It’s All about Love May 21, 2006, Year B, 6th Sunday of Easter The Rev. William V. Livingston, Rector Church of the Resurrection, Starkville, Mississippi I’m in a precarious position this morning. With this my first Sunday with you since announcing my pending departure, the chicken side of me wants to totally avoid the subject and your reactions. I think you know me well enough that I can’t and won’t do that. I could avoid our biblical texts altogether and focus on the discernment that lead to my decision. My homiletics training won’t allow me to do that. Having arrived home at 2:00 a.m. and not talked with any of you, I’m at a disadvantage. I do not know how you are handling the news at this time. While I do know that during his teaching here, Bishop Gray began by talking about the ministries Diane and I have accepted and that some of you met with him individually, I do not know if any acted on threats to unload on the Bishop, nor how he addressed this topic. Perhaps today offers no better opportunity to accomplish what sermons are meant to accomplish: to preach through a text and connect it to the events of our lives. You see, there is great irony in today’s Gospel text. First, here we are on the sixth Sunday of Easter and for the third Sunday in a row, we hear from what is known as the Gospel of John Farewell Discourse. Despite being in Easter, we are privy to Jesus’ last conversation with his disciples before his crucifixion.. Those first disciples had planned to follow Jesus to the top of the heap and sit upon thrones in his kingdom. Then, suddenly and unexpectedly, the man on top got down on the bottom and washed the feet of his followers – incredible! It was unlike anything they could have imagined. The man they thought would be king had knelt at their feet! Why? The answer comes in the next shocking event: his prediction of his death. Already confused by his washing their feet, his casual description of his excruciating death is more than they can handle. Fear of abandonment, lack of leadership, loss of the one they had committed everything to was more than they could bear. He uses this last time together to not only calm their fears but to connect all the dots: his ministry, his death, his resurrection, ascension and sending of the Holy Spirit. I’m neither foolish enough nor grandiose enough to compare my pending leave with Jesus’ departure nor your relationship with me with that of the disciples relationship with Jesus. However, I understand a rector and parish choosing ministries that take them down different paths is disruptive. It is natural to be anxious and angry and want to blame someone – whether the Bishop or me – for this discomfort. Therefore, there is a personal irony in hearing Jesus’ farewell address for the last three weeks. Perhaps in our Wednesday discussion of last Sunday’s Gospel and Jesus assurance that he did not leave his disciples orphaned, someone summed it well when she alluded to feeling orphaned as a parish. With just a few weeks before General Convention at which we will weigh issues before the Episcopal Church, it is also ironic we hear this text in which Jesus connects the dots of his life, ministry, death, resurrection and ascension as being about love. Before Jesus ended his earthly ministry and entered into a new relationship with his disciples he wanted them to know the same thing he wants us to know. That something is this: the Maker of all things loves us and wants us. We need to know this and abide in God's love. The overwhelming love that exists between Jesus and his disciples has its origin in the God to whom Jesus is returning. His love overflows in his final act of self-giving on the cross. Jesus emphasizes abide and love. We are to abide – to accept, endure, dwell – in this love. Jesus taught many things, but the one thing he taught more than anything else was about love: a love that binds people together in a very relational and spiritual way, that thinks of the other before the self, that is willing to lay down one’s life for a friend. It is such love that Jesus is talking about. We unfortunately define love as a noun, as a warm fuzzy feeling, but it is a verb. As anyone who has grieved the loss of a loved one or experienced a loved one’s pain knows, it is not about warm fuzzy feelings and does not come without pain and suffering. Real love isn’t blind. It isn’t ignorant of the facts. Real love is love that continues despite the facts. Real love finds the way to move on despite failure and disappointment. It is such love that Jesus showed to others that offers us a glimpse of God’s love. Jesus’ love embraced all the people he met, those who accepted him and those who did not. Because of his intimate union with God, it was divine love that Jesus offered to others, to those who were easy to love and those who were not. His entire life revealed God’s universal, unselfish, merciful love. Jesus’ self-emptying love points back to the self-emptying love of God and forward to the kind of self-emptying love expected of us. To lay