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Easter 6C: Plan B

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"Lydia of Thyatira", by Harold Copping
“Lydia of Thyatira”, by Harold Copping

FIRST LESSON:  Acts 16: 9-15

After Paul and his traveling companion Silas completed a tour of the churches that they had already founded on his first trip, they decided to strike out into new territory.  But (as the verses immediately preceding this passage tell us), the Holy Spirit has “redirected” them, preventing them from going to Asia.  So they instead traveled to Macedonia (i.e. Europe.  So when you think about it, for those of us who are of European descent, this is our story.).  We are told that Paul had a vision about a man from Macedonia pleading for Paul to come and help them.  Now this was really a little odd when you think about it.  They were setting sail for the seat of Western Culture—think Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Alexander the Great, and Homer—that was the enlightened Western culture of the time.  Paul was essentially taking the Christian message to the place from which the Westernized Greek culture had come three centuries before.

And there he encountered what was obviously an unlikely convert—a Gentile and a woman to boot!  (What is really ironic is that European and Western Christianity struggled and continue to struggle for centuries over women in leadership and now we find out that the first European convert was a woman!  Go figure!)  Paul and Silas go looking for devout Jews to whom they could preach the Good News of Jesus Christ.  They wait until the Sabbath, sure to find those that would be gathered in prayer.  And, it seems, the ones he finds are women, praying not in a synagogue but near the river.  Paul Walaskay points out that it is a bit of a surprise that the well-known Jewish Pharisee and teacher from Jerusalem would carry on a serious discussion with a group of women. (From Feasting on the Word)  After all, this is flying in the face of what every good Jewish teacher knew and what every orthodox Jewish student was taught.

Lydia listens eagerly and embraces the message that Paul is bringing.  She was baptized and then she continued to take an active role by inviting them to come and stay in her home.  Without any hesitation at all, she opened her home in the name of Christ.  Essentially, this unlikely convert in an unlikely place was one of Paul’s best disciples.  That should be a lesson to all of us.  What if Paul had been so sure of his original plan that he had insisted on not going to Macedonia at all?  What if when he got there he had shunned the idea of ending up with a bunch of unimportant women not in the synagogue but outside the city gate?  (In essence, Paul went to preach to the masses and ended up leading the UMW Circle or the Thursday Morning Lectionary Group!)  But maybe Plan B didnn’t turn out so bad after all.  Think of it.  Think of all the cathedrals in Europe; think of the Vatican; think of Michelangelo and Da Vinci; think of the Sistine Chapel; think of Christianity as we know it today.  This is where it begins.  Visions and dreams are powerful things.  We just have to listen to them.  And sometimes they draw us beyond the boundaries that we’ve set around our lives.

The truth was that Lydia was ready for the Good News that Paul brought.  She was longing for it, in fact.  She did not let who she was or the boundaries that society had created for her stand in the way.  We really know very little about her and, yet, she is a hero of the text.  And the story almost didn’t happen.  We don’t know who or what happened to the “man from Macedonia” that supposedly prompted this whole thing.  In Feasting on the Word, Ronald Cole-Turner sums up this passage like this:

Here is the center of the story, the moment of intersection between human obedience and divine initiative.  Longing and grace meet there on the bank of the river.  The longing heart of a faithful woman is opened by the gracious impulse of a faith-giving God in an action that, like the incarnation itself, is at once fully human and fully divine.  Like Lydia we are astonished when, looking back, we can say only that our steps were guided and our hearts opened. 

1)      What is your response to this passage?

2)      In what ways are visions or dreams or other ways of discernment part of our faith journey?

3)      Where do you find yourself in this story?

4)      What stands in the way of our being open to the surprises that God offers to us in our lives?

