John 11:31-35
May 2, 2010: Fifth Sunday of Easter
Love one another. I don’t know a single Christian who doesn’t think this pretty much sums things up – do you? But the only way it becomes more than just a Christian bumper sticker – more than just a nice sentiment, is if we move from words to action. And that is one of the greatest questions of our faith: What moves us to love in deeds, not just in words and feelings?
Let’s start by admitting something: It can be genuinely hard to love someone. We’re happy to live this commandment – or try to live this commandment – with family and friends. Although, even that is challenging at times, to say the least. But let’s be honest, some people are unlovable. Their shadows are too big. Their mistakes are too unforgivable, or even just too hard to understand. Maybe the enmity is too strong, or the wounds they caused too deep. I don’t know about you, but when I’m faced with such folks, just being told to “love this person” is not enough. It’s just not. Something has to come from within me that is stronger than my initial reaction, than my judgments, stronger than my will. And, to be perfectly honest, that “something” doesn’t always come. And so sometimes, it’s not only hard to love someone – in action or otherwise; sometimes it feels just plain impossible.
Of course, the truth is, sometimes it’s also hard, if not impossible, to love myself – the shadows are too big, the mistakes too unforgivable, the wounds I’ve inflicted are too deep. And I wonder if maybe, just maybe the two things are related. Maybe, just maybe, the reasons it’s hard to love others sometimes are related to the reasons it’s hard to love myself sometimes. Maybe this is why Jesus doesn’t just say, “love one another.” Jesus tells the disciples this is a “new commandment”, which seems a little odd, doesn’t it? I doubt this was the first time in their very Jewish lives that the disciples were told to love one another. That could not have been a new commandment to them. But that isn’t all Jesus says – that’s not the whole commandment. I think the “new” part was what he tacked on to the end: “just as I have loved you.”
This clever little addition of, “as I have loved you,” packs a double punch when we remember who Jesus is. When Jesus loves someone, we get a glimpse of two things. First, we see how God loves because Jesus is the embodiment of God’s love. To know how Jesus loves us and others is to know how God loves us and others. At the same time, when Jesus loves, we see how we are to love – how human beings are called to love one another. This one sentence says two distinct yet intimately related things: you can love one another because I have loved you, and you are called to love one another as I have loved you.
When we understand this, clearly knowing how God loves us is the crux of it all. If we don’t know how God loves us, we will lack both the capacity to love others and the blue print for loving others. “Love one another,” is easy to say and hard to live. But Jesus’ addition of, “just as I have loved you,” gives us the key for moving from words to action. We can love others, even when it’s hard; but first, we have to know that we are loved – truly, deeply, fully loved, even when we don’t feel like we deserve it – even when we don’t feel that lovable.
But, understanding how God loves us is, I’m afraid, harder than it sounds. It would be nice if just saying it would make it true, wouldn’t it? But, if love is not experienced, words about love mean nothing. I can tell you over and over that God loves you – no matter what. But, if you have not stood before God, stripped of all pretenses and masks, and felt God’s love, I suspect those words ring flat. If on the other hand you have felt both completely known and loved by God – even if it was only for a fleeting moment – those words probably have the ability to stir something up in deep inside of you, even if only for a fleeting moment.
Even if we have these experiences, there are times for all of us when we find ourselves unable to connect to God’s love, and it’s nice if we can get a little help. It’s true that we have Jesus to help us, but I’m also eternally grateful for people who walk the earth in the here and now who can at least point me in the right direction. I think of them as spiritual guides. Some are individuals I know personally, and some are my spiritual guide through their writings and sermons.
Now first, I want to make a comment about what I think is a necessary quality of a spiritual guide. If they are not willing to tackle the complexity of life and the complexity of the bible, they are not helpful to me. Finding God through shadows and doubt, and through scriptures that confound as well as clarify, is hard. When someone dares down that path, I am grateful for their courage. When they do so and actually meet God along the way, I’m grateful if they take the time to erect sign posts for me to see when I come along in my own time.
Frederick Buechner is a spiritual guide that has both dared to go down the path laden with shadows and doubt, and he has blessed us with sign posts from his encounters with the divine. He embraces the complexity of life and definitely finds God deeply imbedded in that life. In the beauty and joy, and in the darkness and pain. And what he knows from those encounters with God, is that nothing is outside the reach of God’s love. Not us, not our most shameful selves, and not anyone else.
