When my childhood pastor’s daughter was about 8, she told her mom she wasn’t going up for the children’s sermon anymore. “The answers are always the same,” she said, rolling her eyes. “God, Jesus, Love. It’s not even hard.” She wasn’t wrong. Sometimes it does feel like the answers in church are always the same, no matter what the question is: God, Jesus, Love. If you have been working through the readings from the Gospel of John in Eastertide, you have already preached plenty of love. Perhaps you find yourself reluctant or even resistant to preaching love again. Across the pages of Scripture, though, God makes it clear that love isn’t optional in the Christian life. Jesus makes it a command — the command, even: “Love one another as I have loved you,” he tells us in John 13:34, and there’s no wriggling out of this one, no tricky Greek to trot out or contextual hoops to jump through. Jesus says what he says: obedience to Christ means loving like he loved. It would have been nice if Jesus had commanded us to act like we loved each other. Maybe we could fake our way through a discipleship like that. But Jesus demands more. “I am giving you these commandments,” he says, “so that you may love one another.” Jesus calls us to love wholeheartedly, generously, truthfully — and that’s hard. That costs us something because love doesn’t solve everything. It isn’t some magical potion that makes our days easy and our relationships a breeze. Love can be helpless. Love can hurt. Love takes it out of us, and it doesn’t always – always – give back. We’ve all loved people who were difficult to love, who we pour more into than we get back from. We’ve all been in situations that love couldn’t cure — you can’t personally love someone out of cancer, depression or addiction. Sometimes it can seem like we, individually or as a church, have been loving and loving and loving and loving and not really getting anywhere. It’s painful, and it’s exhausting. Author Debie Thomas writes about her own struggle with Christ’s “impossible” commandment in Journey with Jesus. After noting the limits on her own ability to love, she asks, [W]hat can I do? Where must I begin? Jesus offers a single, straightforward answer: “Abide in my love.” Following on the heels of last week’s Gospel, Jesus extends the metaphor of the vine and branches and calls us once again to abide. To rest, to cling, to make ourselves at home. Not simply in him, but in his love. My problem is that I often treat Jesus as a role model, and then despair when I can’t live up to his high standards. But abiding in something is not the same as emulating it. In the vine-and-branches metaphor, Jesus’s love is not our example; it’s our source. ... Read the rest of the commentary on the website.
Thank you to this week's writer Carol Holbrook Prickett. | 
No comments:
Post a Comment