Who Are We to Love? (John 13:31-35; Acts 11:1-18)

      Who are we to love?  The two passages we read, together, explore that question, and I think it’s a perennial one that percolates along in our collective sub-consciousness, whether we know it or not . . . During my formative years – the 1960's – there was a major sea change in society’s answer to that question . . .  the “free-love movement” began as a serious asking of that question, a serious challenge to the ever-increasing alienation and hypocrisy and self-involvement that rampaged – and still rampages – through our culture. It’s hard to remember that that’s how it began, because all we can picture are the excesses, all the “let’s thumb-our-noses-at-our-parents” images shown on television, but it is was the era of “Jesus freaks,” of experiments in communal living which – after all – were modeled on the way the first Christians lived.  In the mid-60s the answer to the question was clear to the flower-children, at least: Who are we to love?  Why, everyone, of course . . . just as Jesus taught.

      The children of the sixties were searching for a better way, embodied by the Beatles song “All You Need is Love.”  But by the turn of the decade it had all come apart.  In 1970, like a-ticking-clockwork announcement that the ‘60s were indeed dead, along came another song – this time by rocker Stephen Stills.  We boomers – and you know who you are – might remember it – “If you're down and confused, And you don't remember who you're talkin' to, Concentration slips away, 'Cause your baby is so far away . . . and if you can’t be with the one you love, honey, love the one you’re with.”  And in the end, the idealism of the sixties gave way to a crass sexualization, where “free love” degenerated into “free sex.”  Who are we to love?  Honey? “Love the One You’re With.”  It’s love as self-gratification, where there’s a girl, right next to you . . . and she’s just waitin’ for somethin’ to do, and that girl is nothing much more than a way to satisfy your own needs, an object. And even though you may be the same to her, somehow I don’t think that’s what Jesus meant when he said “love one another.”

      And sixties flower children grew up to be today’s boomer bankers and lawyers and . . . preachers, and even though we think we know better, even though we’ve been told and may even believe that the 60s were disastrous for the notion of love, I’m not so sure many of us boomers – or many from other generations, for that matter – have any better answer to the question of just whom we are to love. In Peter’s day, the Israelites thought they knew the answer, too, and for them it was cut and dried: they are to love, they are to do for, eat with, associate with only folks just like them. They all dressed the same way, they all ate the same things, and they all worshiped exactly the same way.  And the ultimate brand of belonging, of we-are-us-and-nobody-else, was circumcision, a privilege reserved only for the males, and which marked them for life.

      And in the passage from Acts, Christian Jews, circumcised Christians, those who’d come to believe that Jesus was Lord, criticizePeter for eating with these uncircumcised Gentile believers.  They say “Why did you go to uncircumcised men and eat with them?”  And by way of reply, Peter tells them of a vision sent to him by the Lord.  Now, this is the second time we hear of this vision in Acts . . . the first time is as it happens; this time, Peter recalls it verbatim.  It was in Joppa, he says, and I was praying and in a trance I saw a vision.  “Something like a large sheet was let down from heaven” and notice it was “something like” a large sheet, or literally a large piece of linen . . . it clearly wasn’tsuch a thing, but Peter doesn’t know how else to describe it . . . visions are often like that, what’s seen is too fantastic to describe accurately, and we’re left with only the dreamer’s impression, as she or he compares it to something known.  Ezekiel said something of the sort – only in Hebrew – when he had his vision of God: he saw “something like gleaming amber” with “something like four living creatures” . . . in the middle of each was “something that looked like coals” . . . visions of the divine are like that, beyond the ken of our abilities to comprehend . . . and the sheet was let down from heaven by its four corners – and what else do we know that’s supposed to be belowheaven and have four corners? – it was let down by its four corners, and on it Peter saw four-footed animals, reptiles, birds of the air, beasts of prey – all the critters of the earth, all squirming and slithering and galumphing across the sheet, and dig it – it’s like a silent newsreel, up on a screen, they’re without a sound, but in fascinatingly colorful motion . . . and a voice said to Peter “Get up, Peter, kill and eat . . .” and we can only imagine his reaction, it’s hard to feel it in our Gentile guts . . . it would be like on that TV show “Fear Factor” when the contestants are asked to eat sheep eyeballs or earthworm leavings or something, but for Peter it was probably worse . . . he was the product of a thousand years of purity laws, where eating indiscriminately of the beasts of the earth was considered blasphemous . . . unclean . . . profane . . . and so his reaction is only appropriate: By no means, Lord! Certainly not!  Nothing profane or unclean has ever entered mymouth! But the voice came back saying “What God has made clean, you must not call profane!”

