"There's No Getting Round it"

One of my favorite songs is one I learned as a very young boy in Church School. "Rock a my soul in the bosom of Abraham." Perhaps you've heard it? It's a great old tune. 'Easy to learn and sing. In one part of the song the lyric goes like this.
"So high you can't get over it, so low you can't get under it. So wide you can't get around it, ya gotta go through the door."
It seems to me that this lyric describes a number of us with dead on accuracy. We are a people who are always trying to get around things. When I was a kid I hated gym class. I tried a thousand different things to get around having to go to gym class. I faked being sick. I "forgot" my gym clothes. I even went to study hall hoping that no one would notice my absence. Of course none of it worked.
Then I got older and I tried to get around other things. Required classes in college and seminary were something that bugged me. Did you know that the college I went to required you to take swimming classes in order to graduate? Swimming? I was an English major! What did swimming have to do with British novels? Well, I didn't get round it in the end. But I did become a pretty good swimmer.
I wonder. Do you ever try to get around things? Do you ever try to get over on someone or get around something you know you should do? Sometimes, as the song says, we go low. We stoop down and go under - just to avoid what we know we should be doing in the first place.
'Going through that door.
I believe Christian faith is like that.
There are certain things that you just can't get around if you want to be a Christian. I'd like to focus on just a couple of them.
If you are a Christian it's important to understand that Jesus is about peace. No amount of so called Just War Theories or well paid military chaplains can change the truth that our Lord and Savior calls us to love our enemies and to pray for those who persecute us. We can wrestle with it, argue about it, even get angry with folks for bringing it up in the first place. But you can't get around it. Jesus Christ calls his followers to be peacemakers.
Another thing we can't get around as followers of the Master is the call to love one another. It's pretty clear. We are to love the Lord God with all our heart all our souls and all our mind.....and then Jesus tell us....to love our neighbors as ourselves.
And the love he describes is "agape" love. That is, the love of God in Christ Jesus as lived out in Christian community. It requires compassion, grace, flexibility, and forgiveness.
These two things are pretty critical.
We really can't get around them if we want to be Christians.
We have to go through the door of peacemaking, step over the sill of justice and enter into a new way of being in Jesus Christ. And we have to give our whole beings to God while we go about the day to day wonderful business of loving one another. You just get around it. You have to go through the door of fellowship and friendship formed in Jesus Christ.

Pastor Schuyler Rhodes