Easter 6

May my words and my thoughts be acceptable to you, O Lord, my refuge and my redeemer. (Psalm 19:14)

SEASON: Easter 6
PROPER: B
PLACE: St. John's Parish, Kingsville
DATE: May 14, 2000


TEXT: John 15:9-17 - “As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love. . . . .You are my friends if you do what I command you. I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made know to you everything that I have heard from my Father.”

ISSUE: - Here’s a passage that is very challenging to the world today. It speaks repeatedly of ‘abiding,” which means a permanent relationship. It speaks even more repeatedly of love, which may include affection, but more accurately means ‘attachment.’ It calls the community to at-one-ment with God in friendship, and to live out the commandment of love in a broken world. Bonded in a unique family of divine love, the church has a mission in God’s world.
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John’s community that this Gospel account addresses was a frightened community. Its leaders who were eyewitnesses to Jesus work and mission had died off. The church was facing persecution from without, and uncertainty from within. It seemed to be under attack, and its foundations were shaky. So John’s gospel gives encouragement to a challenged and surrounded community. “Abide in my love” seems to be the basic catch phrase. Even in the Epistle of I John, which was read this morning and which was not likely to have been written by the same persons, there are striking similarities when it comes to the words “abide” and “love” which are repeated over and over again.

The important meaning of the word “abide” is simply to stay in a permanent, remain, dwell permanently. The poplar phrase we might use today is “hang-in there.”
The other repeated word is “love.” Whenever we hear the word love, we think of it in terms of some kind of an emotional affection. While there might be some kind of emotional meaning to the word, the real meaning of love in this context was “attachment.” Love was attachment. Remember in the book of Genesis (2:23-24) it’s written, that a man shall leave his father and mother, and clings to his wife, and the two become one flesh. Even then, a man normally stayed with his father and in his father’s house. Love was bonding. The whole Biblical idea of loving God is rooted in this attachment concept. People today will say, “How can I love God when I can’t see him?” Often the issue is how can I have an emotional feeling for God. We can’t quite grasp that love of God. Rather, it is attachment to God. Again, how can I love other people. Again, the Biblical concept of love is to be attached to other human beings. That isn’t to say that affections don’t come or are irrelevant. They aren’t, but we are to be attached to one another as the common human race, and in the family that God has created.
Thus, you have Jesus saying in this passage, “As the Father has loved me (been attached to me), so I have loved you (attached myself to you.) What you see in this passage is the call to an attached, bonded, permanent family of God the Father. The family is about the Father’s business, keeping the commandment to love one another and to carry on the servanthood ministry to one another and to God’s world, as Jesus Christ had accomplished.
In this passage what’s even more compelling is that John says that Jesus called his disciples not merely slaves, but friends. They are invited into a full and complete relationship. If that isn’t the lifting up of the human race and family of God, I don’t know what is. God sends Jesus the Christ who is intimately attached to the Father. It’s a Father - Son relationship, permanently attached, to reach the world that God has created to bond with it in such away that they become family and friends, unlike subordinates. The sign of the relationship is in doing the commandment of love of attachment to the brokeness of the world in the on going effort to restore the family of God to wholeness.
The question for us today is whether or not there is much in the way of relevance for us. We don’t live in the 1st century, we live in the 21st century now. Yet, I can’t help but believe that this passage really takes on for us a kind of prophetic stance. We live in a world of significantly enormous detachments among peoples, races, and nations, even in and among our own families. In the United States today we are so caught up in our infatuation with our individualism, that the concept of attachment in a profound kind of love is becoming quite foreign to us.
We have the great detachment of the races. There was a song that Kris Kristofferson used to sing, “Jesus was a Capricorn, “ and the refrain was “Everybody needs somebody else to look down on.” Liberals look down on Conservatives, and vice versa, of course. Rich look down on the poor, and poor often unilaterally condemn the rich. There is real tension and brokeness in human relationships.
Notice that what we hear today so often is people demanding “my rights.” We hear this a lot as related to the rights to bear arms. I have my right to possess and bear any kind of arms I want because my rights are protected by the constitution. Yet what of the rights of the community to be able to sit on its doorsteps without fear of danger? I know this is a complicated issue, but we are always having to weigh what is mine, but in the light of the good of the whole.
We see the individualistic rights often expressed in the way people drive as related to road rage. How dare you inconvenience me? I have the right to the road. There are military groups that believe that government is unjust, and that it has no right over them. Thus, they are advocating revolution that is chaos, that fosters anarchy.
Christianity today is often based by many groups on having a personal relationship with Jesus. I’ve heard people refer to have to receive their personal holy communion. This personal relationship and self-satisfying religion of today is a fascinating phenomena in that Jesus’ teachings hardly ever addressed anyone individually. He spoke almost all of the time to the community, to “you all.” (Y’all as they say in the South.) People will be together, worship together, pray together, sing together, and still have little sense of relationship, of bonding or attachment with one another. The church today often divides and people leave out of disagreements when the church doesn’t believe what I personally think it should believe. Wasn’t it interesting how when the church went through some liturgical and theological changes how people abandoned one another. I’ve often been left brooding over the way even in church communities people leave a church community without notice. People just leave, like there’s never been any kind of relationship even though we drink from the same cup week after week.
Often in church repeatedly we can no longer function except by people doing their own individual thing, when they have time unrelated to the sense of doing things together in community. Notice that people have to do things alone, by themselves. “Loner-ism” is the trend of the time, which is kind of interesting in that we are a nation that detests totalitarianism. We cherish a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, which is becoming increasing corrupted by individual greed and grasping for personal unchecked power.
Today we even see this in many of our marriages. It is as if the personal individual self-satisfaction is the be all and end all of life. The strength that comes from bonding and union that supports our children gives way to personal satisfaction and gratification. It’s as if my only friend is me. What a lonely world. We are a crowd of very lonely individuals, and we bear witness to that rank individualistic way of life as if it were something wonderful. Maybe we are in denial?
When Moses was leading the people of God in the wilderness, it really became an enormously heavy load for himself as an individual. At nearly a point of breakdown, the Spirit of God tells Moses to select a group of 70 men to carry the load of leadership. Jesus begins his own ministry in community. When the disciples are commissioned at the end of Jesus ministry they are sent to baptize all nations, whole communities. Peter is directed to feed the flock. At the heart of the Gospel is the concern for community, for the corporate community of God’s world. For the church over the ages, it has been believed that schism is far worse than heresy, for it divides and weakens us as the people of God.
The relationship of Jesus to God the Father was one of relationship, permanent bonding in a fellowship. The relationship that Jesus brought to the world was one of relationship with God’s people, and they were called upon to bond permanently with one another. Therein we find the meaning of love, as we serve together in a permanent friendship with God and one another to see us all as God’s own unique family in which brokeness is healed and we are raised up with Christ. Reclaiming this effort at serving the good of the whole community in relationship with Christ is a real challenge for the individualism we cherish today, but it may in the long run be worth the effort, if a broken and isolated world can find its peace in God, and bear witness to the plentiful love of God.