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Sermon for the Sixth Sunday of Easter – May 9, 2021
John 15:9-17
Dear friends, grace to you and peace from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ.
As many of you know, we have a preschool here at Oak Harbor Lutheran Church. It is called “His Kids Preschool.” I’ve been leading chapel services for our “His Kids” students for ten years now, and I thought I had seen it all. But this year I encountered something different. I’m not talking about COVID. That has certainly made for a different school year and I wrote about that in our most recent church newsletter. I’m talking about something else. At some point this past school year, several of the students in both the morning and the afternoon classes started saying something as they left chapel. They started saying, “I love you, Pastor Jeff.”
I have to admit that when they started saying this I was uncomfortable. I didn’t really know how to respond. I was kind of hesitant and guarded in my response. I’m a little ashamed to say that, at first, I couldn’t bring myself to say, “I love you too,” back to them. I mean, those are potent words. I felt like I should save those words for my own kids. And so, instead, I said something lame like, “Oh, you’re so sweet,” or, “Thank you, I appreciate that.”
Over the course of the school year, however, I changed my mind. I changed my mind because they changed my heart. Because, you see, no matter how lame my response was to them, no matter how stingy I was with the words, “I love you,” they kept on saying it. “I love you, Pastor Jeff,” they kept saying, week after week. And so at some point in the school year I started saying, “I love you too.” And as we come to the end of the school year, I say it comfortably and sincerely and without hesitation. I will always love my own sons in a more profound way, but I have come to say “I love you too” to these preschoolers in part because they have worn me down my defenses with their persistent love. I have come to say “I love you too” to these preschoolers not because they are my own kids, but because they are His Kids. They are God’s kids, and if God loves them and has chosen them and has brought them into our community of faith, how can I do anything other than say, “I love you too?” And in being freed to say it back to them, this school year – in spite of all the challenges – has been a tremendous joy.
In our gospel reading for this Sunday Jesus calls upon his followers to love one another. His commandment to us is that we love one another as he has loved us. And I have to say that I think that much of the time we are as stupid and stingy with our love for one another as I was with those preschoolers at the beginning of the school year.
I think this is in part due to the very shallow understanding of love we have absorbed from the culture around us. Our culture teaches us that love is an emotion. It is a warm, tender feeling or a flutter in your tummy. To take this a step further, our culture often confuses love with sexual attraction. Or our culture teaches us that love is a matter of compatibility, of like-mindedness. It happens when personality-types mesh well. And so love, we think, is what happens when something makes us feel a certain way, either in our heart or in our tummy or in our privates. Love is what happens when we find someone who thinks like we do and acts in ways we approve of and appreciate.
I’m not saying those factors are entirely irrelevant, but that isn’t what Christian love is. That isn’t the kind of love Jesus is calling us to have for one another. “No one has greater love than this,” Jesus says, “to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” That’s real love, Jesus says. That’s the top shelf stuff. That’s Christian love.
Christian love is different from the kind of love our culture has us chasing. Instead of being self-focused, Christian love is selfless. Christian love is sacrificial. This doesn’t necessarily mean literally giving up your life for someone. On rare occasions it might mean that, but more often it simply means getting over yourself! Christian love means letting go of your selfish impulses for the sake of the other. Christian love means receiving others into your life not because of how they make you feel or what they can do for you, but simply because they are people for whom Christ died, because they are children of God, because they are His kids.
We are commanded by our Lord Jesus to love each other in this way. Not only in our families, not only with our own children and spouses, but here in the church. We are called to love one another this way as Christians so that we might bear witness to the love of God to all the world.
Unfortunately, we don’t do a very good job of this. So often we are hesitant and guarded with one another. The world continues to divide us up and pit us against one another, coming up with more and more things for us to disagree about, constantly feeding our addiction to anger, and so we are often reserved and suspicious and uncomfortable with one another. This has always been the case, but the political climate and pandemic stress and widespread loss of trust has made it all so much worse. And so we hold back our love, saving it for our select circle. Dear friends, this isn’t how it is supposed to be. We are called to a higher love, freely given.
Thankfully, no matter how stupid or stingy we are with our love, Jesus keeps pouring his out upon us. He does so right here today through his Word. “As the Father has loved me,” Jesus says, “so I have loved you.” Jesus calls us to abide in his love – to receive it, to remain in it. The commandment to love one another comes out of his promise that he already loves us, and he isn’t shy about saying it again and again! The kind of love we are to have for one another has already been granted to us through his saving work for us on the cross, where, out of his great love for us, he literally laid down his life for us. Jesus calls us his friends. He calls us his chosen ones. We are His kids.
As we abide in the relentless love of our Lord Jesus, he wears down our defenses, he strips away our false, cheap notions of love, he changes our hearts so that we can keep his commandment and love one another as he has loved us.
Jesus says to us today: “As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you.” He will keep on saying this to us until it sinks in enough for us to say, “I love you too.” He will say it over and over again so that we will begin to embody that love for him in our love for one another right here in this congregation, and with all who are His kids. He will keep on calling us to abide in his love, so that we would begin to live out this higher love, freely given, in all our relationships – and in so doing, our joy would be complete.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
Rev. Jeffrey R. Spencer
Oak Harbor Lutheran Church