      What God has made clean,you must not call profane . . . well, that was news to Peter, I’m sure . . . just when had God made all these things clean? Must’ve been when he wasn’t looking . . . but it all happened three times – and three is a verysignificant biblical number! – so God must’ve been serious, and then Woosh!the sheet was whisked off up into heaven, like the backdrop in an old-fashioned vaudeville show.  And that’s what it was: not vaudeville, of course, but a show nevertheless – it was a demonstration, a tableau, a helpful illustration.  And the symbolism is clear: four-corners . . . below heaven . . . filled with creepy-crawlies . . . the earth, and all that is in it, ready to be fried up for Peter’s use.  It was enough to give an observant Jew the vapors.

      And if that’s not weird enough, he says, three Caesareans – there’s that number three, again! – came up to him out of the blueand asked to go with them, and to a Gentile’s house, to boot.  Now, we know – because Luke has told us earlier in Acts – that this Gentile’s name was Cornelius, and he told Peter that an angelhad appeared to him, And Peter says: “As I began to speak, the Holy Spirit fell upon them” – Cornelius and the other Caesareans, that is – “just as it had upon usat the beginning.”  And of course, what he’s talking about is at Pentecost – which we’ll celebrate in a couple of weeks – when the Spirit came upon the disciples in tongues of fire . . . and as Peter finishes his story, he says: “if God gave them the same gift he gave us when we believed, who was I that I could hinder God?”  And his Jewish-Christian audience falls silent, and then praises God, saying “God has given even to the Gentiles the repentance that leads to life.”

      Do you remember over in the book of John, and Jesus is talking to the Pharisee Nicodemus? And Nicodemus can’t quite wrap his mind around God’s plan for salvation, and Jesus tells him “Don’t be astonished . . . the wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you don’t know where it comes from or where it goes . . . and so it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”  In our story, the circumcised Christians – and Peter before them – experience this first hand.  The Spirit of God blew someplace they couldn’t even imagine, and as it did, it worked a new thingin the world, or at least new to the likes of the circumcised Christians . . . and if these first century Christians, so much closer to the Christ-event than we are, were unprepared for the this new thing, how much less prepared are we today?

      Because I, for one, have to admit it . . . with all the worldly evidence againstthe Spirit’s moving around me, all the killing in Syria, the genocide in Africa and bombings and , it’s hard for me to see, or even to imagine,the Spirit working in our world.  It’s hard for me to picture what a new, surprising Spirit-action might be in our cold-steel scientific culture that denies even the existenceof a spiritual reality beneath the physical one we all can see.  And yet . . . we can be assured that the Spirit is moving, that it isworking even in our dangerous world.  And we can know, without a doubt,that its ways will be as different and surprising to usas they will to Peter and the other Christian Jews 2000 years ago.

      But what shouldn’tsurprise us about the actions of the Spirit are its motives, for although we probably can’timagine where God’s Spirit will blow next, we canbe pretty certain of the end-product: it’ll be an expression of God’s lovefor humankind.  Paul, as usual, said it well: “the Spirit helps us in our weakness,” interceding with sighs too deep for words.  Jesus sent the Spirit as an advocate for us, God’s children, and nowhere is that better seen than in our passage.  The Spirit descends upon Gentiles, working in them to the total astonishment of the Jewish Christians.  They are so dumbfounded that they are silenced at first, and then burst out in rejoicing, praising the Lord, for even though they are surprised, they know the truth of the matter.

      And the truth of the matter is that God’s love – shown through the sending of God’s son Jesus Christ – is for everyone, Jew or Gentile, man or woman, slave or free . . . everyone.  As John put it, God so loved the world . . . the world, not just Jews, not just Americans, not just Christians, that God sent his only begotten Son.  And that, brothers and sisters, brings it back to love . . . if God so loved the world, who are weto love?  In our story from Acts, the answer is clear: the Spirit of God demonstrated God’s love for Gentiles as well as for Jews, for people not-like Jewish Christians as well as those likethem.  The Jewish people had hitherto only loved the ones they’re with, only the ones in their tribe, their own family.  The Holy Spirit showed decisively that God’s love extends to the so-called unclean as well.

      So who are weto love?  Jesus, in our passage from John, puts it succinctly: “I give you a new commandment,” he says, “that you love one another.  Just as I have loved you,” he says, “you also should love one another.” And of course, that last is the clincher: it tells us just howwe are to love one another: as Jesushas loved us.  And Jesus loved us madly,indiscriminately and with passion, he served us, healed us and – in the end – diedfor us . . . and, as Peter and the circumcised Christians found out, he loved people who are not us.  And so now we come to it:  who are we to love?  Who Jesus loved, of course, and that is everyone.  And it’s not an option, is it?  It’s a commandment, we have no choice, as followers of Jesus Christ.  We must love everybody:  Republicans, Democrats and Independents.  Bankers, lawyers and drug addicts.  The English, the Chinese and Iraqi terrorists held as prisoners-of-war.  Jesus – who was, in fact, God – loved us, and we are to love everybody we meet, just like him.

