Homilies for the 5th and 6th Sundays in Easter

5

Fifth Sunday in Easter

24 April 2005

St. George’s Episcopal Church

Le Mars, Iowa

John 14.1-14

Don’t Lose Your Way

Jesus is a wanted man. The Jerusalem authorities are seeking him, plotting to kill him,

questioning people about his whereabouts, ordering them to let them know if they hear

where he is. Jesus and his companions are in hiding, having a private dinner together as

Passover nears. He’s under pressure to get his companions to grasp what most matters

before he is taken from them. This morning’s text is near the beginning of the lengthy

discourse that begins at this gathering and leads up to Jesus’ arrest. This long goodbye in

John’s Gospel takes a place of central importance, the place occupied by the Last Supper in

the other Gospels.

Jesus’ companions are worried and afraid; they show the bravado of men unsure they will have the courage they expect will be called for. Blustering Peter has just announced he is ready to lay down his life for Jesus, but Jesus predicts Peter will deny him, not die for him. And they must be frustrated with Jesus. Events are coming to a head, and they don’t like the way Jesus is handling things. Jesus has been welcomed into Jerusalem by cheering crowds, ready to proclaim him king and messiah, but he takes no advantage of this; he ignores the opportunity to ignite rebellion, cast out the infidels, and bring on the kingdom of God. Rather than leading the crowds to God’s victory, he confuses and disappoints them with cryptic talk of his coming death. The support of the people is melting away, and the enemies are closing in. And now Jesus is talking about leaving them. Is he going to usher in the salvation of Israel, or is it all going to end in defeat? Is he at last going to show them God, triumphant over the powers of evil, or was it all a misunderstanding? Is this Jesus in whom they have put their hopes, for whom they have given up so much, now going to fail them?

Philip says, “Lord, show us the Father, and we will be satisfied.” Jesus says, “Have I been with you all this time...and you still do not know me?” Impatient with this messenger who seems unable to deliver a clear message from God, the disciples miss the crucial fact: Jesus himself is the message. Looking ahead to the glorious coming of God, they have not seen that God has been with them all along. They still haven’t stopped trying to fit Jesus into their preconceptions, in which he can be a prophet, even the Messiah, God’s anointed; they cannot wrap their minds around the truth that the Father–God himself–is with them when Jesus is with them. Jesus–blessing the lost and lowly, healing the sick, delivering from demons, castigating the righteous, the rich, the powerful, eating and drinking with outcasts –what they cannot buy is that this is the only God they are going to get; that to see God’s love for human beings in the flesh, part and parcel of this world with all its chaos, confusion and contingency is to see God as he truly is. “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.”

The infinite distance between us and God is annihilated; the route and the destination have become one: the way to God is God himself, God with us, this Jesus who says, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” It is in a lot of ways safer to let Jesus be a great prophet, a profound teacher of morals, a religious innovator, one who points us on the way to God. That Jesus would be so much easier to manage than this one, not one ahead of us on the path to God, but the path itself...and the God to whom it leads. I once met someone who, though quite religious and very involved in the life of the Church, said he couldn’t be a deacon because he couldn’t believe that Jesus was God; the idea of God becoming human was, he said, demeaning to God. Like Philip, he might be satisfied with a Jesus who shows us the Father in some religiously plausible way. But not with the God who reveals his true nature in Jesus who gives himself for us, a God whose glory lies precisely in being humiliated, dirtied, broken, and cast aside because of relentless love for us. Andrew Hodges, commenting on the piously outraged reactions to Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ, that infamous artwork consisting of a cheesy plastic crucifix immersed in a container of urine, said, “If you don’t want to accept Jesus’ humanity fully, then you might as well worship Zeus.” Anything less than the God who was in Christ, the God made flesh, is just a consoling religious fantasy, making no difference in the reality of human life. If we are to be saved at all, it can be only by the dying love of God himself with us. There is no other way but the way of Jesus.

What, though, is it to follow the way, to follow Jesus? The answer is unequivocal–it is the overriding theme as John’s Gospel builds to its conclusion–but it is in many ways also unsatisfying. Jesus makes it plain shortly before the exchange recorded in today’s lesson, and he returns to at length a few chapters further on, in his departing prayer for his disciples (John 17). First he shows the disciples what he means, getting down on his knees and washing their feet–even the feet that will carry Judas out into the night on his errand of betrayal–and then he tells them: “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples; if you have love for one another” (13.34-35).

