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Good morning. Good morning. I think we can do better than that. Good morning.

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Good morning. All right. Good morning over in the overflow room. I know they can't reply back, but I know they're there.

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It is my distinct pleasure and honor to reintroduce and welcome back to The Pulpit. To continue the conversation begun yesterday, our Westervelt lecturer, Dr. Scott McKnight. His second lecture is entitled, The Christian Life According to Paul, A Life Designed in Community.

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Now you all have his impressive credentials and the bios that were provided, so I don't want to rehash that in the minute that I have to introduce him. What I did yesterday was ambush him at lunch and asked him that I introduced myself and told him that I would be introducing him, and if he could share with me some things that may not be in the bio. that he wouldn't mind us knowing about him. He graciously agreed.

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He is married. His wife's name is Chris. They have two adult children. His son happens to be a scout for the Chicago Cubs.

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That's a baseball team. I found that out. His daughter is a public school teacher. He did mention to me also that for 10 years he used to coach high school basketball.

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He's an avid golfer, and he's a gardener. Oh, and he loves Jesus, just so you know. So there you have it, a little something, something that you might not know about Dr. Scott McKnight.

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At the conclusion of this lecture, everyone is invited to the atrium for Coffee Fellowship, but without further ado, Dr. McKnight, welcome. Good morning. Good morning.

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I see everybody got up early on campus. Nothing like 8.30 lectures. You should teach college students at 8 o'clock in the morning. I did that for 17 years.

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It's an interesting experience. 8 o'clock. Again, I want to say thanks for the opportunity to be here, and I hope that we can cast a vision of what Paul's trying to do in his letters. or at least a framework for understanding what Paul is doing, because I think it reshapes how we see Paul and the Christian life.

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Our contention, as we said yesterday in delineating the old perspective from the new perspective from the post-new perspective, is that the Apostle Paul can offer us a whole new view of the Church for America, a vision that centers on the church and a vision that centers on the church as an inclusive, social boundary-breaking fellowship of difference. And difference, again, is spelled with T-S and not E-N-C-E. So we are difference.

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My contention is also that the Christian life is shaped or reshaped by this vision of the Apostle Paul. If the church is a fellowship of difference, then the Christian life is about learning to navigate this life in the company of those who are not like us. Let me put this stronger. The Christian life is learning how to love, to live with, and to fellowship with those who are not like us.

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And I think our Sunday morning services in the United States mock this theory of what Paul is talking about, which takes us to, and I think this is the distinctive contribution of the new perspective on Paul, it takes us to ecclesiology as the first move in Pauline theology, an image. This will be the image that we get to think with this morning. There are three ways to eat a garden salad. First, I want to get the ingredients on the table, and I am the cook in our house, and I love to make salads.

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Spinach leaves, arugula, kale, everybody has to have kale today, chard, carrots, broccoli, we use dried fruit and some nuts, tomatoes, purple cabbage for color and roughage, and then some cheese. And I like to use Pecorino Romano because I get to use Italian words while doing so. During the summer, I use tomatoes from the garden.

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During the winter in Chicago, I call them maters. I will not distinguish what we buy in stores. I will not call them tomatoes. It is red, pulpy substance that gives off the idea that it's real tomato, but it's not.

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All right. Now, three ways to eat these ingredients. First, one can take each element, each ingredient, and put it in a separate bowl and eat each item separately. I don't know many people who eat salads that way, but some might.

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The 2nd way, which is the most common way, is to put all the ingredients in the same bowl and drench the ingredients with your favorite salad dressing, Caesar or Thousand Island and French or French, and then mix it all together. The 3rd way is to put all the ingredients in a salad bowl and put just a bit of olive oil and then toss it all together. These 3 ways of eating the salad, if you haven't figured this out,

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are three images of the Christian life according to the Apostle Paul, or I'm going to use Paul to adjudicate. The first approach of eating all the salad ingredients in separate bowls is the path of the American church. Separate all the diversity of the tasty items of American Christians into separate churches on Sunday morning So there is no mixing and lots of similarity.

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It's easy to eat this way and to worship this way. The weekly affirmation of one holy Catholic and apostolic church mocks American Christians on Sunday morning. The second approach, that approach that is so popular in restaurants, is to drench your salad with salad dressing.

