Love One Another (Easter 5 April 28 2013)

Homily.  Yr C Easter 5, April 28 2013, St. Albans

Readings:  Acts 11:1-18; Ps 148; Rev 21:1-6; Jn 13:31-35

Love One Another

I want you to imagine this situation.  You’ve just been told that you have one day left to live.  You have one opportunity to communicate with your friends, to give them one final message.  It’s your last chance to sum things up for them in a way that they’ll remember when you’re gone.  But here’s the catch.  The only way you’ve got to communicate with them is to send them a tweet.  And for those of you who use Twitter, you’ll know that your tweet is limited to 140 characters, so you have to get right to the point, no wasted words, no long-winded speeches allowed.  What would you say?  What would you write in that tweet?

Jesus faced a situation a bit like that the last time he sat down with his disciples.  Of course there wasn’t the tweeting part, but he knew it was his last chance to speak to them.  Judas, his betrayer, had just left to arrange to have Jesus arrested later that night, which in turn would lead to Jesus’ execution the following day.  The scene at that last supper is a tense one.  And Jesus must have thought to himself, “What is the one thing that I want my followers to know and to remember when I’m gone?  What’s the one message they need to hear and learn so that they can carry on my work when I’m no longer with them?”

And so Jesus gets right to the point:  32 words, 130 characters, well within the limits of Twitter:

Love one another.  Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.  By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.

This is the one thing that Jesus wants us to know and do as his followers.  Love one another.  It is at once so simple and yet so difficult.

It’s simple because we know what it means to love.  It’s hard-wired right into our DNA.  Now, there may be some complicated situations when we’re not sure what to do, but 99% of the time we know what it means to love, we know what we should do, and it’s something that each of us does on a regular basis. That’s something we should celebrate.  As humans we are, after all, created in the image of God, and so loving is in our nature.  What’s more, as followers of Jesus we have been blessed with the gift of the Holy Spirit, and that Spirit of God which dwells within us urges each of us to love one another, just as the Spirit urged Peter to get up and go to Cornelius in our first reading this morning from Acts.

  

Love one another just as I have loved you.  It is simple but yet it’s also difficult.  Because often we know what it means to love and yet we don’t do it.  What is it that gets in our way?  Sometimes we’re afraid.  Sometimes our fear of the other overwhelms our love for the other.  Sometimes we’re tired.  After all, love is not effortless.  Sometimes we’re too busy, or too focused on our own goals, or we feel that we don’t have enough time, and the list goes on.

Way back in 1973 there was an interesting experiment done amongst the students at the Princeton Divinity School.  This was a group of young men, in those days it was just men, preparing for ordained ministry. Each of them was asked as part of the experiment to give a spontaneous sermon on why people should always stop to help strangers and each was then told that he had to rush over to the church immediately to deliver the sermon, and that it was important not to be late.  Now as it happened, on their way to the church, each of the students passed a man slumped in an alleyway, in a state of apparent distress.  Unbeknownst to the students, the man was acting the part for the study.

Now even though these priests-in-training were about to preach about helping strangers, how many of them do you think actually stopped to help the man in distress as they hurried along, trying to get to the church on time to deliver their important sermon?  How many?  Well, it was ten percent.  Only one in ten took the time to stop to see if he could help.

Love is difficult because love can be costly.  It can sometimes mean giving up on our own goals, whether that goal is to be on time to preach a sermon, or something else completely, something that might be more applicable to your situation.  It can also mean sometimes that we have to risk criticism from others.  In our first reading from the Book of Acts, Peter reaches out to Cornelius, the Gentile, the Roman soldier.  Peter must have been afraid when a Roman soldier knocked at his door.  But at the urging of the Spirit, he goes with him.  In many ways the book of Acts is all about how Jesus new commandment that we love one another actually plays out in the real, complicated, messy lives of his followers.  And one of the biggest questions that Jesus’ followers have to wrestle with in the book of Acts is the following:  Jesus calls us to love each other, but who gets to be included in that word “the other”?  Is loving one another limited to loving our friends and family?  Is it limited to loving our own “people”, however we may set those boundaries?  Or are we called to go beyond these limitations? To love the other, the stranger, the foreigner, the one who is different from us, the one we are afraid of, the one who is our enemy?

Of course Jesus himself had addressed that very question in the Gospel of Luke, when he was asked “who is my neighbor?” and he responded by telling the story of the Good Samaritan.  But it seems that the lesson of that story didn’t really sink in, not even with Jesus closest friends and followers.

We read in Acts that the early community of followers of Jesus was a Jewish community who couldn’t even imagine that the other that Jesus was talking about might include Gentiles.  And so when Peter, driven by the Spirit of God, goes to the house of the foreigner Cornelius, breaks what he believes is God’s law by entering and eating with them, and then he teaches them and baptizes them, can you imagine the reception he’s going to get when he gets back to Jerusalem?  Peter is criticized, and he is forced to defend himself.  Loving the other can sometimes get us into trouble.  If the other is one of the marginalized in society, then loving the other can put us onto the margins as well.

A few years ago, there was a terrible tragedy that took place in New York City.  A man named Hugo Tale-Yax, a Guatemalan immigrant, homeless because he had just lost his job, early one morning he came upon a woman who was being attacked by a man.  He sprang into action and intervened, possibly saving the woman’s life.  But the assailant had a knife, and he stabbed Mr. Tale-Yax in the chest.  The assailant fled, Mr. Tale-Yax fell to the sidewalk, bleeding to death.  During the next 90 minutes, video camera records showed that there were about 20 people who walked past Mr. Tale-Yax as he lay dying on the sidewalk and not one stopped to help or to call the police.  When someone finally did call 911 and the firefighters arrived, the homeless man was dead.

I don’t know why those passersby didn’t help.  Perhaps they were afraid.  Perhaps they thought it was just another drunk lying on the sidewalk.  Perhaps, like those priests-in-training, they were focused on their own stuff, or they were in a hurry.

I don’t know much about the homeless man either.  I don’t know why he chose to act.  I don’t know if he was an atheist, or a Jew, or a Christian or a Muslim.  I don’t know if he had been baptized, or had ever attended a church, or had ever heard the words of Jesus.  I don’t know how he would have described himself or his beliefs.

But I do know this about him.  Hugo Tale-Yax, by his actions, showed himself to be a disciple of Jesus.

Because Jesus said “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another.  Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.  By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love one for another.”

Amen.