The "New" Commandment

This is the sermon I delivered last week in my preaching class for seminary. It impacted me as I was preparing to deliver it and it challenged all of us (yes including me) in class, so I just thought I would share it here for all of you.

“The New Commandment?: John 13:31-35”

                Love: A word we use in a number of different ways. We say we love our families, our friends, our shoes, our new haircut even our outfits or favorite sports teams. As a matter of fact, we use the word love so often that a lot of its meaning is lost on us, because we never really stop to think about what it means to love. In our Gospel reading today, Jesus talks about love, but a much deeper love than the love that we have for our new outfit or favorite sports teams, but before we get to the actual reading of the passage, let’s set the stage for what we are about to read.

This is the point in John’s Gospel where Jesus is with his disciples in the upper room. Judas has just left them to betray Jesus, so really this is one of the last encounters that Jesus will have with his disciples before he is arrested and crucified. Jesus knows this, but the disciples do not fully realize it no matter how many times Jesus tells them of what is to come, so that’s where we are when our Scripture passage opens, so let’s go there now. John 13:31-35 reads:

13:31 When he had gone out, Jesus said, "Now the Son of Man has been glorified, and God has been glorified in him.
13:32 If God has been glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself and will glorify him at once.
13:33 Little children, I am with you only a little longer. You will look for me; and as I said to the Jews so now I say to you, 'Where I am going, you cannot come.'
13:34 I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.
13:35 By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another."

                So here we are coming close to the end of Jesus’ ministry and life here on earth. He just has a few fleeting moments left with his disciples after this and it only makes sense to me that he is probably trying to remind them of the most important things that he has taught them and that is when this conversation takes place. Think about this when a parent drops their college student off at school for the first time, they make sure they have everything from their room at home that they will need and if they are like my parents they double and triple check everything before they are finally ready to leave the house. They make the trip to the school, trying to keep the conversation as light as possible for as long as possible as they know the emotions are sure to set in at some point. Once they arrive at school they help them get everything moved in and set-up. At this point, they know they are going to be leaving their child behind and they want to remind them of certain teachings or expectations. When my parents left me for the first time, I remember very vividly my parents telling me about 100 times throughout the day that they love me, and they accompanied all of the “I love you’s” with little pieces of advice or things they had taught me. One of the last things they said to me was “Make good choices.” Now this is a catch phrase around my house and I couldn’t even begin to count how many times my dad said this when we were growing up, but they wanted to remind me that the choice is mine, because they weren’t going to be around all of the time to help me make those decisions. I was on my own for the first time and they wanted to make sure I remembered what they had taught me.

 I think that is what Jesus is doing in our passage today. In fact, interestingly enough, Jesus addresses his disciples as little children. His time on earth is coming to an end and he is addressing the group of men whom he had taught for three years. In a way they were like his children. He took them under his wing and “raised” them if you will. The use of the “little children” language also alludes to the love and affection that Jesus has for his disciples.  Parents LOVE their children and Jesus LOVES his disciples. At this point in the gospel Jesus knows he isn’t going to be with his disciples much longer and the choice is going to be theirs, so he reminds them of some of the most important teachings that he has taught them over the last three years. One of these teachings is to love one another just as Jesus had loved them.

                But why would Jesus call this a new commandment? Surely, loving one another was not a new commandment. Loving one another was a part of the Jewish tradition and was present in the Greco-Roman culture around them, so why would Jesus say this is a new commandment? Jesus doesn’t stop at just loving one another. He continues on and adds that the disciples should love just as Jesus has loved them. Well, that’s not as easy as it sounds. Let’s think about how Jesus has loved and who Jesus loved. Jesus loved ALL people. Even the men who Jesus called his disciples were the outcasts of society. They were fishermen, not the cream of the crop. We can learn a lot just from that one fact. You see the Jewish people went through schooling and there were several different levels to this schooling. At the end of each level, only the cream of the crop moved up to the next level and eventually if they made it through all of the levels they became apprentices under a rabbi. The rest of the boys dropped out of school and were then trained in their father’s trade. We do not know when in this whole process that the disciples dropped out of school, but we do know that they did not do well enough to get all the way through the process and were thus trained as fishermen. All of the other rabbis picked from the smartest boys in the class and choose one or two of them as their apprentices, but not Jesus. Jesus chose from the rejects, the boys who were not able to memorize the Hebrew Scriptures and recite them and this was just the start of Jesus’ ministry.

