Sermon by Garrett - April 24 O tell me the truth about love
It's a verb whose object is anything from pecan pie to afternoon naps to God.
Love.
It makes me think of the poem that I love by WH Auden, a great Episcopalian, no less. "O Tell me the Truth about Love"
Some say that love’s a little boy, and some say he’s a bird, some say he makes the world go round, and some say that’s absurd: but when I asked the man next door who looked as if he knew, his wife was very cross indeed, and said it wouldn’t do.
I fear I may be that man next door this morning who sounds like he knows.
O tell me the truth about love.
Our text opens with the strike of the gavel, “When Judas had gone out...” What we learn from the start is that Jesus’ love is manifest in the face of betrayal and mistrust. It’s a dark scene, one of deep vulnerability. Jesus has just washed his friends’ feet. And little do they know that these freshly cleaned feet are about to be asked to walk the hard road of the cross.
Knowing what is about to transpire, he tells them – little children, you are going to have to lean on one another.
Following the resurrection, the disciples recount this story with a pit in their stomach: they see how they failed to heed his word of love – their feet fled from the road of suffering love, and instead opted for plush grass of comfort and security.
As they talk about loving one another now, they use this word differently: it’s been salted by these memories – they don’t just need to love another, they need to forgive one another for all they ways they went astray and broke trust.
This is the community into which we have entered. If we are going to tell the truth about love, we need this part of the story. Washed as they were in baptism, we need forgiveness for all the ways our feet have opted for the lush grass of half-hearted love.
There is a story told early Christians that lived in the Egyptian desert, which my sermon could merely be a footnote to.
“Two monks were in Cellia. One of them was old man, and asked the younger: “Let us stay together, my brother.” The other said: “I am a sinner, and cannot live with you, Abba.” Be he begged him: “Yes, we can stay together.” The old man had a pure heart, and the younger did not want him to know that he sometimes fell to lust. The monk then said: “Let me go away for a week, and we will talk about it again.” At the end of the week the old man came back, and the younger, to test him said: “I fell into a great temptation this week, abba. When I went to a village on an errand, I lay with a woman.” The older man said, “Are you penitent?” The brother said, “Yes.” The old man said, “I will carry the burden of sin with you.” Then the brother said, “Now I know that we can stay together.” And they stay together ‘til death parted them.
I will carry the burden of sin with you. Another way of talking about Christian community. Maybe we could think about love this way.
“Just as I have loved you,” Jesus says.
How did Jesus love people? I mean there is no mistaking that he loved people. But how did he do it? What did it look like – how did he hold his face when he listened? Did he squint his eyes as he listened intently, or hold his face with a relaxed grin?
There was a priest friend I had in college who I always sensed loved the way Jesus loved. He look at you so intently – and he always had the most affirming look in his eye. He was an old, wise soul; and I know this because he wore spiritual bifocals. Through one lens he saw you as you were, and the other was seeing you in another light, in the light of God. I talked to several people and they all say that he sometimes closed his eyes when you were talking - was he sleeping or was the person in front of him shining like the sun?
I think this is how Jesus looks at us. And its one of the most beautiful truths about love.
And it’s how one early Christian writer talked about loving people “in” God. Love people in God. That’s how Jesus loved. He sees people for the muddled mess that they are in, but it is always as they are in God. He sees them as sinners and saints. He sees them as Pittsburghers, AND as citizens of the New Jerusalem.
And I am not sure if it’s good or bad news that those are not the same thing. But there you have it.
Like my old priest, we need to wear our spiritual bi-focals. And to see people as they truly are: muddled and confused, sure...but always as they are in God, as people who will one-day shine like the sun.
What would happen in our world if we began seeing the world this way? How would that change our relationship with our coworker or our spouse or ourselves?
You see this love that Jesus talks about us roundly non-possessive. All things belong to God, they are not mine to control. I can't fix people.
Does this get at why Jesus is going to ascend in a couple of weeks - it's an act of humility, and rather than staying on earth, he's going to give us his Spirit to learn about vulnerable love.
Tell me the truth about love – Auden said.
Go ahead, tell us, the world replies. That is what we as Christians are trying not just to say, but to enact. Not just with our lips, but in our lives. The truth about love. The truth about our need for community, and the truth of all creation shining in the presence and light of God.
These bare feet washed in baptism and that strayed into the grass of half hearted love, are promised to stand on holy ground.
And this is what comes into focus for the disciples and for us reading this great passage on this side of resurrection:
Every act of love, every time we love our neighbor in God and in hope, we are building the New Jerusalem. Each gesture is a brick, a beam, and each small act of resistance a stoplight in the heavenly city.
And one day, we believe that the great gift will be given. We will see the ways our burdens were shared. We will see the ways we were loved in God. And we will see the fruit of our hope.
We will see the work of our hands, and know firsthand the glorious truth about love.
Christ in you, Christ in me, in the power of his Spirit, bringing all things to life in love.
May it be so.
Amen.Tags: Clergy Voices