CHOSEN TO LOVE ONE ANOTHER John 15: 9-17 Rev. Ann Owens Brunger May 6, 2018 On this first Sunday in May, we are well into the Easter season. In two weeks, on May 20 th, Easter season ends with our celebration of Pentecost. At Pentecost we remember how the Holy Spirit filled Jesus' dis-spirited followers and brought the church to life. Our Gospel lesson for today is very appropriate for this time between Easter and Pentecost. It is a passage from the 15 th chapter of John. The setting is the Last Supper on the evening before Jesus' crucifixion. Jesus is preparing his closest and dearest followers for what is about to happen. Jesus is telling them: From now on nothing is going to be the same. I am trying to get you ready to endure the cataclysmic change in all our lives and then carry on without me in the role you are used to. So, now, as I read these words of Jesus to his disciples at the Last Supper, I invite you to imagine that you are one of Jesus' disciples during this pregnant time of waiting between Easter and Pentecost. You are waiting for what is going to happen next. Imagine that you are NOT hearing these words of Jesus for the first time, but you are remembering what he said at the Last Supper. Weeks have passed since Jesus' crucifixion and resurrection and you are huddled together, hiding out in Jerusalem, waiting for the future to unfold, trying to figure out what you are going to do next. During this time between Easter and Pentecost you are trying to remember every word Jesus ever said to you. Especially fresh in your memory is what Jesus said at the Last Supper. Imagine that you have endured the horror of the crucifixion, the wonder of the resurrection, the astonishment of meeting the Risen Christ, not once, but several times. Now you have just experienced the disappointment of Christ's final departure. He has told you to carry on his ministry without him by your side. Oh no! How are you supposed to do that? How are you going to be safe from the hostile Roman and Jewish authorities? How are you going to go from being Jesus' disciples to being his apostles those who are sent out to take the good news of Jesus Christ to the world on your own without Jesus to teach and lead you in person like he did before? It is time to grow up, stand up, rise above your fear, take responsibility, change, get moving! But how? Don't you remember? At the Last Supper, Jesus told us so many things. We didn't get it at the time, but now it makes more sense. Jesus was trying to prepare us to carry on without him by our side. Remember what he said? John 15:9-17 New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) 9 As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love. 10 If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father s commandments and abide in his love. 11 I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete. 12 This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. 13 No one has greater love than this, to lay down one s life for one s friends. 14 You are my friends if you do what I command you. 15 I do not call you servant any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to
you everything that I have heard from my Father. 16 You did not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask him in my name. 17 I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another. Jesus tried hard to prepare his disciples to carry on his ministry of saving, healing, praying, forgiving of BEING God's good news to the world. It seems to me that Jesus' original teachings for his original disciples are still relevant today. They are still useful lessons for us who are Jesus' followers in the 21 st century. Jesus told his followers NOT to think of themselves as SERVANTS, but as FRIENDS. Servants are supposed to follow orders, do what they are told to do. But friends have autonomy and initiative. Friends are peers. Jesus' friends were now expected to go out and do things on their own. There was no going back to their old jobs and their old homes no going back to fishing or tax collecting or being mentally ill, like Mary Magdalene was before Jesus healed her. Jesus' knew his disciples so well. He knew their strengths and weaknesses, their quirks and their temptations, their fears, their rivalries. In the Gospel of Matthew, we catch a glimpse of the disciples' rivalry. Mrs. Zebedee, the mother of James and John, comes to ask Jesus to give HER sons more status and authority than the other disciples. This audacious request by an ambitious Jewish mother made the other ten disciples angry. In the Gospel of Mary, we learn about the rivalry between the male and the female followers of Jesus particularly between Peter and Mary Magdalene. The Gospel of Mary? That's not in the New Testament. When I went on sabbatical for 3 months in the summer of 2001, I used that opportunity to study the New Testament Apocrypha. These are writings that the church rejected and decided NOT to include in the New Testament. Many of these writings were destroyed, others hidden and discovered only in the mid-20 th century. I was interested in comparing the rejected writings with the writings included in Holy Scripture. It was illuminating. The comparison highlighted what stories and beliefs the church decided were important and true. Before my sabbatical study I had assumed that the New Testament was made up of all the writings from the early church. But that is not the case. There were many writings that the church tossed aside, even destroyed. There was triage, a sorting out of writings the church accepted and writings the church rejected. The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were included in the New Testament. The Gospel of Mary was rejected by the church along with the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Truth, the Acts of Paul and Thecla, and various letters. Even though the church has never included the Gospel of Mary in the Bible, I find it interesting to read. It gives us a glimpse of male/female rivalry among Jesus' original followers, which I find very plausible. Here is a sample of what we find in the Gospel of Mary. It may be a report of a rather heated conversation between Jesus' closest associates in that time between Easter and Pentecost when they were trying to re-group and figure out what to do next. Peter is bothered by the fact that Mary Magdalene was the first person to meet the Risen Christ and he wasn't. [Peter] questioned them about the Savior, Did he really speak with a woman without our knowing about it? Are we to turn around and all listen to her? Did he choose her over us? Then Mary wept and said to Peter, My brother, Peter, what are you thinking? Do you think that I have
