Sermon

St. Philip's Episcopal Church, Durham, NC

5/21/06 - 6 Easter

The Rev. Scott A. Benhase

"This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you."   John 15

Both last Sunday and this Sunday we have been confronted in the Gospel lessons with the love commandments from Jesus. Jesus connects our love for God with our obedience to him. He says that if we love God, then we will keep his commandments. In other words, our love for God is made manifest in our obedience as Jesus' disciples. In fact, Jesus says that the only way you and I can prove the truth of the Gospel to the world is by obeying his command to love God and to love one another. Now that's a powerful statement. Don't our great and glorious church buildings prove the truth of the Gospel? What about our many and varied church programs, don't they confirm the truth of the Gospel? What about our high-minded positions on moral issues, don't they show everyone else that the Gospel is true? No, Jesus says. It's not our buildings, not our programs, not our moral positions. It's our obedience to God made manifest in our love for God and for one another.

So, Jesus is clear: our love for God and one another is the only currency we have for claiming the truth of the Gospel. But how can we know if we are obedient to this command to love God and one another? Love is hard to see in the abstract. You and I can express our undying love for God and one another, but no one would have any way of knowing the truth of that love if our expression remained mere words. Our Epistle lesson addresses this. St. John, writing to the early church, recognized how easy it is for humans to say we love God. St. John tells us that it's only in our tangible love for one another that we can truly love God. He writes: "for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen." It is not our lofty pronouncements about our love for God that makes us obedient to God. Rather, it is in regular practice of love for one another that we are obedient to Jesus. Such love is a practice we engage in as a daily discipline. It can never be limited to an idea or a thought. To drive home this point, St. John even calls us "liars" if we say we love God, but then do not practice love for one another. The Bible then tells us that we can't truly love God with our buildings, with our programs, or with our moral positions. And, we can't even love God with our words. We can only love God by practicing love for one another.

So, how are you and I doing in that department? My guess is that each of us would have a long and complicated answer that question. But why is it so complicated? Shouldn't it be clear and straightforward? We either behave in loving ways with one another or we don't. I think one reason it gets so complicated is that we mistakenly base our loving behavior on our feelings. And since we can't control how we feel, sometimes we'll behave lovingly and sometimes we won't, depending on how we're feeling. We allow our motivation to love to be based on how we feel about another person. If that person happens to be kind toward us or if their life story moves our hearts in some way, then we find it easy to love them. But what about the person who shows contempt for us? Or, what if their life story isn't very sympathetic? Loving then becomes very hard. So, we sometimes fail to love others because we allow our love for them to be primarily motivated by our feelings toward them.

That's not the way of Jesus. Jesus is able to love us, not based on his feelings toward us, but based on his obedience to God. Picture for a moment the events of Good Friday. If Jesus allowed his love to be motivated by his feelings, then how could he love the soldiers who spat upon him and mocked him? How could he love the crowds who cried out for his crucifixion? How could he love Peter who denied him? The answer is pretty simple: he could not. But his love for humanity was located somewhere beyond his feelings. It was located in his steadfast obedience to God. And that needs to be the locus of our love for one another.

This is something I know we all struggle with. I know I do. I believe I am getting better at it, but I also know I still have a long way to go. Sometimes I still get trapped by my feelings. I still allow my feelings to dictate whether or not I practice loving behavior with another person.

Some of the old disciplines do not work for me. I was told long ago that when I was faced with a person who was hard to love, then I should just picture them as Jesus and then I could love the "Jesus" in them. Trouble is, that never worked for me. It did not seem honest. Often times, as hard as tried, I couldn't see any Jesus in them. He may have been bound and gagged deep down inside the person, but I couldn't find him anywhere. That made it nearly impossible to conjure up loving feelings toward the other person. The more they didn't act like Jesus, the harder it was for me to muster up loving feelings toward them. So, a war would be waged in my head. One part of me would say: "Remember, you're talking to Jesus," while the other part of me would say, "no, you're not, he just called you a jerk." Back and forth this would go and it was exhausting.

My problem was two-fold: One was my beginning assumption that I could somehow see Jesus in the other person. And, the other part of the problem was that my behavior was always based on me and my feelings. It was all about how I could play mind games with myself so that I could to try to love the other person. If you try to do similar things, then I think we all need to stop such self-deception. It is dishonest not to mention exhausting. The truth is there are always going to be people in our lives, both in and outside the Church that we are not going to like. We simply will not feel good about them. We won't like to be around them. No amount of trying to feel differently will change that. We can't clinch our fists, hold our breath, and stomp our feet and force ourselves to feel differently.

What we can do is this: We can learn to separate our call to love others from our feelings about them. Our feelings will always toss us to and fro on the winds of our human frailty. We can discipline ourselves to practice love toward people we do not feel like loving. We can insist that, regardless of how we feel, we will still love them in the way we behave toward them. Now I know this approach to loving others goes counter to our cultural conditioning. In our culture feelings reign supreme. Feelings are the prime cultural motivator for how we judge our relationship to another person whether that person is a presidential candidate or our next-door neighbor.

But the Gospel of love is another story. To put it frankly, Jesus doesn't care whether or not you and I have warm and fuzzy feelings for another person. Jesus' concern is that his disciples, that you and I, love others, because Jesus' command to love is based, not on human feelings, but on the divine act of his cross and resurrection. In the Gospel, love and the cross are synonymous. So, our expectations about love and our motivation to love will always be conditioned by how we define it and where we locate our motivation to love. If love is always based on our feelings, then we will act according to our feelings. But if love is based on what God did for us in the cross of Jesus, then our feelings must take a back seat. In today's Epistle, St. John gives us our clear contextual motivation to love. John writes: "we love because Jesus first loved us." So, as Christians, you and I would have no idea of what love could possibly mean apart from the love poured out and displayed for us on the cross of Jesus. Jesus and his cross define love for you and me.

Following Jesus then can never by a vague spiritual quest. Nor can it be joining a new moral program. That would base following Jesus purely on human motivations and aspirations. No, our discipleship in Jesus is located in our desire to be obedient to his command to love as he has loved us. And this is the best news we could possibly receive. As disciples, we do not have to concern ourselves with whether someone is worthy of our love, or whether they deserve our love, or even if they need our love. We don't even need to check to see if they have the right moral, social, or political qualifications for us to love them. All we need to do is love them and trust that God will use our love to expand the Kingdom on earth as it already is in heaven. It's really that simple.

You know, this parish may never be known for great preaching or teaching. We may never be known for an outstanding music program. We may never be known for our vibrant children's ministries. And, we may never be known for our dynamic outreach ministries. Although, I think we are faithful in all those aspects of our life together, they nevertheless require particular skills and resources. But love does not require a particular level of skill like preaching and teaching. Love does not require we have a critical mass of human and financial resources to do significant outreach. Love simply requires that we choose to love others, come what may, cost what it will.

Is there any reason then why this parish should not be known as a church where people really love one another?  If we want to attend ourselves to discipleship in Jesus, then that is our calling. For it is only in such discipleship that we can make incarnate for others the truth of the Gospel. AMEN.

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