And They Will Know We Are Christians....

John 13:31-35

¹When he had gone out, Jesus said, “Now the Son of Man has been glorified, and God has been glorified in him. ³²If God has been glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself and will glorify him at once.³³Little children, I am with you only a little longer. You will look for me; and as I said to the Jews so now I say to you, ‘Where I am going, you cannot come.’ ³⁴I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. ³⁵By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”

I have a confession to make: I have a love hate relationship with the season of Easter, and it is all about ‘love’. The lectionary which is the recommended text from Presbyterian Church (USA) is heavy on the love texts from the book of John. It doesn’t seem to make sense in the order these texts come before us. Some are Jesus’ appearances after the resurrection, but others like the one today jump back to before the crucifixion. I want to celebrate Easter not move back into the Lenten time.

Added to that, today’s scripture also deals with another of my hot topics: Evangelism. When I picture in my mind evangelical is a good and powerful thing but evangelism connotes the screaming student standing on a stump on the A&M campus beating his Bible at the tailgaters before a football game, or I picture the haunted houses that are meant to represent hell and conclude with an alter call. Neither of those are how I am comfortable doing evangelism. I am more comfortable with witness or testimony that shares my faith or even proclamation. TedTalks, sermons, and sharing our story. That’s evangelism I can get into.

I am not sure that is the message here either though! To understand Jesus’ evangelism message, we must explore today’s scripture. This is one of those texts that confuses me because it is in Easter but it takes place before crucifixion at the last supper of Jesus with his disciples.

One of the questions I get every year is why do we call Maundy Thursday – Maundy? What does that mean. It comes from this scripture. Maundy comes from the Latin word mandatum, meaning a mandate or command, and comes precisely from this passage: “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.” In most of the texts where Jesus is asked questions or teaching, he uses parables. He presents mystery. Last week I preached about trying to figure out what Jesus meant by sheep and comparisons to God as the Good Shepherd.

No longer. There isn’t imagery to figure out. In our scripture today, Jesus is about focus and clarity. He has a last meal with the disciples, he serves them by washing their feet. He proclaims he is glorified and then he gives them a commandment. There are two things to remember here. Jesus knows he has been betrayed by two closest to him – denied by Peter and accused by Judas, and he knows that he is going to die.

What would you say to those closest to you if you knew you were going to die within days? What of the items on the bucket lists we accumulate would you do in your last days? I dare to say that it would be the things left to us that were the most important. What do we value the highest? Jesus broke bread sharing fellowship, the valued koinonia, communion. Jesus washed feet. And, he issued a final commandment.

This is a clear-cut set of three things that mattered most to do for Jesus in the last hours he had with his disciples. He included all of them, even the two who he knew were about to turn on him. You’ll notice of all the important things Jesus taught and the example he led, many of the things we hold most dear in our faith were not where he turned. We are not told to memorize scripture – no sola scriptura, we aren’t told about election, salvation or judgment. We aren’t told to expand the church, study trinity, not even worship and praise of God. That is not to say these things weren’t considered important. It is to say they were eclipsed by the commandment that was the most important to Jesus to say as his final words.

The movies elaborate on dying to a point that isn’t often realistic. Few of us have the gift of preparing a final message before we die to reassure or impart to our closest friends and family what we want them to remember of or from us. Often when a loved one is hurt or dying, we have good intentions but may not know how to show our love.

Reverend Dr Janet Hunt tells a story of her father:

She was standing in a hospital room many years ago now.  It was during one of a dozen such stays after my dad's first heart surgery.  A group of friends from his church had come to see him.  She remembers that they stood awkwardly around his hospital bed, fumbling for words to say.  Pretty soon, one of them offered to pray and once he was done, they did not take long to head for home.

She describes the group as kind people who went out of their way to coordinate schedules and drive to the hospital to make this visit. Still, they stumbled as they spoke, clearly uncomfortable seeing my normally gregarious dad hooked up to all kinds of tubes and wires and looking so very discouraged. They were not terribly good at it, but Reverend Hunt learned that it didn't much matter.  For no sooner had they left his room than her dad turned to her and said, "Anyone who doesn't have a church home is stupid."

I agree with Reverend Hunt – her dad’s filter was off in his pain, so maybe we wouldn’t quite phrase it that way, but those of us who have experienced the love of church can’t understand why anyone wouldn’t want to have a Christian church family, a home where we are loved and accepted.

This is where I have the problem with love. We banter about the word so much that we think oh yeah, I know that - I love others. Possibly like Rob Bell’s Nooma video suggests, Americans have lost the nuance because we have one word for the several Greek ones for love. We love tacos, we love our family, we love our spouse or partner, we love God. Maybe it is from overuse, maybe it is from being cheapened or commercialized and belittled. My problem isn’t with love but with a sarcastic response to a watered down version that hasn’t deepened or challenged us. The gospel of John is all about Love of Jesus and love of one another. This is not easy or cheap. Love is hard and it is costly if we do it fully. If we do it as commanded.