thought this up myself in my heart, or that I am telling lies about the Savior? Levi responded and said to Peter, Peter, you have always been an angry person. Now I see you contending against the woman like the adversaries. But if the Savior made her worthy, who are you, then, to reject her? Surely the Savior's knowledge of her is trustworthy. That is why he loved her more than us. (Interesting, right? The church has struggled over the role of women in the church from the beginning.) At the Last Supper, when Jesus was trying to prepare his disciples for the future, he could foresee that his small band of followers might easily disperse, disintegrate, and disappear after he was gone. He had been the glue that held them together. It was only because of him that they had come together in the first place. What was going to keep them together? Even if they stayed together, what was going to knit them together in community? Jesus' answer was clear: It was LOVE that was going to knit them together in community. Love one another, he told his followers repeatedly. This is Christ's commandment to us in the church here today too, Love one another. But this commandment to love sounds strange to 21 st century American ears because our culture characterizes love as a feeling, an attraction, a preference. So we react saying, No one can make me love somebody. You can't order me to love. I can't manufacture a feeling. Either I love somebody or I don't. I can't decide to love. When Jesus commanded his followers to love one another he was talking about the bonds of relationship that are quite different from what we think of as love. The love Jesus was talking about was not romantic love (like I fell in love with the greatest guy ever. ) It's not about preferences (like I love to hike, read, cook or I love extreme moose tracks ice cream. ) Jesus wasn't talking about love that is voluntary. Jesus told his original followers: I have chosen you to love one another. And this is what he tells you and me still today. The Biblical Greek word for love is agape and it means to be for one another, committed to one another, even to the point of giving your life for another, even if the other is undeserving and unlovable. We humans are not able to generate this love within ourselves but we receive it from Christ who received it from God, the source of all love. And having received the gift of divine love, we are to pass it on to others. We may not even LIKE the recipients of our love. Some people in our community of faith may not be lovable. We may not be lovable. We might waffle, like Peter. But, remember, Jesus loved him anyway. We might have big egos, like James and John, but Jesus loved them anyway. We might be manipulative like Judas Iscariot, but Jesus loved him anyway. We might want to show off our relationship with Jesus, like his mother did at the wedding in Cana. But Jesus always loved his mother. Whenever I find it hard to obey Jesus and love another person, I tell myself, God loves that person I find unlovable just as much as God loves me. The inheritance we have received from our Risen Lord is the gift of love for one another that is the glue that holds the church together. Love for Jesus, which translates into love for one another, holds us together in the church, even though we are people of different ages, different values and priorities, different social status and spending power. People who wouldn't ordinarily get along with each other or understand each other, or love each other are drawn together by our Lord to love one another in the church. That makes the church a unique community within our 21 st century American culture. Jesus knew what we know from reading the Bible and what his disciples probably knew too at the time. Jesus' followers weren't always the best and the brightest and the bravest and the most
faithful. His original disciples seemed to be distinctively under-qualified to do the work Jesus was giving them to do. Jesus' male disciples did not always behave kindly toward women, children, the poor, the hungry, Samaritans, Pharisees. And yet, THEY WERE CHOSEN, in spite of themselves, in spite of their prejudices and ineptitude. And so are we. Jesus reminded his disciples at the Last Supper, You did not choose me, but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit. Our Risen Lord is saying the same thing to us in the church today: You did not choose me, but I chose you. I have chosen you to love one another and to continue my work here on earth. But this strikes us as odd, too, like the commandment to love one another. We 21 st century Americans really like to do the choosing ourselves. Our culture highly values individual choice and free will. We would rather make choices than be chosen. We like to choose our leaders. After worship, this morning, we will hold a congregational meeting to elect officers to lead the church. We Presbyterians vote. This past week we had an election for county and city leaders. American citizens vote to select the candidates of our choice. (Although many of us are skeptical about the way the American electoral process has become so influenced by moneyed interests, that the American voters, in fact, have few real choices.) In our personal lives, we choose our colleges, our majors, and our jobs. We choose our spouses and how many children we want and where we are going to live. In our time, people are seeking more choices of how and when they will die. We have an infinite number of consumer choices among umpteen brands of breakfast cereal and bread and electronics and cars. We have infinite choices for entertainment. In our religious life some of us like to choose our denomination, our congregation. We go church-shopping to pick out a church we like, rather than pray first and ask God, Where do YOU want me to be a member? Some choose to be baptized and accept Jesus as Lord and Savior. (I am being careful to say SOME people make these religious choices, because I know that others do not make choices and accept being chosen.) Many died-in-the-wool Presbyterians, like me, have learned to leave the choices up to God. We have learned to accept being chosen rather than doing the choosing ourselves. I did not choose to be a Christian, a Presbyterian, an ordained minister for almost 40 years. I did not choose to come here to serve this congregation for three months during William Pender's sabbatical. I will admit that, when I was younger, I resisted the choices God made for me. Over time, I have learned God's choices are so much better than my choices. I have learned to accept being chosen, rather than doing the choosing for myself. I have also observed that many problems human beings experience in our lives are caused by making bad choices for ourselves, without even considering what God is choosing for us. When Jesus was getting ready to leave his disciples to carry on without him by their side, he didn't give them any choice. You did not choose me; I chose you. I chose you to be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in Judea, in Samaria, to the ends of the earth. Think of all the things in OUR lives that we have not chosen. Many of these unchosen things have shaped us and made us who we are. We did not choose to be born. We did not choose the time and place in human history to live on this earth. We did not choose our DNA. We did not choose which mother's womb would nurture us to life. We did not choose our parents, our skin color, our gender, our ethnicity, our original nationality, the first language we were taught. All of these aspects of our identity, that make us who we are, have been chosen for us, given to us. God has certainly given us the freedom to choose how we are going to live within the choices God has made for us. Hopefully, sooner or later, probably through trial and error, we will learn to accept
God's choices for us as the best choices. So, here we are. God has chosen us to come together and live and worship and serve together as Christ's followers. God has chosen US, as unqualified, unwilling and inept as we might be. God has chosen us to be the church, the Body of Jesus Christ in the heart of Knoxville and to the ends of the earth. God has chosen to love us. God has chosen us to love one another. Thanks be to God!