                Throughout the three years prior to our Scripture reading for today, Jesus had been accused of hanging out with sinners, adulterers, tax collectors, and even worse and you know what all of those accusations were true and Jesus was unashamed of that fact. You see the Pharisees and other religious leaders were teaching people that they needed to love one another, but in practice they only loved people who were just like themselves. Of course that NEVER happens in churches today. We would never be guilty of loving only those who are like us, would we?

                What would happen if a homeless person were to walk through the doors of our sanctuary? Would we be more concerned with the way they are dressed or how dirty they are than with meeting their spiritual and physical needs? Or what if a man or a woman with multiple piercings and a tattoo covered body walked through our doors? Would we be scared or nervous or jump to conclusions or would we reach out and embrace them in our community? You see in a roundabout way I believe Jesus is addressing this very thing and pointing us to what is most important and that is love, but not just any kind of love, but loving one another like Jesus loves us.

                If we think it’s about how we look when we enter this building, we’ve got it all wrong. Jesus didn’t care how people looked; he met them where they were. If we think that we have to agree with everyone in order to love them, we’ve got it all wrong. Jesus didn’t even agree with his disciples all of the time and he surely didn’t agree with the tax collector or the adulterers that he came in contact with, but he still loved him. This love that Jesus is calling us to is so much bigger than we know.

                My pastor and I were taking some time not too long ago to catch up and just talk about some of the things we were going through and processing through those things together. At one point in our conversation, Westboro Baptist Church came up. I am sure many of you are familiar with Westboro, but just to refresh your memory a little bit, they are the church that is known for their protests of military funerals and their signs that read “God hates fags.” I don’t know about you, but their protesting and their signs just don’t scream love to me. As the conversation progressed a little bit and we began to really react to such actions, we had to take a step back, because Jesus is calling us to even love people like Westboro Baptist, whom we don’t agree with and don’t really want to be affiliated with, but we have to love them. Really? Even them, God, but they are so hate-filled, how am I supposed to love them? And what about the people on the other side of the political spectrum than me? We don’t really agree on a lot of things. Do I have to love them too?

                Well, if we take this commandment of Jesus seriously, the simple answer to those questions is yes. We are called to love everyone. Jesus doesn’t give us a way out. There is no fine print that says, but only if they agree with you. He simply says, “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.” But if you notice our Scripture passage doesn’t even stop there.

 He goes on to say that others will know that we are disciples of Christ because we have loved one another. Our Scripture passage for today ends with that and I am going to leave you with this. If you never told a soul that you were a Christian and the only way they could tell whether or not you were is by the way you love other people regardless of whether or not you agree with them, would they know beyond a shadow of doubt that you are a disciple of Christ? Do you love in such a way that the love of Christ flows out of you to everyone you meet? If so great you’re much farther along on this journey than I am, but if you’re like me and there’s room to improve, who is it in your life that you need to be more intentional about loving even when you don’t agree with them? How can you love them and show that love to them? Christ loves the world and everyone in it and we are invited to participate in that love, will you join him? Amen.

It's a Struggle.....

