Marked by a Loving God

Our gospel this morning comes from John 13:31-35. "When Judas was gone, Jesus said, "Now the Human One has been glorified, and God has been glorified in him. If God has been glorified in him, God will also glorify the Human One in himself and will glorify him immediately. Little children, I'm with you for a little while longer. You will look for me - but, just as I told the Jewish leaders, I also tell you now - 'Where I'm going you can't come.' I give you a new commandment: Love each other. Just as I have loved you, so you also must love each other. This is how everyone will know that you are my disciples, when you love each other."" This is the Word of God for the People of God.

All right, well... Let's just do a little context. So John Chapter 13, this is returning back to Holy Week, to Maundy Thursday. Which if you were here, in the Maundy Thursday service this year I mentioned that the word "maundy," which is a really weird word, we don't use it anywhere else, but it comes from the Latin "mandatum," meaning "mandate" because Maundy Thursday was the day in which Jesus gave the disciples the new commandment. So earlier in the chapter Jesus has washed the feet of his disciples.

And then he predicts that one of them will betray him. And then Judas has left to betray him. You have our passage and then immediately after the passage is a dialogue with Peter where he wants to go where Jesus is going. He says that he can and Jesus tells him you will deny me three times before the rooster crows. So that's, in a nutshell, kind of where we are. Now I find it interesting that right after it says that Judas is gone, Jesus says, "Now the Human One has been glorified."

So... Jesus is perfectly aware that he's about to be betrayed.

There doesn't seem to be anything glorious about that.

This is a night in which Jesus is going to be betrayed essentially by at least two of his own. These men who have walked with him for 3 years.

And the fact that this passage, this new commandment, is sandwiched in between two descriptions of betrayal is significant.

The commandment "Love each other" isn't actually a new commandment. We are told, "Love your neighbor as yourself." That's an Old Testament commandment.

The new part is that Christ tells us to love each other as he has loved us.

In this moment Jesus, even as he's washing the feet of his disciples, he knows who's going to betray him.

Still he washes their feet.

As he prepares the Last Supper and serves them, he knows he's going to be betrayed and still he serves them.

Jesus is modeling for us a profound understanding of love, one that

baffles us. It's not easy.

I'm sure everyone in the room has been hurt, betrayed by someone. Sometimes [indistinguishable]. Think back to that moment when you first find out.

How broken you feel.

Devastating.

It's even worse when it's someone we love and trust.

And yet Jesus is saying

continue to love.

Now, just to be clear, this doesn't mean that you should remain in an abusive relationship. It bothers me when people will use Christ's sacrificial love as a reasoning to remain in a situation in which they're getting hurt, repeatedly. That's not what God desires for us.

It's one thing

to love sacrificially when it's your choice. It's another one when it's essentially forced upon you.

It ends with, "This is how everyone will know that you are my disciples,

when you love each other."

Had I done a children's time, you know, I would have shown some pictures of zoo animals. A picture of an elephant, How do we know it's an elephant? You know what the characteristics of an elephant are. Big, gray, trunk.

A rhinoceros? Also big and gray, but they have a horn.

Giraffe? Tall, really long neck, spotted. But then the question is how can someone know just by looking at us that we are followers of Christ?

By the way in which we love one another.

Who thinks we're doing a good job of that right now? Just nationwide? I think in this church we're doing a pretty good job, I hope. I hope y'all feel that too. But nationwide, there's so much division.

Nationwide, there are Christians from slightly different traditions bickering with one another.

And I have to ask myself, you know, if we can't even manage to love one another, how are we supposed to love our enemies?

How are people supposed to be able to recognize that we are Christians?

We are called to love sacrificially,

to love in a way that

we don't put ourselves first, but rather each other.

To love in a way that, you know, we love Christ and we want others to come to know Christ in the same way that we do. And when we have a heart in the right place when we are willing to love sacrificially, we become willing to

to allow for differences in worship.

So for those who prefer a traditional style, that's fine. Keep coming to the traditional service. But I'm grateful that this church has allowed me to get this new service going, to try something new.

Sometimes it is not always easy to do that in churches. Cuz people will fight just for the sake of it because any kind of change, even if it does not affect them directly... We've never done that.

We are called to love.

I think of all the verses in Scripture that talk about love. A lot of them are from John, Gospel of John, and the three letters. And the pronouncement that God is love.

I'm gonna geek out for you, a little bit. So in physics, quantum physics, we know now that atoms, they don't exist in and of themselves. There's a relationship between atoms that we don't quite understand yet. For instance, they can now split an atom and have one in like New York and one in California and if they reverse the rotation of one of them, the other one reverses. Yeah. So there's this connection that we don't understand. We also know that molecules will behave differently if they're being observed.

So I don't know exactly how to explain it, but it's essentially like sometimes they'll behave like particles, like individual circles. But then other times they'll behave as waves.

And it's really interesting. I'll stop talking about it now, but it's really interesting. But the bottom line is there is a connection between everything.

And there's a relationship.

And who we are as individuals, we can't, we're social creatures. We can't live in isolation. We need one other.

And if God is love, God also needs community, which is one reason why we believe so strongly in the Trinity, because in God's self is community of love. That is 3 and yet somehow 1.

We don't understand it,

but that is what we believe.

And what I love about, what I love about our theology of the Trinity is this idea that God can bring about unity through diversity.

God can bring about unity through diversity.

So, when you look at a church,

This is kind of the question that I ask myself is, is this unity in the church, is it from God or is it from man?

The question is how diverse are they? Because if they are diverse, it's pretty definitely from God.

But if there's no diversity,

then it's probably likely that it's a group of people who are comfortable.

They don't... they can predict one another's responses because they have so many similarities, so many things in common. There's not necessarily a whole lot of challenge or growth.

