6 Easter

May 10, 2026

John 14.15-21

 + I was having a conversation this week with someone and it came up that today is Mother’s Day.

 I responded by saying, “Wow! That slipped my mind.”

 This friend then said, “it’s strange being a fifty-something-year-=old orphan isn’t it?”

 That hit me hard.

 Orphan? I thought.

 That’s a word we don’t use much anymore.

 It has become somewhat archaic.

 I don’t know why.

 Because orphans are still very much a thing.

 Any of us who have lost parents—no matter at what age—are orphans.

 I remember my mother saying that when her mother died.

 And I definitely thought about that a lot in my own grief process following my own mother’s death.

 There is something very sobering about that fact that we can be orphans as adults.

 And I think being orphan has a major tie-in to the general pandemic of loneliness our culture is experiencing right now.

 Watch any film brought out by the A24 Studio.  

 There is an epidemic of loneliness in our world right now.

 For those of us who work with people on a regular basis, who actually help people in their emotional and spiritual pains, loneliness is a big thing.

 And sometimes it’s a thing people don’t often identify.

 Like being an orphan.

 Or a widow or widower.

 In our Gospel reading for today some of these issues, I think, are addressed.

 But first, we hear Jesus say something that we have heard a thousand times,

 Jesus says, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.”

 Now, most of us might be reassured by that statement.

 But I think some of us hear that the way we hear most religious language: as pressure.

 As obligation.

 As some impossible thing.

 We hear “keep my commandments” and immediately our minds start hearing rules and regulations.  

 We start imagining Christianity as a kind of spiritual performance review conducted by a disappointed supervisor in the sky.

 I want to stress that God is not a disapproving supervisor in the sky.

 But it’s important for us to remind our selves that,  in John’s Gospel, Jesus is not standing over the disciples with a clipboard.

 He is speaking to frightened people.

 Lonely people.

 People who are about to be orphaned in a very real way.

 And that matters.

 This whole section of John happens on the edge of loss.

 Judas has gone out into the night.

 Peter is about to fall apart.

 Jesus keeps talking about leaving them, and they do not know how to imagine a world in which the center of gravity of their lives is suddenly gone.

 And into that fear Jesus says: “I will not leave you orphaned.”

 I will not abandon you.

 I will not discard you.

 You will not be spiritually homeless.

 “I will not leave you orphaned.”

 Which means Christianity begins not with commandment, but with what?

 It begins in relationship.

 The commandments are not the price of admission to God’s love.

 They are what love starts to look like once it enters the bloodstream.

 Now, that’s different.

 Because there are forms of religion that are fundamentally transactional.

 Behave correctly, believe correctly, suffer correctly, and perhaps, if you did it all perfectly, correctly, maybe God will tolerate your existence.

 But Jesus never says, “If you perform adequately, THEN I will love you.”

 Rather what does he say?

 He says,  “I am with you. I will always be in you. I will never leave you alone.”

 And only then does he begin speaking about love that manifests itself in the world.

 Christianity is not merely saying the Creed correctly while ignoring the human being collapsing beside you.

 Jesus never says:

“They will know you are my disciples by your ability to win arguments online.”

 He speaks instead about love embodied.

 Love enacted.

 Love that takes on flesh.

 And consequence.

 And that kind of love is difficult because it keeps refusing abstraction.

 It is much easier to love humanity as a whole than to love actual humans.

 Humanity is theoretical.

 Actual people interrupt us.

 They irritate us.

 Or hurt us.

 Actual people are needy and contradictory and wounded and exhausting and occasionally very strange.

 Which means the commandments of Jesus are not really about moral bookkeeping.

 They are about participating in the life of God itself.

 To love the lonely.

 To forgive when every instinct screams otherwise.

 To tell the truth.

 To stand up and speak out.

 To protect the vulnerable.

 To refuse cruelty in a culture increasingly organized around it.

 To insist that no human being is disposable.

 That is not being sentimental.

 It is resistance.

 And Jesus promises that we do not do this alone.

 “I will ask the Father, and [God] will give you another Advocate.”

 The Greek word there is Paraclete.

 Comforter.

 Advocate.

 The One who stands beside you.

 The One who stands up for you.

 Not a distant force.

 Not vague positivity.

 Not some kind of religious mood lighting.

 God beside you.

 God accompanying you through grief and doubt and failure and all the bewildering terrain of being alive.

 And honestly, I think many of us live as functional orphans spiritually.

 Even in the Church.

 We carry the deep suspicion that we have somehow exhausted God’s patience.

 That eventually God will discover who we really are and quietly back away in disappointment.

 But the Gospel says the exact opposite.

 The Gospel says God moves toward us.

 Again and again.

 God moves toward frightened disciples.

 Toward betrayers.

 Toward deniers.

 Toward the grieving.

 Toward people whose prayers barely hold together.

 Toward people who are trying very hard to believe and people who are too tired to try at all.

 Toward the lonely.

 Toward the orphans and the widows.

 “I will not leave you orphaned.”

 And maybe that is the word some of us need today.

 Not advice.

 Not correction.

 Not another impossible burden.

 Just you are not abandoned.

 Not by God.

 Not in your grief.

 Not in your confusion.

 Not in your loneliness.

 Not even in your failures.

 Christ remains.

 Quietly.

 Persistently.

 Sometimes almost hidden beneath the noise of the world, but still…. there.

 Alive in acts of mercy.

 Alive in bread broken and shared.

 Alive in the cup given and received.

 Alive in communities that refuse despair.

 Alive in the stubborn insistence that love is stronger than death, even when death appears to be winning.

 “In a little while the world will no longer see me,” Jesus says, “but you will see me.”

 And perhaps that is the task of the Church—for us who are followers of Jesus—right now.

 To become people who learn how to see Christ still moving through the world.

 In tenderness.

 In justice.

 In compassion.

 In endurance.

 In the holy refusal to give up on one another.

 Because resurrection is not merely something that happened to Jesus once, way back then.

 It is something God keeps trying to do everywhere.

 Even here.

 Even now.

 Even in us.