MyCommandment

John 15:12-17

Pastoral Prayer: Lord Jesus, we are made able to do what You command by Your faithful obedience to the Father. Remind and teach us by Your Spirit that what You give us to do, You have already done. May what is heard today be Truth and only Truth, and all God’s people say, Amen.

Forty-one years ago, around this time of year, we packed up a Green Chevrolet Conversion van that we dubbed “The G.I. Joe Van,” put Kimberly in a car seat we secured to the bolts of the carpeted engine cover, and headed south. We made the long trek and checked in to the Leigh Anne Apartments near the Intersection of I-35 and I-20 in south Dallas County, just north of DeSoto, Texas. We set up our Section 8 upstairs apartment and set out to get a lay of the land. My parents headed back to OKC. For the first time in our lives, we were hours away from family, with no job and a few friends we knew who lived across the parking lot.

We knew that we would find more friends, people to get to know, a community of faith at a local church. My friend Mack, who now pastors in San Angelo, Texas, pointed us to a few to visit. One Wednesday, we set out to find one on the list he gave. We could not find the building. Back in our bedroom, after putting Kimberly to sleep, we talked and cried. “What have we done?” “Where are we?” “It would be so nice to find some folks to get to know.”

The next Sunday we made our way to a small church several miles west of our apartment. Mack had mentioned this church had a relatively new pastor. We showed up for worship. Before the night was over, the pastor called and set up a time and day to have lunch with us. I may not have mentioned that I did not have a real job. Mack was a painter, and I helped him while I looked for a job. We met Rick at a nearby Chili’s and enjoyed the visit. TimberRidge, named for the ranch land on which the church had been built, became our first church home away from home.

In a year’s time, I had a job cleaning swimming pools, started work on my Master’s, and we had begun to make friends in our new church. Rick asked if I would be interested in becoming the Associate Pastor with Youth Responsibilities. We prayed, agreed, and the church called us to our first paid vocational position. Rick became my mentor.

Over our three years together, I learned a number of what I affectionately call Davisms. I have mentioned some of them over these past thirty-plus years. One that I keep in my frontal lobe: “Don’t ask what you are not willing to do.”

Jesus looks at the disciples and says,

As the Father has loved me, I have also loved you. . . . This is my command: Love one another as I have loved you.

When it comes to doing, Jesus instructs the disciples to do what he does. Therefore, as those who have heard the Gospel Good News from those who passed on what the disciples heard and saw, and what the Apostles proclaimed over the past two millennia, we do what Jesus commands: love one another.

I served part-time/full-time at Timber Ridge. That meant that I was paid for 20 hours a week, but often gave twice that. Why? It wasn’t that Rick was a slave driver, though he was; it was that, to learn how to do what you may ask others to do, I needed someone to watch and participate with. What it looks like to love one another. The danger is always to turn loving one another into one more to-do. When that happens, we often prefer something easier.

It is easier to organize a fellowship meal, plan for a Sunday Bible Study lesson, or even serve in the nursery. If we are not interested in any of those or other things on our to-do list, we muse that someone else will do them for us. But love one another? Is there anything harder to do?

No one has greater love than this: to lay down his life for his friends.

Facing the Cross, Jesus makes the point that it is the love the Father has for the Son, the love the Son has for his followers, that provides for his faithfulness and obedience that leads to his own death. It is not the doing of the things; they bear witness to the Father who sent him. Jesus loves his own to the end, those given to him. In this specific instance, he has the disciples, his followers, in mind.

Think about it.

Or them.

Four fishermen - Peter and Andrew, James and John - busy with the family business, would likely look with skepticism at Matthew, whom they may have had to pay Rome’s taxes to after their fishing exploits on Galilee. Just because Jesus calls all five of them into his merry band does not mean that they were instantaneously best buds. Nathaniel is invited to come and see Jesus, and all he can say is, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” Clearly there is something like a prejudgment made about someone from the other side of the tracks, as it were. Imagine the disbelief of the ten other disciples hearing a mother tell Jesus her sons deserve the top two spots in Jesus’s Kingdom. There is likely more, but not less, to help us see that the command to love one another is not without the accompanying difficulty in keeping said command.

