Faith Venture

Imagine Jesus at a slope from the seashore to the mountain. There is one of those mega-church-sized crowds of 10,000 listening to him teach. And then he closes his eyes, face turned upward, arms raised and reaching out toward the crowd, as he works himself into an emotional frenzy, he shouts, “Yes, I see you with the arthritic hip. And you are cured. And you with the migraine headaches that won’t go away, yes, you are healed. Yes, I hear you who are suffering from depression. You are made whole…”

I was pondering the words of Linus, the philosopher/theologian of Charles Schulz’s Peanuts gang, who said, “I love humanity; it’s people I can’t stand.”

Jesus taught people in crowds. He healed individually. He dealt with unique individuals. People with severe skin diseases whom he actually touched (could you? I?). A woman with bleeding. A foreign woman with a sick child. A Roman (don’t overlook the significance of these last two) with a sick servant. People. He loved people. He told us to love people. Not crowds. People. Individuals.

What are we to learn?

Perhaps the next human we meet, we see as an individual. An individual with their unique hope and dreams and struggles and accomplishments. Not just classified into a faceless group–black, Asian, Mexican, rural white, and so on, and so on.

Like Jesus, we discard theory and just love the individual we meet next. And the one after. And the one after…

Those first century Corinthians must have been something else. Two letters that the Apostle Paul wrote to them are preserved in the Christian Bible. In one of the most famous passages in the entire Bible (chapter 13 of 1 Corinthians), Paul defines charity (love) for them. Evidently they didn’t have a clue.

Pope Benedict XVI in a series of talks on the Church Fathers talks of the third Bishop of Rome, Clement, writing to the Corinthians toward the end of the first century (maybe 30 years after Paul?), observes that if there were abuses in Corinth, the reason should be sought in the weakening of charity and other indispensible Christian virtues.

Someone must have thought, “Why did anyone ever stop in Corinth and start a church there? They’ve been nothing but trouble.”

If we look honestly at ourselves today, what would we observe?

Would the leaders who founded our congregation wonder why they bothered with such a divisive and stubborn people?

Would a church leader observe that problems within us are due to the weakening of charity?

Would we even consider that an indictment? I do know people whose attitude toward charity does not extend beyond themselves.

Many people observe Lent at this time of year by giving up something, making a sacrifice, turning their attitudes toward God and our need for grace. Maybe we could be in prayer and contemplation about whether we ourselves and our congregations are weakening in charity–and do something about it.