Hmmm... Very interesting. As I came back to my blog for the first time in several months I found this blog post which I started at the end of the fall semester while I was still in Biblical Interpretation. This is interesting to me as it applies to the post which I came here to make. The paragraph that I had already written is as follows:

Over the course of the last two weeks in our Biblical Interpretation class, we have heard a total of 16 sermons. This class only meets once a week, so we ended up listening to 8 sermons each class period. I know some of you may be thinking that you have a hard enough time getting through one sermon on Sunday morning. There's no way you could get through 8 sermons in a 3-hour period, but for me it has been very interesting to see how different people can look at the very same passage but see it very differently. As I have listened to the many different sermons, I have come to one conclusion, which is, this Christian lifestyle that we are all trying to live is a struggle and it is  time that we start admitting that not only to ourselves, but to our congregations and the hurting people around us.

That was true to me then and I am even more aware of that truth here lately. Over the course of the last 3 (almost 4) months, I have struggled with knee pain and trying to give my body the time it needs to heal while still fulfilling my duties at school, church, and driving back and forth to doctor's appointments. None of those tasks are easy to begin with, and let me just tell you, they aren't any easier with a bum knee. I have had to wrestle with where God is in and through this. I mean I am at seminary being educated and becoming better equipped to minister to others, why would this happen to me? Did God cause this? No, I don't think I am ready to make that leap. This happened, because I stepped in a hole. Is God trying to teach me something? Well, I do believe God can use anything and God is definitely using this situation to help me see that we do the church and people we minister to an injustice by making this faith journey sound easy. We love to share our mountaintop experiences, but where is the authenticity and vulnerability of sharing our valley experiences.

As I have been thinking through these things, I look around me and I see all of the pain, hurt, injustice, violence, etc. in the world around us.  In just this last week, we have seen the bombing of a marathon in Boston and the subsequent city shut down and stand-off between the first responders and the bombers, a friend of my sister's past away due to injuries sustained in a car accident on the morning of her 21st birthday, the pastor I grew up under had to undergo emergency brain surgery due to a hemorrhage, and this only scratches the surface on what the people around us are going through on a day-to-day basis. Are we doing the church an injustice by telling stories or victory and omitting stories of pain and suffering? Are we leading in such a way that makes people feel guilty for struggling or that makes people realize that sometimes life sucks but we have a God who is bigger than our problems who is always there to walk this journey with us?

So how do we do this? How can we change the atmosphere of our churches to one that is not only inviting but one that is authentic and vulnerable?

• The short and sweet answer to that is it starts with the leader. The leaders of churches must be willing to be authentic and vulnerable in front of their congregations. We must be willing to admit that during the faith journey there will be struggles, but God will be with us along the way and as a church family, the community of believers, we must be willing to walk alongside one another not only while we are on the mountaintop, but also when we are in the valley. 
• We must begin to create an atmosphere that gets rid of the fake and forced greetings of "How are you?" "I'm fine how are you?" We all know we are not fine all of the time, so why do we continue to put our masks on in the very place where we should strip ourselves of the masks and allow God to comfort and guide us.
• When you are having a mountaintop experience, don't be afraid to share your experience with others but recognize that not everyone is in the same position you are and some people may need your listening ear or to be shown compassion and love.
• DON'T give the churchy answer!! We, as Christians and leaders alike, have this bad habit of giving one another the churchy answer even when we know that's not how we really feel, because that is what you are "supposed" to say. Be open and honest with one another and if you don't know what to say, be honest about that as well. Most of the time your presence means more to someone than anything you could ever say. 
• DON'T put the blame on the person who is struggling. As someone who is currently in this position, I can honestly tell you, people do not want to be told that "if they only prayed more, God would heal them" and they don't want to be asked what unconfessed sin they have in their life that is causing them to hurt in this way. 
• LOVE people. God created us to be in community with one another and to love each other. If someone is hurting, let them know that you love them and are there if they need someone to talk to. (Note: Only say this if you are truly serious about being there for them. For some people, it is difficult to ask other people for help and it becomes even harder if someone has mentioned that they are there for them, but in reality they really aren't.)
• PRAY for them and with them. Again, as someone who has been through and is going through a hard time, it is great to know that other people are praying for you and even better when people pray with you. That way you know they are not just saying that they are praying, but they actually are praying for, with, and over you.