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This is to colonize diversity by making it all taste alike. If you put too much Caesar dressing, which seems to be what restaurants like to do, if you pour Caesar salad dressing all over your salad ingredients, you will never taste the ingredients. they will all taste the same. You might feel a little bit different texture between your teeth.

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This kind of church life in which one white or theological culture rules may be why we prefer option one on Sunday mornings. The third is the way Paul saw the church. We may be different but we need to be together.

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In the same bowl, mixing it up with just enough Holy Spirit oil to give each of our differences zing and taste. Far more difficult than it is to paint an image, because it requires the flexibility of conversation and listening compromise, and change. Hence my claim that we need to reclaim Paul's central new perspective vision for the church and the Christian life for the American church.

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Paul, in my opinion, is not outmoded. He's far more progressive than we care to be. I don't know. I think that's worth tweeting.

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There aren't very many people who say Paul's a progressive and he's ahead of us. What we need is a good dose of reading Paul anew in the light of what he was seeking to accomplish. And in today's session, I want to explore the ecclesial focus of Paul's mission as the clue to the Christian life for Paul And I want to begin with the social realities of a Pauline church, realities often ignored in our churches by assuming that Paul's churches were, voila, just like ours.

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So I want to look at the ecclesial social realities of a typical Pauline church, so far as we can guess well. In his recent study of Pauline churches, based on the archaeological evidence from Pompeii and adapted for other cities, Peter Oakes proposes that an early house church of Paul with due adjustments for Rome would have looked something like this. He suggests there were about 30 people in the church. Think about that.

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That's when the salad bowl really makes a difference. When there's 5,000 on Sunday morning, who cares? But when it's 30, you have to, you can smell the people, They're there.

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First, he says, there would have been a craft worker who rented a workshop with separate living accommodation for his family and some male slaves, a female domestic slave, and a dependent relative. That's where they met. Second, a few other householders who rent less space with family and slaves and dependents. Third,

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A couple of members of families whose householder is not part of the house church. Fourth, a couple slaves whose owners are not a part of the house church. Fifth, a couple of free or free dependents of people who are not part of the house church. Sixth, a couple of homeless people.

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And 7th, a few people who are renting space in shared rooms like migrant workers. Unlike other attempts at this kind of sketch, Oakes constructed his model on the basis of who owned space in Pompeii and who lived and worked in those spaces. Consequently, a clearer picture of a typical house gathering, a house church, emerges with some concrete social reality. There is an inevitable amount of speculation in this kind of historical spade work, but Oakes is far more careful than most, and I find his conclusions highly reasonable and suggestive for understanding who was in a Pauline church.

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There is a bit of a discussion today of where on the social spectrum the earliest churches were to be located, But it seems to me that Richard Askew and others are correct in locating the Pauline churches among the many associations, that's a technical word, associations of the Roman world. Associations, it might be observed, were gatherings of the Roman non-elites. And in that, they often mimicked the elites in their hierarchies and status alignments.

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It is not hard to understand, then, why the authorities saw rebellion, or at least potential disturbances, brewing in the widespread growth of associations in the Roman Empire. Add to this one simple word. The Apostle Paul called his gatherings ekklesia. We translate the word church.

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This, however, was a highly political term used in the Greek world for citizen gatherings. Our churches impress us as sanitized and sanctified, while the 1st century Pauline churches raised suspicion and the specter of sedition. Unless, of course, you listen to Fox News or to CNN. To be sure, most would have seen those ekklesia associations as harmless collections of mostly nobodies, but that would not have kept some from wanting to keep an eye on them.

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Now think of this. A group of very ordinary non-elites from all sectors of the non-elite world in the Roman world, gathering together, calling themselves the ekklesia. This is really weird.

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And it's a political statement. These social realities now need to be made even thicker. At least as early as Galatians and as late as Colossians, a letter which I think Paul wrote, those early house churches brought together those who were not used to dining, and praying and dwelling with one another.

