Faith Works 7-31-21

Faith Works 7-31-21

Jeff Gill

Enough is all you need

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After the last few weeks, I had a couple of people ask me if I was referencing a book that came out a couple of years ago titled "Enough," by noted Methodist pastor Adam Hamilton. My answer is "no," but clearly after posting the last column in this series, I need to get a copy and compare notes!

It doesn't surprise me that a perceptive and pastoral writer and teacher like Hamilton would have already been all over this topic, because as a minister, it's a reality of life we see in many forms, all around us. The congregation I last served knew of my references to the problem in my occasional comments from the pulpit about storage units, and how they had popped up like mushrooms in rainy summers all over the landscape.

One of our church leaders commented to me that she now couldn't drive past a row or fenced lot full of rental storage spaces without thinking about those sermons, to which a preacher can only say "mission accomplished!"

But I want to talk about something deeper than the highest pile of stuff, even though the stuff is the more visible, blatantly obvious part of the problem. This time last year I was shuttling to my childhood home in Indiana which my sister and I were working to clean out and sell for our mother, and we were getting rid of a lot of stuff. Dumpster loads uncounted, even with myriad Goodwill and other places to pass along what could still be used.

And I wrote a column or two then about warning older parents to check with their adult children about how much of the stuff they were saving for them, and whether they really wanted it. In the last few weeks, I've had three conversations with people who told me a) they didn't like my column then, b) they clipped it, and c) they did after much deliberation have those conversations with adult children.

Sometimes tears were involved, with their kids and with me. Some of it provoked gales of laughter. But all three ended with a large amount of pitching. Stuff isn't love, but we can confuse the one with the other in all sorts of ways.

Which is where this gets real. And getting real, for me, means getting theological. Buckle up for the sermon, friends.

Love is not earned.

This to me is the heart of the Christian Gospel, the good news we point to in the person of Jesus Christ. Love is not, cannot be, is never going to be earned. That's not how love works. Love is a gift, it is grace, a gift freely given, but it's not purchased, it's not obtained by force fiscal or physical, and it's not earned.

The lie this world tells us is that love is indeed earned. By effort, by good works, by our deserving it or achieving it by what we do. If we do the right things, we get love in return. And more complicatedly, love must be given if we have done what we think we need to do to deserve it. The fault line, the crack that is sin at work in the world, is the belief that runs right through the human heart telling us that we have to earn love, even as we understand the beauty and glory of love just clearly enough to realize we can never earn it by our own actions.

You can, however, earn stuff. Plenty of dollar stores to make even more stuff accessible, or you can go on the internet and get the pricey stuff to jolt our endocrine systems for a moment into thinking we got the moral equivalent of love. Or you can keep working to do good things and hope the next piece of goodness we perform will get the job done. That way, however, lies madness, or at least a pile of compulsive behaviors. 

The message of Jesus, from a certain angle, is about how we are each and all essentially loved, loved by God, so much that . . . you may know a Bible verse here. And with that love firmly established from the manger to the cross, we have no fear of the tomb or the storage locker. Because we know in Jesus that we are loved, and that is enough.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's still throwing out stuff. Tell him how you know you're loved at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.