Love One Another
John Wilkinson Third
Presbyterian Church
May 21, 2006
John
15:9-17
Many of you will remember the distinguished pastorate of William
Hudnut, Jr., who served Third Church from 1946 to 1964. Some
of you will remember as well William Hudnut, III, also a Presbyterian
minister – who served in the pastorate as well as a U.S.
Congressional representative and most famously as Mayor of the
City of Indianapolis. Now a fellow with the Urban Land Institute,
Bill Hudnut will be in Rochester on Monday, June 5 to speak
at a benefit dinner for our Third Church outreach programs.
This event, to be held at the lovely facilities of Colgate Rochester
Crozer Divinity School, promises to be wonderful for many reasons
– to hear a fine guest speaker, to enjoy a nice evening
with Third Church friends, and to support our extensive outreach
programs. Additional reservation forms are located in the red
friendship pads. We hope that you will be able to attend this
great event on June 5.
***
The great American novelist Toni Morrison has announced her
retirement from teaching. I hope she will continue to write.
Morrison’s novel Beloved was recently acknowledged
a standard for the last quarter century.
In Beloved, the character Sethe says: "Love is
or it ain't. Thin love ain't love at all."
The culture in which we live seems to love thin love. That
seems fine on one level, though certainly fleeting. Whatever
your era, you and I have grown up with popular music that throws
around the notion of love. From my era: “Love Hurts,”
Love Stinks,” “Love Is Like a Rock,” “Loves
Me Like a Rock,” “Love Is A Rose,” “Love
Will Keep Us Together,” “Love To Love You Baby”
– a personal favorite! You get the picture – except
for one more sill love song called: “Silly Love Songs.”
In our celebrity-focused world, we seem particularly focused
on celebrity love. Each week at the checkout line a magazine’s
headlines will shout out the current status of any of a number
of celebrity couplings. It is easy to criticize until you surreptitiously
slip a People in between your broccoli florets and
bran flakes.
But given all that, I need to be clear that that is precisely
not what we are considering this morning. I do not mean to be
dismissive of pop music or popular culture. There are times
when a 3 minute top forty song – something like “Can
You Feel the Love Tonight” or “Will You Still Love
Me Tomorrow” or “All You Need Is Love” –
says it all, captures human emotion and human heartache and
human longing.
But if love is something we toss around casually, this conversation
is anything but casual. “You shall love the Lord your
God with all your heart and soul and might.” “The
greatest of these is love.” “If you love me, feed
my sheep.” And then this: “This is my commandment,
that you love one another as I have loved you.”
Jesus is speaking to his followers prior to his death, but
we know that he has his death on his mind. His followers do
not; that is part of the problem. They have been taken with
his ministry of teaching and preaching and healing, but they
do not yet realize the places where this ministry will lead
him, and them.
In all of the gospels you will experience Jesus’ repeated
attempts to tell them – they do not get it, which means,
ultimately, that we do not get it. “After I am gone,”
he says, time after time. They either ignore or reject the concept
altogether.
We are in the season of commencement speeches and valedictory
addresses. Here is Jesus’. “This is my commandment,
that you love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater
love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s
friends.”
This is not Toni Morrison’s “thin love.”
This is ultimate love.
The New Testament will talk about three kinds of love, at least.
Eros – romantic love. Philia –
sisterly or brotherly love. Agape – self-giving
love. All three are needed in each human life; all three are
certainly gifts from God.
When we hear the word “friend” in John’s
gospel, we are hearing a version of the word “agape.”
Our word “friend” does not really convey the sense
of this – to hear the word “friend” this morning
is to understand it in a new way, therefore, as one who is loved.
As important as romantic love is, we would say, and as important
as friendship is, Jesus is saying more here. He appeals, Gail
O’Day says, to an “understanding of friendship wholly
grounded in Jesus’ particular love.” (New Interpreters’
Bible, Volume IX, page 758)
Jesus takes this to a deeper place. Because God has loved me,
he says, I may love you. And because I love you, you may love
the world, with all of the passion and intensity and integrity
of my love, which moves beyond all love – all loves excelling
– into a song of love unknown.
