Message for Sunday Worship at Flathead Lutheran Bible Camp’s 2023 Women’s Retreat

(Adapted from a tvprays.org reflection and my dissertation)

What is it that drives us to love our neighbors, to boldly give people a glimpse of the reign of God through congregational ministries and our daily lives? For us, the scriptural principal of agape, which Jesus uses in Mark 12:31, continues to guide us: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Experiencing the agape of Jesus, how can we not want others to experience it? In a culture filled with options, filled with advertisements, filled with promises, we cannot assume people will experience God’s love. And we should never assume that the paid congregational staff are the only ones equipped and empowered to share the agape of Jesus. 

Laying the groundwork for what later became known as the Priesthood of All Believers, Martin Luther wrote, “For all Christians whatsoever really and truly belong to the religious class, and there is no difference among them except in so far as they do different work. That is St. Paul’s meaning, in I Corinthians 12, when he says: ‘We are all one body, yet each member bath his own work for serving others.’ This applies to us all, because we have on baptism, one gospel, one faith, and are all equally Christian” (An Appeal to the Ruling Class). 

There is another metaphor of Paul’s that I find equally helpful, and that was true before the pandemic had me utilizing the postal service at a new pace. In 2 Corinthians, Paul mentions other apostles whom he calls “super-apostles” (2 Corinthians 11:5, 12:11) and “false apostles” (2 Corinthians 11:13). 

These traveling missionaries have come to Corinth after Paul left. Now, impressed by these new apostles’ credentials, the Corinthians may be asking about Paul’s credentials. Earlier in the letter, Paul tells the Corinthians that he and Timothy do not need letters of recommendation since the Corinthians themselves are a letter recommending Paul’s ministry.

 “3Are we beginning to commend ourselves again? Surely, we do not need, as some do, letters of recommendation to you or from you, do we? ²You yourselves are our letter, written on our^* hearts, to be known and read by all; ³and you show that you are a letter of Christ, prepared by us, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts.”(2 Cor. 3:1-3)

I have always been a proponent of letter writing and still have, in various shoeboxes, the letters my parents and I wrote to one another during my many months at summer camp and my first few years in college, before email replaced letters. With all of this as background, I love the metaphor of people being the letters.

The Apostle Paul’s opponents seem to have pointed out that he did not have “letters of recommendation bearing the imperial seal in order to verify [his] identity.” Paul contrasts letters written on paper and letters written on the heart. One scholar explains that this is “a representation of Paul’s fundamental dualism of ‘letter vs. spirit’ (2 Cor. 3:6), which is consistently applied to his interpretation of the Torah (or Law) . . . this defensive rhetoric of Paul, wonderful as it may sound, turned out to be completely ineffective in the presence of people who demanded nothing other than hard proof.” The argument may not have worked on Paul’s opponents, but it absolutely worked on me.

I serve a congregation that puts more emphasis on our actions rather than our words, so to me this Scripture passage also seems to serve as a bridge to something more. Yes, our actions of growing food, providing housing, practicing hospitality, and loving our neighbors will always be paramount. But we also understand the power of language and are slowly growing our skills in telling our faith stories. 

Eventually, both our words and our actions will be the letters of recommendation for the congregation, the larger Christian church, and the triune God we worship. 

We all have the potential to be the letters of recommendation to the communities we live in and to the world, letters of Jesus’ agape. Our very human hearts are filled with the love of Jesus. That love is made known in feeding and housing people, caring for the neighbor, learning about the world we inhabit, disrupting racism, and advocating for marginalized people or the natural world.