A sermon preached as guest preacher at Diamond Lake Lutheran Church in South Minneapolis on April 24, 2016.
Grace,
peace, and mercy are yours from the Risen Christ. Amen.
It is a joy to be among you, and I
am thankful for the invitation to preach today as part of the In A Different
Voice series. I am a former preaching student of Dr. Karoline Lewis and
currently serve as a chaplain for Regions Hospital and HealthPartners Hospice. Thank
you for welcoming me into your midst on this Fifth Sunday of Easter.
My sermonating this week has been
accompanied by the ever-present song running through my head of “They will know
we are Christians by our love, by our love, they will know we are Christians by
our love.” But I find this to be
particularly irritating, because quite often Christians are not known by their
love for others. Christians are more easily identified not by their love, but
by whom they seem to hate the most. This song has been running through my head
this week as I observe religious liberty legislation take on a fever pitch in
the news. We see people of faith perpetuating hate towards those who identify
as members of the LGBTQ community, and calling that hate “religious devotion”.
Many Christians perpetuate xenophobia, fear of the other, as they express
hatred towards our Muslim brothers and sisters. And progressive Christians
often exhibit the same hatred and disgust for more conservative evangelical and/or
fundamentalist Christians, I have certainly been guilty of this in my own life.
Most of the time we think we have a
pretty good idea of what it is to love one another. We love our spouses,
children, parents, siblings, friends, and pets. We might abstractly love people
or groups of people, for example, I love people nearing the end of their lives,
as well as loving individual patients. Where things get a little more
complicated is in loving those who are less loveable.
We find it easy to love those who are like us.
Many of us who are married or partnered find ourselves with someone who comes
from a similar ethnic, socioeconomic, and religious background. Many of us
choose our friends based on similar social and political leanings. It takes
work to love someone who is different from us.
And human love is also imperfect
because we want our love to be reciprocated. We want it to be equitable,
guaranteed, and safe. We want to love and be loved, and we are willing to
invest ourselves in it, if there is a guarantee that our love will be
reciprocated or at least appreciated. Because to be loved and to love requires
a certain amount of vulnerability, and we have learned, through socialization
or hard-won experience, that vulnerability is an opportunity to be hurt. We
sometimes prefer to love our neighbors from a distance, because then we get to
dictate the terms of what it is to love one another. We would rather lift up
#BlackLivesMatter in prayer because then we don’t need to have an honest
conversation about the ways that racism is still deeply embedded in our church.
It really doesn’t cost us anything, and we get to feel good about the ways that
we are loving our neighbors.
This text from John’s Gospel is one
of those passages from scripture that we have heard so many times that we think
that we know what it means. But we owe it to ourselves to look a little
deeper. The context of these verses is
tremendously important. Jesus has just shared a meal with his disciples. He
washed their feet, which would have been filthy from sand and dust. It is an
intimate time, the last time that Jesus is gathered together with all of his
disciples before his betrayal. Jesus says of the foot washing, “I have set an
example for you…that you should also do as I have done to you.” He is saying,
“You should demonstrate love and service to one another by literally getting
your hands dirty.”
And then Jesus foretells his
betrayal. He says to those gathered around him, his closest friends, his
confidants, “One of you will betray me.” The disciples are shocked. They look
at one another in disbelief. Jesus is their friend, their teacher, their
spiritual leader. They simply cannot imagine that this could be true. But Jesus
knows that it will be Judas Iscariot, and Judas knows this too, so when Jesus
says, “Do quickly what you are doing to do”, Judas runs out of the house. The
other disciples still don’t get it, and think that Judas is running out to buy
groceries for the Passover meal.
Then Jesus says, “Dear ones, I am only going to be with you for a little
while longer, and you will be looking for me, because you have not been paying
attention to all that I have been telling you.” He goes on, “I am going to give you one
major commandment. Only one, because it
is probably going to be hard for you to follow. It is to ‘love one another.
Just as I have loved you, love one another.’”
Jesus concludes, “Everyone will be able to know that you are my
disciples, if you show love to one another.”
We do not get any commentary in the text about what the disciples are
thinking or feeling about this commandment. So I imagine a very human reaction
from the disciples regarding this commandment to love. OF COURSE they love each
other. They are friends. They probably get annoyed with each other at times,
but at the end of the day, they are loyal and loving towards one another.
But Jesus is NOT saying, “Everyone will you know that you follow me by
the love that you show to your friends.”
Jesus shared a meal and washed the feet of Judas, the one who betrayed
him for 30 pieces of silver. Judas is decidedly not his friend.
Jesus says, “Just as I have loved you, you should love one another…by
this, everyone will know you are my disciples, if you have love for one
another.” ONE ANOTHER is not just Jesus’
inner circle of disciples. It is not just those who were open and friendly to
the message that Jesus and the disciples shared.
ONE ANOTHER is not just people who are Christian. Or American. Or churchgoers.
Or polite or who are likely to reciprocate that love. The love demonstrated by
Jesus is without condition. It is without qualification or justification. It is
the sort of love that is demonstrated by washing the feet of the one who would
betray you.
This is not the kind of love that we have because we have affection for
someone, or a familial bond, or similar interests. It is the kind of love that
flows from us because we are first loved by God. But it is hard to love this
way. And for this reason, we need an example. God incarnate washes the
feet of those closest to him, including the feet of Judas, who will literally
turn him over to be killed. Jesus is incarnationally modeling what it is to
love. We will at times fall short, but we need not despair, for God is still among us, and within
us, and loving us in spite of all of the ways that we betray God and deny God
by not seeing the face of Christ in our neighbors. We are loved at the core of
our being, because we belong to God. We are made in God’s image. Nothing we can
do can ever tear us away from God’s love.
BECAUSE WE ARE FIRST LOVED, WE ARE
FREE TO LOVE. THIS IS VERY GOOD NEWS
INDEED.
Let us pray,
God, we give you thanks for your
love for us, an expansive love for all of humanity and all of creation. May
that same love flow through us as we seek to follow you. Amen.
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