 NEW TESTAMENT:  Revelation 21: 10, 22-22:5

This passage offers us yet another glimpse of how an early Christian hoped for the future.  Drawing on Old Testament passages in Isaiah and Ezekiel, the author lays out a vision of the time when the throne of God will no longer be heaven, but rather heaven will be on earth.  The writer’s vision of the in-breaking of the new comes set with a view from a high mountain.  From it, he sees the “New Jerusalem” coming down from heaven and then goes into intricate detail of what that city looks like.  In this vision, the city has no temple.  Now remember that for centuries of Judaism and early Christianity, the temple was considered the dwelling place of God.  But in this New Jerusalem, God has a new dwelling place—the city itself.  It is the whole city, not just one place in it, that is the center of life, healing, and hope.  It is symbolic for God’s activity and Presence in every corner of Creation, rather than in just those place that we’ve reserved for the Sacred and the Holy.

Revelation is itself an indictment of the domination and corrupting power of the Babylonian and Roman empires.  In fact, it is an indictment of all empires that are not part of this vision of the Kingdom of God in its fullness.  The key is that this indictment is against modern-day “empires” as much as it against what would have been 2nd century empires.  In our modern-day thinking, empires have often become acceptable entities.  We have become comfortable with decisions made for the good of a few, with things like preemptive war, and with a world where the successful and the powerful not only make the decisions but hold most of the world’s resources.  How does that fit in with this vision of the “New Jerusalem”?

When most of us read this passage today, we imagine that city that it talks about.  We imagine what it will be like someday to live in that city, to drink from that river of the water of life, and we try to live our lives in pursuit of it.  Someday, we’ll leave all this behind and we’ll be with God.  We’ll arrive in whatever place you envision our next thing to be.  Someday, we’ll bask in light and life.  Someday…But the truth is that there is not a city to pursue.  There is not a river flowing in some far off place about which we only dream.  We’ve already been given it. It is here…it is now.  It is THIS city and THIS life that we are called to bring into that holy vision, to usher into eternity.

 Methodist Bishop Peter Storey of South Africa is quoted by Joyce Hollyday in Feasting on the Word:

 I have often suggested to American Christians that the only way to understand their mission is to ask what it might have meant to witness faithfully to Jesus in the heart of the Roman Empire…America’s preachers have a task more difficult, perhaps, than those faced by us under South Africa’s apartheid, or by Christians under Communism.  We had obvious evils to engage…You have to expose and confront the great disconnect between the kindness, compassion, and caring of most American people and the ruthless way American power is experienced, directly and indirectly, by the poor of the earth.  You have to help good people see how they have let their institutions do their sinning for them.

 1)      What meaning does this passage hold for you?

2)      How do we envision that holy city about which the passage talks?

3)      What stands in our way of bringing that about?

4)      Why is it so hard for us to see this vision as a present reality?

5)      What is your response or reaction to this claim by Peter Storey?

6)      How do we respond to the notion of our institutions and the way we have “ordered” our existence essentially “sinning” on our behalf?

 GOSPEL:  John 14:23-29

This week’s Gospel passage raises new questions about our relationship with Jesus and our assumptions about God.  Here, Jesus makes his absence imminent.  We know that something is about to change.  But he also leaves everything open for what is always an unfinished encounter with God.  He promises the disciples that they will not be left alone, that a “Counselor”, an “Advocate”, the Holy Spirit will be there to help them remember what Jesus had always told them and teach them everything that they need to know.  The writer of this Gospel does not abandon the traditional ideas of second comings and heaven but his emphasis is definitely on the here and now.  In fact, upon Jesus’ departure from this earth, we are called to be the ones who serve as dwelling places for God in Christ’s Name.  These are not images of dwelling places hidden away or secluded from the world, but in the midst of the world, in the midst of our very lives.  We are essentially told to look less FOR the dwelling place of God and BECOME the dwelling place of God.  In that is peace.

Faith does not take away all the difficulties of life—there is still grief and heartache, floods and hurricanes, oil spills, plant explosions, and terrorist plots.  But this passage reminds us that we are not alone.  God walks the journey with us, in us.  Faith does not plug the holes in life making them all OK; faith rather enables you to keep your footing among them.  Now note that Jesus does not say to wait until he returns; he tells the disciples to keep going, to keep moving, to keep being the people of God.  And he tells them that they will have everything that they need—everything.