Frederick Buechner is a theologian, writer and Presbyterian minister. He was born in 1926, and so his childhood was shaped mostly by the depression. His family moved around constantly as his father chased jobs, until his father committed suicide when Frederick was 10 years old. Writing was always important for Buechner – it was his passion in school, and he won great acclaim for it. But, around 1955 he began attending Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church and there he heard a call to ministry, suprising him and his pastor alike. He went to Union Theological Seminary, and while there he realized that life was not just an intellectual pursuit of truth. “No intellectual pursuit ever aroused in me such intense curiosity,” he wrote, “and much more than my intellect was involved, much more than my curiosity aroused. In the unfamiliar setting of a Presbyterian church, of all places, I had been moved to astonished tears which came from so deep inside me that to this day I have never fathomed them. I wanted to learn more about the source of those tears and the object of that astonishment.”
Buechner knew we can’t just think our way to belief and trust in God. We can’t just reason our way to discipleship. We have to find God, meet God, encounter the divine in some way in order to be transformed – in order to know what it’s truly like to be loved by God – in order to know how to truly love one another. Words are not enough.
So how do we encounter the divine? How do we experience God’s love for us? Buechner’s wisdom seems simple enough: pay attention. He writes, “Maybe it’s all utterly meaningless. Maybe it’s all unutterably meaningful. If you want to know which, pay attention to what it means to be truly human in a world that half the time we’re in love with and half the time scares the hell out of us.”
To pay attention means to give equal attention to the beauty and the darkness in the world and in ourselves. We have to pay attention to the half we’re in love with and the half that scares us to death. Most of us have experiences of seeing God in beauty and creation – finding God in those moments of euphoria and deep gratitude. But, God is only worthy of our trust if God is found in both the beauty and the darkness – both the extraordinary and the mundane. "Listen to your life,” Buechner writes. “See it for the fathomless mystery it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.”
When those moments of darkness arise within you, pay attention. God is there. And when you have that experience – that grace-filled gift – of finding God there, you realize what it means to be fully loved by the divine. As Buechner writes, "The world is full of dark shadows, to be sure both the world without and the world within ... But praise [God] for the knowledge that what's lost is nothing to what's found, and that all the dark there ever was, set next to light, would scarcely fill a cup.”
When we pay attention – when we see ourselves as we truly are and see the world as it truly is, and then find divine love in the midst of that, the words about God’s love are no longer just words. We are changed by that experience. And that experience is what enables us to love one another. We now know how to love others because we know what it’s like to be loved by God. More than that, I believe we can’t help but love others in the same way.
But there’s a trap we often fall into that gets in the way of living out this love in the world. We think it looks a certain way. We think it is a certain profession, or going into the peace corps or putting your life on the line for a cause, or moving to India to care for lepers. But it’s not that simple. Loving others doesn’t look one way. To love is our call – our vocation. The way we do this will be a unique reflection of who God created us to be.
Last week, Kathleen O’Malley spoke during worship about her trips to Iraq and her work to end the war. We were having coffee later that day and I was telling her that I felt inadequate given all she was doing. She reminded me that I missed about half of what she was saying. She said you have to start with knowing yourself deeply, knowing who God created you to be, and loving who that person is. Your path will come out of that process. “Leading with your soul,” she called it. Buechner said it this way: “The place God calls you to is where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”
Buechner nails it on the head: “We hunger to be known and understood. We hunger to be loved. We hunger to be at peace inside our own skins.” This rings so true. This is where we need to start. But Buechner knows that is not the end of human longing. He knows we are created by God to want more than that…to hunger for more than that. He goes on to write, “We hunger not just to be fed these things, but often without realizing it, we hunger to feed others these things because they too are starving for them. We hunger not just to be loved but to love, not just to be forgiven but to forgive, not just to be known and understood for all the good times and bad times that for better or worse have made us who we are, but to know and understand each other to the point of seeing that, in the last analysis, we all have the same good times, the same bad times, and that for that very reason there is no such thing in the all the world as anyone who is really a stranger.”
The commandment to love one another is not really a commandment in the sense of a rule that we can just follow. What’s new about this commandment is that it is written on our hearts, embedded in our souls. To follow Jesus’ commandment, we need only to become who we truly are. We need to tap into our own longings to be loved and there we will find the desires we have to love others. This work is not sweet or simple. It means doing the hard work of going into our deepest selves, even when we fear what we will find. It means trusting that no matter who we are, what we have done, when we get to the core we will find the person God created us to be. In fact, we will find God’s love. And all of this is the same thing as learning about what is at the core of every other person. Accepting God’s love for us means accepting God’s love for others.
I’ll end with what I think is a beautiful summary of Jesus’ commandment. Buechner writes, "Your life and my life flow into each other as wave flows into wave, and unless there is peace and joy and freedom for you, there can be no real peace or joy or freedom for me. To see reality--not as we expect it to be but as it is--is to see that unless we live for each other and in and through each other, we do not really live very satisfactorily; that there can really be life only where there really is, in just this sense, love.” Or as Jesus put it, “love one another just as I have loved you.” Amen.
