Sermons

EASTER 6: YEAR A 2008

Spring has finally arrived. Everything is in bloom, my cars are covered with pollen, my day begins with sneezing, and love abounds. The day after spring break on the college campus two young women were walking toward each other from opposite sides of the parking lot and when they were twenty yards apart one raised her left arm and flashed her new engagement ring. The other young lady squealed with delight and ran to embrace her and hear all the gory details of the proposal. I also know it’s spring, the season of love, because I’ve conducted my first wedding of the season.

I don’t do many weddings any more. The ones I do conduct are mostly for the children of friends whom I married twenty or thirty years ago. That was the case a week ago when I stood at the altar rail with the bride and groom before me. It was the middle of the service and there was a terribly long and bad rendition of Ava Maria. It suddenly dawned on me that no where in this service do we ask either the bride or the groom if they love each other. At no time do I turn to the bride and say, “Sarah do you love Charles?, or, “Charles, do you love Sarah?”  The first half of our wedding service is an explanation of Christian marriage, all the way from its institution at creation to Jesus’ first miracle at a wedding in Cana. We ask the bride and groom if they understand what they are getting into, but we don’t ask if the love each other.

The second half of our marriage liturgy is the nuptials, the vows each says to the other. It is there that we ask “Will you love her?” “Will you love him?” We don’t ask about anything prior to that moment; what we care about is the future. “Will you love one another?” Love is an act of the will. In the Christian faith, love is a commandment.

Now that is a far cry from the way we usually think about love. We usually think of love as a feeling, a wonderful, exciting feeling. I ask engaged couples what it is about the other person that causes them to love each other. One bride-to-be said, “He brings me flowers every Friday It’s so sweet!” A prospective groom says, “She is always builds me up and makes me feel good about my self.” I always ask, “How do you settle your fights?” At least half of them tell me they don’t fight. Just wait! Just wait until you forget the flowers one Friday or leave the toilet seat up one time too many! Just wait until you sit up holding a sick child all night. Just wait until you open the trunk of your sixteen year old son’s car and find stolen merchandise looted from neighbors and you call the sheriff. That must be a different kind of love  because it hurts like hell.

You see, mature love, tough love, Biblical love, is the willful decision to care and nurture your own self or another person. If, in doing that, you feel good, then that is a bonus.

In the Gospel for this morning we are once again in that longest part of John’s Gospel where Jesus is in the Upper Room following the foot washing and the meal where he likened the bread to his body and the wine to his blood. In telling the story of the Passover he would have recounted Moses receiving the Ten Commandment on Mt. Sinai and then, he looked at them and said, “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another.” And in today’s Gospel he says “If you love me you will keep my commandments.” Loving, as Jesus puts it, is behaving. That’s not the way we usually do things, especially we Episcopalians. We appoint ad hoc task forces to research a problem or question, and we hear report after report and talk and talk and talk, and if we get revved up enough, and feel good about doing something, then we might just act. That is thinking and feeling our way into a new behavior. What Jesus is saying is that you act your way into a new way of behaving. That’s how it is when love is a commandment. Even if you don’t feel like loving, you act lovingly. If you don’t feel like being just you act justly anyway. If you don’t feel generous you give anyway. The simple truth of the matter is that our thinking and feeling and our being are shaped by our acting-- we become the way we act.

Max Beer Holm tells the story of the “Happy Hypocrite”—the wicked man who fell in love with the saintly girl, and to woo her he put on the mask of a saint’s face. Years later a cast off girl friend discovered the ruse and came to expose him for the rogue that he was, and demanded that he take off the his mask. When he did , underneath was the face of a saint. A new commandment I give you, that you love one another.” “If you love me you will keep my commandments.”

The strange thing that happens is that when we try to act loving in order to become a loving person, we are slowly transformed. It is as though a new spirit begins to grow within us, a new power of being. Jesus called that new “spirit” a “Paraclete”. In the Greek legal system a paraclete was one who stood beside you in court and pled your case, one who supported you. That transformation that occurs as you act more loving or generous or more justly is none other than God’s Holy Spirit at work in you. You are changed and those close to you are changed.

Dr. Richard Selzer, a surgeon and a Christian, discovered this fact in a hospital room. He tells the story in his book, Mortal Lessons.

“I stand before the bed, where a young woman lies, her face postoperative and half paralyzed. A tiny…facial nerve , the one to the muscles of her mouth, has been severed. She will be thus from now on. As the surgeon, I had followed with great care the curve of her flesh- I promise you that. Nevertheless, to remove the tumor. I had to cut the nerve.

Her young husband is in the room. He stands on the opposite side of the bed, and together they seem to dwell in the evening light, isolated from me, private. Who are they, I ask myself, he and this wry-mouth I have made, who gaze at and touch each other so graciously?”

The young woman speaks first: “Will my mouth always be like this?” she asks.

“Yes” I say., “It will. It is because the nerve had to be cut.”

She nods in silence. But the young man smiles. “I like it” he says. “It is kind of cute.”

All at once I know who he is. I understand, and lower my eyes, for one is not bold in an encounter with God. The husband bends to kiss his wife’s crooked mouth, and I am so close that I can see how he twists his own lips to accommodate to hers, to show that their kiss still works.”

“If you love me you will keep my commandments.” Amen.