Sermons from the Pulpit

Preached to the Congregational Church in Exeter, U. C. C., on the fifth Sunday of Easter, May 13, 2001, by Michael L. C. Henderson, pastor.

Leviticus 19:1-2, 9-18; Revelation 21:1-5; Acts 11:1-18

I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.
    -John 13:34-35

     How can you tell if somebody's a Christian? How do you differentiate them from all those Muslims and Jews and heathens and pagans and atheists? Some of them wear little crosses on a necklace or a pin. Some of them have bracelets with WWJD on them, What Would Jesus Do? Some of them have chrome fish symbols on the back of their car. Some of them have bumper stickers. And of course you can see them going into churches on Sunday mornings.

     But Jesus says those are not the ways you spot a Christian. He says what's distinctive about his disciples, what sets them apart, what identifies them, is the way they love each other. Or at least that's what he had in mind.

     It's a sad commentary about the world in general, if any group of people who actually love each other will stick out like a sore thumb, but that's apparently how Jesus experienced it. Do you agree with him?

     And then there's the problem of whether his disciples have actually lived up to his expectations here. And we're among those disciples. "Wow, look at how they love each other, they must be Christians!" Do you think folks say that about us? In the eighteenth century, when Christianity was the official religion of the whole Western world, one clear-eyed observer by the name of Jonathan Swift said, "We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another." In the twentieth century, a Christian writer asked her fellow Christians, "If you were put on trial for being a Christian, would there be enough evidence to convict you?"

     Everyone will know we are Christ's disciples by the way we love each other. You understand that we're not talking about feelings here. In the Bible love is never a feeling, it's a decision, it's an act of will, it's a promise, it's a commitment, it's a deed, it's a vocation. Your feelings don't matter. So you can love people if you feel nothing for them. You can love them even if your feelings toward them are downright nasty. But when this is pointed out to anyone with a 21st-century mind, the 21st-century mind immediately wants to know: Why would I ever want to do that? That's what you call a culture gap.

     Peter thought he knew how you tell a Christian. If you follow Jesus and you promise to stick with him and he gets in trouble and you run away and pretend you never heard of him, and he gets killed for your sake, and then he comes back from the dead and forgives you and tells you, "Feed my sheep, take care of my lambs," that gives you a pretty clear idea of what it's all about. But it never crossed Peter's mind that you might not have to be Jewish to be Christian, until all of a sudden God told him you don't.

     Do you wish you could have visions like this one he had, or are you glad you don't? This large sheet being lowered from heaven by its four corners - I want to say, "Hold it! Who or what is holding up those corners?" - and it's alive, squirming and writhing with four-footed animals and predators and reptiles and birds of the air, and those critters are not kosher. They are unclean. God told the Jews not to eat them. But now God is saying, "Get up, Peter; kill and eat.". It freaks Peter out.

     You have to understand that this isn't just habitual obedience to arbitrary rules, it's a matter of who Peter is and who his people are. The dietary laws are part of a communal religious identity that was hammered out over thousands of years on the anvil of history. There were people who got killed for acting Jewish, and I'm not talking about the 20th century, I'm talking about the third century B. C., before the Roman Empire, when the Jews were subject to a Greek emperor who forced them to worship his gods and made them sacrifice a pig on the holy altar of the temple of the Lord in Jerusalem. And God is now telling Peter to forget about something his own people have died for. No wonder he's horrified.

     But actually, God didn't tell Peter to stop being a Jew. God told him that being Jewish doesn't mean you despise, avoid, or exclude everything and everybody that isn't Jewish. God made them too, and God made them good. This is not the first time God said something like this. The so-called Old Testament says it over and over again. Read Isaiah. Read Genesis!

     Jesus on his way to the Cross trots out this shiny new commandment, "Love one another as I have loved you," but what's so new about it? It says in the dusty old Book of Leviticus, "You shall love your neighbor as yourself." The thing is, that commandment is always new, isn't it? Because the world hasn't ever kept to it. It's like when somebody asked Gandhi, "What do you think of Western civilization?" and he answered, "I think that would be a very good idea."

     Why do we have Mother's Day? Why do we make this annual fuss over Mom? I mean apart from the Hallmark aspect of it. It has something to do with how we perceive women as nurturers and caretakers and comforters, as people who love unconditionally. Mother's Day began as an American women's protest against the violence of the Civil War and later the First World War.. The idea seems to be that women and especially mothers are the only humans who even come close to obeying Jesus' new commandment, so naturally we revere them. My own mother snorted at this notion, and she herself was living proof of how absurd it is, but the perception remains that mothers are more loving than other people, and that's what Mother's Day is about.

     Our experience tells us we'd darn well better make a fuss over people who care about other people because they're so few and far between. We and the world are suffering from a chronic deficit of that good old hard-working committed hanging-in-there love, so naturally we lavish attention on those exceptional people who seem to be making up for that lack: Christians, Moms, various kinds of martyrs and peacemakers and saints and Nobel Peace Prize winners, all the people who show by their deeds that they understand other people's mourning and crying and pain, no matter whose it is. In the process sometimes we make mistakes, and honor people who don't deserve it and fail to honor people who do. But there's no mistake in believing that love of neighbor is uncommon and exceptional enough to be cause for celebration when it appears.

     It sticks out like a sore thumb, so it can indeed serve as an identifying characteristic: You can tell they're Christians by the way they love each other. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples. Or it would serve to identify us if we actually did love that way. Until we do, we and the people who observe us will have to make do with other forms of identification, like crosses and fish and Christian bumper stickers.

     We have a cross right here for that very reason, but this cross is a recent innovation. Our Puritan ancestors, the folks who gathered all these Congregational churches and founded the towns and villages of New England, wouldn't have allowed it in the door. They actually believed that people would know they were Christians by the way they behaved. They thought that by the grace of God they could be visible saints - that's exactly the term they used, visible saints. Is that ridiculous, or is it wonderful? I vote for both.

     Everybody needs to have a particular, peculiar identity: This is who I am, these are my people, this is my niche in the world. You can't feel safe or real without that. But any particular identity is by definition exclusive. If you are this, then you are not that. If you are Christian, then you are not Jewish. Peter once thought all Christians had to be Jewish, but now behold, this very church is full of Christians who are not Jewish, and we are very clear about not being Jewish, which is too bad, because you can't begin to take hold of the Gospel of Jesus Christ if you can't see it from the perspective of the Jews who gave it to us.

     The oddest thing of all is this crazy idea that love of our neighbor is the very thing that sets us apart from our neighbor! Love is the uniting of people, the bringing them together - not separating them. That sheet that came down from heaven, held up by its four corners, contained everything and everyone in the world that is weird and alien and not like us, and God commanded Peter to love everything in it.

     Tall order. But the Gospel of Jesus Christ is, or is supposed to be, enough, all by itself, to hold us together against the combined centrifugal force of all our differences of mind and heart. And it might just do that. Pray that it does.

     Amen