Acts 11:1-18
Revelation 21:1-6
John 13:31-35

God be in my words and in my speaking; God be in our hearts and in our understanding. AMEN.

The three lessons appointed for this Fifth Sunday of Easter present what I think of as good themes for the Easter season. In the lesson from the Acts of the Apostles, we have the account of an interaction between Peter and the religious authorities in Jerusalem, which culminates with a new understanding of the wideness and inclusiveness of God’s grace. In the section of the Revelation to John, the loud voice from the throne declares a new understanding of the relationship between God and human beings: “See, the home of God is among mortals. [God] will dwell with them; they will be [God’s] peoples, and God … will be with them…” The idea the mortals will be God’s peoples — in the plural, which recognizes the vast diversity of the human community. The vision isn’t that God’s presence among us homogenizes us into some kind of unity, but rather that, in spite of differences ethnic, cultural, regional, religious, tribal, economic, and political, the entire human community is God’s family.

These themes of inclusion harmonize well with the new commandment — the new insight; the new instructions — Jesus gives to his disciples in the selection from John’s Gospel appointed for this Sunday. Jesus said, “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.” There is nothing more important, I believe, in the Christian Gospel than this new commandment to love one another as Christ has loved us. It sounds simple, obvious: easy; it is the only thing we have to do to be recognized as Christ’s disciples.

But it isn’t that easy. It isn’t that simple. Love is complex; relationships — whether we’re talking about the forces that hold communities together (or split them apart), whether we’re talking about the intimate connections of marriages and families, whether we’re talking about interactions between political, economic or ethnic entities in the global community — relationships are built and maintained, strengthened and undermined by all kinds of issues, events, experiences, needs, and feelings. Even though the statement: “Love one another” sounds like a simple directive, it is ridiculous to imagine that actually carrying it out will be easy. If it were simple or easy, we would already have world peace and harmony. The tensions that afflict our communities, our families, our society, our world, are not very responsive to the simple solution. Remember Nancy Reagan and the campaign to “Just Say NO” to drugs? On one level, it’s the obvious solution: each individual ostensibly has a choice whether or not to take drugs; if everyone chose not to, there would be no drug problem. But — even leaving aside the complicated international political and economic forces involved in the American drug problem — on an individual level, so much else affects a person’s decision to use drugs or not that it is simplistic to the point of ludicrous to imagine that a slogan alone is the answer.

As one of my colleagues put it once: “We could all wear buttons that say: ‘Love one another’ — but that wouldn’t make us Christians.”

It seems to me that there is a lot of sentimental baggage attached to the word, LOVE. Loving others gets equated with “always being nice.” In a parish Bible study I led (some years ago), I asked participants to describe how they went about loving others. I can’t remember what everyone said, but one response has stuck with me. The person said: “When some jerk cuts me off in traffic, I say a prayer for them instead of yelling at them.”

Sometimes we seem to think that “all” we have to do is to think nice thoughts about others — and indeed, some of the work we must do to love one another is internal: working on our attitude, on the way we see one another, on the ways we react in certain situations, to certain sorts of folk. But I point out that the kind of love I believe Jesus is talking about is a verb; it’s a series of actions; it’s the way we behave, rather than a state of mind or a type of feeling.

Let me give you an example — maybe not a happy or optimistic example, but doubtless a familiar situation. I know a couple who were married for twenty-two or -three years. It was not a perfect marriage — perhaps not even a healthy one. There was a lot of tension, a lot of arguing; but they stayed together until their kids were in college and high school. When they divorced it wasn’t a surprise to anyone, though it was (as such things are) painful. I talked with each of them (separately) about the marriage and the divorce, about their feelings, and I vividly recall him saying: “I still love her; I’ve always loved her;” and her saying, “He always said he loved me, but he never behaved as though I mattered.”

If simply feeling love, simply thinking kind thoughts, isn’t enough to hold a relationship together — even as intimate and self-selecting a relationship as marriage — how can love (the noun, the feeling) knit together the disparate and often conflicting factions in a local community, or the global one?

I believe that the love Jesus commands us to express is the verb form, the action. In another memorable passage in John’s Gospel, which we heard a couple of weeks ago, Jesus asks Peter: “Do you love me?” and when Peter says that he does, Jesus replies: “Feed my sheep.” It isn’t enough merely to live within the comfort of the noun-form; possessing love for Jesus ought to impel us to loving acts in his name. After all, his love for us drew him to the Cross. If we only feel that inner and private love for Jesus — and for our fellow human — but never do anything to make it concrete, we run the risk of failing to communicate our inner convictions, our deepest feelings to the people who most need what we have to give.