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So Galatians 3.28 and Colossians 3.9-11, there is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And Colossians 3, seeing that you have stripped off the old self with its practices, and have clothed yourselves with the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge according to the image of its Creator, in that renewal there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free, but Christ is all and in all. Now take Peter Oaks's house church

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and give labels to the people now like Jew and Greek, male and female, ethnicity and cultural ideologies, and we are suddenly peering into a first century church fellowship. Another important word Paul uses for the churches, koinonia, fellowship. We can complicate this further. What if one of the slaves was a woman and who at the inn where she was the slave of the innkeeper was offered to patrons for sexual services?

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Now bring her into one of Paul's churches. with the realization that she had few options, which she and others may have been pursuing. But until something new turned up for her, we have a Roman reality impacting one of Paul's fellowships. Paul's mission was for churches

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and for composing these churches of everyone. His gospel was that Jesus was Messiah and Lord. Not just Messiah of the Jews, but Messiah and Lord of all. If Jesus is Messiah and Lord of all, then all are invited to the table.

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And if all are invited to the table, then everyone has a place to sit. And that means exactly what it means. They have to talk to one another, share life with one another, give to and receive from one another. Regardless of 1's status in the Roman world, and Rome was a status-driven world, everywhere one went in the Roman Empire, there were very clear distinctions of class,

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and status. Romans were obsessed with status, and they showed this in clothing, in where one got to sit at public gatherings and private banquets, and it came into full play in the Roman legal system. Martin Goodman, a leading scholar on Rome, described it like this. On the public level, Roman society was highly stratified on the basis of birth

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and wealth. The social and political status of each adult male citizen was fixed at irregular censuses. On the domestic scale, he continues, the only fully legalized, recognized persons in each family unit was its male head, the Pater Familias. Complicate this status system on another scale, the political one.

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The emperor, the senators, equestrians, and it gets more complex. Now we add yet another kind of scale in the Roman world of hierarchy. First men, then women, then foreigners, and then slaves. Hierarchy, and status, and reputation, and connections are the empire.

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complicated, once removed with synagogues, and local Jewish communities, and status gets A twist and a challenge. Jews had their own hierarchies, and Paul the Jew attempted to bring together in the house churches dotting the Roman Empire of both the Roman and the Jewish worlds into a new fellowship, which he called the Ekklesia, a salad all mixed up in a salad bowl that often contained the French word frisson, tension. That's what a 1st century church looked like, as best I can tell.

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Again, it mocks Sunday morning in America, where we prefer a fellowship of the sames rather than a fellowship of the difference. We get to choose our churches, and we choose our churches on the basis of similarities. Paul chose churches on the basis of dissimilarities. Now I'd like to look at the ecclesial focus of the Apostle Paul.

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What I want to contend is that church was Paul's obsession. He had nothing less than an ecclesial perception of God's mission, and we need to dwell on just this point a little more, not least because we are so madly in love in America with individualism and private spiritualities. I read a blog post this morning by a young, very popular writer who says he no longer goes to church because he finds God in nature.

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and he sees himself as a very consistent Christian in doing so. I wonder, I don't wonder, what Paul would say of such a spirituality. For Paul, spirituality was a spirituality, spirituality of fellowship.

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And if it's a koinonia and an ekklesia, then all aloneness is not what it's about. N.T. Wright once observed that if we began reading Paul in Colossians or Ephesians, we'd all be in the new perspective. And it's because of its ecclesial focus and emphasis.

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And this is a point worth pondering So I want to begin with a brief look at Colossians. Paul's mission is expanding throughout the Roman Empire because the Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth, is the firstborn, I'm quoting now, firstborn over all creation, and in him all things were created. In fact, these all things were created for him

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and in Him all things hold together. Colossians 1:15-17. We dare not miss the extravagance of the claims Paul just made for Jesus. This Jewish Messiah, Jesus, is the fullness of God embodied in real human Jewish flesh.

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And God will, through him, reconcile to himself all things through his blood. Most importantly, for Paul in Colossians, his mission is spelled out explicitly. He is called to present to you the word of God in its fullness. And he calls this mission the mystery.

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And here's what it is. To the Lord's people, God has chosen to make known among the Gentiles the glorious riches of this mystery. So here's the idea for Paul, is that his mission is to expand Israel to include Gentiles, not to replace Israel with the church. God, okay, this same Christ, he said, is the head over every power and authority, and his cross disarmed the powers and authorities.

