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If you are going to be Christian, you have to talk about Jesus. I have learned that lots of people in our congregation are somewhat self-conscious (or even embarrassed) to talk much about him. So in this sermon from April 27, 2008, I explored what it might mean to talk about loving Jesus ..
If You Love Me
Acts 17:22-31 John 14:15-21
Most of the time I object to scripture study and sermons that treat individual verses from the Bible as though they were “sound bytes.” With a few notable exceptions (like the book of Proverbs and some of the Psalms), every verse has a context – it is part of a story or a letter, for example. Understanding the verse requires that we study that context as well as the specific words. Well, today I am going to make an exception and look at just nine words from the Gospel of John.
Before I do that, though, I have to give a compliment to the Apostle Paul. You all know by know that I have a complicated relationship with the writings of St. Paul: I variously find him to be wordy, dense, inspiring, confusing, and eloquent. But I stand in awe of this sermon he preached to the citizens of Athens. He begins respectfully, honors their religious beliefs, and nonetheless delivers a beautiful summary of the Christian faith, along with a gracious invitation to become part of the movement. It is a passage to which I return when I want to appreciate skillful rhetoric in the service of deep faith, and I invite you to put it on your list of “favorites,” too.
Now, those nine words: “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.” [John 14:15]
From time to time I see a cartoon – in the newspaper or maybe the New Yorker – and the point of the joke is that what one person says is not the same thing as another person hears. So, for example, Jeremy’s mother in “Zits” says “Please take out the garbage,” and what Jeremy hears is “you are my domestic slave.” I worry that these nine words from the fourth gospel often get caught in that kind of misunderstanding.
Jesus is very clear, actually: “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.” What many people hear, though, is “If you keep my commandments, I will love you.” Now that’s a simple enough mistake to make. Many of our human relationships work like that: our connections with one another are based on experience. We consider people who are affectionate, loyal, and trustworthy to be friends. If someone demonstrates that she lacks those qualities, we don’t become friends, or we let the friendship lapse.
Moreover, there are many passages in the Bible (especially in the Older Testament) that say that God rewards those who are faithful and righteous and does not reward those who are not. Even Jesus tells his followers about the reckoning at the end of time when God will welcome those who have served others and cast out everyone else.
So, it is especially important that we hear what Jesus said in this verse, not what we were expecting to hear, or what we have heard from other humans, or even what we have heard in church or Sunday School. And what Jesus said was, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.”
I am spending this much time on these nine words for three reasons. The first is personal: this is an idea that literally changed my life. The moment came in a Bible study in the library at my church in Seattle.. I don’t remember what we were studying, but I do remember what one of our pastors said: “We don’t do good deeds in order to get God to love us; we do good deeds in response to knowing that God already loves us.” Or as it says in one of the Vacation Bible School songs I once taught: “We love because God first loved us.” It is hard to explain, after all these years, just how startled and moved I was by that clear and simple theological statement. Like many of you, I hadn’t given a great deal of thought about my spiritual life between high school and my mid-thirties. Somehow these words brought together all of my careless thinking about God and human behavior and neatly summed up a distinctly Christian doctrine. Faith became, in an instant, a matter of responding to God’s love and grace, not chasing them.
The second reason is pastoral; let me explain what I mean by using baptism as an example. When I spoke with Candi and Chad about Abigail’s baptism, I reminded them that our action here in church with words and water does not change how God feels about their child. God welcomes, loves, and blesses Abigail without any assistance from us. What we do in baptism is not to earn or insure God’s grace; what we do in baptism is to celebrate God’s grace. The same is true of worship, prayer, and the various spiritual disciples. We do not undertake them in order to get God to pay attention to us, to answer our prayers, or to grant us special favors. We do these things in response to the glorious and unnerving realization that God already pays attention to us, already answers our prayers, and has granted us more favors than we are generally inclined to notice.
The third reason is ecclesiastical, that is, it has to do with the church. In particular, it has to do with our church, our congregation. You may notice that when we welcome newcomers into membership, we ask them two quaint-sounding questions: “Do you love the Lord Jesus Christ?” and “Do you purpose to live according to his law of Love?” Which are pretty close, I think, to the nine words from the Gospel of John: “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.”
Two years ago, some members of the spring new member class asked me about those two questions. The truth is, after all, that we do not talk much about “loving Jesus” around here. In response, I wrote a sermon about the ways I love Jesus. I’ll put that whole sermon up on the website if you would like, but let me remind you of the ways I have discovered that I really do love Jesus:
· I love that Jesus is both fully human and fully divine, that he worked and played and ate with his friends and sometimes got crabby, like anyone, and at the same time he was filled with God in a way different than anyone else.
· I love that Jesus spoke to both women and men, not just to persons of both genders, but using language and metaphors that touched the lives of both men and women.
· I love that Jesus was healer, and that health and wholeness were so important in his ministry.
· I love that Jesus was passionate about Justice.
· I love that Jesus “spoke the truth to power,” in the tradition of the Hebrew prophets – but also in the language of story and parable.
· I love that Jesus moved to the end of his life with resolve and courage, but also with sadness and fear.
What I am leading up to here is that I think it is time for us – our congregation, our United Church of Christ, our style of progressive Christianity – it is time for us to reclaim the habit of loving Jesus. You know me well enough to know that I am not talking about a sentimental attachment. I have little use for the romantic portraits of Jesus, whether those are paintings that show him as fair-skinned and blonde, hymns that describe him as meek and mild, or poems that never get past the image of the good shepherd.
And I know you well enough to know that many members of this congregation have good reasons for feeling reluctant about the invitation to love Jesus. Significant harm has been done to many of you in the name of Jesus, and the kinds of churches and the kind of theology that troubles us spiritually, emotionally, and politically is often wrapped up in a lot of talk about “loving Jesus.”
It is still a vital and essential thing to do. Nothing else, really, can sustain a life of discipleship. It is good and important for our minds to be engaged in being Christian, but when life challenges us, when death confronts us, when courage fails us, or when comfort eludes us – we need more than thinking. We need the habit of loving Jesus. We need to be able to fall back upon a relationship that has become deeper and richer; we need to be able to abide with the complicated and charismatic incarnation of the God who is always a mystery. We need to make peace with all the foolish, naïve, self-indulgent visions that humans have had of Jesus – even those we have entertained ourselves. There is, in the end, no way to be a Christian without loving Jesus – even if we do so tardily, tentatively, reluctantly, or even intermittently. Or as Jesus said, in just nine words: “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.”
Amen.
