Sunday, October 25, 2020:
Leviticus 19:1-2, 15-18
1 Thessalonians 2:1-8
Matthew 22:34-46
I recently read about a phenomenon and term coined by a Japanese monk. He calls it the “three legged chicken.” A chicken has a left leg and a right leg, and they’re used to dart about the pen. What’s not helpful is a third leg. This isn’t some Hallowe’en monstrosity; it’s just an idea. The third leg is the ‘general idea’ of a chicken leg. An abstract notion of a chicken leg. But a chicken can’t walk with just the idea of a leg. And you certainly can’t eat an abstract ideal of a chicken leg, either. And, this monk adds, when this mystery third leg starts to walk by itself, something is not right. Something will go wrong.*
Three legged chickens don’t exist, but this phenomenon of the three legged chicken certainly does. The three legged chicken attacks when we get stuck in the realm of ideas, notions, and abstractions. When we forget that we are bodies, in a world, coming up against other bodies. Our faith can become a three legged chicken if we leave the building (or close the Facebook app), go out into the world, and find that what we’ve heard and prayed hasn’t been ‘inwardly digested’ as the famous collect puts it. Because you can’t eat this abstract third chicken leg. It happens when our faith stays here [in our heads, if even] and doesn’t inform the work of our hands or the movement of our feet. And the three legged chicken isn’t just some guilt trip for religious people. There are three legged chickens running all over the place: When there is educational instruction without the development of character. When there is progress without insight, moderation, and responsibility. When there is charity without eye contact. St. Paul describes what real, lived faith looks like: “[W]e were gentle among you, like a nurse tenderly caring for her own children.” It’s a simile, a figure of speech, but the care he’s describing is anything but abstract.
Today in Lutheran churches all across the world they’re observing Reformation Sunday. I wonder if we might say that one of the impulses informing the Reformation was the realization that faith needed to be lived. And lived by, and accessible to, all. Our own Prayer Book is a product of this impulse, and what did Archbishop Cranmer put right near the beginning of the communion liturgy [which I’ve cribbed for our 10 AM service today, too]? “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength. This is the first and great commandment. The second is like it: Love your neighbour as yourself. There is no commandment greater than these.” The architect of the English Reformation wanted to ensure that this didn’t get missed when the community came together for its sacred meal.
And, of course, Jesus, himself the leader of a reform movement — within the Jewish religion, he identifies this as being at the core of what he’s been up to. An expert on the Law comes up to him, and like we’ve heard in previous weeks, Jesus is posed a question. It’s a test. But, unlike previous weeks, my sense is that this isn’t a trick. I think they recognize a bit of themselves in Jesus, but he’s also kind of confounding. Scruffy, hangs out with undesirables… So, ‘What’s at the core of what you’re doing,’ they ask? And all Jesus does is reach back into the Jewish tradition, to Leviticus (like we heard) and Deuteronomy: Love God. Love the person in front of you. They can’t argue with that. They share those scriptures, that inspiration. But Jesus demonstrates — in hanging out with those undesirables, in prioritizing human beings over rules or ideals — that faith can and should be lived, incarnated. He’s no three legged chicken.
So there is much here for us to incarnate, to live out. There are movements in our world today that are three legged: so idealistic that dialogue and actual implementation are impossible, because we’re more concerned about maintaining our rightness than opening ourselves up to others. There are movements that are fixated, apparently, on love of God, but lacking in the grit and realism of life in the world, among other people. And there are movements that claim love of neighbour (or at least concern for neighbour), that lack the depth, selflessness, and wisdom that come from the inner conversion of the heart that, I believe, can happen when we open ourselves up to that mysterious yet known force of love in the world that we call God.
Two years ago when Bishop Michael Curry preached at the wedding of Meghan and Harry, right near the top he quoted Martin Luther King, someone we could desperately use today: “We must discover the power of love, the redemptive power of love. And when we do that, we will make of this old world a new world, for love is the only way.”
May we be people of love. May we be real. May we be reformed, and may we re-form our world through this. Amen.
© 2020 The Rev’d Matthew Kieswetter
* Timothy Radcliffe, Alive in God: A Christian Imagination (London: Bloomsbury 2019), 11.