Let’s face it: it isn’t easy to love even our families and neighbors — but Jesus’ directive to love is not limited to those with whom we have many things in common. We are also required to love strangers and foreigners, even our enemies, because (as the passage from Revelation would have it) all of us — those like us and those very, very different from us — belong to God. So although it’s all well and good to revere a beloved passage from the Bible — like today’s passage from John’s Gospel — it is also tremendously important that we understand that Jesus’ directive to love one another is altogether more than a simple slogan. It is a challenge, and one that we often — both as individuals and collectively as a community or nation — fail.

Loving one another isn’t easy. It involves so much more than just “being nice” or thinking kind thoughts about others. It’s more, too, than doing good works for those less fortunate — although that is definitely a valid way to express love and compassion. But the kind of love Jesus talks about — Love one another — is reciprocal; it involves being in relationship with the other. It’s specific and very concrete, and it can take wildly different forms: confronting alcoholics or addicts with their disease and getting them into treatment; marching in support of reformed immigration laws; setting definite, clear, and firm limits with a teenager; visiting someone who is sick or shut in; volunteering at the Haven; and so on. It takes more effort to enter into a relationship, than just to write a check to a group doing good work; but Jesus often asks us to do difficult, challenging, and risky things. And just because a thing is difficult doesn’t mean it isn’t worth doing.

To illustrate this, let me tell you a parable. It’s about my wonderful cat Petrouchka — who I had for eighteen years and still miss. Now, cats aren’t human. They don’t have the same kind of language; I can’t really know what went on in his little kitty brain. But I do know that we had a relationship that involved an exchange, a mutual dependence which — for lack of a translation into Cat Language — I will call love. My part involved, of course, care for his needs like food (which he enjoyed tremendously) and regular visits to the vet (which he did NOT enjoy, but needed), as well as things like patting, brushing and scritching all the places he couldn’t reach very well. His side involved greeting me at the door when I came home, sleeping on the bed, shedding on everything — especially things which needed dry cleaning! — and sitting in my lap and purring. More than anything else, I think it was the lap sitting which he identified as his job, his responsibility. It was how he loved, how he actively made concrete his side of the bond we shared.

He had lots of opportunities to sit in my lap, because I spent (and spend still) long hours sitting in front of my computer. Much of my creative output has been influenced in one way or another by the warm, furry, purring presence of my animal friend.

Several years ago, I invested in a kneeling chair for my computer desk. It was one of those ones that have a slanted seat and a slanted knee rest designed to distribute one’s weight a bit differently and to allow for the correct alignment of the spine. I liked the chair a lot: it was far more comfortable than a conventional chair for long writing sessions — but it put my lap at a 45 degree angle, too steep for my faithful kitty lounger. Petrouchka was upset. For a solid half hour, he wound around my chair, across my desk (and keyboard), nudged my knees with his face, and tried to convey his dissatisfaction with the turn of events. I was apologetic, but there didn’t seem to be anything else to do. Finally, he got under the desk and surveyed the situation; then, to my utter astonishment, he climbed onto the part of the chair where my knees went, and leaned his front legs and chest against my thigh. I reached down and patted him; he wriggled around until he was completely secure and comfortable, then went into purring overdrive. Lap sitting was how he made love concrete. If I was dense enough to make it difficult, it still didn’t negate his obligation. If he couldn’t “talk” me out of the new chair, why then, he still had to find a way to make it work.

We have to love like that: actively, concretely; we have to love actively, even — and perhaps especially — when others seem to make it harder for us to love them. Jesus gave us an example of that active, unshakable love. His love for us was undeterred even by the Cross. We can hope and pray that our love will not be so severely tested, but even when it’s difficult, even when the tried and true methods fail to work, even when the rules change and the other makes it harder for us, even when it means questioning things we would prefer to accept without examining, we are still called to love, to make our love real, concrete, visible, tangible. And when we do, others will know — with the inner certainty which goes far beyond verbal assurances — that we are in truth disciples of Christ.

In the name of God, AMEN.

Sermon preached by Beth Hilgartner at St. Barnabas’, Norwich, Vt.