God is not something or someone that we need to pursue.  Holiness is not something that we need to go toward.  Everything is here.  Everything is now.  The passage tells us that God and Christ, that everything we’re wanting, that everything that we’re so desperately desiring, will make a home in our midst.  We just have to get out of the way and let go of whatever it is we think we have to pursue.  The Holy Spirit, the Advocate, the very essence of God in our midst brings it all into the present tense.  Here…now…in this city, we are called to drink from the waters of life.  We just have to stop the pursuit long enough to experience the Way, and the Truth, and the Life and realize that God has left a part of the Godself, the very essence of the holy and the sacred in our midst.  Our calling is simply to welcome the Spirit in, to provide hospitality and space in our lives for that to happen, and to simply become the Breath of God that continually breathes Creation into being.  But remember that it might come in the form of a Plan B.

 1)      What meaning does this passage hold for you?

2)      What does it mean for you to think of the Holy Spirit as bringing God and the experience of God into the “present tense”?

3)      Why is it that we feel we must “pursue” our relationship with God or our faith?

4)      What would it mean to just love God and embrace the God that is with us now?

 In garden design, gates and curved paths and alcoves satisfy a human desire for mystery and resolution. A well-planned garden mirrors the invitation to pilgrimage and spiritual completion. Ascensiontide — this most profound time of the Christian year — invites a man or woman of prayer to make a turn on the path that reveals that he or she has only been idling near the gate, and is only now beginning to explore the vast richness of the garden.

This Sunday finds the Christian world poised upon the edge of Ascension’s night of the soul. We hear the resurrected Jesus say to the disciples, “I am going away.” He has been with them 40 days. Jesus will take them once again to the Mount of Olives, that threshold between desert and city, sacred and profane, where the cloud of Divine Presence will absorb the risen Lord and leave his friends bereft once more.

The disciples have just gotten used to recognizing him again. He is teaching and breaking bread with them at Emmaus, appearing suddenly in the Upper Room, showing his wounds to Thomas, eating a fish. On the Sea of Galilee he calls out to the fisherman to “try the other side of the boat.” He cooks breakfast for them. Finally, after 40 days, they are getting used to his presence among them.  And now he says, “I am going away.”

Could the extraordinary circumstances of resurrected encounter have lasted forever? Could these men and women have remained in that first union of intimate and personal friendship with the risen Lord? He tried to tell them, of course. “It is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Counselor will not come to you: but if I go, I will send him to you” (John 16:7). Winding through those last discourses in John is this message: You must go on. There’s more. You are not finished with your journey, you are not yet mature apostles. This is merely a resting place. I go to prepare another place for you. “I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you maybe also” (John 14:3).

Easter is not the end after all. Easter is not the final destination for the disciples, and not the final destination of the soul. Nor is Easter the final destination of the church. Easter begins the transition between one reality and another. The indwelling of the Holy Spirit cannot take place in that outer garden where Jesus has not yet ascended to the Father, where he has presence and voice, wounds open to the touch, where he is the risen Lord of a hot breakfast and a marvelous catch of fish. The disciples must once more taste emptiness and detachment, and open again the once-broken heart yet to be filled with the Holy Spirit. Only then will they go to “the ends of the earth.”

We know what’s going to happen. After Jesus is taken into the cloud the disciples go back to Jerusalem. Ten days later, while observing the Jewish feast of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit comes upon the company. And because we know what is going to happen, we tend to lose this crucial season of the soul — like decorating the house for Christmas and skipping Advent. I’ve actually heard Christian educators say, “There’s no point in having church school after Easter — we’ve come to the end of the church year, and besides everyone is so busy!”

When I was a little girl, the Paschal candle was extinguished in Ascension as a sign of the mystery of Christ’s departure. Basic to all prayer is the observance of cleansing purgation and ablution upon the threshold of fulfillment: Advent for the incarnation, Lent for the resurrection, Ascension for the Coming of the Holy Spirit. Ascension recognizes the separation of the Risen Lord from the disciples as he goes to dwell at the right hand of the Father. The cloud that takes him symbolizes the practice of a dark night of the soul. By practicing the seasons we know how to be in prayer. Why do modern Christians tend to dismiss Ascension? Is it part of our American denial of death? Is it fear and awe — the mysterium tremendum — of ascending in heart with Christ to the throne of God? Would we rather not accept the responsibility of apostleship at Pentecost and its radical implications?

