May 15, 2022 – 5th Sunday of Easter

We are all a work in progress – being stretched to love each other – all of humanity, as God does

Let us pray.  Holy and gracious God, we give you thanks for the gift of your presence in this time and place, and within each one of us. Help us now to open our minds, our hearts, our whole lives, to receive the gift of your living Word for us this day, and may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our strength and our redeemer.  Amen.

If you haven’t noticed this already, you are going to hear a lot about love in today’s church service – in the hymns, in the prayers, in the commitments that people are making in baptism and confirmation. The three persons being baptized, and the one confirmand, will say these words: they will promise to “put their whole trust in God’s grace and love,”; we will pray that they be taught “to love others in the power of the Spirit.”; and we will pray that they are ‘sent into the world in witness to God’s love.” So we really need to grasp the depth and the breadth of what this “love” is all about.

First of all, the kind of love that’s being asked of us does not come naturally to us. If you look at today’s Gospel reading – I want to set the scene for you from the verses just ahead of what we read today. Jesus is gathered in the upper room with his 12 closest disciples. They are going to celebrate an intimate meal together and Jesus knows it will be their last meal before his arrest and crucifixion and death. He washes his disciples’ feet – something very unusual for a rabbi to do – to demonstrate the kind of humble, serving love they are to have for each other. This is the love that he has for them. This is what they need to have for each other. And then he shares his grief and his pain that one of his closest followers is about to betray him. After this, Jesus gives Judas Iscariot a piece of bread. Judas rises and leaves to set up the handing over of Jesus to the authorities. Today’s passage begins with, “When he [Judas] had gone out …”, Jesus then says, “Now the Son of Man has been glorified.” The plan of the arrest, trial, and execution of Jesus has been put in motion with Judas’s departure.

The amazing thing is what Jesus is then able to say as he watches his betrayer leave the scene. He says these words, “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.” It is amazing that Jesus could even be contemplating thoughts and actions of love at such a time as this – where he is about to be unjustly executed! So this I the kind of love. It’s not a warm, “fuzzy”, good-feeling kind of love.

In today’s Collect Prayer – the prayer we prayed together right after the opening hymn – it comes from a quote of John’s Gospel, chapter 14, verse 6 – Jesus Christ is the way, the truth and the life. In other words, his actions and his teaching dictate how we, as baptized disciples of Jesus Christ, are to live our lives, totally – completely. So what is the fundamental characteristic of Jesus’ life? It is total and complete obedient love of God – living out God’s will in its entirety, and all-inclusive love of humanity – no exceptions.

Now we recognize well enough that we need God’s help – we need God’s grace – to be able to love like that. And in all the promises that we make, or reaffirm in our baptism, we say these words – “I will, with God’s help.” So how does this call to love play out in a Christian disciple’s life? Well fortunately, in the first reading today from Acts, we have exactly an example of it in the life of Peter and his encounter with the Gentiles in Caesarea. And once again, I want to set the scene for you a little bit. We only have the last part of this reading. This takes place very early in the Christian movement – probably just a few years after the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. All the disciples are Jewish, and Peter is a kind of ‘senior apostle’ in the group. So while he’s up in the north country, north of Jerusalem, in a city called Joppa, as a result of a vision from God, he agrees to accompany some Gentiles to the nearby town of Caesarea – to go into their house and to accept hospitality - something absolutely forbidden for Jews of that day to do!

So Peter goes to Jerusalem after this has taken place, (which is the religious centre for both Jews and Christians at this point), and he is called upon to explain what happened – a little bit like, in the USA, when they call you before a Senate Subcommittee. It’s that kind of “grilling.” They want to know why he went and ate and lived with Gentiles. Peter’s willingness to be inclusive – to connect with Gentiles – may seem obvious to us today. We live in a time – in a country - that promotes inclusion. But Peter is disciplined about his “loving obedience” to God. So in his vision, when he’s told to disobey God’s ritual law of eating certain animals, he refuses! But when he does, he hears a voice that says, “What God has made clean, you must not call profane.” Those would have been very perplexing words to Peter. A divine vision and a voice telling him to disobey God’s law – at least as he understood it. And then fresh off of that encounter, he senses the Spirit telling him to “go with the Gentiles asking you to come with them, and don’t treat them any differently than your fellow Jews.

So when he arrives at the Gentiles’ place in Caesarea, they make it clear that they want to hear from him. They want him to preach about this ‘gospel’. So Peter starts to preach and the Holy Spirit comes on the Gentiles just as the Spirit did on the Jewish believers. Peter, by this experience, is stretched. Suddenly God has made Peter’s ‘circle of loving obedience’ larger! No longer can he separate God’s humanity into two groups – Jews and Gentiles. All are included!

The call to love one another as Christ loves us is not easy. Sometimes it involves real struggle – real transformation – a willingness on our part to change. Think about some of the challenges of the last century – particularly in our church – like the ordination of women in the church’s ministry. It’s not enough to superficially ‘allow’ this practice to happen. The church’s ‘circle of loving obedience’ had to be expanded – re-drawn. Our understanding of ordained ministry had to be changed. Or look at the place of LGBTQ2 persons and their relationships, and their marriages, in our church. It’s not sufficient to grudgingly acknowledge equal rights under secular law, but rather, as the Spirit told Peter in today’s First Reading, not to make a distinction between them and us - and ‘us’ of course, simply being persons like ourselves. Our ‘circle of loving obedience to God’ is challenged to become bigger. And now it’s being challenged again with transgender and non-binary persons. And again, this is not about political correctness! It’s not just about ‘progressive inclusion’. It is about truly grasping that God – the God whose disciples we are – is calling us into this deeper, broader, more inclusive love. And the Spirit is confirming that call through the grace that we experience as we open ourselves to people who are different from us.

This is what it means to be following the Christ who is “the way, the truth, and the life.” And as we see our need to take down walls, to enlarge our ‘circle of love’, and to redefine ourselves, it is nothing to be ashamed of. We are all a work in progress!

In today’s service, as the final hymn, we will sing the hymn “Love divine, all loves excelling.” We pray in that hymn that Jesus and his unbounded love will enter our hearts, to deliver us with his grace. And then in the final verse we sing these words, “Finish then thy new creation”, through which we are “changed from glory into glory.” That reference isn’t to some magical process that suddenly happens to make us fit for life in heaven. It is a lifelong journey that we begin with Christ at our baptism, and that continues involving continual encounters with the Holy Spirit through our lives that call us to deeper, broader, and more profound love for God, for others, AND for ourselves. This is our journey with Christ – the way, the truth, and the life.  Amen.