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And if you've read Walter Wink, you have a pretty good sense of, I think, what Paul meant by the powers. At this point in the letter, Paul engages the opponents, who have yet to be identified with any degree of compelling force. But there is a bit of a Jewish exclusivism at work, as well as some Gentile idolatries.

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And all these are brought to their knees, Paul says, in the Gospel. The ecclesial focus of God's redemptive work now extending to Gentiles leads to the stunning statement I quoted above about the Scythians and barbarians. where Christ is all and in all. Because of this Christ-centered and ecclesia-centered work of God in this world, the house church folks are to be marked, notice, by compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience.

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And they are to forgive one another. But above all, Paul says, And he understrikes this in his letter with these words, Clothe yourself with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. The household regulations which bug us today, but which was a very Roman thing for Paul to bring up when associations were under suspicion, are shaped toward the Church and toward its Lord.

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Notice, too, that there is for Paul an us versus them, a sense of ecclesial identity over against the world when he says, conduct yourselves wisely toward outsiders. He closes the letter reminding them of their ties to other fellowships in Western Asia Minor. Now I want to say what I think is the really important thing to observe from what we've seen in Colossians. There is virtually nothing in Colossians about inner spirituality, about personal spiritual formation, about individual transformation, or about everything that shapes so much of how we teach the Christian life in the American church today.

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Of course, Paul expects them to be transformed and to get sanitized from the ways of Rome. But his focus is so ecclesial, all things individual are folded into God's mission to form a new kind of community, the Ekklesia. I want that to be emphasized. For Paul, the Church comes first, and the individual's Christian life

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is part of the growth and sanctification of a local church. Think about what that local church looked like in the Pauline world. It wasn't pretty. I don't think Paul's vision entailed getting individuals sanctified, and therefore the church would improve.

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It was groupthink before personthink. It was we before me. We hear Roger Williams' and Henry David Thoreau's musical harmonies in our world today far easier than Paul's music of Koinonia and Ekklesia. Ephesians could easily command more of our attention, but I want to cite one instructive passage, because this is Paul's mission.

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In Ephesians 2, he says this, Christ is our peace. In His flesh, He made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us. He has abolished the law with its commandments and ordinances, that He might create in Himself one new humanity in place of the two, thus making peace.

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and he might reconcile both groups to God in one body through the cross, thus putting to death that hostility through it. So he came and he proclaimed peace to you who were far off, Gentiles, and peace to those who were near, Jews. For through Christ both of us have access in one spirit to the Father. So then you are no longer strangers and aliens,

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But you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Himself as the cornerstone. In Him, the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord, in whom you were also built together spiritually into a dwelling place for God. Notice how ecclesiocentric his vision is. God's mission, according to Paul, is to form the church.

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But what needs to be noticed the most is that Paul's idea of the church is a far cry from the church growth movement's obsession with ethnic and social and economic segmentations eating the individual bits of the salad separately. No, Paul's vision is that in this new age, when new creation is breaking into the Roman Empire, there is a new fellowship sprouting in Roman cities called the Ekklesia, and alarmingly, it's mixing Jews and Gentiles, slave and free, men and women, barbarians and Scythians, into one new political body. Yet one more political term that Paul uses for the church. That is, in Christ, an expression that is not far from the meaning of the word church.

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In Christ, there is peace, yet another political term from Rome, And they are one, and the hostility is gone, and the former law of separation is abolished. And in this church body, God is reconciling the two into one, which is a subversion of both Jewish and Roman politics. Gentiles are no longer strangers, but now citizens.

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Now how is that for a political term? This new body is actually a holy temple in the Lord, that is, a dwelling place for God in the Roman Empire. Mercy, I say to myself, this is a powerful new vision that is political and ecclesial to the core. Now you might, in Texas, say, bless his heart.

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Didn't he have such a great idea? Now the download for us is this. The mission of the Apostle Paul is to form fellowships in separate cities that embody a new socio-political and economic and spiritual order. One body made of others and unlikes, a fellowship of difference.

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My contention is that for Paul, the Christian life was learning how to live in this new ecclesial identity that demonstrated to Rome not its parading of power and status, but instead a parade of sacrificial love and care for all, especially those unlike us. This is why I contend We need to reclaim Paul for the American Church.