Sometimes I think it would be nice if Jesus had given us a more reasonable command. As it is, he tells us to do something that at the same time seems both too easy and too hard. We might have hoped for a code to follow, a discipline, a method, some suitably strenuous but, for the committed, possible rule of life to set us apart from non-believers and mark us as becoming worthy of God. This is what religion has always been about: creating an identity that makes it clear who is inside, with God, and who is excluded, unfit for God’s company.

Or we might have hoped for a demanding program designed to make the world a better place, a scheme for marshaling the means to bring about the kingdom of God on earth. The disciples must have heard Jesus’ command to love one another as, well, pretty flimsy in contrast to the bracing calls to smash the Roman occupation and cleanse the nation. It can seem just as insubstantial today, in contrast to urgent demands that we work to protect human dignity, to save civilization from the godless barbarians advancing from–take your choice–the left or the right.

The more you think about it, the less attractive, and the less possible, this business of loving one another appears. Ann Lamott is one of those people who, when reminded we are supposed to forgive and love one another, immediately says, “Do you mean I am supposed to love George Bush!?” Contemplating this alarming idea, she writes, “in heaven, I may have to sit next to him, and in heaven, I know, I will love him. On earth, however, when I consider that he is my brother, and I am to love him (Plan B: Further Thoughts On Faith, p. 144). I’m reminded of the old Woody Allen line that someday the lion shall lie down with the lamb but the lamb isn’t going to get any sleep” . (I know some of you are trying to cope with the idea of George Bush in heaven…) Whoever for us symbolizes all that is unlovable in our fellow human beings, the fact is that it’s hard enough to love those you respect, those you think of as good and sane, let alone those who push your hot buttons. Following Jesus into the way of unconditional love that ignores all the perfectly good reasons why certain persons ought not to be loved is bound to be messy. Most of the time I’m not at all clear on just what it would be to obey Jesus, but I’m pretty sure it would mean putting up with a lot of objectionable ideas and practices, getting ourselves into compromising and uncomfortable situations, being called upon to do things that we’re embarrassingly bad at, getting identified with the people we most want to stay clear of. What’s true here is what Rowan Williams said about sex: “the whole business is...surrounded by so many odd chances and so many opportunities for making a fool of yourself, of being liable to be damaged or made helpless” (“The Body’s Grace”).

It is, of course, a matter of seeing ourselves, and everyone else, no matter what and all appearances to the contrary, as forgiven, fully loved and accepted by God. It is to reject the absurd, and ultimately impossible, position in which I regard myself as forgiven while seeing someone else as excluded from God’s love. It is to be now, in this world, the indiscriminate love of God for human beings without calculation of whether we’re worth it. And, lest this begin to sound too much like a feeble “I’m O.K. you’re O.K.,” we can draw on a more austere theological vocabulary: to follow the way of Jesus, to submit to his law of love, is to be no less than the holy people of a holy God. For God’s holiness consists in his utter faithfulness to people, his commitment to save and heal even in the face of our refusals, our betrayals. And our holiness lies in being dedicated to God’s purposes, to aligning ourselves with his steadfast love, to the making of a common life in which we are to one another as God is to us, our love his love made flesh under the–always–unfavorable conditions of our time and place.

The great Al Pacino, playing Detective Will Dormer in the American neo-noir remake of Insomnia, is the good cop gone bad; along the way he lost faith in the system, and in despair, broke the law to get a criminal convicted. Too late, with his crime compounded by covering up the accidental shooting of his partner, Dormer sees he has gone wrong, that he abandoned what he most cared about. Mortally wounded, he speaks his dying words to Ellie Burr (Hilary Swank), the young detective who reveres him, but who has discovered his misdeeds and is now tempted to cover them up to protect him: “Don’t lose your way!” It is good advice for us, trying to be faithful to Jesus. At any moment any number of things, all worthy in their own right, will seem more pressing, more serious than the one thing that truly matters, the reason we exist: to be the love of God in this world, to be for one another and those around us Jesus, his body enlivened by his Spirit, until his promised return.

