RVCC Pastor's Sermon

Sermon - May 17, 2009

“All You Need Is Love”

By Rev. Nancy Foran
John 15:9-17

As many of you know, Joe and I are putting our home in Cumberland on the market, so we can move closer to all of you, our church family here in Raymond. And let me tell you, this selling your house business is a lot more complicated than it was when we bought our little cape 25 years ago.

Particularly in the current housing market, it is all so specialized. You have a real estate broker (that is not new), but then the broker urges you to hire a home stager. Now that person’s expertise lies in knowing home buyer tastes and sensibilities.

The home stager will tell you how best to arrange what furniture she thinks you should have in a given room, what centerpiece to place on your dining room table (Should it be a bowl overflowing with clementine oranges or golden delicious apples?), and at what height you should hang the pictures she has carefully chosen for each wall.

The home stager will even do the arranging and all the shopping for you! Her goal is to create an environment that will cause prospective buyers to sense that your house is warm and inviting, one they would pay your list price for in a heartbeat.

One evening recently, I was noodling around on the website of the home stager who had been recommended to us. There I discovered that she has a secondary aspect of her business, which she calls “date staging.”

Apparently she will evaluate your home prior to your big date.

She will make suggestions on furniture and accessories to purchase and will arrange everything for you to make the most positive, warm, and inviting impression possible. Considering how much the date stager charges for her services, I would have to conclude that what one is looking for is not a one night stand but rather a long and serious partnership.

Imagine believing that a loving relationship might blossom because of one’s choice of a blue over a green rug in the living room - or might wither and die because that piece of artwork was hung two inches too high in the bedroom! Oh, my – what we will do for love.

But that is how the old Beatles song goes, right? All you need is love (da, da, da, da, da). All you need is love (da, da, da, da, da). All you need is love, love. Love is all you need…..love is all you need…..love is all you need.

You know, that is the essence of the passage we just read in the Gospel of John. “Love one another as I have loved you.” Love is all you need. That is the root command that Jesus shared with his disciples at the beginning of the end of the last night that he spent with them.

The setting is this. They have shared their last Passover meal together. Jesus will soon walk to the Garden of Gethsemane. There he will be abandoned by his followers and left alone to be captured and later tried and executed.

However, in spite of all that is to come, in that ordinary upper room in the Holy City of Jerusalem, Jesus has just bent over each one of his trusted followers and gently washed their feet with a wrenching poignancy that in a most visceral way turned the tables on the essence of their relationship. Now, as Jesus himself said, they are friends, not master and slave, not teacher and student. Any honor status between them has been wiped away along with the dust between their toes.

As David Ewart writes, “They are friends - they are equals who have a solemn obligation to look out for each other's good - even to the point of laying down one's life (something one would normally only do to defend the honor of a blood relative). And they are not just friends with Jesus. Jesus is commanding them to be friends with one another since that is how he loves them.”

In a single unassuming act, Jesus has illustrated a new model of spirituality. In contrast to the patriarchal paradigm that the disciples had always known, with its language of burdensome servitude to God, Jesus demonstrates a new covenant theology of communion and community. There is an equality and a sense of inclusion that overwhelms as Jesus once again rocks and shocks the world with his simple language of friendship and love.

And that, I believe, is where the joy lies that he promises – in the befriending and in the loving. Of course, it sounds all warm and fuzzy. Would that it were! However, in our heart of hearts, we know that love is not always easy. Earlier in this chapter in the Gospel of John, Jesus said, "As the Father (meaning God) has loved me, so have I loved you."

And how did the God love Jesus? In the words of James Howell, God “pushed him out of the comfortable confines of heaven down onto earth where, as a baby, Herod tried to kill him, the Father sends him into the wilderness for 40 days under assault by the devil trying to get his claws into him, the Father loved him by pressing him into conflict with the super pious and with violent bureaucrats who plotted to put an end to him, and the Father loved him by encircling him with friends who were total knuckleheads. They never "got" what he was about, and they ran for the exits when he could have used a few friends. How did the Father love Jesus? Peril at every turn, demons to be cast out, the sick pulling on him, crowds pressing, a woman yanking the hem of his garment, no roof over his head, and then the worst conceivable end.”