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The American Church, argued by one and all, is segregated, and its witness of God's new society evaporates into a thin witness of wistful hope that someday, perhaps, but probably not, we will all be one. It does not begin at conferences and rallies. It begins when you invite a different to your table and to the Eucharist table at your local church. I cannot think of a better statement of what God is doing than one made by my professor, James D.G.

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Dunn, who in a little book on the book of Acts described what the Spirit can accomplish when unleashed in a group of people. Here are his words. You should tweet this and put it on your mirror in your bathroom. The Spirit of God transcends human ability and transforms human inability.

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The Spirit of God transcends human ability and transforms human inability. Tweet that and follow it with hashtag boom. I think the people in the other place know what I'm saying. The Spirit God gives us, God gives to us, is the power to do things we could never do and takes us to accomplish what we can do and makes it even better.

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The Spirit transcends our abilities and transforms our inabilities. So I want to look now at ecclesial cohesion. I came of age in the charismatic movement era, and in spite of my best efforts to experience glossolalia, it never happened, even though several times I went gape-jawed a few times in earnest prayer. But there was much chat about the Spirit in those days,

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and especially about identifying which spiritual gifts each of us had. We filled out forms to figure out which was us. Beside the rather laundry list approach this has, and wondering which one was mine, and the weird possessiveness that seemed to overtake some people, the bigger point needs constant re-emphasis. Each of us

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is gifted by God's Spirit. But the gifting, in Paul, is for a purpose. And the New Perspective's ecclesio-centric focus draws our attention to the purpose of spiritual gifts. Ask yourself why God chose to give to the Church spiritual gifts.

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Then ask how Paul saw them. If, as we quoted Jimmy Dunn to say, the Spirit of God transcends human ability and transforms human inability, then perhaps the most significant strategy for building unity in the salad bowl is to let the Spirit guide the whole body of Christ in gift assignments. In the midst of his missionary work, When his churches were cracking and creaking with disunity, Paul reminded them routinely of the gifts of the Spirit.

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Paul's question is this, why the gifts? His answer, unity. As each person's body has different parts, so the body of Christ has different parts. Why?

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And I quote from Paul, So in Christ, we, though many, and he might say different, form one body, and each member belongs to all the others. Later in his ministry, he will say the gifts are given to create unity in the church, Ephesians 4:16. The unity Paul envisioned for the social realities he knew in the house churches springing up in the Roman Empire was a unity achieved and achievable only because of the gifting of the Spirit. The more Spirit, the more unity.

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The less unity, the less Spirit. There are four lists of gifts in the New Testament. the most complete one in 1 Corinthians 12. To one, there is given through the Spirit a message of wisdom to another, a message of knowledge by means of the same Spirit to another, faith by the same Spirit to another, gifts of healing by that one Spirit.

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Paul got tired of writing by one Spirit, so he quit at this point. But he kept going with his list, to another miraculous powers, to another prophecy, to another distinguishing between spirits, to another speaking in different kinds of tongues, and to still another the interpretation of tongues. Now you are the body of Christ, and each one of you is a part of it.

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And God has placed in the church, first of all, apostles and prophets and teachers and miracles and gifts of healing and helping and guidance in different kinds of tongues. When the Spirit comes, the Spirit assigns everyone a responsibility in the church. And in so doing, the Spirit takes us away from our selfishness and individualistic life and tosses us in the salad bowl with a mission.

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In addition, the four lists of the spiritual gifts differ, leading me to this observation. These are representative examples of the Spirit's assignments. Some tally the gift lists into about 20 spiritual gifts, list them out, and then ask you to figure out which one is yours. But I think a preoccupation with lists turns things inside out.

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Instead of looking at the list and wondering, which one is me, a better approach is to ask, what has the Spirit gifted me to do in this fellowship? And that is your gift. To repeat our point, the gifts are given to us for the good, and for the unity of the body of Christ.

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Paul gives the eschatology of spiritual gifts in Ephesians 4 when he says that the gifts are given until we all reach unity, in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God, and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ. Now I want to pause yet again to consider the Christian life in light of Paul's ecclesiocentric and pneumocentric understanding of the Christian life. For him, the Christian life was an assignment in the local body of Christ, an assignment not so much an opportunity for growth and personal intimacy with God, but an assignment shaped to make the local ecclesia more than anything one could ever have imagined in the Roman Empire. This assignment is our contribution to the local church unity across all known boundaries, ethnicity, race, gender, culture, and socioeconomic status.