St. Augustine urges, “Today our Lord Jesus Christ ascended into heaven — let our hearts ascend with him.” But we must also enter that cloud, that ancient euphemism for the unknowable Divine presence. The walk through Ascension may not be peaceful or beautiful or clear. But it is the way home. “Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them.” The indwelling of the spirit will become home.

“I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb. And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine upon it, for the glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb. By its light shall the nations walk; and the kings of the earth” (Rev. 21:22-24).  The temple is the Lord God almighty dwelling within us. Our home will be wherever the Spirit sends us as apostles to the ends of the earth. But we don’t know all that yet. To find our way home we must go where Jesus has gone. We must take that surprising turn in the garden path. At the edge of Ascensiontide, we know only the threshold beyond which Jesus has gone, into a cloud of luminous darkness. (Suzanne Guthrie, “The Turn in the Path”, in The Christian Century, May 9, 2001, p. 13, available at http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=2125, accessed 5 May 2010.)

 Some Quotes for Further Reflection:

The old divines talked about the gift of faith.  It seems to me that there is an earlier gift, a desire, an openness to receive the light when and if it is offered.  This openness is a quality of perception like poetry or divination or the wonderful imagination of a happy child. (Morris West)

 He is the Way.  Follow Him through the Land of Unlikeness; You will see rare beasts and have unique adventures.

He is the Truth.  Seek Him in the Kingdom of Anxiety; You will come to a great city that has expected your return for years.

He is the Life.  Love Him in the World of the Flesh; And at your marriage all its occasions shall dance for joy.  (W. H. Auden)

 Everything has already been given; what we need is to live into it. (Thomas Merton)

 Closing

 Come, my Way, my Truth, my Life:  such a way as gives us breath, such a truth as ends all strife, such a life as killeth death.

Come, my Light, my Feast, my Strength:  such a light as shows a feast, such a feast as mends in length, such a strength as makes his guest.

 Come, my Joy, my Love, my Heart:  such a joy as none can move, such a love as none can part, such a heart as joys in love. Amen.

 (George Herbert, 1633, UMH # 164)

Easter 5C: Blowing Boundaries Open

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Brandenburg Gate, Berlin Wall, November 9, 1989
Brandenburg Gate, Berlin Wall, November 9, 1989

FIRST LESSON:  Acts 11: 1-18

This story is actually told in Chapter 10 and then again in Chapter 11 of the Book of Acts.  The issue that was rather hotly debated was whether the newfound faith of these early Christians was intended only for Jews or whether it was to include Gentiles (while allowing them to remain Gentiles).  In other words, was circumcision so important as to keep people out of the community of faith?  The biggest concern was eating and sharing bread and food with these “unclean” believers.  And there was no lack of voicing of people’s opinions about this matter.  Conflict and confrontation was open and loud, rather than being swept under the carpet the way we often do today.  Perhaps it is a reminder that voicing conflict can indeed be transformational for a community.

So Peter has heard this confrontation and conflict and responds to it.  His response is to tell a story (Gee…wonder where he learned that!).  He retells the story of what happened to him in Chapter 10.  He tells the story of his vision and the sheet with all of the creatures and the reminder that nothing of God is profane (and that everything is in effect “of God”.)  He did not charge in angrily shouting theological platitudes.  He just told them a story.  As Stephen D. Jones says in Feasting on the Word (Page 453), “a story invites people across the separating chasm, making everyone the winner.  Jesus knew this as he changed so many hardened hearts with parables.  His parables often left people with questions for them to explore, rather than theological issues for them to debate.”