You might have noticed in this month’s Anglican Digest a little piece reporting on interesting typographical errors in parish newsletters. One said: “Remember in prayer the many who are sick in our community. Smile at someone who is hard to love. Say ‘Hell’ to someone who does not care much about you.” That missing “o” was, we may assume, inadvertent, but sometimes we do want to give those people hell, those whose theological, or political, or ethical, or aesthetic or whatever views are disastrously wrong, crazy, probably dangerous and obviously not seeing things from God’s point of view. Lots of things matter–some more than others–and it’s hard because we must try our best to speak God’s good news to the issues of the day, and sometimes that means taking a stand on matters that divide us. But Jesus, who is the way we follow, says loving those who are wrong matters more than being right. Let us pray that we stand steadfast in love, faithful to the way of Jesus.

Amen.

Fifth Sunday in Easter

6 May 2007

Church of the Savior

Orange City, Iowa

John 13.31-35

You will look for me…where I am going you cannot come. John 13.33

Looking For Jesus

One Sunday afternoon down by the river, a drunk stumbles into a baptismal service. Unsteadily, he walks out into the water and stands next to the preacher. The minister takes him by the arm and says, "Mister, are you ready to find Jesus?" The drunk says, "Yes, preacher, I sure am." The minister dunks him under the water and pulls him right back up. "Have you found Jesus?" the preacher asks. "No, I didn't!" says the drunk. The preacher then dunks him under for a bit longer, brings him up, and says, “Now, brother, have you found Jesus?" "Noooo, I have not, reverend." The preacher, in disgust, holds the man under, this time for half a minute. Finally, he brings him out of the water, and asks, "My God, man, have you found Jesus yet?" The drunk, gasping for air and wiping his eyes, asks the preacher, "Are you sure this is where he fell in?"

For those of us who grew up as evangelicals, the words, “finding Jesus” are familiar and resonant. To find Jesus is to be saved, to be converted, to repent. If anyone has a hard time finding Jesus, it’s because he’s too comfortable with his sins. Jesus is there to be found, waiting for the sinner, not elusive, not playing hard to get. So what Jesus says here in John’s gospel is disconcerting: “You will look for me, but you won’t find me!” Here Jesus is talking to his disciples, but he reminds them that he said the same thing to “the Jews.” Of course, they’re all Jews; what Jesus tells his Galilean disciples is that he told the Judeans, and by connotation the sophisticated, religiously well-connected people from Jerusalem, that they’d seek, but not find, him. The incident is back in chapter seven, where these words are Jesus’ response to the Pharisees who, realizing that the crowds are beginning to see Jesus as the messiah, demand his arrest. So what a strange thing for Jesus to say to his friends: “You will look for me but you won’t find me…just like those Pharisees who wanted to arrest me and put me to death. Some seek Jesus because they hate him. Some seek Jesus because they love him. Yet Jesus seems to lump them all together. As if, wherever he’s going, it’s somewhere where even that difference doesn’t matter.

I think this strange thing Jesus says connects to the “new commandment” he proceeds to give: “Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” What’s striking about this command is where John records Jesus giving it. Today’s brief text comes right after the scene in which Jesus predicts that one of them is going to betray him and then sends Judas out into the night. And it comes right before the scene where Jesus predicts that Simon Peter will deny him three times before the next morning. So this is who he commands to love one another: people whose salient characteristic right now is not love, but betrayal and denial.

Here, as in many other places, it’s important to pay as much attention to what Jesus does as what he says. For he enacts his own words. When Jesus tells them that one of them will betray him, Peter draws Jesus aside and whispers, “Who is it?” and Jesus identifies his betrayer by dipping a piece of bread in the dish and giving it to Judas. Keep in mind the general significance of eating together for these people. Table fellowship was the sign of mutual acceptance. It was what the decently religious Jew could never imagine doing with Gentiles, and what the fastidious Jew would avoid doing with anyone even a bit careless about the law. Jesus and his disciples were from the start in hot water with the Pharisees because they were so wanton about who they ate with. Those years of Jesus’ public ministry were a moveable feast where the guests were crooks, traitors and whores. And then there’s this particular meal. It’s the last meal Jesus eats with the disciples before his death. It’s the meal we re-enact each Sunday with the consecrated bread and wine. It’s no exaggeration to say that Judas has just received the Eucharistic bread from Jesus himself. (In light of this, I don’t know what people are thinking when they deny a place at Jesus’ table to the unbaptized, or to the badly behaved!)

It’s as though Jesus is saying, “Here, I’ll show you how to deal with those who betray you!” and then does the last thing imaginable: breaks bread with him, shares a meal with him, shares his life with him. Jesus commands them to love one another, and he has just showed them what he means. He creates fellowship where the only reasonable thing is condemnation. He calls to communion where the only reasonable thing is exclusion.

