Year B
John 15:9-17
The Very Rev. Denise Vaughn
The Love that Breaks Boundaries
You may remember or have heard this popular song from the mid-1960’s, “What the world needs now is love, sweet love. It’s the only thing that there’s just too little of.” It did seem the world needed a good dose of love then in an era of both national and international unrest. I remember this song striking a cord with me and my friends. America at that time was reeling from the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights movement, and opposition to both. It seemed the world needed a good dose of love. Even today we have our own sense of unrest and so it seems that in every generation “What the world needs now is love.” Since the Garden of Eden, there has never been and never will be a time when love is not the world’s primary need.
Yet, what the world needs the most is so readily available and freely given. It’s called God’s love and this agape love is what the Presiding Bishop in his book “Love is the Way” writes about. He says the way of God’s love is essential for addressing the seemingly insurmountable challenges facing the world today: poverty, racism, selfishness, and deep ideological divisions. It’s the only thing that can, and that ever will, make the world a better place. The way of love will show us the right thing to do, every single time. It is moral and spiritual grounding. It’s how we stay decent in indecent times.
Yet, sometimes he says, it’s hard to feel God’s love in our everyday lives, especially when chaos descends. This is when faith and obedience all centered in the life and teaching of Jesus, whose way is this kind of love, is our example.” All three of the texts today give us a glimpse of this way of God’s love or God’s GPS as Michael Curry likes to say. In Acts 10, we get a sense for the breadth of God’s love, as it encompasses Cornelius and his household. This was a paradigm-buster for some of those first Jewish Christians who struggled with the idea of Gentiles being a part of it.
There were clear boundaries between Peter and Cornelius and their respective cultures. The Jerusalem temple of the New Testament era had walls and warnings that kept the Gentiles at a distance. We are all well-acquainted with racial divisions and prejudices. While prejudice has always been a sin, it is not new to our century. But God’s love did not keep Cornelius and his family at a distance capturing a new vision of the kingdom of God. A new day dawns as Gentiles through the Holy Spirit break out in tongues and lift their voices in praise to God.
And thus, we are reminded that the gospel affirms that “God so loved the world,” not just “God so loved Israel.” God’s plan was not just for the Jews, but for all people. For the work of the Holy Spirit is one of empowering and uniting all peoples through Jesus Christ. The witness of this story is that neither Peter nor Cornelius was able to cross the boundaries on their own. Just as we are not able but the outpouring of the Holy Spirit gave them the power and a vision of seeing the world differently to move from their segregated places.
In the text today from 1 John, the epistle, we are reminded of the totality of God’s love, as we see each person, for lack of a better word, of the Trinity involved. Two great truths are affirmed side by side. On the one hand, there is truth that Jesus is uniquely God’s Son. On the other hand, there is the truth that we may be “born of God” and be called “children of God.” This is accomplished by the only Son, sent by the Father, and witnessed by the Spirit. And we know we are “children of God” when we love God and obey God’s commandments. God births children of faith through Jesus and causes them to overcome the world with love.
In a sermon on this lesson about love the great St. Augustine wrote: The discipline of love, dear friends, its vigor, its flowers, its fruit, its beauty, its charm, its nourishment, its drink, its food, its embraces-we can never have too much of these! The awesomeness of this love that St. Augustine was preaching about leads us into the marvelous passage from John’s gospel today. Here is the mind-boggling truth that Jesus’ love for his followers is in line with the Father’s love for him. Here we see that love drawing the disciples in, calling them friends. And here we hear the irresistible invitation to make that love of Christ our home-the place where we abide, our very dwelling place.
In all the lessons today, we are introduced to this theme of a relationship between love and obedience. Jesus says, “You are my friends if you do what I command you.” And John writes, “By this we know that we love the children of God when we love God and obey his commandments. For the love of God is this, that we obey his commandments. Yet, when we hear this theme, these teachings, the risk is that we will misunderstand the message as one of conditional love. Because so much of love is in fact, conditional love, we naturally project that understanding onto God. And so, it may sound to us as though God’s love for us is contingent upon our obedience.
But Jesus and John are not saying that the Lord will love us if we obey or that his love is withdrawn when we do not obey. Rather, it seems that we will obey if we love. And love, as we know, is what is most important to him and what the world needs the most. But we humans have always had a hard time understanding what Jesus means when he talks about love. It’s not just a feeling or being nice to people. It takes a lot of work and practice. When we really think about what Jesus is saying when he tells us that we are to love one another as he loves us. We find that he means we are called to love the same way he loves us. We are called to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. We are called to love others sacrificially just as he laid down his life for us to show us perfect love.
How can we do this? Jesus sets the direction but left to our own devices, we can’t. So the hope we have is found first, in the Holy Spirit who abides with us and gives us the strength and courage and wisdom to help us in all situations of our lives-in the good times and the very hard times. Second, we have the church. A whole bunch of other disciples who are stumbling along with us trying to figure out what it means to love others as Jesus loved us. We can hold each other up when we don’t get it right and celebrate when we do. God is busy using his Easter people to extend the reality and life of the resurrection into the world. This extension is not to add just a few more lucky souls, but to extend Easter into the whole world, to Gentiles like those in the household of Cornelius.
Our part in bringing the kingdom of love to the world is always with the help of the Spirit and in partnership with God. Disciples of Jesus always work as junior partners and doing the right thing is only possible when we stay close to Jesus, so we can produce his fruit which is the work of love. In every generation, it is right to say and to sing that what the world needs most is love. And it is right to affirm and to declare that there is plenty of love available for this needy world. There is no shortage on God’s love and we are invited to spend our lives in the love of Christ; to dwell there by keeping his commands; to love one another by seeing through walls and crossing boundaries, as God loves us.