love, as best you can

 

SERMON PREACHED at St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN 

& St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN,

SEVENTH SUNDAY OF EASTER

(SUNDAY AFTER ASCENSION)

 (May 12^th) 2024

 

READINGS

 

1 John 5: 9-13

Psalm 1

John 17: 6-19

For several weeks now, since Easter, we have been journeying with the source of the Fourth Gospel, guided by his mystical and vastly poetic mind into the impossibly deep mind of the one he calls Word, Logos, the Son of God. We have used his telling of the Jesus story from the Fourth Gospel, but glanced too from time to time at his instructions to one of the early Christian communities, instructions that we know as the Epistles of John.

Throughout the readings we have been encountering the great promise of Jesus to be with us, as he puts it, even to the end. Which end? This of course can be the end of our own lives – and the promise of a beyond. It can be the collapse of civilizations and perhaps of humankind, and the promise of a beyond. It can be the collapse of the cosmos, of the universe and universes, and the promise of a beyond. It is all of these and more, and that is impossible for us to grasp. Yet the love of which John’s Jesus speaks is an intimate love, as close as breath.

So we can’t grasp it. John asks us not to understand with our head but to be immersed with our heart. The language particularly of John 17 from which we’ve read today is the language of deep heart, or as I call it cardiac intimacy, with God. It is the language of love, and it is no accident that the Greek word agape, the māori word aroha, the English word love appears repeatedly in John’s writings. It is as Paul famously writes, a love that does not insist on its own way, does not dominate, does not pout, a love that lives for the other. It is a love for neighbour, but, and this may surprise some advocates of Christian nationalism so frighteningly dominant in some pockets of Christianity, a love that does not impose its will on those around us.

It is a love that rejoices in the knowledge that we belong to God. At St. Peter’s we will sing that later. That belonging is the belonging of intimacy, involving trust, and both dedication and discipline. Not discipline in a brutal way, but the discipline as again Paul writes, of an athlete, focusing again and again on the tasks needing to be done. In the case of love, the love that Jesus prays for in what is called his High Priestly Prayer, the work, the tasks to be done to maintain that love are tasks of reconciliation, cooperation, tasks of immersion in the experience of Christ, which we might extrapolate as tasks of worship, of encountering Christ in scripture and paradoxically in one another. Armed with practice and rehearsal in those disciplines, we are able to know that we belong to God, and we are even able to be signs of divine love and hope in the community into which God has placed us.

As John writes the Jesus story he realises that this disciplined exposure to Christ love is the very essence of evangelism, of proclamation. After the resurrection the risen Lord will give Peter the command to love, and very few other instructions. So it is for us, and no, it is not easy, but it comes with God’s own promise, I am with you always. Our task is to continually accept the one who was with us always, seeking the spirit of love, of truth, whose coming we will celebrate at Pentecost, and who can enable us to be bearers of gospel love.