As I mentioned, the text immediately after Jesus gives his new command is the one where he tells Peter he will deny him. I think it testifies to the care with which John has constructed his gospel that in his concluding chapter he ties Peter’s personal encounter with the resurrected Jesus back to this scene. It’s at that breakfast on the beach, after the disciples have been out all night on the lake and finally landed the 153 fish. Once again, Jesus is giving bread to his disciples, sharing a meal with them. When they finish eating, Jesus talks to Peter. There’s no recrimination, just a question, posed three times: does Peter love him? Three times Peter says yes, but we know that Peter can say one thing and do another. “Peter, show me that you love me. Feed my sheep. Do what I’ve done with you. Do what I did with Judas. Do what we did with the scorned and rejected sinners of Israel. Feed them. Eat with them. Don’t hate and condemn and exclude but forgive and include and love. If you want to love me, love them. If you want to find me, you’ll find them.”

If you go looking for Jesus, really looking for him, not for some imaginary Jesus of faded religious piety, but Jesus the friend of sinners, Jesus the crucified criminal, you won’t find him, you’ll find someone else. He’s gone away and left someone in his place for you to find. Often, not someone you especially want to find. Not someone who can give you what you think you need, but someone who needs something from you. Someone not attractive or loveable or simpatico, not someone you really want to forgive and include and share a meal—or a life—with. You’ll find the likes of Judas the betrayer and Peter the denier and your world’s equivalent of tax collectors, harlots and sinners, and worse of all, a whole lot of latter-day Pharisees who smugly will assure you they’ve found Jesus. Like them, like Johnny Cash, I’d prefer to have my own personal Jesus, but if I want to be his disciple, I have to obey this one impossible command to love these people.

A few days after the scene in today’s text, the disciples, ashamed and confused, are called out of hiding by Mary Magdalene and the other women, and run to Jesus’ tomb. It is empty. The Lord is risen! This Easter season we celebrate Jesus’ resurrection, and that is our great joy. As Lynn read at the Vigil from Chrysostom’s glorious Easter sermon: Rejoice today for the Table is richly laden! Feast royally on it, the calf is a fatted one. Let no one go away hungry. Partake, all, of the cup of faith. Enjoy all the riches of His goodness!

But it’s better not to move on to the triumph too quickly. It’s a good idea to stop for a moment in the silent emptiness of that tomb, to listen there for his command. The resurrected Jesus is present for us precisely in his absence. An empty place we fill for one another. We might well prefer a palpable presence, a world put to rights, to a hope and a promise and a command to love as recklessly as we have been loved. For it’s a dangerous command. A few Easters back, the Archbishop, preaching in Canterbury Cathedral, reminded us:

Jesus rises from the dead so as to find not only his home in heaven but his home in us. He rises so that we may rise out of the prisons of guilt, anxiety, self-obsession or apathy that so constantly close around us. But for this to happen…we have to go on, day after day, getting used to parts of us dying, just as Jesus died: we have to get used to the beloved habits of self-serving and self-protecting being brought into the light that shines from Jesus' face and withering away in that brightness. (11 April 2004)

Can we believe it? Most of us most of the time have to say what Denise Levertov says: “I doubt and interrupt my doubt with belief” (“Opening Words”). It can be hard to believe that that tomb was empty, that Jesus lives. But that’s the easier part. What’s harder is believing that Jesus really means it, that we really do have to love one another, and that it’s the only way to know him. That we really do have to betray our loyalty to being right and good and pure and sit at the table with the wicked and unwashed. We’d rather have our questions answered than to be questioned: who are we willing to share our bread with, who are we willing to love? Do we want to find Jesus the one way he can be found? Are we ready to follow him, walking out of the empty tomb into the light? I conclude with words from another Welshman, the poet priest R. S. Thomas:

There have been times

when, after long on my knees

in a cold chancel, a stone has rolled

from my mind, and I have looked

in and seen the old questions lie

folded and in place, like the piled

grave clothes of love’s risen body.

(“The Answer”)

Amen.