Peter was not trying to go outside the boundaries.  He just recognized that God had somehow shown him a different way of looking at something.  The point for Peter is that God had given those Gentiles the same gifts of the Spirit received by the apostles and the more orthodox believers.  That is a turning point for the whole Book of Acts and, for that matter, the whole Christian message.  Here, Peter was in no way demeaning Jewish belief; he was just saying that God’s vision was a larger one.  Rather than characterizing this Way of Jesus as an alternative boundary, it becomes an alternative vision, a different way of viewing all of Creation.

It is a good reminder that theological reflection is not a list of rules; it is a way of living, a way of understanding how God is at work in our lives as well as the lives of those around us.  It is also a good indicator that bringing people of a different culture or a different lifestyle or a different focus into a faith community requires us to rethink and re-reflect theologically on the statements of that faith.  It is in that way that our faith community grows and truly transforms the world.  It is not a matter of “accommodating” or “tolerating” or even compromising; it’s a matter, rather, of continuing to listen to God and how God is working in the world.  According to Peter, the things in the faith that do not change are speaking the name of Jesus, bearing witness to the resurrection, and acknowledging the transforming power of the Holy Spirit.  Perhaps everything else is open for discussion…

If Golgotha was the day of reckoning for our salvation, then the day that Peter dreamed of innumerable unclean creatures made clean in God’s estimation was the day salvation actually came to our house, to you and to me. Before that moment, Christianity was not available to those who were not born and ritually inducted into Judaism. But ever since the early church was opened to Gentiles, Christians have struggled to be as open in other times and places, and as willing to embrace those we thought were unclean but whom God has declared clean.

Christians have always struggled with two images that describe the church: is the church the Virgin Mother, pure, unsullied and unstained? Or is she an Earth Mother gathering her wayward children to her skirts? In the church of the Virgin, no eye is pure enough to see God, no tongue clean enough to speak God’s name. This church is vigilant in covering her children’s ears and tries to keep them from seeing or touching the world’s impurity. Its clergy are a model to the flock in morality, goodness and self-control.  In the church of the Earth Mother, however, the dirty hands and unwashed faces of her children are a delight. “I am come that you might have life,” Jesus said, “and that you might have it abundantly.” This church’s children gather to her like Ma Kettle’s kids come in from the barnyard, frogs in their pockets and grass stains on their jeans. What they lack in cleanliness they more than make up in joy. Her clergy are earthen vessels.

Of course all churches are a mixture of these symbolic figures. Christians are neither all heaven nor all earth, but a wondrous mixture of dust and glory, which is why churches are hospitals for the soul—less like sterile operating rooms scrubbed and sanitized for elective surgery and more like MASH units where mangled bodies of injured humans are rolled in for emergency treatment.

The situation of the 21st-century church is not that different from that of the first-century church in Jerusalem. Today we struggle to maintain a holy community in the church where the glory of God can shine brightly in the lives of God’s humble servants. But we do so realizing that we are only human, and that strive as we may, we are not all holy.

In the first century the dividing line between exclusionary holiness and holy hospitality was circumcision, dietary laws and ritual observance. Today it is homosexuality, gay marriage, women’s ordination and the right of property ownership. Today’s fixations are not the issues that divided Christians at Chalcedon or Nicea or even Jerusalem, but they are, nonetheless, issues on which we must work out our salvation with fear and trembling.

It would have been so much easier if the Spirit had left well enough alone and not blown where it did, showing Peter the wider dimensions of a gospel meant for all people, both clean and unclean. But the Spirit is a spirit of love and cannot resist drawing disparate elements together; it has a broader vision of the future and a greater hope for our humanity than we have ever imagined, a vision articulated by the 148th Psalm, which sings of a time when all the earth and all created things shall praise the Lord. Angels praise God, sun and moon, sea monsters and all deeps, fire and hail, kings and peoples . . . all of us praise the Lord. Salvation, occurring in all times and places through the Holy Spirit’s direction, is today offered to one and to all. (From “Dreaming in Joppa”, by Jon M. Walton, in The Christian Century, April 17, 2007, available at http://www.christiancentury.org/article.lasso?id=3194, accessed 28 April 2010.

