"The struggle to love"

Easter 5, Year C, 2001

Trinity, Asbury Park, NJ

Reading: Acts 13:1-18; John 13:31-35

"I give you a new commandment
that you love one another.
Just as I have loved you,
you also should love one another."

It's probably the most well-known verse
in the New Testament,
or at least the most often quoted one.
And it's probably
the hardest
to follow.
Because loving one another...
well it sounds simple,
but somehow
when you try to do it,
it's so easy
to get tied up in knots.

Today being Mother's Day,
what comes to mind
when we think of love
is probably families.
Those of you who have children
may remember the love you felt
that first time you looked at you first born baby,
an amazing passion wakened somewhere deep within you,
which seems to come from nowhere
and never lets you go.
And there's the love we have for our parents, a love which
becomes painful
as we face their aging
and their death.
And love between grandparents and grandchildren,
sisters
and brothers,
all kinds of love
which finds expression
in our families.

And yet
that same love
is so fragile, so hard to express,
sometimes.
I still remember the struggle I had as a teenager,
still loving my parents,
but needing to learn how to be myself,
to make my own decisions,
to set my path,
to be other than just
my parent's
child.
And I watch my friends with teenage kids
as they want desperately to protect them,
to save them from learning things the hard way,
and yet have to give them the freedom
to grow into responsible adulthood.
It's the love which bids us together
which makes it so hard
when the first flush of romance
fades into
a kind of taken-for-granted-ness,
that promises of unfulfilled love
which can deaden us
when we are unable to have children, or when longed for relationships
fail to materialize.
It's the love which tears us apart
when relationships with our loved ones
are broken,
through misunderstanding,
or error,
or death.
One the one hand, love is incredibly precious;
on the other,
it can be really painful.
Loving
is a struggle.

And it gets no easier
when we get outside the family context.
Another of the most frequently quoted bible verses
comes when Jesus is asked what the greatest commandments are.
"love God," he says,
"and love your neighbor
as yourself."
And when he's asked,
"Who is my neighbor?"
he tells the story
of the good Samaritan.
Which as far as I can work out, suggests that my neighbor
is anyone
I run across
in the course
of my daily
life.
Except that is a whole lot different today
than it was for Jesus. When you're traveling mostly by foot,
when communication is limited
to passed on messages or perhaps a rare letter,
the pool of possible neighbors
is pretty small.
But when you live in a world of TV, telephone, the Internet,
the pool of neighbors
is expanded
to include
the whole world. People speak of the phenomenon
of compassion burnout. There are so many needs;
the whole world is my neighbor. How can we I love all these people?
And so, too often, we respond
by narrowing our circle of love
until it is small enough
for us to handle, small enough
to keep a hold on.
Love becomes confined
to the domestic,
a phone call here,
a casserole there,
some unused furniture
donated
to a local charity - all of them good things to do,
but too often
costing us little, and having relatively little impact
on our world.
Loving our neighbors
is not just about
the personal and the domestic
but about the public
and the political.
Lobbying our governments
to provide for the weak among us,
working to address the causes
of poverty,
seeing that all our children
have a fair chance
at a decent education.

One the one hand, love like this
can be incredibly costly;
on the other,
it can be really rewarding.
Loving
is a struggle.

And then
there's the church.
If there's one place
where Jesus' words, "love one another as I have loved you,"
should have some impact,
it's here among us followers, Christians -
we've even taken on his name.
But loving
is as much a struggle
here
as it is anywhere else.

It's by our love for one another, Jesus said, that
people will know
that we are followers of Christ.
But love is not always
the public face
we show the world.
How many times
have you heard someone say
"The church is full of hypocrites.
You people talk about love, but all you do is fight."
And if we're honest
we have to admit the truth
of their accusations.
One of the things the church at large
struggles with the most
is how we deal
with our differences.
Whether it's at the local level, deciding what sort of music we sing,
or nationally and internationally
trying to face up to issues
like human sexuality,
and how we read Scripture,
and what are the real essentials
of our faith,
we struggle with one another and with our differences,
we struggle with how to love.
And there are no easy answers.
And that was as true in the early church
as it is now.

Our first reading today
was from the book of Acts,
which tells the story of the very beginnings of the Christian church
the years immediately after
Jesus died and was raised.
We look back at that period
as a kind of golden age -
the apostles were still around, many people
had witnessed the resurrected Jesus
and it had all the excitement
of any new movement.
And yet
there were problems.
And one of them was that perennial question,
who is in
and who is out.
Christianity
began
within the Jewish community.
Those early Christians
still went to prayers at the local synagogue,
they still kept the laws
and the traditions
that had been part of their lives
for generations.
But as the good news of the gospel
began to spread
outsiders
wanted to join in.
they had heard about this Jesus,
now they wanted to be part of this community
called by his name.
But they brought with them
their own traditions
and their own values.
They didn't circumcise their babies;
they didn't keep
the food laws.
And so the early Christians found themselves
divided,
struggling with the question
of what was the core
of this newly established faith,
who could be in,
and who should be out, struggling with
how to love.
Should the newcomers
be required to buy into the whole Jewish
tradition,
as well as the new Christian one,
or was God doing something new
here.
It's a question that comes up
time after time
in the New Testament.
There are no
easy
answers.

This time round, in the story from Acts
it took a vision
to convince them,
a vision, and the evidence of their own eyes, of God at work
among the outsiders.
They were called to experience
and to express
the love of God
which had broken down the barriers
which used to divide them,
to see God at work
even in the most unexpected places
and the most unexpected people
and to welcome them
in to the community
of faith
and love.

The call
to love one another
invites us to look
where God is at work,
in the faithful witness
of our brothers and sisters in Africa and Asia,
in Colorado and Newark, South Carolina and in San Francisco,
in Trenton and Cape May,
Vineland and Princeton,
Red Bank and Rahway,
to love one another
even as we struggle
with our differences.

And the call too,
is to love one another
as Christ loved us,
and to remember that he spoke those words, sitting at the table
with Matthew and Andrew and Philip,
and Peter who would deny him,
and Nathanael and James and John,
and Judas
who would betray him,
and the other Judas and the other James and Bartholomew,
and Thomas who would doubt him...
And we join them, followers of Christ,
with all our differences and all our struggles.

"I give you a new commandment
that you love one another.
Just as I have loved you,
you also should love one another."

Raewynne J. Whiteley
13 May 2001