North Yarmouth Congregational Church

(A sermon for Easter 6B by the Reverend Martha K. Spong–May 13, 2012–John 15:9-17–click here for audio)

When I was a little girl growing up in a Virginia so long ago and faraway it feels like a storybook, my mama told me what her mama told her even longer ago:
“Pretty is as pretty does.”

My daddy’s mama had a word to add:
“Make yourself useful as well as decorative.”

At church I heard more pieces of advice
“Go and sin no more.”
“Forgive 70 x 7 times.”
“Be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect.”
“Go and make disciples of all nations.”
‎”Be angry, but sin not.”
“Love your enemies, and pray for those that hate you.”
“Never spank in anger.”

Wait, that one was my Cornell-educated social worker mother, not Jesus, to give us a sense of how times have changed.
And just as I want to say, really, pray for those who HATE me? I also have to say to my mother, of long ago memory, “Never spank in anger? When else would you want to?”

She might have needed to check in with herself about that, just like we need to check in with ourselves about all these seemingly simple, ultimately complicated instructions for life that came from Jesus. How’re we doing on that forgiveness piece? Heck, how am *I* doing on that? … More on that later.

The truth is that any phrase we hear over and over again takes on a life of its own. From this week’s text, for instance, comes a verse that even non-religious people probably know, but they don’t necessarily know from whence it came or exactly what it means.

“Greater love hath no man…” Wait, I’m hearing it in my head in the King James Version. We read it this way:

No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. (John 15:13, NRSV)

But I hear it this way, no matter how many other ways I read it:

Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. (John 15:13, KJV)

How many of you know this, have heard it this way, too? I associate it with war movies, and the noble sacrifice of one character who makes it possible for all the other characters to live. I grew up with parents who lived through World War II, and I watched a lot of movies on our black-and-white TV that all seemed to have the same basic plot as “They Were Expendable.” A group of men from different walks of life are gathered with a mission to perform, and some or all of them are going to die, but usually one makes the sacrifice. You can see it coming almost from the beginning of the movie.

In that room where Jesus gathered with his disciples on the last night of his human life, he was the only one who could see what was coming. Everyone else was still struggling to understand basic principles of his teaching. He spent the whole evening, according to John’s gospel, making one last attempt to impress on them the importance of love.

‎”This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.”

It’s not the only time he says something like this. Later he says that’s how people will *know* they are his disciples, by the way they love each other.

And then he goes on to talk about laying down his life.

If he’s asking us to do the same, we may want to put this back on that list I started with and simply set those verses aside as being the rule for more dedicated and faithful people than we can ever hope to be. And while I don’t want to let us off the hook—a life of faith often involves some sacrifice of what we want—it’s also possible he was simply talking about himself.

You see, he was getting ready to lay his own life down to accomplish a purpose we can’t duplicate. He was laying down his own life to save us from isolation and sin and disconnection, to show in the reality of his death and his resurrection that God exists and cares for us.

In these words spoken in the brief space between dinner and arrest, he tried to tell them again what to do. Love one another.

That’s not always easy. It sounds nice, but it’s not always easy.

Think for a moment about someone you find hard to love.
…
No, really. Think about it.

I suspect the disciples were just like some of the people you’re thinking of. They were individuals from different walks of life, just like those guys in the foxhole movies, and they were tired from being on the road and on the run for three years, and they were puzzled by this man who they loved, they really did, but why was he telling them to love each other? Wasn’t it enough to love him?

They didn’t understand that he was preparing them for a time when they would have to manage on their own, when their actions and decisions would be made not by asking him what came next but by calling on their memories of things he did and things he said. You’re not my servants, he said on that last night, and in that one idea he up-ended all their ideas of how the world worked. He took away the hierarchy of master and servant and brought them onto his level, as friends. And he made it clear that as friends, sent out together to continue his teaching, they would need each other’s love.

“Go and sin no more.”
“Forgive 70 x 7 times.”
“Be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect.”
“Go and make disciples of all nations.”
‎”Be angry, but sin not.”
“Love your enemies, and pray for those that hate you.”

These are just some of the things we do to live that love Jesus was talking about with his close friends on the last night they were together before the world changed completely.

Or maybe they are some of the things we don’t do, but think we should.

‎”This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.”

And Jesus loved. My goodness, did he love. He loved us all, broken and difficult as we might be, without regard to where we live or what we eat or how we pray or who we love…or can’t manage to love. He simply loved us.

God loves us, with tremendous patience, and I imagine a good sense of humor because how else could God do it, and taking a long view of our possibilities, and never forgetting grace—the promise that we are forgiven and loved not because we deserve it but because God wants to do it.