down one’s life for another is the greatest love. This love was implied in the foot-washing but is now stated explicitly. Those he has chosen, he appointed, he commissioned to go and do works of love. The same is true today. Jesus chooses us and not the other way around. Yes, we can refuse the love. We can reject the mission, but we have been chosen. We are to love one another in the way he loved us. The ground of the community’s abiding with Jesus is the love that God and Jesus share with each other and that the community is called to enact. It is a profound message, one that we have heard again and again. It may be so familiar that we slip over its obvious meaning without considering some of its most challenging implications. Perhaps it is the radical nature of this love that requires a commandment. Jesus gave us the Church, but the Church reflected in this text is not a building where one goes to get something, but is one of interrelationship, mutuality and indwelling. It is "the blessed company of all faithful people". The mark of the faithful community is how it loves, not who are its members. He was talking about a lifestyle of love for one another because we need one another. Jesus set the example. Remember, He said, “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” His disciples – his friends – did not know it then, but Jesus was doing for them what he wanted them to do. It is also what he wants us to do. Were the church to shape itself according to this text, it would be a community in which decisions about power and governance would be made in the light of the radical egalitarian love of this image. There is only one measure of one’s place in the faith community – to love as Jesus loved – and all, great and small, ordained and lay, young and old, male and female are equally accountable to that one standard. Such a love and such a community is one which uses no language that says, “Because I wasn’t adequately recognized, I won’t serve; because I don’t like what the rector or vestry has done, I refuse to worship; because General Convention passed or did not pass a certain resolution, I’m withholding my financial support; or, my only concern is this parish and not the diocese, not the broader church nor the broader world.” Once we abide in Jesus’ love, the shape of God’s love in us is forever changing throughout all of our lives. Because the world is constantly changing, the shape of God’s love in us never stays the same. The only expectation is that we bear fruit – the fruit of this love. So, each of us, you and I, have been chosen and appointed to bear the fruit of Jesus’ love. As trite as it may sound, that was the purpose of this last week’s mission trip to El Salvador in which you sent 12 folks bearing Christ’s love to give and receive love where God has revealed a need. It is the purpose Diane and I take new ministries on the Gulf Coast where our unique gifts can bear fruit. God has not and will not leave you abandoned. Each of you have been chosen to offer your unique gifts to bear fruit as you seek to call a new rector and as you and your new rector take on the new shape of God’s love. Either we are a chosen people or we are not, either we love as God shows us or we don’t; either our love is bordered by these four walls or is without boundaries; either we really don’t love and our words are merely fluff meant to give us warm fuzzy feelings or we walk the walk of this love. Regardless of whether we stay or go, God’s love in Christ is with us. Grounding our lives, our ministries, our community and the world in this love is how we stay as we go. Shortly after becoming Bishop of Chicago, now Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold preached on the parting words we heard proclaimed in today's Gospel: In the midst of his farewell to his disciples, as recorded in the Gospel of John, Jesus declares, "As I am loved by the Father, so have I loved you." His ability to love is the direct fruit and consequence of his being loved: "As I am loved. so have I loved you." Why is it that our love is so faltering and short-lived, so subject to moods and patterns of natural affinity? Because we have not allowed ourselves to fall into the hands of the living God and to experience in its full force the brutal gentleness of the divine love. The "brutal gentleness" indeed! God's love is sometimes like this, an oxymoron, brutally gentle, bitterly sweet. Will we stand by and watch as Jesus vanishes into the fog? Will we grasp after an explanation for his premature departure? Will we know ourselves as loved, and through every desolation, await the return of God's unchanging presence? Praying that we answer these questions correctly, let us pray again the words of today's Collect: O God, you have prepared for those who love you such good things as surpass our understanding. Pour into our hearts such love for you, that we, loving you in all things and above all things, may obtain your promises, which exceed all that we can desire; through Jesus Christ our Lord. AMEN.