Sixth Sunday in Easter

28 May 2000

St. George’s Episcopal Church

Le Mars, Iowa

The Rev. Karen Wacome, Celebrant

Dr. Donald Wacome, Lay Preacher

Acts 11.19-30

Psalm 33.1-8, 18-22

1 John 4.7-21

John 15.9-17

BLESSED ARE THE CHEESEMAKERS

This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. John 15.12

One of the most well known scenes of the movie The Life of Brian occurs on the fringes of a multitude to which Jesus is speaking, delivering the Beatitudes. The people there can’t quite make out what he’s saying. One of them exclaims “Blessed are the chessemakers?!” He’s surprised and puzzled at what he has misheard, but a fellow standing nearby pompously starts explaining what Jesus means, pointing out that of course Jesus doesn’t mean only cheesemakers, but all producers of dairy products. This reminds us that we don’t always really hear what Jesus is telling us, and that we can replace the thing he’s saying that’s hard to hear with something quite different that seems to make sense to us even though in fact it’s completely silly.

The text of today’s gospel is a fragment of the very long discourse of Jesus that occurs at the Last Supper. The scene begins with Jesus washing the disciples’ feet and it ends, five chapters later, with Jesus and the disciples setting out for the place where Jesus will be arrested. Jesus knows his death is drawing near, and he speaks with urgency, repeating a few basic things many times, as though he’s anxious to make them stick in the minds of his disciples who, even at this late date, are in some ways still obtuse and uncomprehending. One of the things he wants to leave with them is an understanding of what he wants them to do. He commands them to love one another.

Jesus’ command seems to make sense, but in reality it is hard to hear and hard to take seriously. Love is the best of things; everyone wants everyone to love everyone. But we know that in reality it’s too much to ask. In the naive sixties the Beatles sang “All you need is love” but then we grew up and spent the next three decades figuring out that love is easier said than done and that we’d better pay attention to houses and careers, families and retirement funds. Most of us have more than enough on our plate trying to love one or two or a few of the people closest to us, and just being decent to everybody else.

I hope I’m not unique in not finding my fellow human beings altogether lovable. Most of us are, when it comes down to it, fairly annoying. As my father-in-law has often succinctly put it: People are no good! Telling us that we ought to love one another sounds unrealistic and sentimental. Sure, we ought to be civil to one another, but love’s a lot to ask for. Most of the time it’s not humanly possible.

People with no connection to Christianity sometimes have a better grasp than we do of the audaciousness of Jesus and the things he said. There’s a remarkably cynical and nihilistic cartoon series, a product of generation X or Y or whatever letter we’re up to now called The Parking Lot is Full. One of its memorable installments features a crazed and goofy looking guy, grinning wildly and saying “I love everyone.” The caption reads:

ALDS (Acquired Love Disorder Syndrome) proved to be the most horrific disease ever to strike mankind. I mean, it’s one thing to talk about loving thy neighbor, but can you imagine actually feeling that way? Just look at the guy!

From this world’s point of view the command to love might be a fine sentiment, but to take it seriously would be crazy.

Jesus was speaking specifically about the community of faith, of what became his Church, and someone might be tempted to think that within the Church, where everyone is good and lovable, it’s reasonable to expect us to love each other. But we all know how far that is from the truth. When it comes to religion, matters that seem of ultimate significance are at stake, the convictions and commitments in terms of which we define ourselves, the activities that get us hooked up with God. Here often there is the least love lost, and we are readiest to relate to one another in terms of judgment and condemnation. Consider those ‘hot button’ issues that divide and threaten to break the Church, things like the ordination of gays. I confess that I find it really difficult not to regard those who disagree with me on this issue as betraying the Gospel, as taking a stand obviously at odds with everything the Church is supposed to be about. At the same time I know that those on the other side of the issue feel the same way about me. What can it mean to follow Jesus’ command in this sort of situation? Specific issues come and go, but one way or another the Church of Jesus has almost always found itself in this sort of situation. The command Jesus repeatedly gave as his humiliation and death approached is contrary to our inclinations and beyond our powers.

At the Last Supper Jesus gives one clear indication what it means to love one another: No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. There can be no doubt about whose death Jesus refers to here, though of course there have been times when his disciples have embodied his love at this extreme. Recall, a few years ago, in Rwanda, during the tribal genocide, when 13,000 Christians - Anglicans, Roman Catholics, Pentecostals, Baptists, and so on - were ordered to separate themselves according to their tribes, into the Hutus and the Tutsis, so some among them could be taken out and murdered. As a body, they refused to do so, proclaiming “We are one in Christ!” So they were all machine gunned and died together.

