LOVE IS IN THE ORDINARY

This past week I attended an excellent performance of the Bob Fosse Musical titled “Pippin” at a local theater.  I enjoy that show mostly for the music, but the story line has something important to communicate also.  The title character, Pippin, is a young man, coming of age, who is convinced that he is destined to make something epic and enduring with his life, something grandiose and spectacularly impressive.  He is the son of King Charlemagne in 9th Century  France, and he is determined to become as glorious as his father, whose name is literally in English “Charles the Great.”

He first thinks that he can do it by becoming the mightier warrior who has ever lived—until the day that he kills an enemy soldier and he realizes what an empty dream that is.  He quits the royal army.  Then he pursues a life of hedonistic pleasures, spending his charm on women and temporal gratifications—until the day that he discovers that all of it ends up in grief.  Then he decides to kill his father so that he can be the king, wielding all power over his subjects—until he finds out on his first day on the job that he is incompetent.  Eventually, after becoming a homeless nomad, he is given pity and hospitality by a widow and her young son, who take him into their home and give him a job working their farmland and tending their estate.

But for Pippin that work and those relationships are too ordinary.  He is certain that his destiny is something much greater, and so he leaves them—even though they have come to love and appreciate him, and are crushed by his departure. 

Pippin has no idea what he’s supposed to be and do, but surely it can’t be this.  There has to be something more to life than mere love.  Right? 

But in the end, after hitting rock bottom again, he discovers that there is nothing “mere” about human love, even when it can look pretty unexceptional as it is lived out day-by-day.  Pippin returns to the two who have opened their hearts to him, and in good old Broadway fashion basks in the life of a lesson well-learned. 
The plot of the play is kind of formulaic in that regard.  It seems a bit “tidy” in the end.  But it’s still true.

It is true because the most primal life force in the world—love—usually comes disguised in some of the most ordinary circumstances of life.  Like in families and friendships, like in welcoming strangers and caring for the weak, like in engaging in the most unremarkable acts of charity and justice for our neighbors.  Like in de-centering ourselves and our personal ambitions for the sake of making sure that a whole community can thrive.

Love is usually not worked out in the halls of celebrity or politics or business or media.  In fact it is often most conspicuously absent there.  That’s just the truth.  Real love is not normally glamourous.  But it is very biblical. 

In today’s 1st reading (Genesis) we hear of the welcome by Abraham to three complete strangers—at least one of whom was, we are told, the Lord in disguise.  They were in a place where nobody was there to notice.  There were no signs and wonders.  Just three travelers who were begged to stay and to accept hospitality.  Love. 

And two of the three hosts—Sarah inside the tent and the unknown servant who prepared the lavish beef dinner—are never even seen by the guests.  There is nothing glamourous or conspicuous about their acting out of their ordinary loving commitment to be dedicated to the ones without a place to stay.

And in the end we learn that there is a divine weight, a heavenly importance to something so seemingly ordinary.  Abraham is promised that his wife Sarah (who is still invisible and silent in this story) will have a child within a year—she who is already very old and previously unable to become pregnant.  This all happens outside a tent, far from any gathered crowd to applaud and to be amazed.  There is nothing “mere” about acts of love, acts of welcome that occur behind the spotlight of popular approval. 

In fact, as we hear elsewhere in the gospels, it is when religious behavior starts to be done for public spectacle that we ought to become most suspicious of it.  Love is at the heart of life, and love is most often embedded in people and events and relationships that look very, very unexceptional.  Pippin has something to teach us. 

Today’s gospel of Luke is something of a mirror image of that story of Abraham and the traveling strangers.  Abraham’s service was the very ordinary human way through which God come to be known among his family.  Hospitality and work is the only way in which the divine comes to be present among us. 

Yet it is also true that hospitality and work, in and of themselves, without reference to Jesus Christ, are just that—hospitality and work.  Not bad things, but not moments through which to meet God, and to realize our own ultimate happiness. 

And that’s really the point of this gospel of Martha and Mary.  It is interesting to notice that here too there is no indication in the story that Jesus had ever met these sisters before—he was just passing through a foreign town, and they reached out to welcome him in to their home. 

One of these sisters—Martha—imagined the task to be nothing other than hospitality for its own sake…certainly a good and virtuous thing in itself, but missing the more important part.  It was Mary who understood that in this ordinary act of hospitality, of everyday love, we are brought face to face with Christ.  Pippin has something to teach us.  Our ultimate fulfillment as human beings (what we Christians call “salvation”) comes through plain old ordinary love, day by day by often ordinary-looking day.  In faithful commitments to spouses, families, friendships, church, neighbors, the poor and suffering.  That’s where we meet him.  And, oh yes, at Eucharist.  In ordinary looking bread and wine and blessing and gathering and singing and praying.  Pippin can teach us too, right there alongside Jesus.