Happy Mothers Day! Today's gospel (John 15:9-17) proclaims Jesus' teaching on love. And, today especially, we have to wonder how instrumental Mary, Jesus' mother, was in what Jesus is teaching here. Very instrumental, I suspect...

The 4 distinct parts of Jesus' teaching are like 4 movements of a beautiful symphony: I. As the Father has loved me; II. So I have loved you; III. Abide in my love; IV. Love one another. Together these 4 movements make up one harmonious teaching on the power of God's love in our lives.

If we leave out any one of them, the teaching becomes incomplete and imbalanced, and so ceases to be transforming Good News in our lives. And so this morning we will explore each of these 4 key movements and its significance for our lives, beginning with:

• As the Father has loved me;

  • Let's forget the “as” for a moment and just focus on the simple statement of Jesus that: – “the Father has loved me...”. Jesus is revealing something extraordinarily important to us in these words.

  • There is one crucial thing that Jesus really knows, and that we really do not know, and that is... what God is really like...

  • When Jesus says these words – “the Father has loved me” – he really knows the One whom he's speaking of. He knows that the One he calls 'Father' is the absolute Perfection of Love. Ordinary human love is not perfect love; it tends to flicker and fade, even get extinguished, when things are not going as we wish them to. But the Father loves perfectly, completely, and eternally... even when things don't go as he wishes. And Jesus knows this.

  • He doesn't know it just from reading Scripture, or from what others had taught him in his home or in the temple. It's not just a belief or a theory for him. He knows the Father's love through 1^st hand experiences of actually being loved by the Father.

  • Jesus could say to us: “You don't know the Father like I do...” and he would be right. And very often that is exactly the reason why we experience difficulty and struggle in our relationship with God. Because we don't know what God is really like, how God is really thinking and feeling in relation to us and our lives. We naturally relate to God as we imagine him to be... and the challenge there is that who we imagine God to be... is not necessarily who God really is. We can be wrong.

  • Our image of God, which leads us to experience God in certain ways, can be “off the mark.” And in this, we differ from Jesus, because Jesus is always “on the mark.” He knows that God really is the absolute Perfection of Love because this is how the Father has actually loved him.

  • Now that's all well & good for Jesus, but what about you & me? We don't know the Father as Jesus does. So, are we supposed to just believe whatever Jesus says about God's love is really true?… No!Jesus understands that we can only come to know what love is by first having been loved ourselves. And so, in the 1^st movement of this teaching he tells us, “As the Father has loved me...” And, then, without even taking a breath, he begins the 2^nd movement, where he personally addresses us & says:

• So I have loved you.

  • “As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you.” In one sense, that is a very unusual thing to say. It's not what we're accustomed to hearing a religious leader say. A more typical thing for a leader to say would be: “Whatever I say about God, take my word for it, because I am the expert: I'm a great rabbi; I know the Scriptures inside out; I pray, I fast, I teach; I heal the sick; – so you should trust what I say!” But Jesus doesn't say that. Now, it's true that he was indeed a great rabbi who knew the Scriptures inside out, and who prayed and fasted and taught and healed the sick... and more... but as important as those facts are, they are not what matter most. They are are not what actually enables human beings to trust in Jesus in a way that transforms their lives. That kind of transforming trust only arises from the depths of our souls in response to divine, self-giving love, that love in which God proves that he is willing to even lay down his life for you and me.

  • Because, at the depths of our souls, we know that's what matters most. At the depths of our souls, we don't really care about the kinds of things that can be listed on a person's resume... or the amount of money that they have... or the color of their skin... At the depths of our souls, all we really care about is their genuine capacity to love. And the only test of that which we find compelling is whether or not they can genuinely love us.... with all of our baggage – all of our wounds & all the poor choices we have ever made, and actually care for us enough to help us rise up and be healed from our wounds and our errors, so that our suffering is actually brought to an end.

  • Jesus loves us in this divine, self-giving, knock-your-socks-off kind of way. And as we experience him loving us in this way, perhaps even now, we know in the depths of our souls that we are in the Presence of the Holy. We know that we are being personally addressed by the Living God. We know, in a nutshell, that we are in the presence of One who can be unconditionally trusted. And so... we do trust... because that's what divine love does to our hearts. It gives us that deep trust & confidence & boldness that we call 'faith' (Eph 3:11-23.) And that is why in our tradition it is love alone – not fear, or service, or obligation, or expert opinion, or a creative imagination – but love alone that is the foundation of our faith. How does all this happen, though? How does the Living Christ – the Crucified & Risen one – speak to our hearts and convince us of his love for us, so that we're no longer the same?

  • To be honest, I really don't know how it happens. All I know for sure is that it really does happen. Personally, I'm not sure we can actually know much more about the process than is described in our Scriptures – that there is a mysterious transmission of Divine Love into our hearts by God's Spirit (Romans 5:5). That works for me; it matches my experience. And what more can we really say? It's mysterious.

  • It can happen to us in prayer; in meditating on God's Word; in receiving the Sacraments; in being genuinely loved by another person. Or when we are gardening, or helping someone, or just staring out the window. It can happen in more ways than we can possibly imagine. In fact, it can happen in so very many ways.. that I don't think we could come up with 1 single formula for how it happens.

  • At the same time, however, as an Anglican Christian, I know that there is great wisdom in the traditional formulas that have been handed down to us, and that our community has been engaging in for centuries (which is basically why I am an Anglican). I am sure it's true, for example, that when we are faithful and open to God's Spirit in our midst, all of the ministries that make up our common way of life (the ministries of Word, and Sacrament, and Pastorally Caring relationships, and even our humble little Offices of Morning & Evening Prayer) become portals for that one all-important transmission of Divine Love into our hearts. If they didn't, I frankly wouldn't be interested in them.

