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Mountain Spirit

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Easter 5C
May 2, 2010
Acts 11: 1-18* Psalm 148* Revelation 21: 1-6* John 13: 31-35
David M. McNair

I completely enjoyed being with the youth in the confirmation class, which we wrapped up last Sunday. As most of you know, I have worked with young people since the 80’s were in style the first time around, and — I want you to know — we’ve got a stellar group of teenagers in our church. They are bright, curious, honest, interesting, and fun to be with. Fourteen of them are planning to be confirmed on May 23, which is the Day of Pentecost. It will be a great day to celebrate the Holy Spirit coming upon us with new life and fire. I approached the class by telling them that I hoped they would see confirmation as a chance to Confirm Not Conform. Confirmation is about affirming our own beliefs — not conforming to what others tell us we should believe. I told them that no question was out of bounds and that questioning is vital to faith. During the course of the class they asked good and interesting questions like: Is there a hell? Is Jesus the only way to God? What does God look like? Why do priests wear funny collars? One youth said she was a bit hesitant to be confirmed because she felt like confirmation was so permanent – she wanted to know what would happen if she decided later in her life that she wanted to follow another religion. Among other things, I said that in confirmation we confirm the promises made at our baptism. In baptism we are signed and sealed as God’s own forever — that is permanent.  Yet, faith is a life-long journey and an unfolding which is always changing.

Confirmation and all the sacraments are like doors we walk through.  They are mysterious gifts/signs we partake of now which continue to unfold with meaning throughout our lives. All the sacraments take on deeper significance and meaning as we look back on them, remember them, and reflect on them later in our lives.

Today, four weeks after the Day of Resurrection, the readings assigned by the lectionary take us back to the events of Holy Week. The Gospel text returns us to that upper room where Jesus shared his last meal with his disciples. Judas had just left the room to do what he was going to do. The betrayal and awful events of Jesus’ last days on earth had been set in motion. The remaining disciples know something terrible and frightening is about to happen, but they don’t yet understand the meaning of the events of the next few days. Only later, after the resurrection, after Jesus’ appearances to them would the meaning of Jesus’ words that final night begin to become clear and take shape in their lives.
Jesus was saying good-bye to his friends, and he needed to leave them with something. So he told them what it meant to belong to him, and how they would continue to belong to him. Instead of addressing the disciples as students, he addresses them with an intimacy that conveys the poignancy of this moment. “Little children,” he says to these grown men, “listen to me now. I am with you only a little longer. You will look for me… [but] where I am going you cannot come.” I’m asking you to remember me by giving you “a new commandment: love one another, just as I have loved you. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”

The disciples must have had lots of questions they wanted to ask Jesus about these strange words. Questions like: Where are you going? And why can’t we come too? What do you mean, you have been glorified? And finally, what is so new about the commandment you are giving us? There’s nothing new about that commandment. Practically the same words are right there in Leviticus chapter 19: “you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” This is Torah 101 and even we passed that class.

As far as the disciples knew, there had always been a love commandment.  Only later, looking back on the events of that night and the next day, when their beloved friend and teacher hung dying on the cross, did it begin to make sense:  Love one another just as I have loved you.

Imagine the memories and feelings that must have flooded them as he said these words: “just as I have loved you.” He might have asked them, “How have I loved you?”  I called you — taught you — and blessed you. I invited you to be part of everything I have done. You were with me when I feed the multitudes, when I gave sight to the blind, touched and healed the lepers and drew a line in the sand and told the woman caught in adultery that God did not condemn her and when Lazarus walked out of the tomb. I was with you when you were scared out of your minds during the storm on the Sea of Galilee. I cared for you like a shepherd cares for his sheep and I showed my Father to you. On this very night, I washed your feet and lovingly dried them and told you to do the same for each other. You didn’t really understand that, but you will. And tomorrow morning, before most people have finished their breakfast, I will be flogged, taken outside the city gates and nailed to a cross. You won’t understand that either, not until later, and then you will know what I have done out of my love for you. Then you will know what it means for you to love each other as I have loved you.

This is love that goes way beyond ordinary neighborliness. It is far more than tolerance or honoring a neighbor’s rights and respecting her space, and doing a good deed now and then. It doesn’t have much to do with simple feelings or affections. This kind of love is something fierce and uncompromising. It is love that is willing to spend itself for the sake of the other. It is love that is realized in concrete actions. And this kind of love is to be the distinguishing mark of followers of Christ.

In his memoir Tis, Irish-American immigrant Frank McCourt tells the story of his landlady Agnes Klein. She is the Catholic widow of a Jewish man killed by the Nazis and the mother of a boy named Michael who was severely traumatized and permanently disabled by his experience in the concentration camps. Mrs. Klein follows her tenant around with vodka and orange juice while she tells the sad, sad story of her life and its many betrayals. Every couple of weeks, two nuns come to help her — Sister Mary Thomas and Sister Beatrice. Their job is to bathe Michael and wash his sheets and clean the apartment and watch over Mrs. Klein to make sure she doesn’t pass out and drown in the bathtub. Sister Mary Thomas spends most of her time pursuing young Frank McCourt, reminding him to go to mass, telling him to leave NY University where he is in danger of losing his faith, and making plans to secretly baptize Michael. Sister Beatrice, on the other hand, “is always so busy she rarely speaks.” Here is how McCourt describes the nun: 

"While Sister Mary Thomas tries to save my soul from atheistic communism, Sister Beatrice is giving Mrs. Klein a bath or cleaning Michael; what’s left of him. Sometimes when Sister Beatrice opens Michael’s door the smell that drifts up the hall is enough to make you sick but that doesn’t stop her from going in. She still washes him and changes him and changes his bedclothes and you can hear her humming hymns. If Mrs. Klein has drunk too much and gets cranky over having to take a bath, Sister Beatrice holds her, hums her hymns and strokes the little brown tufts on her skull until Mrs. Klein is a child in her arms. "(1)

So love is something you do. Whatever it is, the love Jesus commands is not too spiritual for this world. In any given moment love asks for everything without counting the cost or expecting anything in return.  Love sits by the bedside and holds the hand of a dying person or persistently reaches out a hand of friendship to one who scorns our personal political or religious worldview.  Love goes into the county school and works patiently with at-risk children struggling to learn to read. Love volunteers to sit on the Board of Directors at Neighbors in Need and work the cash register at My Sister’s Place and serves a meal to homeless men and women at Church of the Advocate. Love takes vacation days to work sweating and swinging a hammer building a Habitat House. Love hears the hidden pain in another’s voice, and offers to listen and pray and share the particular burdens of that person’s particular journey.

Now maybe there is nothing new about doing these things — Jewish teaching, as Jesus’ disciples knew, has always called for the love of one’s neighbor shown through concrete acts of justice and mercy. What is new is when these acts are a sign of Jesus’ life in us. To live in Jesus is to love — and to love is to live in Jesus.
And the love of Jesus abiding in us proves to us that the love of God is stronger than any evil we humans may do to each other, stronger than any sickness, suffering, fear, and even death. This love affirms that God will bring a day when “mourning and crying and pain will be no more.”

Until that day, loving as Jesus loves means letting our lives transformed by his love that knows no limits, and letting his commandment take shape in our lives. By this the world will know us as his disciples.