6 Easter

Rogation Sunday

May 5, 2024

 

1 John 5.1-6; John 15.6-17

 

+ As most of you who have hearing my sermons for a long time now know I am a pretty basic preacher.

 

I have about two subjects I pretty consistently and passionately preach about.

 

And those two preaching subjects are?

 

That’s right.

 

Love and baptism.

 

And in our scripture readings for today—guess what?--we get both.

 

(I’ll spare you baptism today in this sermon. I went on last week about my issues with Baptism being a pre-requisite for Holy Communion)

 

But, yes, we will talk about love today.

 

For all my preaching about love, you’d think I was some kind of hippie or something.

 

There’s really nothing hippie-like about me.

 

Well, I am vegan.

 

And I am a pacifist.

 

And I protest a lot about things (I’m not alone on that lately).

 

Geeesh…maybe I am a hippie after all.

 

Yes, I love to preach about love.

 

Today, we get a double dose of love in our scriptures.

 

Jesus, in our Gospel reading, is telling us yet again to love.

 

He tells us:

 

“Abide in my love.”

 

A beautiful phrase!

 

“Live in my love.”

 

“Dwell in my love.”

 

And St. John, in his epistle, reminds us of that commandment to love God and to love each other.

 

Now, as you hear me preach again and again, this love is what being a Christian is all about.

 

Can I stress that enough?

 

Every Sunday, without fail, I preach that from this pulpit.

 

It is not about commandments and following the letter of the law.

 

It is not about being nice and sweet all the time.

 

It is not about being “right” all the time.

 

It is certainly not about being morally superior!

 

It is about following Jesus—and following Jesus means loving fully and completely.

 

It means loving like Jesus loved.

 

And following Jesus means obeying him and doing what he did.

 

And what did he do, what did he preach? 

 

He preached:

 

Love God.

 

Love each other.

 

Yes, I know.

 

It actually does sound kind of…hippie-like.

 

It sounds fluffy.

 

But the love Jesus is speaking of is not a sappy, fluffy love.

 

Love, for Jesus—and for us who follow Jesus—is a very radical thing.

 

To love radically means to love everyone—even those people who are difficult to love.

 

To love those people we don’t want to love—to love the people who have hurt us or abused us or wronged us in any way—is the most difficult thing we can do.

 

If we can do it all.

 

And sometimes—you know what?--we just can’t.

 

But we can’t get around the fact that this is the commandment from Jesus.

 

We must love.

 

Or, at the very least, strive to love.

 

For me—maybe I’m just simple.

 

Maybe I’m just a weird, simple,  priest, up here in North Dakota, serving a parish that a Deacon of this diocese with whom I had lunch this past week said was an example of what parish can do to revive and reinvent itself in a wonderful way.

 

I am at this incredible parish that, on first appearances, might seem like some quirky gathering of eccentric Christians.

 

But underneath it all, it is this strange, powerful spiritual powerhouse of a parish.

 

It is a parish that embodies solidly this command of Jesus to

 

“Abide in my love.”

 

Maybe not perfectly.

 

Maybe not in a classic sense.

 

But certainly in its attempt to do what we are called to do.

 

Call me simple but abiding in Jesus’ love leaves no room for homophobia or transphobia racism or sexism or antisemitism or Islamophobia or any other kind of discrimination.

 

You can’t abide in love and live with hatred and anger.

 

It just can’t be done.

 

When Jesus says “Abide in my love” it really a challenge to us as the Church.

 

And, as you hear me say, again and again, the Church IS changing.

 

And it should!

 

I had a call on Friday with my long-time, very good friend Pastor Ray Baker, the pastor of Faith United Methodist Church just down the street.

 

As you may know, the United Methodist Church has a momentous National Conference Meeting this past week in which the United Methodist Church voted to fully include LGBTQ people in their denomination, which means including in marriage rites and ordination.

 

Ray said to me, “The Church is changing. Thank God!”

 

Pastor Ray is right.

 

The Church IS changing.

 

And our response should be, “Thank God!”

 

The Church of the future, whether we like it or not, has to shed those old ways of abiding in anger and fear and hatred.

 

The Church of the future needs to constantly strive to abide in Jesus’ love.

 

If it does not, it’s gonna die!

 

It will become an outmoded, hate-filled cesspool that will eventually destroy itself.

If it becomes a place led by an insular, self-selected, privileged few, then it will die on the vine.

 

And if it does, then so be it!

 

Now, for me, I won’t stop following Jesus.

 

I won’t stop loving God and others. Or trying to anyway. And probably failing miserably.

 

Because if that’s the place the Church becomes, I know it is not the place Jesus is leading me to.

 

And hopefully none of the rest of us either.

 

And if that’s what the Church becomes, it will, in fact, stop being the Church.

 

If the Church becomes a place of hatred or anger, I doubt many of us would remain members of that church.

 

This is why the Church must change.

 

This is why the Church must be a place of love and compassion and radical acceptance.

 

Because the alternative is just too frightening for me.

 

And we see it all the time around us us—this alternate Church, this Anti-Church.

 

This “Christ-haunted” Church, to use a phrase from Flannery O’Connor.

 

A Church in which hatred and racism and sexism and homophobia is preached from its pulpits.

 

A place in which there are debates about denying people the Body and Blood of Christ of Holy Communion because people don’t participate in a particular ritual or believe exactly what a particular Church believes.

 

This coming Thursday, we celebrate the Ascension of Jesus.

 

On that day, he was physically taken up from us.

 

But what he has left us with is this reality of us—his followers—being the physical Body of Jesus in this world.

 

We can only be that physical Body of Jesus when we abide in his love.

 

When we love fully and radically.

 

There’s no getting around that.

 

There’s no rationalizing that away.

 

We can argue about this.

 

We can quote scriptures and biblical and ecclesiastical precedence all we want.

 

We can throw around canons and rubrics and diocesan provisions all we want.

 

None of that furthers the Kingdom of God.

 

None of that is abiding in Jesus’ love.

 

Abiding in love is abiding in love.

 

And abiding in love means loving—fully and completely and without judgment.

 

To be Jesus’ presence in the world means loving fully and completely and radically.

 

Call that hippie-like.

 

Call that heresy or a simplistic understanding of what Jesus is saying or part of the so-called “radical liberal agenda.”

 

I call it abiding it in Jesus’ love, which knows no bounds, which knows no limits.

 

So, today, and this week, abide in Jesus’ love.

 

Let us celebrate God by living out God’s command to love.

 

As we remember and rejoice in the Ascension of Jesus, let our hearts, full of love, ascend with Jesus.

 

Let them soar upward in joy at the fact that God’s Holy Spirit is still with us.

 

And when we love—when we love each other and God—God’s spirit will remain with us and be embodied in us.

 

 Amen.