on harming us or are in no real way any good to us, using that ol' secular humanist "common sense" measurement we often fall back on.  We just cannot justify a reason to waste such incredible effort (and love is often incredible effort!) on anyone who does not somehow benefit us or come around to our way of thinking.  In other words, if these persons do not act the way we think they should, the "condition" of our love is violated and we withdraw our willingness to love. 

Once that standard of unworthiness has been met, these persons become useless to us.  On a practical and personal level (according to our own standards of measure) they may well be, but there is something greater beyond our own personal and practical purposes; something for which the Holy Covenant (within the marriage covenant and the church membership covenant) is designed to accomplish: to make the impossible possible - that is, to love without strings, without conditions; to become completely freed from the encumbrances of this world that hold us back from being all we are created and set apart to be! 

And this is where the power of the Covenant comes into play, whether we are talking about the marriage covenant or the church membership covenant.  When we enter into such covenants - and especially when we are baptized into the Lord's Holy Covenant - it stops being about "me" or "my" personal decisions.  Real meaning transcends "personal", and nothing seems any longer "practical" when we are working and living outside of our own practical and personal will! 

Entering into a holy covenant is not unlike John the Baptist's understanding of his own role after Messiah Jesus came onto the scene: "A person can receive nothing unless it has been given from heaven.  You yourselves bear me witness, that I said 'I am not the Christ' but [have said] 'I have been sent before Him'.  He who has the Bride is the Bridegroom, but the friend of the Bridegroom, who stands and hears Him, rejoices greatly because of the Bridegroom's voice.  Therefore this joy of mine is fulfilled.  [Messiah] must increase, but I must decrease" (John 3:27-31).

And willingly so, John the Baptist (representing the "friend of the Bridegroom" in our behalf) must decrease because Messiah cannot be all He is called to be in the life of any covenant if we hold onto and try to maintain that which is "personal" and "practical" within our own particular circumstances and desires.  It is often that when we make a decision to join a church, we do so with the understanding that a particular congregation suits us on a personal level.  We do so because we feel welcome in that congregation, because we seem to fit in, and we feel we can somehow benefit from such membership.  We believe we are compatible.  Just like marriage. 

There is nothing wrong with any of this - UNTIL - things begin to change.  We discover that perhaps the "church faces" of those who made us feel so welcome in the beginning are not their true "faces".  We often find out soon enough that the preacher is not much better and then - like the honeymoon - the magic begins to fade and the sparkle diminishes.  What we are often NOT willing to admit is that these once-perfect folks are just like us.  They still have all the bells and whistles that attracted us in the beginning, but they also have the same warts and blemishes we have. 

In other words, they are human ... just like we are human; subject to the same frailties and imperfections and frustrations we have to deal with each day of our lives.  Short of admitting this, however, we go in search of another church, a "better" church.  We go in search of another "honeymoon" in a vain attempt to recapture the "magic" that once was.  This is why so many marriages fail, when couples notice the "fade" and somehow come to believe "love" no longer exists.  "We've just fallen out of love", they say, believing as they do that love should come easily, effortlessly, "magically".  And when it doesn't - and it never does - we think it's over; that the relationship (if there ever really was one!) has run its course.

In both cases, one of the necessary elements of the covenant - our own effort and devotion and participation - is missing or has been put aside because we laid the entire burden on the other person (our spouse or other church members) without considering our own part in the covenant.  We sometimes even blame "fate" without realizing that, by our own willingness to walk away when the covenantal relationship becomes a challenge, we disprove the very notion "fate" even exists in the first place.  We have also denied the very essence of what it means to live in covenant with others; the essence who is Messiah Jesus. 

It is in both contexts of the marriage covenant and the church membership covenant Jesus is speaking of in reminding us that "as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you [bear fruit] unless you abide in Me" (John 15:4).  We should perhaps also note that Jesus refers to the "dead branch" that is cut away as "useless".  When we are connected to Messiah in such an intimate way, allowing Him to feed us and sustain us and nurture us, it is more and more that our own thoughts and our own ways become aligned with the Holy Father's thoughts and ways; hence Jesus' promise of fulfilled prayer requests by those who "abide in Me".  The prayer requests by their very nature seek to INCREASE the Lord while we DECREASE. 

So it is in an almost imperceptible way, we as individuals begin to "decrease" while our Lord begins to "increase".  This process is what our Wesleyan Methodist heritage understands as "sanctifying grace", "going on to perfection" ... for we can never hope to reasonably or even spiritually expect to come near to "perfection" apart from Messiah Jesus whose perfect sacrifice, whose life without sin becomes our "way", our "truth" ... our very "life".

There will always be those who will seem to make life harder than it has to be, and there will always be those who seem focused on making life miserable for themselves and for those around them.  Then we have two choices to make: we can be like the sports "defense" forced to live on their terms and respond only to their efforts - OR - we can become in Christ the "offense" in working within the Covenant and within Messiah and learn to work around these "spirit poachers" on Messiah's (and the Covenant's) terms - and not our own. 

To think of it another way, we can get stuck in the present and hung up by the past - OR - we can keep our eyes on the "cover of cloud by day" and the "pillar of fire by night" and continue the Journey toward the Promised Land with our Lord leading the way.  And we must understand the consequences of a careless and not-very-well-thought-out choice of choosing to go it alone or continue the vain search for the BBD (bigger, better deal) in which case THE Journey will continue and we will be left behind while trying to hitch our wagon to something or someone more pleasing to our own personal and/or practical purposes - discovering for ourselves that ultimate truth: apart from Messiah Jesus, the impossible remains impossible.

For those who have yet to enter into the New Covenant by way of baptism, young and old alike, I invite you to enter into the journey of discipleship.  It is the Lord's Sacrament and Covenant; not ours.  For those of you who are considering joining a church to share in the journey that is faith and discipleship in and for one another, the time is now.  For those of you who believe it is time to rededicate yourselves to the Journey that is faith in YHWH through Messiah Jesus, there is no better time than now.  It is time to move beyond "impossible" and embrace the Eternal Truth: with the Lord our God nothing is impossible in His Holy Covenant.  Nothing.