Those African Christians disagreed among themselves on all kinds of things, some of them perhaps of real importance. But they put aside what they valued for the sake of one another, for the sake of Jesus. There’s more to loving one another than laying down one’s life for someone else, in everyday life it’s putting aside what we think is important for the sake of someone else; it’s counting things we hold dear, things we value greatly, as of less importance than the other person. This offends against human nature. It’s against our better judgment. We long to be right, to be in the right, and to judge and condemn the other guy who is in the wrong. We want to stand up for what’s right, to stick to our principles. Contrast St. Paul, who said “For the sake of the gospel I will be all things to all men” (1 Cor. 9.22). No man of principle there. How different he sounds from most of us, and especially from religious people. What mattered supremely to him was the love of God embodied in Jesus and making that love known to other people. The crucial thing is that everything else must ultimately be put aside, not because it’s necessarily unimportant, but because it’s not the good news of God’s love for the world made flesh in Jesus.

There were many things Jesus might have tried to impress upon his disciples at the Last Supper, many commands he might have given them. But this was the one thing he needed to say: Love one another as I have loved you.

Still, what sort of a command is it to love one another? We can obey commands about what to do and what not to do, but isn’t the whole idea of love that it is given, not asked for, free and spontaneous, not coerced or obligatory? The Lutheran theologian Gerhard Forde points out:

The law says, “Thou shalt love!” Yet it cannot bring about what it demands. If we go up to someone on the street, grab them by the lapels and say, “Look here, you’re supposed to love me!” the person may grudgingly admit that we are right, but it won’t work. The result will likely be just the opposite from what our “law” demands. (On Being A Theologian of the Cross, p. 107)

Common sense says you might command people to do what’s right, to behave nicely toward one another, but that it’s not in our power to love on demand.

One thing is obvious: if we can obey this command, it will only be because God somehow makes possible what is not possible for us. In the first epistle of John (4.19) we read that we are able to love because the God who was in Christ first loved us. God’s love was first embodied in Jesus, who gave himself for us. The meaning of the Cross of Christ is that God put aside judgment and condemnation; he rejected once and for all the principles of fairness and justice; he disarmed the power of the law not because these things were of no value, but because of his love for us. That love is the power that declares us his beloved people in Christ, his sons and daughters, his friends. Whatever we do that pleases God, including our loving God and one another, can only be a grateful response to his unstinting love.

Margery Williams’ story, The Velveteen Rabbit, is one of the great works of theology. As you probably recall, it’s about how a toy, stuffed rabbit is made into a real rabbit by the power of his owner’s love. This is explained to him by another inhabitant of the nursery, the Skin Horse:

“What is REAL ?” asked the rabbit one day... “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?”

“Real isn’t how you are made, said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with but REALLY loves you, then you become real.”

“Does it hurt?” asked the rabbit.

“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.

“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up, or bit by bit?”

“It doesn’t happen all at once, said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”

“I suppose you are REAL, said the Rabbit. And then he wished he had not said it, for he thought the Skin Horse might be sensitive.

“The Boy’s Uncle made me REAL,” he said. “That was many years ago; but once you are REAL you can’t become unreal again; it lasts for always.”

The Velveteen Rabbit longed to be a real, flesh and blood rabbit. Yet there was not a thing he could do about it. It was only the boy’s love that had the power to make him real. All he could do was trust the boy and gratefully love him back, in whatever limited and imperfect way he could, not yet being a real rabbit. It’s the same with us. For the sake of Jesus crucified, resurrected and ascended God refuses to relate to us in terms of judgment and condemnation. So far as human wisdom goes, religiously speaking this makes about as much sense as “blessed are the cheesemakers.” What comes naturally is the lack of love, the readiness to sacrifice others so we can regard ourselves as in the right. No one truly acknowledges that God accepts us no strings attached while failing to accept the fellow human being no strings attached. So long as we relate to one another in terms of judgment and condemnation we’re denying the reality of God’s totally unconditional love. It’s only as we grow into knowing ourselves -- and all others -- as fully accepted by God for the sake of Jesus that we begin to be reshaped by God’s love.

Our faith in Jesus Christ is confidence in the power of self-giving love despite all the appearances to the contrary. Not because we’re sentimental or believe in the power of positive thinking; not because universal love would be a great idea if only everyone would live by it, but because God, the sovereign Creator and Ruler of the universe, showed us who he is in the self-sacrificing life and death of Jesus. God’s purpose is to remake us into a people that love one another as he loves us, and we can be sure that whatever the current paltry state of affairs with respect to our love for one another, God is at work to change us. Our lives will be drawn into to the love and joy that is the everlasting life of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.