And if we cannot imagine becoming traveling companions with our IRS agent, or trusting that the fellow at the table next to you isn’t watching your every move to see if you measure up to his expectations, or that you wouldn’t wish the two Sons of Thunder to end up the least favorite of all the disciples when you learn their mother thinks they deserve more than the rest of you, then ask yourself, why does it seem those most near to you are often the ones most to ruffle your feathers and make loving a chore?

Rick had a line for those times when he encountered those who were hard to love. “You explain people. I will explain nuclear fission,” he would say. He did not expect me to answer but instead to learn to love no matter who was the one another in the moment.

The command reveals our need: Jesus’s command in the face of death, that is.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer ran an underground Seminary in Finkenwalde, Germany, during the rise of the Third Reich. In 1938, the year after the underground seminary had been shut down, Bonhoeffer wrote the little book Life Together. He wanted to record reflections from his experience in the seminary. One observation he made is that community, the conditions for successful learning and loving together, must overcome the expectations of those who join or are called into the group. He named these expectations wish dreams. His warning, gleaned from his own experience, is that wish dreams- our expectations for others and sometimes ourselves- if not shattered, become the ideas that undermine the development or creation of a community of learning to love others. He wrote rather pointedly,

The man who fashions a visionary ideal of community demands that it be realized by God, by others, and by himself. . . . When his ideal picture is destroyed, he sees the community going to smash. So he becomes, first an accuser of his brethren, then an accuser of God, and finally the despairing accuser of himself.

If the wish dream is shattered, then the realization is what Bonhoeffer describes.

By sheer grace, God will not permit us to live even for a brief period in a dream world. He does not abandon us to those rapturous experiences and lofty moods that come over us like a dream. God is not a God of the emotions but the God of truth.

Jesus told the disciples at the top of John 14,

I AM the Truth.

From there, Jesus tells the disciples not how to get to the Truth, but that the Truth has come to them. More than that, dispelling their feeling of not knowing where to go, Jesus tells them He has not only revealed the Father, but that the Father and the Son, by the Spirit, have come to make their home in them. If they cannot- if we cannot hear that Jesus came to us and not that we found the hidden map to Him- then we will be confused when Jesus tells the disciples,

This is my command.

The consequence and condition of the home of love now in you, by the presence of the indwelling Father, Son, and Spirit, is the desire to love one another. Though we may find it difficult, the Spirit of God reminds us what Jesus said and did. Therefore, now that you are in Him and He is in you, the conditions in you to love one another are His work in you.

Jesus put it this way,

Love one another as I have loved you.

When Jesus tells the disciples, “This is my command,” He confesses, a word which means “to say the same thing,” that He has kept His own command. His logic is consistent. The Father loves the Son, the Son loves the disciples, the disciples love one another. The shape of the love the Son has for the disciples, his followers, is made clear,

No one has greater love than this: to lay down his life for his friends.

This is the love with which he has loved the disciples. The love Jesus has for you and me, for us. But we live in a place where we are not subject to die for our friends. What then?

In the sixth century, Gregory preached Homily 27, part of 40 Homilies on the Gospels. His passage of Scripture was the same as ours today: John 15:12-17. By the sixth century, the period of persecution that had kept the church underground until the fourth century had passed. Recognizing that the Church, and so Christians, were not facing the threat of death or of laying down their lives for their friends, Gregory had a suggestion.

“But no one is persecuting us to the point of death. How then can we prove that we love our friends? But there is something we should do during times of peace in the Church to make clear whether we are strong enough to die for the sake of loving during times of persecution. John, the author of this gospel, says, He who has the world’s goods and sees his brother in need and closes his heart against him, how does God’s love dwell in him?”

There is that word dwell. Jesus’s word is remain.

Gregory’s point is that the love for one another demonstrates the love the Father has for the Son and that the Son has for his followers. When his followers keep his command, they illustrate the love that indwells them in a way that goes beyond talking about it. For some, it may mean laying down their wealth, their time, their ego, their self-interest. Again, Gregory is not suggesting we love our way to the Truth. Instead, the Truth sets us free to love one another. We cannot do so apart from the Gift that is the presence of the Father, Son, and Spirit.