      But dig it – with a simple change of tone, the subject of our question shifts to us: who are weto love?  Who are weto presume to love everyone, to even thinkwe can love as Jesus did?  For that matter,howare we to love people we can’t stand, people we’re afraid of, who may have harmed us or someone close to us?  That’s the subject of another sermon, of course, but here’s the answer in a nutshell: we’re Christians, of course . . . we’re the people to whom Jesus sent the advocate, the comforter, that very same Holy Spirit who came upon those Gentiles in front of Peter’s astonished face.  And as we struggle to do what Christ commands, as we struggle to lovein this increasingly chaotic world, we have the Spirit with us as he promised.  Because it’s all there, all caught up in the answer to our question:  who are weto love?  We’re children, of course, of a loving God.  Amen.

Is Seeing Believing? (John 20:19-31)

Our lectionary reading is really two post-resurrection appearance stories, tied together by Thomas the Twin, who dominates the second half.  The first occurs in the evening of the first day of the week following the crucifixion, when Jesus comes to the disciples where they are huddled in a house, behind locked doors for fear of the religious authorities . . . last week we saw what had happened on the morningof that same day . . . Mary had come weeping to the tomb, had found it empty, and when Jesus appeared standing before her, she only recognized him after he called her by name, and she ran to tell the disciples she’d seen him.

All this to say that Jesus having been raised was not a new concept to the disciples, they’d heard it from Mary, and that may have been why they were gathered there in the house, behind those locked doors.  To discuss the possibility of his being alive, and perhaps to talk about what he would do to them if he were.  After all, hadn’t they betrayed him, hadn’t they deserted him?  Hadn’t they denied him not once, not twice, but three times?  If he really had come back, wouldn’t he want to punish them, to exact revenge for their folly? That’s certainly what an earthlymaster would have done to people who had abandoned him, betrayed him, and denied him, and it wouldn’t be rewarding them with an all-expense-paid trip to the Virgin Isles.

And Behold!  There he is!  Jesus, standing before them, just like he stoodbefore Mary, and the Greek verb to standis repeated here . . . he stands among them, like he stoodbefore Mary, and just as he will standbefore the them in later on, when Thomas is among them . . . he’s not floating, not hovering, he’s standing on two feet. Solid. Earthy.  Nothing ghostly about him at all, no siree Bob!  And now to their fear of the Romans, they might have added their fear of his wrath.

That’s why it’s so important that the first words out of his mouth are “Peace be with you” . . . it disarms for all time their fears of retribution, and points the way to the new creation, where revenge and reprisal are not the normative response, where payback is not the way business is done.   But wait . . . there’s more!  He then shows them his nail-scarred hands and his sword pierced side . . . and this flows out of the first pronouncement of peace, it is connected to it. By showing the marks of his death, his crucifixion, he is saying that this peace is more than just a lack of strife—though it certainly implies that as well.  But even more, there is a peace in the never-ending war with the Powers, the power of death over our lives.  And this peace is predicated on the fact—evidenced by those wounded hands and feet—that he has conquered death, he has triumphed over the powers that be. No longer will death signal an end, no longer will we cease to be, but in some unspecified fashion, we will exist beyond it.  Here was the proof, standing before them.

But Jesus says “Peace be with you” once again, and this time it is connected with a sending: “As the father has sent me, so I send you” and this sounds important and significant, an elevation of the disciples’ station in life, but I wonder: after the excitement of the appearance of their beloved master dies down, when they go to their pallets deep in the night to sleep, do they ponder that double-edged statement?  Did they think about what it meant to be sent just like Jesus? Did they remember just how God sent his only son?

Well.  As if to cement the deal, he breatheson them, and is it the same breath that blew across the waters at creation? Is it the word that became flesh, the word that was spoken to Mary in the garden?  Is Jesus bestowing something of himself upon his followers,  Something of his essence?  Earlier, he’d promised them an advocate, a Holy Spirit, which would teach them everything . . . and so here we have the fulfillment of that promise. No massive crowds, no tornado-wind-sound, no dancing tongues of flame.  Just the Spirit, the pneuma, born on the pneuma—which also means breath—of Christ.

The Spirit has been given to them as an advocate, to teach them, to empowerthem to be the ones who are sent . . . and the first thing Jesus tells them they are sent to dois to follow in his footsteps, to continue in his work of forgiving sins: whatever sins they forgive will be forgiven; whatever sins they retain will be retained.  Only . . . if what Jesus does is the model for what they are to do, if they are sent as Jesus is sent,I cannot imagine them as retaining many sins.  Jesus’ life and work was radical in its notion that everyone should be included, that no one is exempt from the reconciling grace of God.  If what Jesus has done is normative for us,there would be a whole lot of forgiving going on, and no retaining at all.