 For us, who is it that we deem “impure” (either intentionally or without even thinking), that we view as unworthy of church membership or church outreach or just love and acceptance in general?  What boundaries have we improperly drawn through this glorious vision that God holds for us?

 1)      What is your response to this passage?

2)      What does that truly mean that the Gospel is available to everyone?

3)      What would it mean for us to live as if theological reflection were a way of living, rather than a way of rule-following?  What would that mean for our faith?

 NEW TESTAMENT:  Revelation 21: 1-6

We are probably accustomed to hearing this passage read at funerals.  And yet, this vision reveals what God has in mind for all of life—even now.  This is the New Jerusalem that God is bringing into being—not after we are gone but now, as we speak.  And the reason we as Christians know these things is through the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Christ.  This is the way that the vision for all has been revealed to us as Christians.  Eugene Peterson writes, “The Biblical story began, quite logically, with a beginning.  Now it draws to an end, not quite so logically, also with a beginning.  The sin-ruined Creation of Genesis is restored in the sacrifice-renewed creation of Revelation.  The product of these beginning and ending acts of creation is the same:  “the heavens and earth” in Genesis, and “a new heaven and new earth” in Revelation.”  (From Reversed Thunder: The Revelation of John and the Praying Imagination, 169)

For many people and indeed many Christians, the hope lies in heaven only.  This is a reminder that hope is here and now—if we will only imagine it and claim it.  It speaks to the broadness of Creation and perhaps reminds us that we should care for THIS Creation rather than banking on the possibility that we’re going to leave it all behind anyway!  But remember—God is here, making the Divine Home among us, among the “unclean” to go back to the Acts passage.  Wasn’t that what the whole Emmanuel, God-with-us, was about?  Wasn’t that why Christ came as God incarnate?  The hope expressed in Revelation is the one that makes all things new.  Isn’t that remarkable?  It is not about personal conversion; it is about world order.  It is about staking one’s very life not on the way things are now but on the way things could and will be, the way God envisions Creation.

This passage is a promise to us.  Perhaps it is a call for patience; perhaps it is a call to not be so hard on ourselves (in spite of St. Augustine’s purporting that we are hopeless and helpless sinful creatures!); perhaps it is simply a call to imagine—to imagine what God can do in our lives and be open to what that looks like, to be open to newness, to be open to the place between endings and beginnings.

This is not a dream for a different place, for a different city.  It is the dream for THIS one, the place where we are living now.  And it’s not just putting us back in that perfect utopian garden in which we started.  After all, we have grown WAY beyond that, fully embracing that whole free will thing and all.  I don’t think that’s what God has in mind.  I think the Garden was a beginning.  Maybe God even MEANT us to break those boundaries.  Maybe that was the whole idea, the place that we learned that boundaries were meant to be explored and pushed and, yes, even blown wide open so that the Spirit of God could blow through unhindered and recreate all that is.

 While our passage today starts off with a beautiful and all-encompassing vision of a new heaven and a new earth, there is a very specific city, the New Jerusalem, at its center. “While the story of the Bible begins with a garden, it ends in a city,” writes Michael Pasquarello III (Feasting on the Word). And Dana Ferguson develops this further: “Why a city? Because cities are places where people live together in dependence upon one another. A city works when everyone in it does something to contribute to its welfare. It is the welcome place where people arrive home at the end of a long and confusing journey. It is where God lives” (Feasting on the Word). What an intriguing way to spur our religious imaginations about our own cities and communities (no matter how large or small), as places “where God lives.” Imagine what it might look like for our cities to be places where we live not in competition and anxiety but in graceful community, welcoming people home and inviting them in. Such a vision is the opposite of destruction, separation, loneliness, and exile. (From a reflection by Rev. Kate Huey, available at http://www.ucc.org/worship/samuel/may-2-2010.html, accessed 28 April 2010)

 1)      What meaning does this passage hold for you?

2)      What does that “newness” look like for you?

3)      What does it mean for you to look upon this passage as a promise for THIS place, rather than a new place?