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We are assigned a gift in order to help the church become one and so witness to the world that God's work unleashes a whole new creation. Now ecclesial ethics. It is not uncommon to hear the liberalizing of the Christian tradition to be an ethicizing of the tradition. That is, to become liberal is to turn everything into politically aligned social ethics like justice and peace.

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One might counter with a rather bold comeback question, well, aren't those biblical ethics Through and through, aren't justice and peace goods? What then, we ask, is Paul's ethic? In 2 words, I'd say Paul has an ecclesiocentric ethic that derives from the Spirit.

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That is, his ethic is the pneumatic life in the Church. This is altogether clearer if we take a look at what Paul says about the fruit of the Spirit. which once again reveals our penchant for individualism over against Paul's steadfast heading toward an ecclesial ethic. A person exposed to the Spirit is filled with the Spirit and manifests the fruit of the Spirit.

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And here's Paul's list. The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. When the Spirit takes root in our life, the Spirit brings forth fruit.

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Which is to say, the Spirit transforms, and I would appeal one more time to Jimmy Dunn's statement about transcendence. This is the big idea for Paul. The Spirit is in us to make us more Christ-like, more godly, more loving, and wiser.

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But we are wrong if we think that this is going to lead to the Spirit as our new life coach, or to our personal spiritual trainer so that we can become more spiritually healthy and fit. No, Paul's list here again is not about intimate intimacy with God or the Via Contemplativa. Notice how other-oriented or ecclesiocentric his list is.

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The first fruit, love, is first because for Paul, love is the heart of the Torah, it is the central Christian virtue, and it is the singular bond that brings peace to a local church. Jews and Gentiles Slaves and free males and females are one in Christ, and that oneness is only sustained when they love one another through the Spirit. Try mixing churches into genuine difference, and you will see why love was so important to the Apostle Paul.

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Over and over, explicitly, Paul claims that love is the center of the whole Christian life. Please read some of these verses carefully in your own time, and you will see that the first item on Paul's prayer list in his last recorded prayer in Philippians is love because it had always been so central. Here are the verses. Galatians 5, 6, For in Christ Jesus, neither circumcision nor uncircumcision has any value.

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The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love. Galatians 5.14. For the entire, I think this one is maybe the most radical statement Paul ever made.

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The entire law is fulfilled in keeping this one command. Love your neighbor as yourself. Galatians 5.22, the fruit of the Spirit is love. First Corinthians 16, 14, do everything in love.

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And Colossians 3, 14, and over all these virtues, put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity. Love, Paul says, is the only thing that counts. Much more than circumcision. Big clap, we can now hear from the males in the house churches.

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And in a deft revolutionary claim, Paul radicalizes love when he says, loving your neighbor is the entire law. Response from the right side of the synagogue. There are, they say, 613 commandments in the Torah, so how can one of the commandments be the entire law? Paul's response, because love expresses the totality of God's will for us.

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For Paul, love is central. It was central because he knew that the challenges of the Christian life for those who were now in fellowship with one another in those house churches across the eastern parts of the Roman Empire were so demanding. The only way they would make it is if each person learned to love the others in the fellowship. Roman slaves,

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And workshop owners were not used to sitting down at table and praying with Torah-observant Jews. And kosher Jews were not used to reading Scripture with prostitutes and migrant workers. And Paul thought this was the greatest vision of God's way of living. We're back to the need to love one another again.

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Notice again the spiritual fruit and how other-oriented they are. When Paul says peace, he's not talking when peace like a river tendeth my way, or whatever that song is. He's talking about peace between Jews and Gentiles, males and females, and slave and free.

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Finally, love. What is love? I'm glad you asked that question, because that's what I have left in my notes. Four points.

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One, The Bible begins telling us what love is when God formed a rugged commitment with Abraham, then with David, then promised a whole new covenant prophecy in Jeremiah 31, and then the new covenant in Jesus. Love, then, is a rugged covenant commitment to someone. I use this word rugged with the word commitment in re-expressing what the word, the Hebrew word covenant, is for obvious reasons.

