Bill Countryman Good Shepherd Berkeley

Sermon preached on the Sixth Sunday of Easter (also Mother’s Day), May 9, 2021

Year B: Acts 10:4-48; Psalm 98; i John 5:1-6; John 15:9-17.

The Bible, from one end to the other, has a lot to say about love, all sorts of love. Love for God is a persistent theme; so is God’s love for us—for this world and for the people in it. So, too, is the theme of human love: the love of parents and children, of brothers and sisters, of lovers for their beloved, the kind of love that holds a human community together—and the kind that can even open the doors of a community tor strangers and sojourners, people with whom we might at first seem to have nothing in common. The Torah gives us the two great commandments of love: Love God with your whole self, and love your neighbor as yourself. And Jesus declared that these two commandments are really the foundation on which all of depends. 

What’s more, our readings this morning all take up this theme of love. Our Psalm weaves an exuberant poetic image of the whole world joining together in unity to celebrate it: 

Shout with joy to God, all you lands;

lift up your voice, rejoice, and sing.

. . . . 

Let the sea make a noise and all that is in it,

the lands and those who dwell therein.

Let the rivers clap their hands,

and let the hills ring out with joy before God. . . . 

(The Saint Helena Psalter)

And love is the topic that runs all through the First Letter of John. We heard it vividly expressed last week in the famous passage that culminates in “God is love”—and then goes on to say that to love God we must love our brothers and sisters, too. And this week’s reading carries on this line of thought. “Every one who loves the parent,” it declares, “loves the child.” To love God is to love Jesus and to love those whom Jesus has claimed as siblings—in other words, to love one another. 

Of course, when John goes on to say, “And [God’s} commandments are not burdensome,” we may begin to hesitate. There are a lot of people in the world I have trouble loving, and some of them claim to be Christians just as I do, despite our serious differences. It’s tempting just to hunker in our community of the like-minded and forget about those people. 

But sometimes God “helps” us along with the task of befriending those we’re suspicious of—or maybe the right phrase is more like “gives us a shove.” Our wonderful story from Acts 10 is an example. Peter definitely didn’t want to go visit Cornelius and his family. The man was a Gentile and therefore unclean and an officer in the Roman army and therefore part of the occupying regime. But God pushed Peter into going by sending him a dream that made it graphically clear that God’s premier concern in all things is not purity, but love. What’s more, when Peter finally got back to sleep, God sent that dream again. And again after that! Not once, but three times, just to make sure that Peter got the message. And then God told him to go with the group of people who would come looking for him in the morning, asking no questions. 

And what happened then? Peter starts telling the story of Jesus, and almost immediately the Holy Spirit falls on this Gentile family—and makes her presence known quite inescapably as they begin to speak in tongues and glorify God. Peter, of course, is flummoxed. How can he deny that these people are genuine followers of Jesus? But how can he initiate them into a community that has been all Jewish up to this point? Happily, he doesn’t have to make the decision all by himself because no person of Peter’s importance in an ancient community ever travelled alone; and he has some other Jewish Christian leaders with him. 

If Peter had been preaching to a Jewish group, or even a Samaritan group, he would have had no hesitation. Next step: baptism. But these are Gentiles! Can he do that? So he put the question to his entourage, “Can anyone refuse water for baptizing these people?” As much as to say, “Can you come up with any other solution?” Their silence confirms his intuition in the matter and only then does he proceed to incorporate this new and hitherto alien group into the Christian community. It was a challenge to take that step. I’m not sure he could have brought himself to do it had not the Spirit given such a plain demonstration of the divine will. But perhaps he remembered, too, that he’d been praying for this very thing all his life in the very words of this morning’s Psalm: 

Shout with joy to God, all you lands [not just Israel];

lift up your voice, rejoice, and sing.

It was happening! The circle of love was widening, however risky it felt at the time.

In our reading from John’s Gospel, we heard Jesus giving his own particular formulation of the love commandment: 

As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love. . . .This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.

This isn’t an isolated command. It embraces everything Jesus had been teaching, not just in word but in deed It sums up his own generous gift of himself to them and to the entire world and asks them to learn it and carry it on into the future.

For love, even though we human beings have a certain natural bent for it, is also something we have to learn. We learn it from family (how fitting that today happens to be Mother’s Day, when we acknowledge this indebtedness), from friends, from the example of saints, from the generosity of God, from Jesus. And it’s the true business of the church to be one such source of our learning. And when Jesus says “Love one another,” he doesn’t mean “Love only one another.” He means, “Learn love here, practice it here, so that you’ll be able to extend it further and further into the world around you.” Jesus isn’t just setting up a principle. He wants to show us how to grow toward that ideal, how to learn love. 

Admittedly, Jesus also says something pretty scary in this passage: “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” Wait a minute! Didn’t the letter of John just tell us that this wasn’t going to be burdensome? But Jesus is speaking here, first and foremost, about himself. He wants us to understand that he’s showing the utmost love that is possible for a human being. He’s showing what an amazing thing love can do at its pinnacle. But he doesn’t ask us to begin there. 

Perhaps with time and practice we may grow even to that point. (Many have, over the centuries.) God grant we never have the occasion to test it! But we begin where we are, not where Jesus is. We begin by learning love, and we can do that even in the company of other imperfect, fallible people like ourselves, of other people who are still learning and growing in grace—of mothers and fathers, of sisters and brothers, of friends, of those who love us, of saints we meet or hear about. And as we learn and grow, we find that love in the long run, is not a burden, but a joy. We are enlarged by it. We grow by it. We become new, more generous people. We may even find we have gifts to share that we hadn’t noticed before. Strangely enough, the commandment to love turns out to be a gift—and living by it a joy.