Several years ago, one of my jobs one day a week was working as an aide for an elder woman. She was a person faith, a very deep and fierce faith, who had lived a pretty hard life. We got to know each other really well. And we had great conversations and arguments about big religious questions. Usually she would school me, but sometimes I had something to teach her too.

So, this was at a time when I was struggling to find a church home where felt a good fit. One day I was telling her about a church I had gone to that past Sunday. And I was saying how, I really liked this, I really like that, I really felt moved by this, but … there was this and that and the other thing I wasn’t happy with, and this one person acted like this and I didn’t like that.

She looked at me and said, “You know, Nathaniel, the hardest part of being a Christian is having to deal with other Christians … but that is exactly how you learn how to be a Christian?”

She had my number. She had zeroed in on how my epic quest for some utopia of a faith community had become a way of avoiding the at times hard work of actually being a part of a faith community with actual human beings.

So, I went back to that church I had visited. And as a matter of fact, that was the United Church of Santa Fe, which became the first UCC church I was a part of. I quickly grew to love that community, and to be schooled by those folks in how to align my living a little more in the way of Jesus and be more human and humane with my fellow humans.

Churches should not expect to be utopias, we shouldn’t expect churches to be utopias … but this happens in different ways when we think churches should be bastions of purity or perfection or righteousness, that reinforce our judgmentalism.

No, churches at best are Schools of Love.

Schools of Love: I borrow this term from the progressive evangelical writer Brian McLaren. Churches as Schools of Love.

We all know that Jesus taught, Love the neighbor, Love the stranger, Love the enemy, Receive God’s love and share that love with all.

But how we actually do that, what that actually means for our real lives, this is an ongoing journey of growth and challenge. It is simply impossible to do alone. We need to help each other out, with grace and grit. We need help from the wisdom of those who have come before. And we need help from God. God help us.

That is the purpose of church: to help each other grow, even just a little, in our capacity to love and receive love, and thus to become more activated as human beings. Sometimes this is joyous and fun, in celebrating together. Sometimes this is tender, in supporting each other through loss and hardship. Sometimes this is tough, in loving each other through conflict, or just through those little irritations that come when you’ve got a quirky cast of characters around here – myself prominent among them.

How do we grow in love? How do we see every encounter as an opportunity or a challenge to grow in love? How do we deepen in our realization of Divine Love?

Through the pandemic, one of the things I’ve appreciated and I’ve heard other people appreciate at our church, is how there seems to have been a growth in willingness to be vulnerable together, to be trusting and worthy of trust in supporting each other through shared vulnerability.

There’s also been, it seems, a renewed energy of sharing genuine, heartfelt, creative expressions of who we are and what we can do. You know, it’s been a really moving past few weeks when our focus on Sunday morning has been on the spiritual work of the artists in our midst here.

The spirit of witnessing each other in authentic sharing – may that grow and grow. This is key to being a School of Love. I just invite and encourage more and more of all this, in whatever ways we meet as a church community, especially as we explore what all we need and are led to do together to be a School of Love in new ways and old ways, right here and now, in this time and place.

And if you hear this and you say, that’s not been my experience here, that this church has been a school of love, in any way – we need to hear about that, that’s very important to name.

I hope it’s clear that “love” here, Christian love, what’s called Agape Love, is not sentimental love. It’s not just about being nice and comfortable all the time. Jesus for his part, as an embodiment of Divine Love, did a whole lot of schooling folks in how to be more loving. He exposed blind spots and hypocrisies, which in the moment could seem harsh, but with grace becomes opportunities to grow in becoming more loving of more people. Churches I hope can be a place to do that too, graciously – to help each other see the ways that we block our love from extending to another person, and the ways we block ourselves from receiving love and mercy and acceptance from God.

Part of what my elder was teaching me in the story I opened with, was how important it is to hang on through disillusionment and disappointment and judgment, to see that as a learning opportunity.

And here’s the other thing about this kind of love that churches often can miss: The religious scholar Karen Armstrong has pointed out that the language Jesus uses around loving your neighbors as yourself, and loving your enemies, is the same language used in treaties at the time. In these treaties between states and tribes were agreements of peace and mutual defense, they used the same language about love that Jesus does.

Jesus is saying, come to each other’s aid, come to each other’s defense, be good allies to each other. Love each other in that way … love everyone in that way … love especially those who no one else is loving in this way: those who are least and last and lost, the most vulnerable, those most likely to be refused respect, mercy, and dignity. That is key to how churches can be schools of love.

I thank God for the ways we do all this. I thank God for the opportunities to grow.

So, my friends, as we endeavor to do church and be church together as such a motley and marvelous band, with Jesus as our guide, and God as our ground, may we continue to get schooled together in love.

Thanks be to God.

Galatians 5: 13-23

It is absolutely clear that God has called you to a free life. Just make sure that you don’t use this freedom as an excuse to do whatever you want to do and destroy your freedom. Rather, use your freedom to serve one another in love; that’s how freedom grows. For everything we know about God’s Word is summed up in a single sentence: Love others as you love yourself. That’s an act of true freedom. If you bite and ravage each other, watch out—in no time at all you will be annihilating each other, and where will your precious freedom be then?

My counsel is this: Live freely, animated and motivated by God’s Spirit. Then you won’t feed the compulsions of selfishness. For there is a root of sinful self-interest in us that is at odds with a free spirit, just as the free spirit is incompatible with selfishness. These two ways of life are contrary to each other, so that you cannot live at times one way and at times another way according to how you feel on any given day. Why don’t you choose to be led by the Spirit and so escape the erratic compulsions of a law-dominated existence?

It is obvious what kind of life develops out of trying to get your own way all the time: repetitive, loveless, cheap sex; a stinking accumulation of mental and emotional garbage; frenzied and joyless grabs for happiness; trinket gods; magic-show religion; paranoid loneliness; cutthroat competition; all-consuming-yet-never-satisfied wants; a brutal temper; an impotence to love or be loved; divided homes and divided lives; small-minded and lopsided pursuits; the vicious habit of depersonalizing everyone into a rival; uncontrolled and uncontrollable addictions; ugly parodies of community. I could go on.

This isn’t the first time I have warned you, you know. If you use your freedom this way, you will not inherit God’s kin-dom.

But what happens when we live God’s way? God brings gifts into our lives, much the same way that fruit appears in an orchard—things like affection for others, exuberance about life, serenity. We develop a willingness to stick with things, a sense of compassion in the heart, and a conviction that a basic holiness permeates things and people. We find ourselves involved in loyal commitments, not needing to force our way in life, able to marshal and direct our energies wisely.