Rev. David Boyd
By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.
I remember some years ago I attended a summer school course at Vancouver School of Theology, my Alma Mater. It was a week-long course led by Janet Wolfe, a United Methodist pastor from Nashville who had taken a downtown church that was made up of 15 members or so and transformed that church into a community church. It was a mixed community of families who lived in the area, drug dealers and crack houses, sex-trade workers, homeless people, high unemployment, and people with various challenges. Wolf talked about how the remnants of an old long-established congregation worked at inviting the neighbourhood into the church and welcoming them as full members of their congregation—after a process of letting go of the historical significance of the church and a new realization that the congregation was never going to be what it once was. There were various things that they did, but two of the things that they did in worship were to pause at some point in the worship service and have people turn to the person beside them and say, "You are a child of God, beloved, and I love you." The second thing was that after the sermon, there would be time for people to respond in whatever fashion they chose. At this summer course with Wolf, we talked about what it would be mean for our congregations if we made these kinds of little shifts.
Wolf told the story of a young woman, a sex-trade worker, whom she had befriended. The woman would occasionally visit Wolf in her office and sometimes yell and curse at the world quite vociferously. Wolf would always quietly invite her to worship on Sundays. One day this young woman turned up, but she would only go as far as the bottom of the outside steps into the church. She did this for a while, listening. The ushers would try to invite her to come in, but she wouldn't. The ushers got to know her a bit and they would prop open the door so she could hear better. Then, after a while the young woman moved up the steps and sat on the top step close to the door. After a while again, she stood in the doorway; a little while later she had progressed into the narthex. A little while later again, she stood at the back of the church. Finally she was able to go into the sanctuary and join the others, sitting in the back row. When it came for exchanging the peace with the words I mentioned a moment ago, "You are a child of God, beloved, and I love," she almost fled. She, like many others in that congregation, were overwhelmed to hear the words, "I love you."
When Wolf had us say the words during a worship service together, we all go quite choked up. We are good Canadians, after all, aren't we? We are quiet and reserved. We don't go around telling other people that they are children of God, beloved and that we love them. And while we all got choked up hearing those words and saying them to others—sometimes total strangers—that they were a child of God, beloved and that we loved them, we also felt, we discovered in a conversation afterwards, that it was liberating and powerful at the same time as emotional.
By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.
It is one thing to hear these words and to know intellectually in our hearts that we love others. That we love God with our heart, mind, strength, and soul and that we love our neighbour as ourself is something we understand well and say often in church. It is another thing altogether to take that love and speak it to another person. It is another thing altogether to put our love into action in ways that put us at risk, that put us in vulnerable places, that stretch us out of our comfort zones.
Last Monday night, at the end of our Lenten series at Nelson United, we asked some social justice activists in our congregation to speak about the source of their inspiration to engage the powers and principalities that surround us. They spoke passionately about what inspires them and each, in their own way, spoke of having the courage to essentially put love into action, especially with respect to those who are not loved by the world, those who are cast to the margins, cast aside, left out; the activists who spoke found the courage to speak the words, "You are a child of God, beloved, and I love you" in the actions of their lives. Amazing things can happen in terms of personal transformation and in terms of societal change when the words "I love you" are spoken and heard and lived!
Why are we surprised by that transformation? I know I am when I hear about how these simple words of love can change situations and lives. I suppose in part I'm surprised because these weren't words that we spoke out loud in our family when I grew up. I regret that very much. I tell my adult children that I love them and I tried to do that when they were small. Yet, it continues to surprise me today that those simple words can change so much.
Why am I surprised?! I shouldn't be. I know someone has counted how many times love gets mentioned in the Bible, but I don't remember; I do know that it's a lot! In an interfaith panel that I watched some years ago, one of the defining characteristics named by people of other faiths of Christians is love—a radical, life-changing love of which we are speaking this evening. Jesus was love incarnate because as John said in a letter, "God is love." Why am I surprised by the power of love?
I guess I'm surprised because the world around us can be a callous place and can convince us that the norm is to seek revenge for wrongs done to us; the norm is to look out for number 1. The norm seems to be that you get all you can get and damn the rest. Adam Smith, the Scottish economist who started the liberal economic movement, believed that there are limited goods and we naturally will compete for those goods. The norm of our world sometimes seems to teach that we should be suspicious of our neighbour not love him or her. Like Walter Bruegemann would say, the norm of our world is to be enslaved to our wants and desires rather than be empowered by the abundance of grace, the abundance of the harvest, the abundance of love.
The Gospel-writer John sets us up. In the long readings that we have been hearing this Lent, John sets us up. He sets us up to know and hear that love changes things and that Jesus embodies this love. Richard Rohrbaugh, the delightful scholar who has written so much about the world in which Jesus lived, said that John's gospel is about a community of believers who were pushed to the margins of society where it existed to protest the values of the larger society. We inherit that tradition of protesting the values of the larger society when those values espouse elitism, a rigid hierarchy that defines who is excluded, a rigid authority that dominates. We speak words of love that are sometimes not welcomed.
By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.
How will we translate our love into action with respect to the election early next month? How do we translate our love into action with respect to the choices we make around food, chocolate, coffee, transportation, and the causes we support? How, indeed?
Well, we have the commandment: you shall love as I have loved. We can say to those around us and to the world, "You are God's child, beloved, and I love you." By this everyone will know that we are Christ's disciples, if we have love for one another.
Amen.
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