The Rev. Noah Van Niel
The Chapel of the Cross
February 24th, 2019
Epiphany 7: Genesis 45:3-11, 15; Ps 37:1-12, 41-42; 1 Cor 15:35-38, 42-50; Luke 6:27-38
My wife and I don’t have much time to watch TV, but lately, at the recommendation of many people (probably because I’m a priest) we have been enjoying working our way through the sitcom, The Good Place. The basic premise of the show is that the lead character, Eleanor Shellstrop, finds herself in Heaven (the “Good Place”) by mistake. 
She was a pretty terrible person in her life on earth but a glitch in the system has placed her in the wrong afterlife. Eventually this mistake is discovered, and the only way she will be able to stay in the Good Place (which she desperately wants to do) is to up her “score,” the tally of all her actions on earth which, because she was such an awful person, was way in the negative. (If this all sounds rather bleak for a sitcom I can assure you it is done with a lot of wit and good cheer.) So Eleanor runs around the neighborhood trying to up her good person points, but without any success. And finally it dawns on her that the reason she isn’t moving the moral needle is because her motivation for doing all these good things is ultimately still self-serving. And she has to figure out how to change her motivation if she has any hope of staying out of, “the bad place.” I’ll leave it there so as not to spoil the rest of the show.
Now I don’t usually turn to half-hour network comedies for tutorials in moral philosophy, but this idea of motivation as the key to one’s moral salvation is a really significant one. The idea that the quality of one’s motivation is the defining factor in determining the morality of one’s action is a very important philosophical idea promulgated most famously by the 19th century German philosopher Immanuel Kant. I won’t pretend that I understand Kant’s entire ethical system; I’m only superficially acquainted with it. But one of the major tenets of his philosophy that I am familiar with, was that in judging an action’s moral worth, it’s “right-ness,” it is the motivation that matters. Why are you doing the thing?
Kant was not first and foremost Christian philosopher, nor does the Christian faith put forth a complete ethical system in the academic sense, but I think they come together nicely in this one point. What makes an action right, in God’s eyes? The motivation behind it. And what is that proper motivation?
O Lord, you have taught us that without love whatever we do is worth nothing: Send your Holy Spirit and pour into our hearts your greatest gift, which is love, the true bond of peace and of all virtue, without which whoever lives is accounted dead before you.
That was our opening collect today; strong words, a strong prayer that has been in our prayer book since the beginning of the Anglican Church. And in so many words, it is saying that in whatever we do it is the motive that matters and that only motive that matters is love. Without it, anything we do is worthless; without it, we might as well be dead.
If you want an example what it looks like to be motivated by love, look no further than the story from our Old Testament lesson. Joseph had been sold into slavery by his envious brothers and now, at the end of the story, he has risen up to the highest ranks of pharaoh’s government and his brothers come groveling to the one who, unbeknownst to them, they had treated so harshly. Joseph had every reason and then some to exact a fierce and full revenge on his brothers in this scene. He could have wiped every single one of them off the face of the earth, and some would have said that was the right thing to do. But instead of retribution, he decided to act in love, a love that is forgiving, and pure, and generous. He owed them nothing. And yet he gives them everything.
But it’s one thing to be loving towards your brothers, even if they betrayed you. The real test for the purity of your motivation, the capacity of your love comes, this morning, from Jesus: “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.” This is the real test. Can you act in love when there is absolutely nothing in it for you, when it may even be detrimental to you? Can you lend and expect nothing in return? Remember it’s do unto others as you would have them do unto you, not do unto others so that they will do unto you. It is at this point, when dealing with our enemies, with those who we know could never pay us back, those who hate us and who we may hate in return, that we run up against the edge of our altruism and our predilection for self-centeredness can corrupt our motives and keep us from following through on acting in love.
However these examples Jesus gives are pretty extreme. When he starts talking about enemies, and people cursing you, it can be hard to relate to our daily lives. While I recognize that in the days of Roman occupation, Jesus’ hearers may have experienced these kinds of things more regularly, most of our moral quandaries are more quotidian. Philosophers like to work with extreme theoretical examples as a way of ortho-rectifying our daily lives, of flattening out the uneven topography of our existence into stark, flat landscapes that are easier to measure. Extreme examples help distill the ethical principles at play so they are easier to understand. And I think Jesus was doing something similar in this passage. He is amplifying the situation to make a larger point about the limits of our love.
But life is not a comic book where every day its good guys vs. bad guys. It’s far less extreme, and therefore far less clear, than all that. Our moral life, the state of our soul, is not made up of one huge heroic action performed in a moment of crisis, but in a million little choices which either follow the way of love and conform us to the life of Christ or follow the way of self and pull us further away from him. And I actually think it is in the smaller, seemingly insignificant moments, those moments where we’re not really even paying attention, that we fail to live by love most frequently; where we can slip ever so easily from a loving motivation to a self-centered motivation for our actions. Do I let that guy in on the highway even though I’m running late? Do I return the dollar bill when the cashier gives me back too much change? Do I stop and talk with that beggar on the street who smells rather foul, or do I plow on by without making eye-contact? These are the moments in our life where we run up against the reality that doing the loving thing does not mean doing the convenient thing, and very often means doing the uncomfortable thing. And it is uncomfortable precisely because it is not about us or for us.
On the other hand, if the mundanities of life are where we so often fail to follow-through to act in love, that also means we are surrounded by opportunities to act in love. We don’t have to wait for an extreme ethical dilemma to choose to act in love, we have the chance to do it every day. And even though striving for a pure motivation of love in our actions will sometimes still leave us with some difficult moral calculations to make, I like to think that approaching life by struggling with which action is more loving, is a struggle that God appreciates. Because it is a struggle he is familiar with. How to exhibit love has been God’s entire motivation since the beginning of time. The arc of salvation history, one could argue, is God trying to figure out how to act out his love for humankind and for this world most fully. He tried preachers, teachers, prophets, priests, peasants, kings, and eventually he said, “Here. Here’s Jesus. Not a messenger, not a prophet but my very self, given for you. This is how much I love you.” In all this, his motivation was love and his motivation was pure. If we are surrounded with chances to act out of love, then we are surrounded with opportunities to be drawn closer and closer to the heart of God, revealed to us in Jesus Christ, who gave of Himself for us, simply because he loved us.
I don’t really think God has a cosmic scoreboard for every individual in the world, tallying the loving and selfish actions as positive and negative point totals, as The Good Place has it, though it does make for good television. But I do think how we act on this earth matters; matters to the health of our soul, matters to the health of our world, matters to God. So when you are struggling with the age old question of, “what is the right thing to do?” ask yourself this one question: is it loving? We can’t control outcomes, we can’t control other people, but we can control our motivation and it can be our salvation. Because to act in love is never wrong. It may be difficult, it may be uncomfortable, you may not get anything out of it, you may even suffer for it, but if our Christian faith teaches us anything, it is that to act in love is never wrong, it is divine.