I only have to look back about eighteen hours to remember the last time I did not love with patience and humor and the long view, and I’m counting on God’s grace because it’s possible I need to be forgiven for it.

I need to be forgiven for it.

Think again about someone you find hard to love.

Is it someone in public life? Or maybe a whole group of people? Maybe it’s someone long dead but still rankling you. Is it someone close to home? Maybe it’s someone right in this room.

Love one another as I have loved you. It’s a commandment, an order, and it’s not all hearts and flowers. It’s work. It wears us out.

Yesterday I had the privilege of officiating at the wedding of Sara Brobst and Jeremiah Bartlett. When I have the opportunity to give a brief reflection at a wedding, I usually talk about how love is not just a noun describing a romantic feeling but a verb we choose to live out from one day to the next. It’s not easy or painless.

But I didn’t need to say any of that, because one of the readings we heard a famous segment from the story of “The Velveteen Rabbit,” a book by Margery Williams about a stuffed toy who wanted to know what it means to be real. He asked the Skin Horse, one of the older toys, to explain it to him and learned that you become real by being loved.

“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.

“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”

“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?’

“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t often happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”

Love wears us out and makes us real, the giving and the receiving of it. We become.

My mother with my son, Edward, and their model of the Peaks Island ferry landing, Summer 1990.

The person who still rankles me is my mother, nineteen years, almost, after her death. It’s mixed. There are other things she said that I will never forget but don’t like to repeat. There are visions of her on the floor with my older son, building with blocks, or holding my second son in her arms, rhapsodizing over his little feet. There are memories of the last moments we spent together, hard and tender, as I realized how little I knew about what to do at a deathbed.

Love wears us out and makes us real, the giving and the receiving of it. We become.

And here’s the wonder of it. God made God’s own self real. God became. God became human and material and touchable, because God loves us. God even let us deal out death to God’s own self in Jesus Christ, to show a love beyond our imagining.

And in return Jesus asks us, he commands us, to love one another. It’s as simple and as complicated as that. He commands us to love one another, and that has implications for the way we talk to each other and the way we spend our money and the way we commit our time and the way we represent Jesus to people who don’t know about him yet and the way we cope with the people who are hardest to love.

It requires tremendous patience, and a good sense of humor because how else could we do it, and taking a long view of each other’s possibilities, and never forgetting the grace we have been given. I’m not always good at it, but I’ll keep trying. Will you? In the name of the one who had laid down his life for love of us. Amen.

(A sermon for Easter 5B–May 6, 2012–Acts 8:27-40; 1 John 4:7-21–click here for audio)

She didn’t look like she belonged there, and she could see it for herself.

It was a summer Sunday, and she decided to visit a church, and she dressed casually because it was summer and it was Maine, and because, frankly, she wasn’t a dressing up kind of person anyway. She came through the rather formal entrance from the main street in town, the only door a person would readily find open, and a well-dressed couple greeted her. And as she looked around, she became more and more uncomfortable, because *everyone* was well-dressed. She could see and feel her own difference. And because I wasn’t there that day I can’t tell you how they treated her. I know the next time she came she sat in the back, and she asked the preacher – me – if the church had a dress code.

Apparently these exist.

We can tell when we’re welcome, or not.

I had a long conversation with her in which I tried to justify the people who dress up for church. I always dressed up for church, so I wasn’t really the one to make the case for coming casual. I understood why it mattered to look spruced up for Jesus. I also understood why it didn’t matter at all, and therefore put no pressure on my kids to dress up for church, figuring it mattered more to have them there. So on balance I think this makes me a moderate on dressing up for church, although I’m pretty sure I’ve only preached in pants twice, ever.

I had to try hard to see the visitor’s point of view, because I believed everyone ought to be welcome and everyone *was* welcome, as far as I could tell: welcome to come into the sanctuary, welcome to worship God, welcome to come to the table and certainly welcome to be baptized.

When Brittany asked me just a few weeks ago if Evan had to be dressed in white to be baptized, I assured her there was no dress code. I would have been just as happy to baptize him in footie pajamas as I was to baptize him in little khaki pants.
It doesn’t matter to me what a person wears to church, even though I can understand why some dress up and can support those who do not, whether the reason is philosophical, practical or personal.

For the people who greeted the lady in shorts, there was at least a long moment of wondering whether she had come to ask for money. That happened sometimes, because the church was downtown in a neighborhood gone a little to ruin, but I always thought the greeters did a great job making people welcome no matter the circumstances and no matter what they might have thought on the inside.

