May 05, 2024 | Rev. Loren McGrail
The most important thing we can do as parents is to insist that our children behave as if they love. “Share your toys. Don’t hit. Say you are sorry. Say it again like you mean it.” Dear Ones, Jesus wants us to mean it. When Jesus says, “Love as I have loved you,” he means it. In fact, he commands it. Does love obey decrees? Can we cultivate our hearts to love? Prune ourselves to love? What would Christianity look like if we obeyed this order and grew this impossible love?
Let’s be honest, most of us want God’s unconditional love or the love we sing, “Jesus loves me this I know cause the Bible tells me so.” We want those loves. We also want to keep our circles small and manageable. We want to choose people based on our affinities and preferences not Jesus’ commandment to love. Charitable actions are easy but calls to stand in solidarity with the oppressed not so much. Part of becoming a more progressive church is to move beyond our beautiful sanctuary with its Tiffany windows in order to stand with those being discriminated against or attacked because of who they are. Holmdel Community UCC we know a little bit about this cost when we were attacked at a school board meeting and then had our flags stolen in a hate crime. We have had a taste of what can happen when we love our trans kids as our own. We know a little bit about the cost of discipleship, don’t we?
Our lectionary reading today has more to say about this. It is part of Jesus’ long goodbye to his friends before his death, his betrayal, beating and crucifixion. It comes up again in Eastertide because Jesus is about to disappear for good now.
He is in urgent pastoral care mode, assuring his distraught disciples that his imminent departure is not abandonment.
Jesus makes us a promise based on a new relationship. Friendship. Jesus once again breaks with the laws of hierarchies---master and slave, to call us friends. Theologian Fred Craddock once said, “From servant to friend, do you welcome, will you accept the promotion?” When discipleship becomes friendship the way of the cross is also borne along in the bargain, to lay one’s life down. Yes, this too. Easier to have Jesus as a model than a friend, wouldn’t you say? Jesus calls us friends so that we will obey his last commandment out of love, “Love one another as I have loved you.”
You will recall from last week’s sermon about the vine and the branches that Jesus’s love is not the example but our source. This is why we are invited “to dwell in him”, to make our home in his love. If we don’t abide, we can’t love. If we try, we will become depleted and worn out. Theologian Debi Thomas says “We can only do this (love one another) if we abide in the holy place where divine love becomes possible. That we make our home in Jesus’ love--- the most abundant and inexhaustible love in existence.”
To fulfill the love commandment and not burn out or become despairing we must drink our fill from the Source, his love poured out for us. When you come to the table this morning with our children, I invite you to think about how this meal can not only feed your hunger for connection and grace but fill you with sustenance for the journey that calls each of us to love one another. This impossible commandment to love and to abide in his love is the only way we are going to save the world. If we can do this, we will find the delight and joy of genuine friendship with God and each other.
Dear Ones, go and be “joyful though”, as the poet Wendell Berry says, “you have considered all the facts…Practice resurrection.”