EASTER 6B 2009

The Journey: Yesterday, Today and Forever #3

Text: John 15:9-17

John 15:9-17 ( NRSV ) 9As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love. 10If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love. 11I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete.12“This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. 13No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. 14You are my friends if you do what I command you. 15I do not call you servants£ any longer, because the servant£ does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father. 16You did not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask him in my name. 17I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another.

I want to thank Jeanette and Dawson for sharing this morning.

It is impossible to escape the theme of love with jumps out at us from the lessons this morning. These passages are very familiar to me, and to many of you. As I pondered them this week, I was struck by both the simplicity of the words and yet the difficulty of living them out. This morning I would like to share with how the questions and issues that I run through my mind when I read passages like these.

I first was struck by the concept of Jesus loving us as the Father loves him.

9As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love.

This is pretty incredible love. This is pretty strong and powerful and lasting love, the love between the Father and the Son. And it is this love that Jesus says he has for us. What does this mean? How do I experience it? How can I grasp a hold of this love, and transform it from an abstract concept that the preacher talks about to something that actually makes a difference in my life?

And then, what does it mean to abide in Jesus’ love. Abide has the connotation of remaining in, or living in a place. How do I abide, or live in the love of Jesus?

Well, Jesus says that we do this by keeping his commandments? What are his commandments? A few verses later he changes commandment’s plural to commandment singular.

This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.

It seems as if Jesus is saying here that all the commandments are summed up, or fulfilled, when we love.

Jesus says that we can be filled with Joy if we pay attention to his words.

I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete

What kind of Joy is Jesus talking about? How can we get joy from loving? My experience of loving is that it can be very difficult and at times painful. This joy must be something deeper than what we usually think about when we think of joy because now Jesus talks about laying down our lives for our friends. This is not easy. This is not superficial or done with great sacrifice. So clearly this joy is a different kind of joy.

And then Jesus says that if we do what he asks, we are not his servants, but his friends. What does this mean? How do we reconcile this with Jesus as our Lord and God?

And what does Jesus mean when he says his disciples did not choose him, but he chose them? Does this only apply to these original disciples, or to all disciples that will come after them? And what does it mean to bear fruit? What does fruit look like in a disciple? And what does it look like when we love one another? What does it mean to love one another?

Well, is there anyone out there, besides the few preachers, who wants to preach this sermon? As you can see, in just one short passage, there are many, many themes that could be addressed, many sermons that could be preached.

My struggle when I read this passage is how difficult it really is to love one another within the community of faith. Love is not just a nice feeling but rather it is action towards others. There are many levels of action that we can take towards one another, beginning with common courtesy and being nice to each other, and then moving to deeper and deeper levels. But when we start moving towards action that requires some significant sacrifice on our part, we usually only exercise sacrificial action towards those who know and care about. This is our common human experience. Yes, people often do heroic deeds towards those they don’t know, but then they often cannot love those they live with.

The deep challenge in the teaching of Jesus is that he is asking us to strive and extend our caring beyond a small circle of family and friends, and this can be very hard. How do we do this?

One of the great joys to me over the years of life within the community of faith is that, through the week to week, year to year life within the church relationships are formed in deeper and deeper ways that do not often happen in the course of everyday life. Church life, when we are taking it seriously, brings us into deeper realms of relationships, precisely because we are dealing with issues of the soul and of the spirit. In essence, we are trying to face life seriously, dealing with the issues of sin and death and suffering and forgiveness and justice as well as peace and joy and patience and love. Week in and week out, if we listen to the scriptures and partake of the sacraments with open and teachable hearts, we will be forced to go deeper in our lives, and central to all of this is being within a community of faith. We learn with others. We grow with others. We have fun with others. We suffer with others. And in truth, we can only learn to love if we are with others.

Having lived within the church in one form or another my whole life, I know both the good and the bad of church life when it comes to living out the love that Jesus is talking about that we should have for one another. From one point of view, it seems that we are very far from being loving and caring. But then, from another, acts of love and caring are occurring daily. In truth, the community of faith as a whole reflects who we are as individuals. As individuals, we can be selfish one minute and then caring and giving in another. Why would we expect the community of faith, the church, to be better than we are as individuals?

The important quality, however, that the church should have is that we want to learn how to love.. we want to be challenged to give and to be better than we are… we are willing to do things that will makes us better over time.. When you read the history of the early church, these people were no different than we are. The people Jesus spoke to, or Paul wrote to, were just like us. It is not that Christians are going to immediately be these perfect people, forming perfect and loving communities. Churches are weak and sinful people who realize their need and gather together to help each other learn to love and to care and to share.

For two thousand years, in different cultures and among different tribes and countries, the church has been established and continued to thrive. We at Faith Episcopal Church are a part of this work of God. Each one of us makes their own decision about their level of commitment to a particular community of faith. And in truth, the joy and meaning and the satisfaction we receive from church life is proportionate to the degree of our commitment to the church. The more committed we are, yes, more is asked of us in terms of caring and working and giving, and even sacrifice. But along with this commitment comes the experience of learning to love and care, and of being loved and cared for.

As we have heard this morning, church is not just Sunday morning. As we ask you to support our church by making a pledge to support our church life, I hope that you will see with the eyes of Jesus what the community of faith is really all about. We are heirs of the very same people who heard him talk about loving one another many years ago. We are those whom Jesus loves with the same love that he has from the Father. We are those whom Jesus has chosen to bear fruit. We are those who are called, with all of our weaknesses and faults, to strive to learn to love one another, as we have been loved. We are the church! AMEN!