4)      What gets in the way of our own “imaginings”?

5)      What does it mean for us to participate in God’s vision for Creation?

 GOSPEL:  John 13:31-35

This Gospel passage is also read for Maundy Thursday.  But on this fifth Sunday of Easter, we are asked to go back to before the crucifixion.  The Gospel writer uses the word “now”, implying that all that has happened up to this point is coming to fulfillment.  It is Jesus’ way of preparing the disciples for his impending death, for the time when they will feel deserted and alone.  He urges them to have patience and to lean on each other, to care for one another and forgive one another.  It is a plea for them to abide in the life that he has shown them.  Rather than allowing their fears and their insecurities to pull them apart, Jesus is laying out a life that will bring them together.

This was a completely different way of looking at things, a completely different concept of what “glory” is.  This glory is the one that feeds that self-giving love that is contained in the “new commandment”.  Glory comes not from being placed above but by allowing Christ’s love to take root deep within oneself.  In other words, we find life and love in community, in the community of Christ.  Without that relationship, everything else falls apart.  No doctrine or theology can replace it. 

Joan Chittister refers to friendship as a “social sacrament”, a sacred act far beyond connections or acquaintances.  Perhaps Jesus saw it the same way.  Once again, the spiritual walk is much, much more than rules or doctrines.  It is about seeing everything and everyone around you as part of God’s Creation.  And, interestingly enough, if you back up to the verses prior to this passage, we read of Judas’ impending betrayal of Jesus.  And then this.  Yes, even Judas, is part of that love, part of that Creation.

Now is the time.  It is time for Jesus to go.  But it is not the end.  It is time for those who love him and follow him to step into place, to experience what it is like to bask and embrace in the holy and the sacred.  Love one another…for that is the way that you will experience the holy and the sacred.  But this is not some sort of passive, saccharine-type love.  This was active.  This was putting oneself aside for another, putting one’s life down for another.  This, again, was breaking all those boundaries open in the name of love.  For it is in each other’s eyes and each other’s lives that you will experience God as Christ said that you could experience God.  And THAT is what glorifies Christ—your being there, your living in that sacredness, your embracing and being holiness.  It is a love that surrenders to God and God’s vision for us.  It is a love that imagines what God can do.  So, love one another…rest deep in God’s love.  That’s what it is about.  “Where I am going, you cannot come.”  You cannot come because there is much work to be done here.  You have to stay and be Christ in the world.  You have to stay and blow all those boundaries wide open.  You have to stay and love one another.  That is the way that we are called to be.

The following chapter goes on with Jesus’ words.  “Do not let your hearts be troubled.  Believe in God, believe also in me.  In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places.  If it were not so, would have told you that I go to prepare a place for you?  And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and take you to myself.”  Jesus’s absence breaks open a new boundary.  Jesus’ Presence, always and forever here, is in our Presence, in our love, in our willingness to follow, to choose that new vision that God holds.

1)      What meaning does this passage hold for you?

2)      What does this “new commandment” mean for you?

3)      In what ways does the Christian community feed your own faith journey?

 Some Quotes for Further Reflection:

Turn your face to the light and the shadows will fall behind you. (Maori Proverb)

 Faith is being grasped by the power of love…it is recognizing that if at Christmas Jesus became like us, it was so [today] we might become more like him.  (William Sloane Coffin)

 People do not enter our lives to be coerced or manipulated, but to enrich us by their differences, and to be graciously received in the name of Christ.  (Elizabeth Canham)

 Closing

We are one in the Spirit, we are one in the Lord, we are one in the Spirit, we are one in the Lord, and we pray that all unity may one day be restored:  And they’ll know we are Christians by our love, by our love, yes, they’ll know we are Christians by our love.

 All praise to the [Creator], from whom all things come, and all praise to Christ Jesus, God’s only Son, and all praise to the Spirit, who makes us one:  And they’ll know we are Christians by our love, by our love, yes, they’ll know we are Christians by our love.  Amen.

 (Peter Scholtes, 1966)