May 21, 2006 - Abide in love
6th Sunday of Easter
21 May 2006
John 15.9-17
Abide in love
© J. Christy Wareham, 2006
Maybe you heard about the Congolese computer specialist, Guy Goma, who was sitting in a lobby a couple of weeks ago at the BBC waiting to be interviewed for a computer technician’s job. The producer of a BBC news program entered the lobby and called for “Guy,” but the Guy that was the internet commerce expert intended for a live, on-air interview was Guy Kewney, who was sitting in a different lobby. Guy Kewney was supposed to offer some wisdom about the day’s legal decision between Apple Computer and Apple Records, something about which Guy Goma had no particular knowledge.
Nevertheless, there was Guy Goma, on camera and answering questions about what it would mean that Apple Records can no longer use the Apple logo to sell their product. Guy Goma thought such questions a little strange for the job interview he came for, but he did the best he could. The interviewer, for her part, was a little nonplussed by the answers she was getting but pressed on in the hope that she’d soon ask something that might bring a more enlightened response. Curiously, to the typical, unwary viewer watching the news that evening, the at first puzzled looking computer tech gradually settled into his new roll as recording industry guru and ultimately managed to look fairly confident in his wisdom.
Then the interview was over. News producers around the world have been having fun with the whole fiasco ever since, although I think, truth be told, they’re all really glad that what happened to the BBC producer didn’t happen to them. Personally, I’m glad that what happened to Guy Goma hasn’t happened to me.
Actually, as frequently is the case, here I am in the pulpit with the sense that it is happening to me. When the lectionary calls for preaching on Jesus’ highest principles of faith, after all, who am I to appear, live and uncensored, as the expert on his deepest truths? I am supposed to comment, expertly, on the commandment to you that you love each other, which is so hard to do that the church, over the last 2,000 years, has still not very thoroughly understood it. I seem to have been sitting in the wrong place, and someone has asked the wrong “guy” to speak about love.
But who of us would be the right guy, or gal? Who of us knows how to love others as Christ has loved us? Who of us, if we did know, could do it—could live a life like that, could serenely lay down that life for friends who don’t necessarily deserve it? No one is qualified to teach love like that. But someone has to. Or maybe, if no one can actually teach such love, someone might still convince the audience that they have enough wisdom, grace and understanding to start the project. Maybe we can all, like Guy Goma, gain enough confidence in our awkward attempt to fake it that something like love will happen. Now, we’re not imposters, not exactly. We’ve just been called on, as a kind of comical mistake, to be experts on loving one another, and somehow we expect ourselves to muddle our way through.
I wonder if Jesus knew in the beginning, when he called his disciples one by one and two by two, that he would be charging them with lives of such extreme love, when all was said and done. Perhaps answering the call was the first test, or the first act, of love. Certainly, in order to love, we have to recognize love when we see it, and the first act of the disciples was to recognize in Jesus the spirit of abiding love, love that seeks to reach the heart of others and draw their heart out to a life of grace and peace. Some people, in deciding to follow Jesus, might have looked instead to him for miraculous abilities or great favor with God or a great drive for power over the world, which, come to think of it, were exactly the things Satan thought he saw in Jesus. But what the disciples must have seen in Jesus was great and miraculous love. Little did they know that by the time it all was over, Jesus would expect such great and miraculous love also from them. Seeing great and miraculous love in Jesus is the first step in following the commandment to love, and in our seeing, we choose to follow him as an act of love.
What else did Jesus do in his life of love?
He learned his spiritual tradition. He absorbed what there was in the scriptures and teachings of his forebears to strengthen his mind and heart, and to empower him to enact love. Jesus also questioned his tradition as an act of love. Not everything people told him was true, and not everything that once was true would be true forever. “You have heard it said of old,” was how Jesus began his challenges to tradition, by which he meant that things had changed. Things changing, however, didn’t mean that traditions were always mistaken. Jesus just meant that ancient traditions are not permanent truths. Jesus changed the way his followers understood the nature of work, family, sexuality and community, because the nature of work, family, sexuality and community shifts over time—because cultural conditions change. Knowing how to love during an era of cultural change is something Jesus expects us to learn. It is better to know how to love than it is to know how to resist change, and sometimes we are called on to make the difficult choice between the two.
What else did Jesus do in his life of love that he now wants us to do, too?