Amen.

Sixth Sunday in Easter

25 May 2003

St. George’s Episcopal Church

Le Mars, Iowa

John 15.9-17

The Forgiven

Today’s texts leave no doubt about what God wants us to do: love one another. In Jesus God reveals his love for us and in light of that the only thing that makes sense is for us to reflect that love here and now. I have to admit though that to me it can sound pretty vapid. I read these passages a few times and in my head it’s 1967 and I’m hearing the Beatles: All you need is love, love is all you need. Lennon and McCartney wrote a lot of great songs; that wasn’t one of them. Sweet but silly sentiment; embarrassingly ineffectual against the world’s real evils. The napalm still fell in Vietnam, the Soviet tanks rolled into Prague, the hopeful sixties unwound into the disillusioned seventies, hate, greed and indifference went on – and go on – unabated.

Of course I’m giving the Johannine writers a raw deal if I dismiss this command to love

as an insipid invitation to good feeling that will effortlessly and painlessly make things right. But what is it we’re being told to do here in the real world? What does it mean to love one another as God first loved us? We need something specific, something concrete. A place to start is forgiveness.

There are different ways to answer the question: where does this new community of love we’re a part of start: The empty tomb? The Last Supper? The day of Pentecost? One answer is that it’s in that locked room where Jesus suddenly appears among those fearful people, those disciples who consistently misunderstood him, frustrated him, and in the end betrayed and deserted him. There he is, as William Countryman describes it: “sharing bread with a group of bewildered disciples…calling them by name, welcoming them back to his love even after they have abandoned him, holding a family reunion where all are welcome” (Forgiven and Forgiving, p. 65). Jesus forgives, not just the sins of the world, but the very specific harms and hurts inflicted by those closest to him. Doing so, he creates the fellowship of the forgiven, the company of those who are receiving the good news that God forgives them. That’s how God first loves us, so if we are to love as he loves us, our task is to be forgivers, the forgiven forgivers. As we’ll pray later this morning: forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. In a world where the essence of what’s right and good is justice for all, rewards for the deserving, fair punishment for the wicked, we throw our lot with the promise of forgiveness for all.

Here too there’s the worry that we’re being directed toward something vacuous. Is forgiveness just another word for letting people get away with things? Is it, as Countryman asks, nothing more than denial, “making nice,” “putting up with the unsupportable while making light of its real impact?” (p. 7). Often we “forgive” by acting as though there was never anything to forgive. Forgiveness isn’t telling lies about the past; its orientation is not toward the past but the future. As the word suggests, it is to give something up front, to give on speculation, to act not in response to someone giving me something – apologies, remorse, restitution – but out of hope that somehow there is a shared future with him. To forgive is to act on the hope of a future with that person, despite the wrong he has done, despite the chance that he wants to keep doing it, despite what might well be my current heartfelt desire to destroy him, at least symbolically by way of imposing pain and humiliation on him. Jesus told us to love our enemies. It would have been easier if he had told us not to have any enemies, and just to get along nicely with everyone. But to love your enemies is to live in the present with them while acting on the basis of a hoped for – even if to all appearances impossible – future in which they will be your friends. My natural inclination is to want to see my enemies vaporized, and to anticipate a world made better by their absence. Yet the love that abides in God never gives up on anyone, no matter what, as a part of the human family, as someone like you and me already completely -- and not yet fully -- redeemed. To forgive is, finally, to trust in God’s forgiveness, and with it God’s healing and refashioning of each of us.

We won’t first think of it in there terms, but I think this is what we see in today’s reading from the Acts of the Apostles. Those Jewish Christians were forced to face the fact that God was determined to save not only them, but those hordes of lawless and unwashed gentiles. It would be hard to overestimate how hard it must have been for those Jewish believers to welcome gentiles into the kingdom of the God. So much of what deeply mattered to them, so much of their identity as God’s people, as faithful keepers of the Law, so much even of what Jesus as the messiah of beleaguered Israel must have meant to them, and so much of themselves…they gave it up to practice the love of Christ. There’s the forgiving we do of others for not being like us, for not caring much about what we care about, for not getting right what really should be gotten right. Unlike many Christians today, we Episcopalians do a good job of forgiving those who believe differently than us. I figure we have a way to go when it comes to forgiving those guilty of other things, maybe incivility, intolerance, ignorance and crimes against good taste.