But I didn’t always see it up close, so if there was a moment of checking themselves, of regrouping to appear welcoming even when the feeling wasn’t there, I wouldn’t have known about it. There are invisible barriers, and when we are the ones who “live” here, we can’t necessarily see them.

I grew up in Virginia, as most of you know, and it was a time when some of the barriers were literal, spelled out on signs warning people of color not to sit in certain places or drink from certain fountains. And as things began to be integrated, I can remember overhearing a conversation at church. What would we do, people wondered, if an African-American family wanted to come to our church? This was a cause for worry, and not unlike the question of how we dress for church, the worry came from both ends of the spectrum. The youth group heard a rumor about church leaders being in the Ku Klux Klan. But what was more likely true was what usually is true in church disagreements: some people liked things the way they were, while others wanted to see the church expand its understanding of community.

The book of Acts, which we read in the season of Easter in place of readings from the Old Testament, is a story of pushing out the boundaries and including more and more people of different backgrounds and circumstances in the community of Christ’s people. Peter and the original group of disciples are all Jews. They want to expand the faith within their own race, and they struggle with the idea that you can follow Jesus without being a Jew, just like them, without following the rules about what you eat and how you wash and who can go into the Temple.

Despite their initial assumption, the message of God’s grace and forgiveness spoke to people beyond their community, and Gentiles joined them. Still, there were struggles, and Acts 6 tells us the Greek followers of Christ complained that “their” widows weren’t getting as much care as the Jewish widows. Philip, part of whose story we read today, was himself a Gentile, a Greek, and one of seven followers of Christ chosen to do active ministry, set to work making sure that inequity did not continue.

When increasing persecution caused the identifiable faithful to scatter, Philip went to Samaria to preach. The Samaritans shared ancestry with the Jews, but did not share all their practices and understandings, so Philip, a Greek, had to master another unfamiliar culture.

From a website so prim they call it “Philip and the man in a chariot.”

And then…

Then an angel of the Lord said to Philip, “Get up and go toward the south to the road that goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza.”

And the person the angel sent Philip to talk with was a lot farther outside his comfort zone than the lady in shorts was for the well-dressed greeters on Main Street, I can promise you.

The followers of Jesus were living on the margins, persecuted by the Jewish authorities, scattered to avoid mayhem, and now he was sent by the Angel of the Lord to talk to someone in a chariot?

Yes. The person in the chariot was a court official of the Candace, the ruler of what we know as Ethiopia, a queen in a line of female monarchs.* He was her treasurer, which means he holds a responsible position of authority. And he was a eunuch, a man who sacrificed part of his physical body in order to hold that position of trust, the idea being that a eunuch would not manage to marry or become involved with the queen, nor would he have a family of his own that might divide his loyalties.

I told you it was more complicated than wearing shorts to church.

The man was Ethiopian, a person of color, and he was a eunuch, and he was also a Jew. He had just come from Jerusalem, where he could go to the Temple, but not all the way inside. He knew the rules. Just getting close was enough.

Imagine if the lady with the shorts had been asked to stand in the vestibule, to listen to the service through the closed doors.
But he knew those were the rules, and he clearly left Jerusalem hungry for more knowledge, as he was reading from Isaiah, that beautiful book of prophecy that seems to point so clearly to Jesus. Certainly Philip understood it that way, and he proceeded to tell the eunuch all he knew about the life and death and resurrection of our Savior, Jesus Christ.

“Look! There is some water! What is to prevent me from being baptized?”

The eunuch was ready to commit to a new way of understanding God. Would Philip let him in? What was to prevent him?
Maybe this person was too far outside the norms being established by the new community. Maybe his differences were too … different.

From the school website.

I can tell you that over many years, the school associated with my church in Virginia became multi-racial.

I wish I could tell you that the lady in shorts came back week after week, enjoyed staying for coffee hour, made some new friends, signed up to help with a mission project and eventually joined the church. I wish I could tell you that.

I hope it’s the truth that she was the one perceiving a difference that was too … different. I know her two visits to the church got us talking about how we made people welcome, and how we failed at it, too. We weren’t limber enough to make a change so quickly, between one Sunday and the next. We needed more time to identify the barriers, to process and respond.

Philip, thankfully, did not. He got out of the chariot with the Ethiopian eunuch. He got into the water with the queer, black Jew and baptized him.

What is to prevent us from doing the same?

In the name of the One who makes us one community of love. Amen.

~Rev. Martha K. Spong

*Many thanks to the Rev. Wil Gafney, Ph.D. for sharing her sermon, “Black, Jewish and Queer: The Ethiopian Eunuch,” which both informed and inspired me this week.