He healed people. This is not easy to do, but it can be done, even by us. We pray for healing every week here, for instance, as a testimony to our trust in the spiritual influence we have to make whole and to cure.
Recently, we’ve also begun working at the more mundane mechanical and chemical forms of healing in the free clinic downstairs on Saturdays. You could practice loving like Jesus loved right now. You could volunteer at the clinic. I can tell you, physically standing in and witnessing the work of Good Shepherd Community Health Clinic—which we named after Jesus, come to think of it—is an experience entirely other than knowing about it or even contributing money to it. I go to clinic board meetings, make phone calls, wear the t-shirt, talk to reporters, and pester community leaders about the clinic, but walking in for even a brief visit on Saturday mornings fills me with a sense of grace that feels like the sort of love that transcends affection. Seeing the glow of Margie Porter, who has loved that clinic into life, feels like standing in the glow of a saint. People really are having their serious health problems improved and removed at the clinic. They’re being healed. You can be part of that. You can love others as Jesus loved, just by deciding to help.
What else?
Jesus told the truth in love. This is a tricky one. I’ve had many people in my life tell me the truth and tell me they loved me both at the same time, but it wasn’t always true. Loving one another by telling the truth is easy to foul up. It so often becomes just telling someone what it is about them that we don’t like, and we can prove they’re wrong to be the way they are.
How do you know if you’re telling the truth in love or just telling someone the truth of what you don’t like about them? Well, if you get something out of the change you ask for, it may be more self interest than truth. Self interest is not love. If you can tell someone an important truth, and the outcome of your telling them is a matter of indifference to you, it might be loving to tell them. When you’re telling someone the truth in love, the first beneficiary is always the person to whom you’re telling it. If you find that you need someone to believe the truth more than they do, you may not be telling the truth in love.
Still, Jesus told people truths in love that were hard to take. When Jesus told Peter the truth that Peter would deny him, Peter didn’t like it. Yet, even though Peter didn’t like it, he actually did want to understand himself. When he realized later how badly mistaken he was about the strength of his loyalty, he wept inconsolably. Perhaps it was Jesus’ telling Peter the truth about himself that so deepened his grief as to prepare him for transformation into the powerful teacher and leader he became. Something twisted in us often must be untangled before we can be realigned into nobility, so if you know something true that would serve someone in their realignment, telling that truth may be an act of love. All of us, at times, benefit from love like that.
What else did Jesus do to love those in his life?
It would take too long to list everything, but an outline might go like this. Jesus told stories—surprising ones, funny ones, infuriating ones, sad ones—and his stories were acts of love. He went off alone to take care of himself, because no one, not even Jesus, can exert loving action 24/7, and we must remember that self care is an act of love. He encouraged his followers and reminded them of all they were capable of. Jesus’ highest expectations along these lines come up in today’s gospel lesson. “I do not call you servants any longer, . . . but I have called you friends.” We are exactly to Jesus as he is to us, and we are exactly to each other as Jesus is to everyone.
“And I appoint you,” Jesus says, “to go out and bear fruit.” Love blossoms and forms fruit on our branches. Love grows from the rain and ripens in the sun. Love sweetens over long days and weeks, and it so weighs down our limbs that we sometimes feel we will break. Love waits for harvest but sometimes falls to the ground for whatever creature may find nourishment in us—maybe a kid out exploring the orchard, maybe a worm in the dirt. We don’t often get to choose.
Which brings us to the last thing that loving one another means. It’s—I’m a little embarrassed to say—the gospel according to Stephen Stills: “Love the one you’re with.” We Americans so believe that we create our own destinies that it’s hard to convince us that we don’t often get to choose whom to love. We think we create our connections with other people; we think we choose our friendships. But it isn’t true. You go to work somewhere, and the people you’re working with were chosen by someone else. Even if you choose the people who work for you, they’re people you choose for their utility in the job and not for their friendship to you. You join a church, and you find yourself in a pew with the people who turn up. You may pick one friend, but you wind up in that person’s circle of friends and have to find a way to enjoy yourself with them.
Even marriage, our most definitive institution of chosen love, is less a matter of our own choice than we try to convince ourselves it is. Anyone who has been married several years realizes how different the person you married is than the one you seemed at the time to have married, and several years still further along you realize, even more to your surprise, that you are not the person you thought you were when they married you. (We are every one of us full of surprises, even to ourselves. Just ask Judas.)
