Sermon for the Fifth Sunday of Easter – May 15, 2022
John 13:31-35
Dear friends, grace to you and peace from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ.
Church is messy. If you’ve spent any amount of time in a Christian congregation, you already knew that. Church is messy because it is full of people, and people are messy. Whenever you get a group of sinners together in community it is inevitable that those relationships are going to be messy at times.
I did my pastoral internship in North Dakota, and I remember being at a gathering of all the interns in the synod. We met with Bishop Rick Foss who huddled us together for some straight talk about ministry. He leaned in close and told us, “It’s the relationships that are going to be hard.” He explained that most of what we do as pastors isn’t that difficult. Most of us who have been called to ordained ministry enjoy writing sermons and planning worship services and doing Bible studies, so most of the time those tasks aren’t going to be a problem. “It’s the relationships that are going to be hard,” he said.
And he was so right. The most difficult part of ministry is navigating the relationships within a congregation – and what is true for pastors is just as true for you as members. It’s the relationships that are so challenging. It’s the relationships that make it hard to walk through the church doors sometimes. Church is messy, and it is messy because people are messy.
Today we hear Jesus give his disciples a new commandment: that we love one another. “Just as I have loved you,” Jesus says, “you also should love one another.”
It is important to note that Jesus gave this commandment in the midst of all kinds of messiness among his disciples. Jesus gives this commandment after washing the feet of this disciples, after he dealt with the literal mess of their filthy feet. Jesus had been dealing with the mess of this odd assortment of people he had called to be his disciples, from Simon the Zealot with his “Make Israel Great Again” hat to the tax-and-spend Matthew, who gouged his neighbors to pay for Rome’s massive big government spending bill. These disciples argued with one another about who would be the greatest in the kingdom. They regularly misunderstood Jesus and did things that were contrary to his will. Just before this passage, Jesus pointed out that one of his disciples would betray him, and just after this passage he told Peter that, in spite of his bravado, Peter would deny even knowing him three times before the night was passed. Messy, right?
We can even look more widely at the kinds of people Jesus had been doing ministry among before that night. We see both the overeducated elite like Nicodemus and blue collar fishermen like James and John. We see prominent, wealthy people like Zaccheus and Joseph of Arimathea as well as lepers and prostitutes. Messy, right?
Well, what if this messiness isn’t a bug, but a feature of the Christian church? That is to say, what if Jesus knows exactly what he’s doing by assembling all these different kinds of people together, both then and now?
The kind of love Jesus calls his people to have for one another is a specific kind of love. We usually think of love as really liking something or someone a lot. But that’s not the kind of love Jesus is talking about here. This isn’t the kind of love he commands. The Greek word here is agape, and it refers to a love that is sacrificial and steadfast. It isn’t about feelings or really liking someone, it is about actions and behaviors and attitudes. It is about bearing with someone, even suffering for someone.
St. Paul writes beautifully about agape love in 1 Corinthians 13. The passage is often associated with weddings, which is fine, but if you look at the wider context Paul is specifically talking about the kind of love Christians are to have for one another. He’s talking about what love looks like in Christian community, in congregational life. He writes, “Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” This is what agape love is to look like in a Christian congregation.
“I give you a new commandment,” Jesus says, “that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.” Living this out is messy. We are as diverse and at times at odds with one another as Jesus’ first disciples, and loving one another in spite of our many differences is difficult. But I don’t think Jesus made a mistake in gathering us together. I think this is how he teaches us to practice agape love. It is in the difficult work of being patient with one another and bearing with one another and enduring all things together that we carry out Jesus’ commandment to love one another. It is the relationships that make church hard at times, but that is how we grow as disciples of Jesus.
At church, including here at Oak Harbor Lutheran Church, you will encounter people with different personalities than you. You will encounter people with different passions and perspectives than you. You will meet people who have different vocations and callings than you. You will worship alongside people who have different approaches to solving worldly problems than you. You will be in fellowship with people who apply their faith in ways differently than you.
This isn’t to say that anything goes. At my ordination I vowed to preach and teach in accordance with scripture and the Lutheran Confessions, and our constitution holds us accountable to those same boundaries. Even so, that’s still a pretty big tent we gather under, so we should expect that it is going to be messy!
But it is in the messiness that we learn to love with patience and with kindness. If we were all robots with the exact same programming, church would always be smooth sailing. But Jesus didn’t gather together robots. He gathered us.
I’ve wondered at times why we have this gospel reading again now in the Easter season when we already hear it every year on Maundy Thursday. And it occurred to me this year that maybe it is in the lectionary again now so we can look at it again from a different angle. Maybe it is in the lectionary again during the Easter season so we can look at it from the perspective of the resurrection.
You see, we could never begin to carry out this commandment to love one another were it not for the love our risen Lord Jesus has shown towards us. The commandment itself comes wrapped in the promise of Christ’s love for us: “JUST AS I HAVE LOVED YOU,” Jesus says, “you also should love one another. Christ’s love comes first, and because Christ is risen, he can keep on filling us up with his love. His undying and eternal love becomes a renewable resource in our lives, tuning our hearts to his commands. It is ultimately not our human efforts but the power of the resurrection that begins to move the needle in our feeble hearts towards loving one another with agape love.
I am grateful for all the ways Christ’s agape love shows up in the life of our congregation. We recently had a new batch of people join our congregation, and I think at one time or another just about every one of them commented on how warm and welcoming this place has been to them, and how powerfully they feel the love of Christ here. While recent politics has taken a toll on the church, including our congregation, I regularly see people from opposite ends of the political spectrum sitting together at fellowship, genuinely enjoying one another’s company. While sometimes people drop out of church after the slightest offense, I have also seen people in this congregation go to great lengths to reconcile with one another after a conflict. The risen Lord is at work here at Oak Harbor Lutheran church, and I am grateful to serve in such a healthy and resilient and loving congregation.
But even here, church is messy. It is the relationships that make it hard at times. But because Christ is risen, we have an ever-present love in our lives that keeps calling us back into the messiness, where the great love that has been given to us can begin to flow through us, so that we would love one another as Jesus loves us.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
Rev. Jeffrey R. Spencer
Oak Harbor Lutheran Church