Are you simply a consumer of God’s love or are you also a provider of God’s love?
Priest and author Barbara Brown Taylor encourages us to be both. She says that, if we think coming to church once a week is our only responsibility as beloved children of God, we’re wrong. She says we must do more than come to church. She says, we must take the Church into the world.
I agree.
God wants our worship to strengthen us to be the eyes and ears, the hands and feet of God in this world. God, I’m pretty sure, doesn’t want us to come here and worship, say our prayers, offer our thanksgivings, throw some money in the collection plate, great one another in God’s name and then go out into the world, eyes and ears closed, hands and feet idle to the work God needs done. God, I think, wants us to be Providers of God’s Love.
The Holy Spirit makes us Providers of God’s Love, the Spirit is what makes us doe-ers of God’s work in the world, providers of Good, rather than mere recipients. And, while the Holy Spirit gets ignited through our worship, that flame will flicker out if we don’t tend to it outside these walls.
This teaching—that we, through the Spirit, through the strength and hope gained through worship, are to be providers of God’s love in the world, not just consumers, is evident throughout our scripture and within our tradition.
In the Gospel, Jesus tells us that everyone should be treated as if they are a child of God. Because they are. No matter what we think of them, no matter what they’ve done, they are a child of God. Treat everyone as if they’re Jesus. Treat everyone as God’s beloved. Because everyone is. By doing this, we become more than consumers, we become providers of God’s Love.
Much of St. Paul’s writings, including his letter to the Romans, address the conflict between our selfish desires (generally, different manifestations of power) and the basic rights of every human being : dignity, peace and justice. Paul wants us to overcome our individual desire and address the universal needs of the world. Does this mean we can’t have nice things and do things for our own pleasure? Absolutely not. What it means is we can’t do those things IN PLACE of caring for our fellow human beings.
Putting aside our own wants to ensure that everyone receives what they need, is being a Provider of God’s Love, not just a consumer.
As Jeremiah points out in today’s reading from Hebrew scripture, prophets who prophesy about warfare and famine, about pestilence and terror are not of God. “God sent” prophets speak of peace, not war, of dignity not humiliation, of abundance not famine. Seeking peace, demanding dignity and trusting in God-given abundance is being a Provider of God’s love, not just a consumer.
Being a provider of God’s Love means standing up for those who are unable to stand up for themselves. We do this locally and specifically through the food pantry, Friends of the Night People, the school-supply and book drives, the Elam Jewett Café, the pet food pantry, Compass House and all our outreach efforts. We reach out to help those who can’t help themselves because that is doing God’s work in the world. That’s being a Provider and not just a Consumer of God’s love.
We also do it more globally and generally, like when we donate to Episcopal Relief and Development or Habitat for Humanity.
These good works are very necessary and extremely useful and I’m proud that we do them. However, being a Provider of God’s Love demands, at times, even more from us. Our faith requires that we feed the poor, clothe the naked and house the homeless, but it also insists that when we hear of wrongdoing we speak up and we speak out. Sometimes being Providers of God’s Love means telling others that their behavior is unacceptable, that their actions are abhorrent and that we won’t stand idly by while they disrespect the dignity of another human being. The Holocaust, The Rwandan genocide, the attacks of September 11—these were all times when faithful people the world over stood up and said, as Providers of God’s Love in this world: stop, this is wrong and we will not tolerate it!
Today, is the United Nations Day in Support of Victims of Torture. A day when, as stated by UN General Sec’y Kofi Annan, “we pay our respects to those who have endured the unimaginable. This is an occasion for the world to speak up against the unspeakable” It is a day on which we remember that we are more than consumer’s of God’s Love, we are Providers.
Torture, unfortunately, isn’t a distant issue.
We have many refugees in Buffalo. People who fled their homelands after being tortured because of their religious beliefs, their political views, their sexual orientation, their gender or their ethnicity. And, as we’ve learned in the past few years, our own military and CIA may have employed torture to extract confessions from people labeled as enemy combatants.
Torture, done by anyone, anywhere, for any reason, is wrong. And we, as Christians, we, as lovers of God, must not be passive in the shadow of such injustice. As the Providers of God’s Love in the world, we must say --to anyone who disrespects the dignity of another being—whether in acts of neglect and inequality or in acts of genocide and intolerance ---“stop! In the name of God, stop this behavior. I, as a lover of God and a recipient of God’s grace will not stand for this.”
By doing that, by speaking up and reaching out, we are using the strength gained through worship to do God’s work in the world. We are taking the grace given to us and spreading it throughout the world, just as God has asked us to do. That, brothers and sisters, is being a Provider of God’s Love, not just a Consumer.
Amen.
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