Insist on it all you want; your belief in the ability to choose whom you are given to love diminishes with every year of life, if you pay attention at all. So you either learn to love the one you’re with, or you put off loving someone while you keep leaving those you can’t love or don’t want to love or shouldn’t have to work so hard to love—or you put off loving the one you’re with until they show themselves ready for your love. The men and women and children that populate your life are the ones for you to love as Christ has loved you, assuming you understand how thoroughly, unreservedly, unaccountably and irresistibly you have been loved by him.
Jesus said, “Abide in my love.” It is hard to do—he never denied that—but it is also what to do, while we may fake it at first, if we mean to be faithful. Love is a choice to follow our gracious leader and teacher and Lord. Love is learning our faith tradition and learning it so well that we can see it changing and evolving into its next flowering and new growth. Love is healing one another—in our body, in our mind, in our heart, in our spirit. Love is telling the truth—especially about ourselves, and then about each other. Love is bearing fruit in acts of grace, mercy and self giving for one another. And we can only love those in our lives for whom our love is a presence and a force for wholeness and peace.
You may be thinking, I do feel the desire to love in a new and gracious way, but I have felt that before, here, and failed in my intention. Of course you have. That’s what we do. So remember right now the words you heard, today, when it hit you that you have to change. Remember the verse of the hymn or the line in the prayer that caught you up and held your heart under the light of grace. Remember, perhaps, just the words of Jesus: “Abide in my love.” And when that moment comes for you to love someone in the way you have not been able to bring yourself to do, stop. Don’t say the thing you have thought to say that is so much like the thing you always say. Stop. Don’t work out all the reasons you can hold something against the one you’re with. Stop. Don’t take advantage of the kindness or vulnerability of the one you’re with in a way that increases you and diminishes him or her. Stop.
Stop and replace all your thoughts and words with Jesus’ words: “Abide in my love.” Just that much pause, and that much truth, may be enough to give you time and latitude to consider how to love this one you’re with as Christ would love him or her, as Christ has loved you. You will bear fruit, fruit that will last. Amen.
21 May 2006
John 15.9-17
Abide in love
© J. Christy Wareham, 2006
Maybe you heard about the Congolese computer specialist, Guy Goma, who was sitting in a lobby a couple of weeks ago at the BBC waiting to be interviewed for a computer technician’s job. The producer of a BBC news program entered the lobby and called for “Guy,” but the Guy that was the internet commerce expert intended for a live, on-air interview was Guy Kewney, who was sitting in a different lobby. Guy Kewney was supposed to offer some wisdom about the day’s legal decision between Apple Computer and Apple Records, something about which Guy Goma had no particular knowledge.
Nevertheless, there was Guy Goma, on camera and answering questions about what it would mean that Apple Records can no longer use the Apple logo to sell their product. Guy Goma thought such questions a little strange for the job interview he came for, but he did the best he could. The interviewer, for her part, was a little nonplussed by the answers she was getting but pressed on in the hope that she’d soon ask something that might bring a more enlightened response. Curiously, to the typical, unwary viewer watching the news that evening, the at first puzzled looking computer tech gradually settled into his new roll as recording industry guru and ultimately managed to look fairly confident in his wisdom.
Then the interview was over. News producers around the world have been having fun with the whole fiasco ever since, although I think, truth be told, they’re all really glad that what happened to the BBC producer didn’t happen to them. Personally, I’m glad that what happened to Guy Goma hasn’t happened to me.
Actually, as frequently is the case, here I am in the pulpit with the sense that it is happening to me. When the lectionary calls for preaching on Jesus’ highest principles of faith, after all, who am I to appear, live and uncensored, as the expert on his deepest truths? I am supposed to comment, expertly, on the commandment to you that you love each other, which is so hard to do that the church, over the last 2,000 years, has still not very thoroughly understood it. I seem to have been sitting in the wrong place, and someone has asked the wrong “guy” to speak about love.
