5th Sunday of Easter
May 19, 2019
31When Judas had gone out, Jesus said, “Now the Son-of-Man has been glorified, and God has been glorified in him. 32If God has been glorified in him, God will also glorify him in God’s own self and will glorify him at once. 33Little children, I am with you only a little longer. You will look for me; and as I said to the Judeans so now I say to you, ‘Where I am going, you cannot come.’ 34I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. 35By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” – John 13:31-35
Alleluia! Christ is risen!
Christ is risen indeed! Alleluia!
Love is not just a feeling. If you love someone but you never enact loving gestures, is it really love? Love is the middle of the night feedings for an infant, the trip to the pharmacy in the middle of the night for a sick friend, getting dinner to the table for your spouse when he is having a stressful and busy week. It’s opening your home to someone who needs a place to eat or a place to stay. It’s taking time to listen to someone who needs to talk. It’s responding to those in need in our community with food for the food bank or diapers for children experiencing the trauma of being pulled from their home when they enter the foster care system.
But then love is also not just a series of actions. You can check all the boxes of loving actions toward a person and feel no real love. You can go through the motions with your partner and harbor hatred and disgust. You can serve your neighbor in line at the soup kitchen and silently judge them for a story you don’t even know. You can put on a smile and say nice things and walk away hating a person you’ve just met. Is it really love if the feeling simply never comes?
And love is not just a generality. I can say I love all people. I can say I love people of the opposite political party, or people of other faiths, or people from other countries, but without really knowing them, without really understanding their stories, without actually entering into relationship with them, those statements, even if they are heartfelt, lack real love. If I don’t really take the time to get to know them, to enter into their reality, to bear some part of their burden with them, is it really love?
But love is also not just reserved for specific people. The nature of love is expansive and inclusive. Of course I love at least some members of my friends and family. I experience love for people I get to know and like. But if that love doesn’t inspire me to care and concern for all people, for the recognition that all people share at least their humanity in common with the ones I love, then one wonders whether that love really is love.
And love isn’t easy. Love requires sacrifice and compromise. It involves give and take. It requires that we love ourselves but also to be vulnerable and take risks. It means working through moments when the feeling isn’t there but the commitment is. It means being willing to risk loss and grief. If means sometimes even putting yourself in harms way to protect a loved one. It asks a great deal of us.
But love isn’t hard, either. Love, genuine love, has a tendency to well up from deep inside us rather than being something we consciously manufacture bit-by-bit in our minds. It bursts forth when a parent watches a child do something new, when lovers lock eyes over a romantic dinner, when in recognizing the pain of people in extreme need our hearts well up with the desire to share of ourselves to care for them.
Love is…complicated.
Which is why the verse at the heart of our gospel reading today is so simple yet challenging: Jesus says, “Love one another as I have loved you. It’s as full of action and feeling, generality and specificity, easy and difficulty as that. It’s a nice thing to say, and a nice thing to hear: Love one another. But try to live it out, and it suddenly becomes more complicated.
One of the things I appreciate deeply about this congregation is that generally speaking people who walk through the door experience love and welcome. We are all of us learning to love across difference when it comes to people in general. We sometimes struggle to make the personal connections to the lives of people who receive our generosity through the many drives we support throughout the year. And because we’re human we carry none of this out perfectly. But faced with a fellow human in our midst, I sense a great deal of love here.
And yet, we, too, struggle to love in all those different dimensions. I do anyway. Sometimes my words or actions don’t match my feelings, my love for people in general fails to cross over to the particular person in front of me. I simply don’t put in the effort to love others that is required to move our world into something new.
But rarely has commanding anyone to love done much good. I could tell you until I was blue in the face to go out and love and you might go out and try a little harder or think a little differently about some person or group of people. But I can’t make you or even myself love just by saying so. Which is what makes this command from Jesus all the richer, because it is rooted first in God’s love for us. God’s actions and feelings, love for all and love specifically for you as you are, God’s automatic feeling toward you and God’s practiced embodiment of love in our world.
Jesus’ love is more than a feeling. He notably ate with those who were outcast, he reached out a hand in healing, he feed hungry people. His words were not empty but his love was embodied in service to neighbor. And Christ’s body is gathered here today to extend a hand of peace and welcome to you in this assembly.
Jesus’ love is full of feeling. He spoke tenderly to disciples, he wept over the city of Jerusalem, he cared tenderly for his mother at the end and spoke by name to a weeping Mary Magdalene at the empty tomb. He calls to you today, knowing your name and speaking love and mercy for you.
Jesus’ love was particular. He healed the people who physically stood in front of him as he traveled along his way. He dined with particular friends who supported his life and ministry. He lived in a community in a time and place. And he offers here his life, his body and blood in bread and wine to you, his beloved.
And Jesus’ love was for people in general. They way in which he crossed boundaries and borders, cavorted with outsiders and welcomed the stranger demonstrated an openness to every last human being on the earth. And that table where you are welcomed and known is open to everyone today.
Jesus’ love was hard. It meant an itinerate life with no house and home. It meant being challenged and derided. It meant enduring the cross for the sake of loving the whole world. And Jesus love was easy. It flowed out into the world at every turn because he himself was the embodiment of love, the embodiment of God.
And that’s what allows us to grow in love for one another. We can practice the actions and even the feelings. We can stretch our love beyond the particular people we know and beyond the generalities we fail truly to love. We can do the hard work and we experience the spontaneous ease of love for others. But in the end it is God’s love for us that we proclaim here when we give thanks for baptism and open the table to all, when we read the stories of God in scripture and lift our world to God in prayer, when we are sent out to try again. It’s God’s love in all that that begins to empower us for loving one another. We will mess it up and try again. But God’s love will always be pouring into us and then beginning to flow out into the world.
Alleluia! Christ is risen!
Christ is risen indeed! Alleluia!
-Pastor Steven Wilco
Stewarding the Word 