10th October - Reverend Jo Jones

Sermon Evensong 10^thOctober 2010 - Nehemiah 6:1-6; Ps 144; John 15:12-end

Love one another

When I was at college I came across a writer called Jean Vanier. He founded the L’Arche community in France which is an inclusive faith-based community for people with and without learning disabilities.  His writing is focussed on what it means to be human, and how our relationships with others can become more as God intended if we allow ourselves to be more open to other people and we let go of this need we have as human beings to control everything that happens to us. One of the things he wrote about which has stuck in my mind is the difficulty of living in community – we imagine living in a Christian community, that it will be easy, surely everyone will get on well all the time, people will be working together, there’ll be no rows or swearing or going off in a huff.  But Jean Vanier writes about how hard it actually is to be with the same people, day in, day out. He writes:

Community can appear to be a marvellously welcoming and sharing place. But in another way, community is a terrible place. It is the place where our own limitations and our egoism are revealed to us. When we begin to live full-time with others, we discover our poverty and our weaknesses, our inability to get on with people, our mental and emotional blocks … even perhaps our hatred and wish to destroy.

We at All Saints aren’t living in the same home, but pretty much living closely with each other Sunday by Sunday and at different times during the week, especially during this extended period of re-ordering the church when people have been spending time doing lots of practical work. We also have a fair few meetings and committees, plenty of worship together and lots of social events –quiz! So we are a community with a life that’s shared in common in quite a substantial way. And we do indeed look after and care for one another and we’re really very committed to our Christian faith and to this parish church – but I wonder if we always find it easy to love one another in the way that Christ has commanded for all who call themselves his disciples?

Love one another as I have loved you, says Jesus in John’s gospel. I had to write a long essay about John earlier this year – already that seems like a lifetime away – anyway we had to cover the debate amongst biblical scholars about the origins of John’s gospel – who it was written by and who it was written for. A mainstream view is that much of the events described in the gospel are derived from the eye-witness testimony of Jesus’ disciple John, though they’re probably not written down by him. There’s also other material known as discourses which are the writer’s theological reflections, a form of thinking about the past, present and future in the light of what Jesus said and did during his ministry on earth. So we see the gospel writer making sense of Jesus’ incarnation, his passion and death and his resurrection and ascension, trying to grasp what it means for the community of followers of Jesus that he was living in. And we ourselves are asking what it means for us, another community of believers here and now.    

Jesus didn’t say like one another – I think he recognised through the relationships he’d had with his own disciples that we can get on better with some people than others, that some people are difficult to relate to and others are easy company – no, he said Love one another as I have loved you.

I think it’s helpful to hear these words of Jesus in three ways with a different emphasis on individual words –

love one another– a command to love those we share this community with,

as I have loved you– to love as Jesus did means to love sacrificially and faithfully,

hear it again

as I have loved you– Jesus loves each of us, now, as we are, he loves us

Jesus assures us of the Holy Spirit to help us with the difficult aspects of human relationships. He promises that Spirit, which can be translated as Helper, to all who ask for it, and as the Spirit convinces us of the truth of God’s love for us, so we are given the grace and power to love others as Jesus did. We may not do all that he did in his ministry, we may not go to the cross literally, but we will be able to bear the crosses that are part of human existence. As Paul says, we will be able to bear with one another in love. We’ll begin to understand and cherish one another as we are, and find that we are being transformed even as we stumble along in the ups and downs of community life. Archbishop Rowan Williams challenged me once with something he wrote about relationships: he suggested approaching other people with this question in our minds: What gift is God hoping to give me through this person?  Of course, it may well be the gift of patience because that person irritates the life out of you, but it might be something deeper… something unexpected … where you are drawn closer to them and to God.

If I try to love others by making an effort of will, straining with my mind to follow Jesus’ commandment, to do as he says – I can probably manage it for a bit. But if I surrender my own fears about being liked …. if I offer to God my own weakness and vulnerability and ask him to overcome it with the assurance of his deep and everlasting love for me, then I find myself becoming more loving, I find myself sharing love with others out of that assurance of God’s love for me. Back to Jean Vanier again:

in community life we discover our own deepest wound and learn to accept it. So our rebirth can begin. It is from this very wound that we are born.

Sisters, brothers in Christ – we are pilgrims on a journey, and many of us are wounded pilgrims, and sometimes the road can be hard going. When loving one another seems an impossible chore, when we are hurt or angry or just fed up with being in a community of faith, then we have a helper, an advocate which is the Holy Spirit of Jesus and we can call on him to help us bear the load and to enable us to bear the fruit of God’s love for us, fruit that will last. We are all unfinished, we are all in the process of becoming and none of us has everything sorted; but as a community we can open our hearts more and more to God’s love, so that we in our turn can help each other to grow in love, so that our love for each other will mark us all out as followers of Jesus and invite others to join with us in following him.