We might wish Jesus had said something else, like: "As (God, that is my father) has loved me...well, I will spare you all of that; I will love you differently; I will let you live on an island of ease and weave a spell of protection around you." But it does not work that way.

If we love as Jesus challenges us to love and if we abide in this love, as James Howell continued, “we may lose the roof over our heads, we will battle devils, people will wrinkle their brow and be totally puzzled by our weirdness, we won't get ahead in the world, (and) we will be catapulted into serving in daunting places.”

No, it is not always easy to love as Jesus loved us. Dr. Peter Storey, a South African spiritual leader who worked alongside Archbishop Tutu and President Nelson Mandela in dismantling apartheid, said that when we invite Christ into our lives, he insists that we let him bring along his friends. Jesus made it unmistakable that we cannot truly love him and not also love the ones he loves and the ones for whom he died. (Bevel Jones).

For me, this notion of radical and uncompromising love is tied closely to the fact that Jesus dubbed those first bumbling disciples his friends. You are my friends. “Love one another as I have loved you.” Love one another as friends.

In the end, I believe we are challenged to look everyone – EVERYONE – in the eye and think to ourselves – you are my friend. In a world where love has unfortunately been cheapened by what color we paint our apartments and what style of lamp is on the end table we were instructed to buy, there is still something about friendship that strips away the layers of cynicism and cultural malaise from even the most jaded among us.

And so we look into the eyes of the man who lost one leg to diabetes and the other to a brown spider bite that we met on our mission trip to Tennessee last summer – and we say to our selves – you are my friend.

And spurred on by those words, we measure and hammer and saw in 95 degree heat and humidity until we never want to see another spindle in our lives, but we build that handicapped ramp, and we construct that back porch so our friend can get in and out of his trailer home more easily and so he has a place to sit and see his beloved hills in the cool of the evening.

And so we look into the eyes of the woman who is bent over by shopping bags and has that beleaguered look and is a regular at the soup kitchen in Portland – and we say to ourselves – you are my friend. And spurred on by those words, with great dignity, we bring her a plate of hot food and a second cup of coffee, and we smile as we tell her goodbye and watch the door shut behind her when she leaves.

Since Jesus loves us with an uncompromising love, so we are called to love one another in the same way. As Lawrence Wood wrote, “[Jesus] calls us to love whether or not we feel love. Sometimes the feeling comes first, and the work is easy….

The difficulty is when we take up the labor before the love. When we get it right…the work of love is hardly work at all.”

In the end, it is really very simple. You know, the Bible has 66 books, 1189 chapters, and some folks have come up with the figure of 92 hours worth of reading. But it all comes down to those eight words. “Love one another as I have loved you.”

That is the prime directive. There is no other, and there is no compromise. That is the truth. In Barbara Berry-Bailey’s words: “Through good, through bad, through stupid and ugly, through beauty and through fun, love one another.”

And we can do it too. We really can. I believe that, and the reason is embedded in all of those “I am” sayings we have pondered over the past couple of weeks. We can do it because we are known and loved by the Good Shepherd who will not run out on us no matter how far off the track we may get. We can do it because we are branches on that old grape vine, and the connection is what we need to nourish ourselves with more than enough love to go around.

The theologian Teilhard de Chardin has written, “Some day, after we have mastered the winds, the waves, the tides, and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love; and then for the second time in the history of the world we will have discovered fire.” My prayer this morning is that such a day will come soon, and that you and I in this small church in Maine will have played a part in its creation as we discover the breadth of friendship and the consequent depth of love.

Sermon - May 17, 2009

“All You Need Is Love”

By Rev. Nancy Foran John 15:9-17

By Rev. Nancy Foran
John 15:9-17