  • But whenever and however Jesus makes himself & the reality of his love for us known, what exactly are we supposed to do? How are we supposed to respond to such perfect, forgiving, and liberating love being lavished upon us without limit? It is incredibly humbling to be perfectly loved. And yet, at the same time, it gives us confidence & boldness. What we are supposed to do, according to Jesus, within that empowering state of grace, is to abide in it. Abide in the eternal truth of it. Abide in perpetual openness and receptiveness to it. Abide in gratitude for it. In the 1^st movement of today's teaching he says, “As the Father has loved me.” In the 2^nd movement he addresses us personally and says “So I have loved you.” And now, in the 3^rd movement, he tells us the real strategy of the Christian life:
     

• Abide in my love.

  • He instructs us to set up camp... to build our home base on the Rock of his Love for us.... to settle down and plant deep roots.... How? by cultivating a practical way of life that keeps us perpetually receiving his perfect love into our hearts and minds and perpetually expressing it in our actions; a practical way of life that keeps us humble & bold; that keeps liberating us from the greed, hatred, fear, and all the other forms of bondage and violence that ravage our humanity & our world. If we long to abide in the love of Christ we need a practical spiritual way of life which facilitates that abiding (what the BCP p. 555 calls a 'Rule of Life') In the Anglican tradition, all of our core ministries are really resources for building up that practical spiritual way of life. That is how we understand the church's role – it is (1) to make those essential spiritual resources available, and (2) to teach people how to mindfully engage in them, so that (3) they can build up a way of life which enables them to abide in the love of Christ. And this changes the world for the better.

  • I often say that I really don't know what it means to be “Christian.” When a person whom I don't know well tells me that they are a Christian, I often feel that they might as well have told me that they like their eggs over-easy instead of scrambled. It doesn't really tell me anything about who they really are and how they actually live. They may or may not have developed a spiritual way of life, which opens them up to that pouring of Christ's love into their hearts by the Holy Spirit (Rom 5:5) and trains them in how to practically abide in that love (2Peter 1:5-8). Instead of the word “Christian,” I sometimes use the term “Christ-centered” to describe persons whose love and way of life actually mirrors the love and way of life of Jesus. These are my role models. They're the kind of people who are great to be around, because being with them makes our lives better instead of worse. They're just ordinary people like us who, in little ways, are becoming more like Jesus.

  • By developing a practical spiritual way of life that keeps us centered on the transforming love of Christ, we are preparing for the 4^th & final movement of Jesus' teaching, which instructs us to:

     

• Love one another, as I have loved you.

  • Charles Schultz (the famous cartoonist who created Charlie Brown, Snoopy, and the other characters of the Peanuts comic) once said: “I love humanity; it's people I can't stand.” Lots of wisdom in that. It's actually not that hard to love humanity, because when we think “humanity” – we often think of the very best examples of humanity that we can imagine – persons like Jesus. Not people with the kinds of problems that we ourselves have. Not people who rub us the wrong way. Certainly not our enemies. And yet, Jesus tells us that, when we are abiding in his love... we will even love those people who are considered to be the dregs of our world – the lepers, the prostitutes, the sick, the hungry beggars, the imprisoned – with all of their needs & their issues & their stress & troubles....

  • But interestingly... Jesus doesn't for a moment instruct us in this teaching to simply forget about the people who are already in the church so that we can go out and love and care for all of the outsiders. Instead, he instructs us to start by abiding in his love right here in our own backyard, right here in our everyday relationships with fellow believers. The commandment to “Love one another as we have experienced Jesus loving us” is a very unusual commandment. There's a hidden twist in it. Because, if we are not experiencing Jesus loving us, we are going to have a very hard time loving even other believers. There's really no way to keep the commandment unless we are experiencing Jesus loving us. So the commandment itself contains both the obligation and the grace that makes it possible to fulfil the obligation. Usually we understand commandments as being only about obligation.

  • What Jesus is doing here is laying the foundations for an intentional spiritual community in which he is the bold but humble Head. The kind of spiritual community where we can actually learn to love. A place where, when we have a hard time getting along with one another, we can stop, and speak openly about it, and pray for one another. We struggle to love our brothers and sisters in the church when they rub us the wrong way. And what could be more natural? But when we stop, and talk, and pray about it together, we can develop the insight that we often imagine that God also struggles to love us when we rub him the wrong way.... And then we very naturally become just as harshly unforgiving with others as we imagine God is being with us. Jesus came into our world, as he still does today, to interrupt that vicious cycle... by loving us as the Father loves him, and repairing our battered image of God. These are the kinds of things that we can openly talk about together, and pray about together in a spiritual community where we are all learning how to experience and to abide in Jesus' love.

  • Our relationships with one another become the training ground for loving those outside of the Christian fold. Earlier in John's gospel, Jesus explains to the disciples that when they love one another, just as he loved them, everyone around them will know that they are his disciples. Why? Because when we are able to love like Jesus loved, people pay attention. Because that kind of love doesn't just “happen.” As we've been exploring, it happens for 4 good reasons. It happens because:

1. As the Father has loved Jesus; 2. So Jesus loves us; 3. And so we abide in his love; and we are  empowered to 4. Love one another. And even our neighbors! And that changes the world. Thanks be to God.