So that’s what the Holy Spirit teaches and empowers us to do: to display God’s forgiving grace to all we meet, to be signs and effectors,doers of that amazing grace.  No matter how hard we find it, no matter how difficult or abhorrent or downright painful it is, we have the Spirit of Godon our side, who teaches us and reveals to us and comforts us as and powers us as weare sent just as Godsent Jesus the Christ.

And now we’re told that Thomas isn’t there, Thomas the Twin, who is nevercalled doubting Thomas anywhere in the gospels, and this introduces and gives a basis for the third post-resurrection story that John tells us, and the second half of today’s lesson . . . and I personally think it’s a set-up, that—like Peter—Thomas represents more than himself, he represents a general attitude, a seeing-is-believing one that is not too far removed from the one that prevails, or has prevailed, in our Western society in the twentieth and now twenty-first centuries.  His outburst—dutifully reported by John—sets us up to hear and interpret Jesus’ lesson at the end.

"Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands,” he says “and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe."  And when, a week later, Jesus appears standing before them, just as he’d stood before Mary, just as he’d stood before the disciples the previous week, Thomas is with them.  Once again, Jesus wishes them peace, and—knowing what Thomas had said—offered to let him touch his hands and side.  “Do not doubt,” he says “but believe.” 

But Thomas no longer needs to put his finger in the nail-holes or his hand in the side, like the other disciples, he believes it’s him just by sight.  “My Lord and my God!” he says.  And here’s the set-up:  Jesus, never one to pass up a teachable moment, uses Thomas’ having to see to believe, his refusal to believe just because he’s been told, to make one last point: “Have you believed because you have seen me?”  he asks, and of course, the answer is “Uh . . . yes . . .” and I can just see Thomas looking hang-dog and shuffling his feet.  “Blessed are those who have notseen and yet have come to believe.”

And this word “blessed” in Greek is a technical term, and I’ve seen it translated as “happy,” but it has a distinctly different connation from simple happiness: when you see the word blessed, it implies that it’s God bestowing favor, bestowing a blessing, upon the recipient.  If it’s happiness, the happiness is God’s doing. And so Jesus is making a theological statement here: God blesses those who have come to believe without seeing. And one other thing we should notice: the careful translation of pisteuow,the Greek for both belief andfaith, as “come to believe.”  In the Greek, it’s the participle form of the verb, which implies ongoing belief, without a definite beginning, and more importantly, without a definite cause. Thus, it does not imply that the blessing is a reward for those who come  to belief without seeing deciding to believe on their own.  Indeed, believing without seeing is a major theme in the Gospel of John. Elsewhere, Jesus explains that belief comes not from our seeing miracles, not from what we see convincing us to believe, but  “from above,” by which he means God.  God is the author of our belief, according to Jesus, not us.

And so, given all of this, given the setup of Thomas not believing until he sees, and Jesus’ simple declaration—and I don’t think he’s chiding him here, he’s just stating a fact, blessed are those who come to belief without having seen—and given that Jesus is adamant elsewhere that God and God alone is the author of our belief—I think that we can identify the nature of the blessing, and it’s not what we normally might suppose. It’s not eternal life or salvation or however you want to term it.  After all, it’s pretty clear that Thomas—and the other disciples, for that matter—who believed only after they saw will inherit the Kingdom of God.  I think the blessing, the favor bestowed upon those who come to belief is the belief itself.

Think about it: even in those days, there was an “I’ll believe it when I see it attitude.”  It took Jesus showing the disciples his pierced hand and side before they would acclaim him Lord.   Many of his followers only believed afterthey saw him doing miracles, feeding multitudes, driving out demons, and raising the dead.  And how much more cynical have we become in this post-modern era, when the single-minded pursuit of science and rationality has sucked all the mystery, all the inscrutability, all the enchantmentout of life.  The modern age has flattened our existence out into the dreary proposition that the only things that are realare things that are material, that we can hold in our hands, and the only things we can knoware things that can be repeated and “proven” by the scientific method.

Meanwhile, spirituality is relegated to a part of our lives that the world labels “religion” or “faith,” and it’s separated from our material lives by the extreme rationality of our time.  How much more of a blessing, then, is our belief in a good and beneficent God in the face of all this mind-numbing mundane-ness?  How much more wonderful that we have been granted belief without seeing, without touching, without weighing or measuring or investigating?

But the nail-scarred hands and the sword-pierced side provide us with a description, an explanation, a pictorial portrayal of the nature of the belief, of the message contained within, and when the disciples see them they—as well as we—know what it is.  Through the life, death and resurrection, God has vanquished the powers that be.  Death, where is your victory?  Grave, where is your sting.  Hallelujah, Amen.