Bill Countryman Good Shepherd Berkeley

SEVENTH SUNDAY OF EASTER, MAY 29, 2022

Year C: Acts 16:16-34; Psalm 97; Revelation 22:12-14, 16-17, 20-21; John 17:20-26

WHAT’S LOVE GOT TO DO WITH IT? EVERYTHING

Our gospel reading this morning is an excerpt from a long prayer that Jesus offers up at the last supper—a prayer full of love and longing and concern for his followers. He knows that, after his death, they will be feeling desolate and abandoned. And he wants them to realize that their connection with him isn’t broken or lost. He speaks about it in two different ways. He talks about it as oneness—oneness with him and with God. “As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us.” And he also speaks of it in terms of love. “I made your love known to them,” he prays, “and I will make it known, so that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them.”

Oneness and love: two ways to talk about the same thing. To be caught up in love is to be caught up in the very life of God. To be caught up in God is to be caught up in love. It’s an ecstatic image showing us what human life can be at its fullest; and it’s also a moral image because it tells us not only who we are, by God’s grace, but what kind of life derives from that. To be one with God means learning how to love ourselves, one another, and our neighbors. 

Jesus really emphasized love in his teachings. He quoted Leviticus: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” And he said that this commandment is second only to the commandment to love God. And, at the last supper, he put it in more personal terms for his disciples: “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.” (15:12) As far as Jesus was concerned, that summed it all up. The other commandments may be useful signposts and reminders, but the real point is “Love one another.” 

And we kind of get that. We sing, “Where there is love and charity, there God is” and “They’ll know we are Christians by our love. And probably we have all experienced some of that love in church communities. I certainly have. And yet, we also know that we Christians have often turned our backs on one another—not to mention the people we think of as “outsiders.” It’s not just a matter of the past—of, say, the Spanish Inquisition. Just now, it’s clear that the Patriarch of Moscow, leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, has had a hand in encouraging the hateful and appalling war on Ukraine just in order to maintain and expand his church. Christians haven’t done a perfect job of loving one another—or of loving our other neighbors, either. 

That’s a discouraging realization. But it’s not the end of the story. What it calls our attention to is that we all have a lot of growing to do. And it isn’t, by and large, something a person can manage in a single great sweep. Loving one another, loving our neighbors as ourselves, is a matter of life-long learning— a process that comes about only with missteps and uncertainties and failures along the way. The disciples’ time with Jesus was just the beginning of theirlearning how to love one another. And sometimes the learning curve was pretty steep.

Now, Paul, of course, wasn’t there at the last supper. He came along later, and he wasn’t much of a lover at the start. In fact, he started out as a persecutor of the Christian community before winding up as an advocate of it. But the story we heard from Acts of the Apostles this morning has a lot to teach us about loving one another, even with all our complexities and faults. 

To start with, we can see here that Paul was “no saint,” in the way we commonly use that phrase. He could get angry, like us. He could act out of irritation or frustration, like us. He could also rise above his own imperfections at times, like us.

Here’s how the story goes. Paul and Silas are in the city of Philippi, an important place in the north of Greece. And they’ve received a warm welcome from some local people, led by Lydia, a prosperous businesswoman there. They’ve formed a Christian community. And Paul and Silas worship with them and also continue to roam around the city, meeting people, telling their message to those who want to listen, It’s a quiet kind of work.

But a certain slave girl starts following them around telling people to pay attention to them because they’re messengers of God. Luke tells us that she “had a spirit of divination.” We don’t know exactly what that meant, but she must have been an exceptionally intuitive person. She picked up on things other people didn’t notice. As a result, she knew more about other people than she had any cause to know. People looked at her as a kind of oracle and paid her to tell their fortunes, which made her a financial asset for her owners. Paul, understandably, didn’t want this kind of introduction to the public—a positive recommendation from a demon! But Paul could be short-tempered and quick on the trigger. And, in a fit of exasperation, he casts out the spirit. The woman loses her gift for fortune telling, and her owners lose a lot of income.

This is not Paul at his best. It would be another thing if he had acted out of sympathy for her. But he didn’t. He acted out of exasperation. She may have gained something from it—a greater sense of internal unity within herself without the demon; but she lost her particular “gift.” She went from being a valuable slave to just one more young woman serving the household. It’s hardly surprising that her owners stirred up a mob scene, complete with ethnic insults: “these men are Jews! we’re Romans!” And then the magistrates took a hand in matters—one of their major responsibilities was to prevent public disorder— and they had Paul and Silas flogged and thrown into jail. All quite irregular, since there’s been no trial. But this was the quickest way to halt the riot. 

But Paul and Silas submit and go quietly to jail. Now, don’t get an image of a big building with lots of cells. The Romans used their jails only as holding pens. And they were minimal establishments. No separate cells with locked doors. Just some rings in the wall and some stocks for chaining up prisoners. But Paul and Silas, instead of being humiliated or anxious or angry or self-pitying, rediscover their loving relationship with God and spend the night praying and singing 

Then comes the earthquake—a very odd earthquake in that it leaves the building standing but unlocks all the prisoners’ fetters! The lone jailer has no way to prevent the prisoners from running away and is ready to commit suicide. And then Paul and Silas do something very generous for their jailer. He had probably shown them no kindness, but they claim him as a loved neighbor nonetheless. And he, for his part, recognizes that these are not ordinary people. They have spiritual resources he doesn’t have. And they’re giving him an immense gift just by staying put so that they can stand trial in the morning. 

Paul and Silas treated their jailer with love even when he was their enemy. Their loving behavior toward him created a loving response in him and led him and his family to become fellow members of Christ. “Love your neighbor as yourself” merged into “Love one another.” 

And I particularly like the way the story ends—unfortunately not included in our reading today. It shows that Paul, even though he was making the journey toward love and oneness with God, was still the same old Paul we can find in his letters—proud, short-tempered, determined, maybe a bit disrespectful of authority. Learning to love didn’t mean he suddenly became all soft and cuddly. The magistrates of Philippi sent a message to the jailer, telling him to hustle Paul and Silas quietly out of town. (Their only real concern, after all, was to prevent any more rioting.) But Paul and Silas refused and told the local officials that they’d have to do better than that because they’ve just illegally beaten two Roman citizens. Now, Roman citizenship was a real status thing in Paul’s time because Roman citizens were a tiny minority among the vast masses of Roman subjects. And the magistrates knew that the Roman governor of Macedonia would not look on their maltreatment in a friendly light. The magistrates were well and truly frightened and did as they were told. 

Love of neighbor, love of one another didn’t give Paul a personality transplant; and it won’t do that for us, either. But it enabled him to recognize a moment when he had to put the jailer’s life ahead of his own interests. And crossing that boundary created a new community of love. 

And this is the heart of the whole thing, something that comes out so vividly in our reading from the very end of the Revelation of John. John has been talking about the age to come, the true fulfillment of our life as divinely created human beings and as followers and friends of Jesus. John has described it as a great, beautiful and peaceful city— with a river and trees and a great park at its center. And the book’s last words welcome us all in:

The Spirit and the bride say “Come.”

And let everyone who hears say “Come.” 

And let everyone who is thirsty come.

Let anyone who wishes take the water of life as a gift.”

This is what God has longed to share with us all along. And in it, we shall find our own true lives, liberated by our love of one another—this love that we are learning even now, a step at a time.