Finally, we're done with all these sermons about Love...

By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and obey God’s commandments. For the love of God is this, that we obey God’s commandments. And God’s commandments are not burdensome, for whatever is born of God conquers the world. 

(1 John 5:2-4a) Easter 6B readings

Love, love, love. dah dah dah, love, love, love….All you need is…Love. All you need is Love…My hope is to have you leaving worship today with that earworm stuck in your head! Because the lectionary for this year has assigned the First Letter of John, we’ve been talking for weeks about love. This week John switches it up a little bit, though, and give us two other repeating words in addition to the word love: commandments, and obey. Those don’t sound quite as warm and fuzzy.

John says loving God means obeying God’s commandments. Obeying God’s commandments is the topic of the book What if Jesus Was Serious that our confirmation class is reading right now. The author, Skye Jethani, compares Jesus’ teachings—specifically Jesus’ longest ethical teaching about love in action, the Sermon on the Mount—with the way Christians live, and he notes that it seems apparent we mostly ignore what Jesus says to do. Jethani challenges us to not only listen more deeply to Jesus, but to obey Jesus—to be not only hearers of the Word, but also doers, as James says in his Epistle. Jethani provokes us to take the commands of Jesus seriously, to obey the commandments to love: “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.” 

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus’ has commands like this: “If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other also…if anyone would take your tunic, let them have your cloak as well…give to the one who begs from you…love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” To be a follower of Jesus is to behave differently that the rest of the world. Jethani puts it this way: “The narcissist loves only themselves. The nationalist loves only their own tribe. The activist loves only their own cause. The idealist loves only their own thoughts. The humanist loves only their own concept of humanity. The Christian loves the irritating person right in front of them.” One concrete thing you can do, to take Jesus seriously, starting today, is to take a moment to identify one of the “enemies” in your life, someone you struggle to love, and ask Jesus to give you the grace to love them. Starting today. Starting right now. Seriously. I’m giving you 30 seconds to do that. Ask for the grace to love someone you find annoying or ungracious or unlovable, someone on the other side of one of the great divides in our world. Jesus said pray for those who persecute you, pray for those who hate you. Picture them now. Know that Jesus loves them just as much as Jesus loves you. Ask Jesus to help you love them that same way.

Jesus’ commands to love our enemies and to pray for them are, really, not two different commands. To love someone, as God loves, as Jesus loves, is obviously not romantic or sentimental; it is to will and to act for the benefit of the other. When we pray, that “other” is transformed as we see them in the light of God’s presence. This kind of prayer will ultimately bring us to act in the best interest of the other—as Jesus did for us—as Jesus did not only for us, “but for the sins of the whole world,” as we say in the Rite I Eucharistic prayer. 

As we wrap up Eastertide and move towards Pentecost, this is the fifth and final week we hear readings about all this “love” one another thing. “I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another. “I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing,” we heard Jesus say in today’s Gospel. This sermon is our last chance, so to speak, to focus so completely on Jesus’ commandments to love. One of the hundreds of quotes attributed to Mark Twain, one of my favorites, is this one: “It’s not the parts of the Bible I don’t understand that bother me—it’s the parts I do understand.” Zosima, the revered monk in The Brothers Karamazov, in trying to explain loving your neighbor, says, “Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams” (Chapter 4). We are here today, each of us, because we know that to be true. We’re here because we want to be love in action for the world, because we do hear Jesus calling us “friends” and not “servants”, because we do understand, even if we may not always live, Jesus’ harsh and dreadful commandments to love our enemies.

My prayer for us all this week is that we will confess to ourselves a bit of Mr. Twain’s discomfort, that we’ll take to heart these five weeks of Scripture readings about the command to love. We know what our Master did; we know how our Master loved; we know what our Master commands us to do. I pray that we’ll obey those commands and be spurred on to love in action, first by praying for one another—even our “enemies” as we did a few minutes ago—and then, as our prayers causes us to abide more and more in Jesus’ love, we’ll find our lives and others’ lives and the world changed and transformed and redeemed by that love in action. 

“God’s commandments are not burdensome, for whatever is born of God conquers the world.” All we need is love. Love is all we need.