Love is challenging and all encompassing. Popular author John Green in his book Turtles All the Way Downwrites about love. One of the main characters is challenged with Obsessive Compulsive disorder and is picking apart her feelings. She says of love – “it isn’t like our other feelings. We say we are in love. We are never in friendship, in anger or in hope.” She says she knew what it was like to be in a feeling – to not just be surrounded by it but permeated by it the way her grandmother talked about God being everywhere.

Her grandmother was right. And I love the imagery of being permeated in it. Love is an action and Jesus isn’t equivocating. He commands: ³⁴I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. ³⁵By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”

 Debie Thomas of the group Journey with Jesus says, “I can’t speak for you, but this makes me tremble. What Jesus seems to be saying is that if we fail to love one another, the world won’t know what it needs to know about God, and in the terrible absence of that knowing, it will believe falsehoods that break God’s heart. I.e: that the whole Jesus thing is a sham. That there really is no transformative power in the resurrection. That God is a mean, angry, vindictive parent, determined only to shame and punish his children. That the universe is a cold, meaningless place, ungoverned by love. That the Church is only a flawed and hypocritical institution — not Christ’s living, breathing, healing body on earth.”

Is this what the Christian church today is showing the world instead of love? Have we become too caught up in all the rest, the secondary things to the extent that we are letting slide what is most important? Have we sold out the church, the very body of Christ to this image of just a flawed institution that many see as hypocritical? Have we replaced loving with judging? We can move beyond and reclaim Christianity – I don’t mean a restoration to the days when church was in line with culture and everyone was expected to attend church. When every leader was expected to align, when the church was a position of power in government and culture. I think we are closer to the days of Jesus when we are called to expect much of what we stand for to be counter-cultural. And, our broken churches will stay flawed because we are people doing the best we can, but there is power in the love of Jesus and in the love Jesus demands of us.

What do we need to do, how do we follow this command Lutheran Pastor David Lose asks, “… when we do love others well, what is that like? And, just as much, when we feel loved by someone – accepted for who we are, valued, honored, even cherished – what is that like? How does it change our lives? What might we learn from these experiences that can help us share our love with others more fully?

When do we freeze and not love others? In our Presbyterian Church, I have often heard the pride of our unity in diversity. Sometimes we do this well, and other times not so much. Loving one another doesn’t mean just those who agree with me. I challenge you this week, talk to someone in our congregation who you normally disagree with. Get together for coffee, a snack or a beverage of choice. Push the edges of the hard love to sit in koinonia, deepen the Christian relationship. Start with one another in this place. If a gathering is too hard start smaller in the hallway. Begin with a smile, move in steps that push your comfort to extend the love Jesus demands not just in our usual comfort places.

Loving others also doesn’t mean I have to know exactly what to do. I don’t think we freeze up or don’t extend love because we don’t care. We might be slow to share love because we are afraid we won't do it right or we might be rebuffed.  Will my gesture be unwelcome or seen as intruding?

This internal relationships of love are the first steps of showing to the world what it means to be a Christian, of reclaiming the Church, the body of Christ as a place that reflects the love of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. The love is powerful, but it is not perfect. In Jesus we are empowered to expand on that love and push beyond the boundaries. What we practice here will become natural and the evangelism of sharing love will branch out. It is contagious – Jesus’ love will spread like wildfire if we each carry our commanded part.

The title of the book I referenced earlier turtles all the way down is based upon a much debated tale that has origins in a Hindu faith precept of elephants and turtles supporting each other in an infinite stack. It says that the world and our thoughts are a turtle that rests on the back of another and that turtle is on the back of one larger underneath it. And thus turtles all the way down. Henry David Thoreau said "Men are making speeches ... all over the country, but each expresses only the thought, or the want of thought, of the multitude. No man stands on truth. They are merely banded together as usual, one leaning on another and all together on nothing; as the Hindoos made the world rest on an elephant, and the elephant on a tortoise, and had nothing to put under the tortoise."

As people of faith we aren’t worried about the bottom having nothing. We are in a stack held up by love. Each of us supporting one another and building the whole bonded together. But our pile of turtles all the way down doesn’t end with a debate or unknown bottom. Our foundation is Jesus Christ. We will hold all His children together and spread the gospel with the glue and example of love supporting, serving and holding one - all of this through love, all this by loving. Through the power and glory of the one who demands that we love another, Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. And they will know we are Christians by Our Love!

Let us pray, Loving God, stir us to the challenging love you want us to give. Empower us to stay the course in following you and reflecting that love throughout our lives. Help us to see each and every person we encounter through your eyes as someone worthy of that love. And always keep us mindful that your love never leaves us. We are your beloved children. Empower us to serve you by loving others.  Amen.