But who of us would be the right guy, or gal? Who of us knows how to love others as Christ has loved us? Who of us, if we did know, could do it—could live a life like that, could serenely lay down that life for friends who don’t necessarily deserve it? No one is qualified to teach love like that. But someone has to. Or maybe, if no one can actually teach such love, someone might still convince the audience that they have enough wisdom, grace and understanding to start the project. Maybe we can all, like Guy Goma, gain enough confidence in our awkward attempt to fake it that something like love will happen. Now, we’re not imposters, not exactly. We’ve just been called on, as a kind of comical mistake, to be experts on loving one another, and somehow we expect ourselves to muddle our way through.
I wonder if Jesus knew in the beginning, when he called his disciples one by one and two by two, that he would be charging them with lives of such extreme love, when all was said and done. Perhaps answering the call was the first test, or the first act, of love. Certainly, in order to love, we have to recognize love when we see it, and the first act of the disciples was to recognize in Jesus the spirit of abiding love, love that seeks to reach the heart of others and draw their heart out to a life of grace and peace. Some people, in deciding to follow Jesus, might have looked instead to him for miraculous abilities or great favor with God or a great drive for power over the world, which, come to think of it, were exactly the things Satan thought he saw in Jesus. But what the disciples must have seen in Jesus was great and miraculous love. Little did they know that by the time it all was over, Jesus would expect such great and miraculous love also from them. Seeing great and miraculous love in Jesus is the first step in following the commandment to love, and in our seeing, we choose to follow him as an act of love.
What else did Jesus do in his life of love?
He learned his spiritual tradition. He absorbed what there was in the scriptures and teachings of his forebears to strengthen his mind and heart, and to empower him to enact love. Jesus also questioned his tradition as an act of love. Not everything people told him was true, and not everything that once was true would be true forever. “You have heard it said of old,” was how Jesus began his challenges to tradition, by which he meant that things had changed. Things changing, however, didn’t mean that traditions were always mistaken. Jesus just meant that ancient traditions are not permanent truths. Jesus changed the way his followers understood the nature of work, family, sexuality and community, because the nature of work, family, sexuality and community shifts over time—because cultural conditions change. Knowing how to love during an era of cultural change is something Jesus expects us to learn. It is better to know how to love than it is to know how to resist change, and sometimes we are called on to make the difficult choice between the two.
What else did Jesus do in his life of love that he now wants us to do, too?
He healed people. This is not easy to do, but it can be done, even by us. We pray for healing every week here, for instance, as a testimony to our trust in the spiritual influence we have to make whole and to cure.
Recently, we’ve also begun working at the more mundane mechanical and chemical forms of healing in the free clinic downstairs on Saturdays. You could practice loving like Jesus loved right now. You could volunteer at the clinic. I can tell you, physically standing in and witnessing the work of Good Shepherd Community Health Clinic—which we named after Jesus, come to think of it—is an experience entirely other than knowing about it or even contributing money to it. I go to clinic board meetings, make phone calls, wear the t-shirt, talk to reporters, and pester community leaders about the clinic, but walking in for even a brief visit on Saturday mornings fills me with a sense of grace that feels like the sort of love that transcends affection. Seeing the glow of Margie Porter, who has loved that clinic into life, feels like standing in the glow of a saint. People really are having their serious health problems improved and removed at the clinic. They’re being healed. You can be part of that. You can love others as Jesus loved, just by deciding to help.
What else?
Jesus told the truth in love. This is a tricky one. I’ve had many people in my life tell me the truth and tell me they loved me both at the same time, but it wasn’t always true. Loving one another by telling the truth is easy to foul up. It so often becomes just telling someone what it is about them that we don’t like, and we can prove they’re wrong to be the way they are.
How do you know if you’re telling the truth in love or just telling someone the truth of what you don’t like about them? Well, if you get something out of the change you ask for, it may be more self interest than truth. Self interest is not love. If you can tell someone an important truth, and the outcome of your telling them is a matter of indifference to you, it might be loving to tell them. When you’re telling someone the truth in love, the first beneficiary is always the person to whom you’re telling it. If you find that you need someone to believe the truth more than they do, you may not be telling the truth in love.
Still, Jesus told people truths in love that were hard to take. When Jesus told Peter the truth that Peter would deny him, Peter didn’t like it. Yet, even though Peter didn’t like it, he actually did want to understand himself. When he realized later how badly mistaken he was about the strength of his loyalty, he wept inconsolably. Perhaps it was Jesus’ telling Peter the truth about himself that so deepened his grief as to prepare him for transformation into the powerful teacher and leader he became. Something twisted in us often must be untangled before we can be realigned into nobility, so if you know something true that would serve someone in their realignment, telling that truth may be an act of love. All of us, at times, benefit from love like that.