Jesus tells the disciples that he has gifted them all they need, such that He can say,

I have appointed you to produce fruit, and that your fruit should remain, so that whatever you ask the Father in my name, he will give you.

Produce fruit.

Let’s keep the imagery of the Vine and the branches close. We are the branches connected to the Vine. The source of any fruit that appears is provided by the Vine. Remember Jesus’s words: “For apart from me you can do nothing.” There is no producing fruit without the work of the Spirit in us.

This is what the Apostle Paul is getting at in Galatians when he contrasts the works of the flesh with the fruit of the Spirit. Our natural inclinations, the works of the flesh, produce their own results, “fruit,” if you will. Fruit not worthy to eat, corrupting fruit, damaging fruit. However, he lists nine fruits of the Spirit that we often read as an aspirational list. We hear Paul’s words, “Be more, for you are not enough.” We think these nine fruits are the goals for what and who we should be.

However, heard this way, they present us with a new law. Keeping the imagery of fruit alive, the Apostle Paul insists that leaving grace behind and taking up the law is like giving in to the works of the flesh, which cannot produce anything righteous. The fruit of the Spirit is just that: products of the work of the Spirit in you, in us. In a devotional book of reflections titled Daily Grace, Volume 2, our friend Jason puts it this way,

Fruit does not force itself to grow; fruit is the product of a plant made healthy.

Made healthy by the love the Father has for the Son, the love the Son has for his followers, and the love his followers have for one another, which produces fruit. The Spirit is working in us.

Laura and I were discussing Jesus’s words in this passage,

Love one another as I have loved you.

I asked her if she had a memory, an experience where the Spirit of God made this reality a living moment that she could share. I told her that sometimes sermons are collaborative; they come alive as the Spirit works in the life of the Church, in real people’s lives, giving us a way to say, Here, God is at work! She wrote this.

I knew God called us to missions. We had had a precarious journey, and it took about 4 years before we landed in Bogota, Colombia. Assisted by my six-month-old on one hip and a wide-eyed 1^st grader looking for reassurance, we began to unbox our household for the 10^th time. I was a little nervous about what was to come and had no idea why God brought us to The California Townhouses. We were once again in a new place, trying to speak a new language, and surrounded only by strangers. We were the foreigners. The previous weeks had been filled with mastering public transportation, standing in long lines, obtaining proper legal documents, forever trying to understand and be understood to complete all the necessary processes for one arriving in a new place. Working in that narrow little house, we just hoped to be “loved”.

We had recently moved from Venezuela where the then, President Hugo Chavez, had spewed nothing but hate of Capitalistic Americans 24/7. Our Venezuelan friends and neighbors had protected us and loved us as much as they could, but the propaganda was deafening and our leaving was under very strenuous circumstances. One morning, unpacking our things ,there was a knock at the door. Opening the front door, there stood a nicely dressed lady who wanted to welcome us into her neighborhood. She had heard we were missionaries and wanted to see how she could help. Even now, thinking about her coming to our door, I can’t see through my own tears. She was, for me, the arms of Jesus. I don’t even remember what all happened in that first meeting, but it was through that encounter that God started a women’s ministry that birthed a church and changed so many families.

Jesus tells the disciples,

You did not choose me, but I chose you. I appointed you to go and produce fruit, and that your fruit should remain, so that whatever you ask the Father in my name, he will give you.

The ask we make is grounded in the love the Father has for the Son, the Son has for the disciples, and the disciples have for one another. The whatever is sourced in the self-giving, other-directed love of the Father, Son, and Spirit and is made plain in Christ’s suffering and death on the Cross, where he heals us and makes us His friends, even his enemies. And the Father’s love for the Son raises the Son from the dead.

Over the years, I have not always followed Rick’s example. And I’m sure there were occasions he did not follow his own. And for those times, I am heartened, and I know Rick is, that Jesus has kept His command for me, for us.

My command Jesus proclaims is the command He keeps, the Risen One, for you and me, for us, and continues to keep in us by His Spirit. Good News!