The word “church” is not mentioned in John’s
gospel – there is little concern for institutions, it
may seem. But the word “community” is mentioned
throughout. It seems that Jesus is envisioning a community of
love, a community of deep friendship…
· based not on what we can get, but can give
· based not on how we are served, but on how we serve
· based not on whether we are liked or not, but based
on the notion that we are loved, and so may love.
Jesus will speak in other places throughout the gospels of
the master-servant relationship. Here we are no longer slaves
but friends. Community is imagined in a new way, as a company
of those who will serve one another, sacrifice for one another,
love one another in the way that God has loved us.
Sandra Schneiders writes: “To lay down one’s life
is the ultimate preferring of another’s good to one’s
own. Service, in other words, by its inmost structure, is capable
of expressing ultimate love, and the love commanded by Jesus
has the inner form of service. Every act of service, however
ordinary, because it consists in preferring another to oneself,
is essentially an act of self-gift and, therefore, an expression
of love.” (Written That You May Believe, page
170)
Just as William Sloane Coffin served as the prophetic voice
for a generation, so has Frederick Buechner served as a poetic
voice. Buechner’s preaching and writing often focus on
the challenges of life, and the ways that God’s mercy
and grace transcend our particular autobiographies to revitalize
our living and our faith. In a sermon called simply “Love”
in a new volume of published sermons, Buechner writes of a critical
moment in his life, when a child was near death, and of discovering
a new thing about the love to which we are called: “This
is the love that you and I are called to move toward both through
the wilderness times, on broken legs, and through times when
we catch glimpses and hear whispers beyond the wilderness. Nobody
ever claimed the journey was going to be an easy one. It is
not easy to love God with all your heart and soul and mind when
much of the time you have all but forgotten his name. But to
love God is not a goal we have to struggle toward on our own,
because what at its heart the gospel is all about is that God
himself moves us toward it even when we believe he has forsaken
us.” (Page 103)
In less than a month, the 217th General Assembly of the Presbyterian
Church (U.S.A.) will convene in Birmingham, Alabama, where it
will be 98 degrees in the shade and somewhere near 200% humidity
– it may be even hotter inside. Many things will happen
at the assembly about which you will hear. One of which you
will not hear very much about is a paper on the Trinity, called
“God’s Love Overflowing.” It would seem to
me that we should give much more attention than we will on a
conversation about the mysteries and magnitude of God’s
love, rather than the controversies that will occupy much of
our time.
At the same time, the assembly will explore a report from the
Theological Task Force on the Peace, Unity and Purity of the
Church. An early section of the report suggests five principles
– embraced over centuries of Presbyterianism – for
the reading of Holy Scripture. One is called the “rule
of love.” If an interpretation of scripture does not lead
us toward a deeper understanding of God’s love for us,
or our love for God, or how that love leads us to love one another,
then it is likely not a very useful interpretation.
That love will take many trajectories – and may lead
us into further controversy, but it is a powerful baseline from
which to start.
· How does the rule of love help us to understand any
of the current disputed issues on the political landscape, from
immigration to war?
· How does the rule of love help us understand any of
the issues brought forth by the current fuss, building on the
former fuss, about "The DaVinci Code,” in the ways
that we engage the issues raised by the book and movie, even
when the issues are silly ones, and more so by the ways we engage
one another as we engage the issues.
· How does the rule of love help us understand conflict
in the church – do we love one another by walking away
from one another, as some have suggested, or by holding on to
one another, as difficult as it may be.
· And how does the rule of love help us understand our
own lives, our own choices, our own relationships.
Because I have loved you, Jesus says, you may love. Our first
and perhaps greatest task is to accept that love. We think we
must do something to earn it. We do not. God’s love to
us is a gift freely given. To accept that gift, to accept that
we are loved, is to free us for a lifetime of being able to
love, freely and completely.
It will not be easy to accept that we are divinely lovable
in a world that makes love a commodity to be purchased or earned.
It will not ever be easy, nor always clear, nor straightforward.
But there is no other way than love’s way; we know that
in our hearts. No other way. And further, we know the deep difference
that love can make, does make, will make.
Be loved, he says. And love one another. In the name of love
we gather. In the power of love we are made friends. In the
promise of love we depart, to love all the world, until the
dawning of the perfect day, a day of wondrous love. Amen.