What else did Jesus do to love those in his life?
It would take too long to list everything, but an outline might go like this. Jesus told stories—surprising ones, funny ones, infuriating ones, sad ones—and his stories were acts of love. He went off alone to take care of himself, because no one, not even Jesus, can exert loving action 24/7, and we must remember that self care is an act of love. He encouraged his followers and reminded them of all they were capable of. Jesus’ highest expectations along these lines come up in today’s gospel lesson. “I do not call you servants any longer, . . . but I have called you friends.” We are exactly to Jesus as he is to us, and we are exactly to each other as Jesus is to everyone.
“And I appoint you,” Jesus says, “to go out and bear fruit.” Love blossoms and forms fruit on our branches. Love grows from the rain and ripens in the sun. Love sweetens over long days and weeks, and it so weighs down our limbs that we sometimes feel we will break. Love waits for harvest but sometimes falls to the ground for whatever creature may find nourishment in us—maybe a kid out exploring the orchard, maybe a worm in the dirt. We don’t often get to choose.
Which brings us to the last thing that loving one another means. It’s—I’m a little embarrassed to say—the gospel according to Stephen Stills: “Love the one you’re with.” We Americans so believe that we create our own destinies that it’s hard to convince us that we don’t often get to choose whom to love. We think we create our connections with other people; we think we choose our friendships. But it isn’t true. You go to work somewhere, and the people you’re working with were chosen by someone else. Even if you choose the people who work for you, they’re people you choose for their utility in the job and not for their friendship to you. You join a church, and you find yourself in a pew with the people who turn up. You may pick one friend, but you wind up in that person’s circle of friends and have to find a way to enjoy yourself with them.
Even marriage, our most definitive institution of chosen love, is less a matter of our own choice than we try to convince ourselves it is. Anyone who has been married several years realizes how different the person you married is than the one you seemed at the time to have married, and several years still further along you realize, even more to your surprise, that you are not the person you thought you were when they married you. (We are every one of us full of surprises, even to ourselves. Just ask Judas.)
Insist on it all you want; your belief in the ability to choose whom you are given to love diminishes with every year of life, if you pay attention at all. So you either learn to love the one you’re with, or you put off loving someone while you keep leaving those you can’t love or don’t want to love or shouldn’t have to work so hard to love—or you put off loving the one you’re with until they show themselves ready for your love. The men and women and children that populate your life are the ones for you to love as Christ has loved you, assuming you understand how thoroughly, unreservedly, unaccountably and irresistibly you have been loved by him.
Jesus said, “Abide in my love.” It is hard to do—he never denied that—but it is also what to do, while we may fake it at first, if we mean to be faithful. Love is a choice to follow our gracious leader and teacher and Lord. Love is learning our faith tradition and learning it so well that we can see it changing and evolving into its next flowering and new growth. Love is healing one another—in our body, in our mind, in our heart, in our spirit. Love is telling the truth—especially about ourselves, and then about each other. Love is bearing fruit in acts of grace, mercy and self giving for one another. And we can only love those in our lives for whom our love is a presence and a force for wholeness and peace.
You may be thinking, I do feel the desire to love in a new and gracious way, but I have felt that before, here, and failed in my intention. Of course you have. That’s what we do. So remember right now the words you heard, today, when it hit you that you have to change. Remember the verse of the hymn or the line in the prayer that caught you up and held your heart under the light of grace. Remember, perhaps, just the words of Jesus: “Abide in my love.” And when that moment comes for you to love someone in the way you have not been able to bring yourself to do, stop. Don’t say the thing you have thought to say that is so much like the thing you always say. Stop. Don’t work out all the reasons you can hold something against the one you’re with. Stop. Don’t take advantage of the kindness or vulnerability of the one you’re with in a way that increases you and diminishes him or her. Stop.
Stop and replace all your thoughts and words with Jesus’ words: “Abide in my love.” Just that much pause, and that much truth, may be enough to give you time and latitude to consider how to love this one you’re with as Christ would love him or her, as Christ has loved you. You will bear fruit, fruit that will last. Amen.
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