I remember growing up in middle school, one of my best friends was a girl named Dua and she was Muslim. And we're still friends. She's in Seattle now. She's a defense attorney. But... we've always been able to have conversations about our faith with one another. And when I was in seminary Dua was the one who asked about my classes and got excited when I would tell her about them. My other friends who are Christians were like eh.

But it was, it's just such a friendship that I deeply appreciated. Because we are so different, but we bonded over a love of reading. You know the Accelerated Reader Program in school? She always got first place. I always got second. She could, she could speed read like nobody else. It's what, that's what brought us together initially and I'm just grateful that it's managed to last throughout the years.

Love each other. It's also interesting that Jesus calls the disciples "Little children." What's going on there?

Jesus knows that the disciples still aren't quite going to get it. So he refers to them as little children.

Because in comparison to God, that's what we are. Little children.

Jesus is saying I'm only with you a little while longer. So I need to begin to prepare you for my departure, for the time when I will no longer be among you physically.

And he begins this preparation with the new commandment to love one another.

Peter, I love Peter, he's that impulsive one and, right after this, he says...like he just completely skips over this new commandment and he goes back to when Jesus has said, "Where I'm going, you can't come."

Which shows us how easily we can get distracted from the main point, right? But yeah, so Peter is like, "Lord, let me come with you."

Jesus is saying, "No, you're not ready." "Yes, yes, I am! I can do it!"

"Peter, you will deny me three times."

The other lectionary passage that we didn't read this morning is from Acts. We spent so much time on Acts last summer that I didn't really want to come back to it yet. But it's one of my favorite passages in all of scripture... it's the moment when Peter is praying on the rooftop. And he has this vision of these animals that descend from the sky on a rug, a blanket, a sheet. And a voice, "Get up, Peter, kill and eat." And Peter, ever the good Jew, "By no means, Lord! I have never eaten anything unclean!"

And the response. Do not call unclean what I have made clean.

The interesting thing about Acts is that this is... We get to witness the early church. We get to witness the first group of people who have been given the gift of the Holy Spirit and how they respond to that, how they learn through that.

And Peter... in the gospels, Peter's the impulsive one. Here in Acts, he's a little calmer. He's not quite so impulsive anymore.

And when these 3 men have come to the rooftop looking for him.

He knows that the Spirit has told him to go with them. But they don't leave right away. Peter invites them to stay for the night so that they can leave the next morning. I kind of wonder if Impulsive Peter would have just left right away. Just, just dove headlong into it, headfirst. But this Peter took the time and said, you know, it's not a smart idea for us to leave right now. Let's wait until morning because it's quite a long trek. Let's be rested.

So Peter takes steps forward, cautiously, watching for ways in which the Spirit is affirming his understanding of what God is calling him to do.

I admire that kind of courage.

I mean, can you imagine being a good God-fearing Jew who, you don't go to Gentiles houses because they do not prepare their food in a Kosher way. Kosher, for those of you who don't exactly know what it is, it's essentially not mixing meat and dairy. It's this idea that you don't want to mix life (dairy) with death (meat).

So they want to preserve this distinction between the two. So their kitchens will actually have two sets of kitchen...like...I'm not a kitchen person. What do you call them? Like cooking ware, cookware, and plates and all of that. So dairy is served on one set of plates, meat is served on the other.

That's, that's a commitment.

But that's not how it is in a Gentile household. Now, Israel would welcome a Gentile, more or less, into their community, but they were not the ones who sought them out.

They were not the ones who got out of their comfort zone and sought new relationships.

But in this moment Peters is being called to do just that. And in Acts chapter 11, which is the actual passage... the Christians hear about this and they get mad at Peter and they criticize him. What you mean you did that? And Peter explains the whole thing to them. And after listening they're able to acknowledge...yeah, this was God working through Peter.

If God has given the Gentiles the gift of the Holy Spirit, who are we to stand in God's way?

Little children. You don't have to understand everything. It helps to believe the right things, sure. Right belief can lead to right action.

But if you believe that you can use violence to further your belief, no. That's not what God wants of us. We know this from the gospels, Jesus never uses violence against a person. At most, he flips tables.

God wants us to love.

To love one another. To love Christ. To follow with our whole hearts, to trust that even when we get it wrong, cuz we will, it's not an "if," it's a "when." God will, we trust that God will let us know when we're starting to head down the wrong path. God will use the community around us to step in and say, "I don't know about that."

But, more importantly, God will not reject us. If we are continuing to desire a relationship with God.

God's not gonna be like, "Nope. You made a mistake. You can't, you can't come home anymore." God's not gonna do that.

I like this Revelation passage, where Christ refers to himself as the beginning and the end, the Alpha and the Omega.

All things work, like in Colossians, I think... all things were created through him and in him. So God, in Christ, all of us are in Christ. But this understanding of Christ as the beginning and the end. I think that, for so many of us, we're... Our default way of thinking is in a line. Beginning of a line, the end of a line.

But in a circle the beginning is the end.

When there's someone that we disagree with, maybe on just about everything, possibly.

Maybe there's a person who, even just the thought of them kind of....

You know what I mean? That feeling in your chest?

Maybe you can't possibly imagine a way in which this divide could be bridged. Someone wrote a book where she was talking about this guy in her church that like, I mean he drove her nuts. He was as conservative as she was liberal, essentially.

But then one day she had this thought that

if she actually believes what she believes, they would be spending eternity in heaven together.

We got to find a way to be okay with it. I think it's in Christ, when we are able to put Christ at the center, to look at Christ, then it doesn't matter how far apart we are standing. If Christ is in the center, Christ can bring us together.

I give you a new commandment.

Love each other just as I have loved you.

This is how everyone will know that you are my disciples.

This is how we are marked as Christians.