The love we are commanded to have is the love of God in Christ, a forgiving love that saves a world by giving itself. The Church of Jesus has one identifying mark: it shares in this love. One way we do that is by seeing ourselves as forgiven by God and offering that same forgiveness to the rest of the world.

N. T. Wright, Canon of Westminster, writes that “on the cross, the true God has defeated the false gods,” (“Coming Home to St. Paul?” Scottish Journal of Theology 55 (2002): 400), “….standing on its head this symbol of imperial arrogance and making it instead the symbol of all-powerful divine love” (404). “This victory must now be worked out in Christian lives and Christian communities” (400). Amen to that. But we need to confess the other side too: that cross is also a sign of failure and defeat. It represents the utter failure of humanity to recognize God when he comes to us in the flesh. And it represents God’s failure to evoke from humankind the response he wanted (Countryman, 107). From that cross of failure and uncertainty the condemned man pleads on behalf of his tormentors: “Father, forgive them…” Then he dies. No law of this world determines that a love that gives itself, that forgives its enemies, has the slightest power to turn back evil or to defeat death. Nothing in this world guarantees that self-sacrificing, forgiving, suffering love makes the slightest difference. We know that the refusal to forgive sickens us and perpetuates hatred – think of that Clint Eastwood masterpiece, The Unforgiven. But that doesn’t mean that forgiveness and the love that gives itself reliably makes things better. Maybe nothing does that. Sometimes it looks that way.

Dominique Lapierre’s The City of Joy takes its name from one of Calcutta’s thousands of slum neighborhoods. Anand Nagar is a shantytown of 70,000 residents crammed into a space about the size of three football fields. That comes out to the densest population density on the planet: 200,000 human beings per square mile. Lapierre’s wonderful, appalling book records the stories of some of those who endured its unimaginable poverty, filth, disease, misery and exploitation. Selima is a young Muslim woman. Her husband is jobless and she spends her days desperately seeking scraps of food to feed her three children. They do not eat every day. Her one joy and hope is the as yet unborn fourth child she carries within her; she is seven months pregnant. One day she is approached on the street and propositioned: 2000 rupees – about two hundred US dollars, a fortune – for the fetus. Calcutta sustains a clandestine trade in late-term fetuses destined for sale in the US or Europe in either scientific research or the manufacture of “rejuvenation” products. Selima is first horrified at the offer, but after a night of internal struggle she decides to make the sacrifice to save her family. She appears at the small, barely equipped, clinic where the procedure is scheduled to take place; unfortunately, the regular surgeons are not there; they’ve gone off to play cards or dice in celebration of a religious festival. But the traffickers recruit a surgeon of sorts; he hurriedly extracts the fetus but something goes badly wrong after he cuts the umbilical cord. Blood copiously flows out of Selima; the surgeon tries to staunch it but fails; within minutes it covers the floor. The traffickers hastily put the fetus in a jar and leave for the airport. Selima dies. The surgeon quickly takes his leave, leaving her alone with the owner of the so-called clinic. He is glad he did not leave for the card game. There is unexpected profit tonight. He knows the address of those who will come to buy her lifeless body so they can recover the skeleton for export. Selima’s family never knows why she disappeared. They never know the great – but futile – sacrifice she made. Thus, the impotence of love in a world of greed and death.

As those who live by faith in the crucified and resurrected Jesus we do not claim some magical power, some secret principle that when properly applied makes everything turn out right. There’s no cosmic bookkeeping that ensures the defeat of evil by self-sacrificial love, no double your money back guarantee that the forgiveness we give now builds a grace filled future rather than exacerbating evil and encouraging wrongdoers. We have only faith and hope that out of death and defeat God will bring new life.

Anne Lamott in her novel Blue Shoe relates that “…after World War II ended in Europe, lost children wandered around until they were gathered in camps run by the Allies. There they were fed and cared for while relatives were located or new families found who could take them in. In one camp it was discovered that none of the children was sleeping well. Their nerves were shot, the memories fresh and haunting. Then a social worker determined that if the children were each given a piece of bread to hold at night, they could fall asleep. This was not bread to eat – there was plenty of that when the children were hungry. No, this piece of bread was just to hold on to, to reassure the children through the night that they were safe now, that there would be bread to eat in the morning.” (p. 38)

That’s a way to think of the bits of eucharistic bread Karen will soon be putting in our hands: we hold them in hope, trusting in, and trying to share in, the fantastic forgiveness and abiding love of God and the future he’s creating.

Amen.