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American theologian Stanley Hauerwas once said that no two people are compatible. If he's right, and who would ever argue with a Texan, then love commits to another person who is changing and growing and not the same as she or he was yesterday. Love decides in advance to be committed to someone wherever they are, within reason.

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All right? Now, I'm going to develop 3 prepositions. And at this point, my research, which I've been working on, the meaning and definition of love for about 5 or more years, dovetails perfectly with a little tension and correction of what Sam Wells said yesterday.

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I added that word correction just to create some frisson in the room. All right? But we had a good conversation yesterday in the question and answer session about this. So one, love is a rugged commitment to someone.

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All right? So it's not, first of all, feeling wonderful about someone. That lasts about two years or less. And then you wake up in the morning and say, wow, here we go.

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Yet one more day. But love is a rugged commitment to someone, and you feel this toward your teenagers most every day. Unless you had perfect teenagers as we did. Two, the central covenant promise to Israel was that God would be with them.

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I will be your God and you will be my people forms the wording of the covenant commitment of God to Israel. How was God with humans? In a smoking pot? In a pillar of cloud and fire?

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In a tabernacle or a mobile temple? In a permanent temple in Jerusalem? And all along, God's presence was known through His leaders, like kings and priests and prophets. But God's deepest act of being with is the incarnation.

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Matthew tells us Jesus was Emmanuel, God with us. The theme of withness goes on. Jesus, after His resurrection, sends the Spirit to be with us. And the final book of the Bible sketches the new heavens

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and the new earth in the new Jerusalem, where God's dwelling place is now among or with the people of God, and He will dwell with them. 3. God's covenant of love is a commitment to be with us. 3.

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Love in the Bible is also a rugged commitment to be for a person. Advocacy forms the heart of love. There is a standard covenant formula in the Bible. I will be their God and they will be my people, which means, you could translate this legitimately, I've got your back.

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And Revelation 21, 7 says, I will be their God and they will be my people. And this is the eternal presence of God the advocate. We learn love by watching God love. And God loves in a rugged covenant commitment to be with us, to be for us, and here is the fourth element of love, unto God's perfect design for us.

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This unto-ness is the principle of direction. God loves us and dwells with us in order to make us loving and holy and fit for God's kingdom. How does this happen?

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God's gracious presence is a transformative presence, because it is, to use the words of Leslie Weatherhead, a transforming friendship. Genuine friendships, which are always two ways, are transformative because we permit others inside our inner most existential circle of being. The inevitability of transformation in genuine loving relationships explains in part why church people sit in separate churches on Sunday mornings.

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The fear of change pushes us away from other people. Now perhaps the most important thing I have to observe about love. Order of these prepositions matters deeply. First with, second for, and 3rd unto.

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Or presence, advocacy, and direction. The reality of presence communicates to the one we love our advocacy. And that combination of presence and advocacy empowers the one we love to internalize us and be transformed by the connection. Wanting the transformation of direction or change and growth without

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present or advocacy is experienced by the child or friend as coercion. I had 25 pastors send their college students to North Park University and then call me and say, we couldn't convince our son or daughter to be a Christian. Will you do it for us? I had a lot of college students in my office in tears, and there was one very common story.

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My dad never had time for me. Presence with the hope of direction is experienced as coercion. In other words, pastors behind pulpits and parents on the other side of the table and serious friendships sometimes have not earned the connection required to be a person whose presence is close enough to be transformative.

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Back to the church and the Christian life. The divine codes for love teach us clearly that love is a covenant, a commitment to be with someone, to be for someone, and to be with and for unto the kingdom. These divine codes for love drove the Apostle Paul to a new kind of people of God, the Church. And we have compared today the Church to life in a salad bowl.

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Just a short time spent in the salad bowl reveals that God's kind of love is not bliss. It's far harder than bliss and not as satisfying. It's easy to love people just like us. Actually, even that can be challenging at times.

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But it's hard to love people who are not like us and who don't even like us. The gospel calls us to love everyone in the fellowship. Paul's mission is for those fellowships to be formed. And in the context of that fellowship of love,

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We learn, and only there till we learn, what it means to live the Christian life. Thank you.