Dare to Dance Again: As I Have Loved You
John 15:9-17
May 9, 2021
Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley
Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://youtu.be/AuVx3YWfKD4
The Rev. David Read was born and raised in Scotland, but he was the senior pastor of Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York City for more than 30 years. His autobiography is called God Was in the Laughter. In it, he talks about growing up in Scotland and his Aunt Belle, his most religious relative, who looked like Queen Victoria. “It was difficult to avoid God in her home,” he said, and it wasn’t a particularly pleasant experience. “Morning and evening prayers, endless church services to be endured.” God, he says, was formidable, to be regarded with awe if not outright fear. The Christianity he knew was very serious business. He quotes a Christopher Marley novel in which a character says about Presbyterians and their religion, “It don’t prevent them from committing all the sins there is, but it keeps them from getting any fun out of it”[1]
Our faith can be serious business, even if we don’t approach it like Aunt Belle. And life can be serious. It has felt especially heavy for more than a year. And yet, there is joy, exuberant joy, throughout the Bible. In the call to worship, we heard from Psalm 98, Make a joyful noise to the LORD, all the earth; break forth into joyous song . . . Let the floods clap their hands; let the hills sing together for joy!
It was Jesus’ last Passover with his disciples and he sensed that. For about a week, he has been interacting with his adversaries in Jerusalem during the day, but withdrawing from the city to a safer place at night. The sense of danger, the stress, has been ratcheting up. At the point of our reading from John 15, he has told the group that one of them will betray him. It is a very serious time, a heart-wrenching time, but it is also when Jesus speaks profoundly about joy.
“I am telling you these things so that your joy may be complete, so that it may be full,” Jesus says. “This is my commandment that you love another as I have loved you.”
Philip Yancy wrote about this. He said,
Not long ago I received in the mail a postcard from a friend that had on it only six words, "I am the one Jesus loves." I smiled when I saw the return address, for my strange friend excels at these pious slogans. When I called him, though, he told me the slogan came from the author and speaker Brennan Manning. At a seminar, Manning referred to Jesus' closest friend on earth identified in the Gospels as "the one Jesus loved." Manning said, "If John were to be asked, 'What is your primary identity in life?' he would not reply, 'I am a disciple, an apostle, an evangelist,' but rather, 'I am the one Jesus loves.'"
What would it mean if we could claim that as our primary identity in life – I am the one Jesus loves?
Brennan Manning also tells the story of an Irish priest who goes out for a walk and sees an old peasant kneeling by the side of the road, praying. Impressed, the priest says to the man, "You must be very close to God." The peasant looks up from his prayers, thinks a moment, and then smiles, "Yes, God’s very fond of me."[2]
Love one another as I have loved you. Those who are loved are themselves able to love. We understand this intellectually. Those who are loved have a capacity for love, an energy from which to draw on. But what if we could really believe “I am someone Jesus loves.” What if we could internalize that and trust it deeply? If you hear nothing else today, try to hear this “You are someone Jesus loves. God is very fond of you.”
Love one another as I have loved you. As they sat around the Passover table, what memories might those words have evoked? Jesus had loved them in the daily routine, walking, talking, sharing meals, telling stories. Jesus had loved them in the high moments like walking on water and feeding the 5,000. He had loved them in the hard times, like when Peter’s mother-in-law was sick, when Lazarus was dead, when controversy swirled around them. He had loved them enough to confront their lack of understanding, to encourage them on the occasions when they could not heal like he had, enough to call them away from their day jobs to join his mission,
His love for them was a comprehensive kind of love. He calls it friendship. He says that there is no greater love than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. Jesus has loved them in the ordinary and now he is prepared to love them in the extraordinary, by literally giving his life for them.
Love one another as I have loved you. I call you friends. If you want to be my friends, then be friends with others.
The philosopher Aristotle lived 300 years before Jesus. Artistotle described three kinds of friendship. Some people are our friends because they are useful to us; they allow us to make business connections or get into a particular social group. Other friendships are pleasurable; we cultivate these because we enjoy them. But the third kind of friendship—the best kind—is for the sake of friendship itself. . we become friends with those whose lives we seek to emulate.
Aristotle said that “a friend is another self.” Friends form each other in the moral life, taking on each other's characteristics —both good and bad. We are known by the company we keep; in fact, we are very likely to become the company we keep.
These friendships are the most formative: a true friend who loves as God loves will, in time, teach us how to love as God loves.
Thus, when Jesus says "You are my friends if you do what I command you," he is not simply offering a useful or pleasurable friendship to those who have done his bidding. He is describing the kind of deep friendship that Aristotle calls the best kind. We are called into this kind of relationship with Jesus and, thereby, with God. The theologian Thomas Aquinas took up this idea explicitly—suggesting that part of the goal of the Christian life was to become "friends with God." Through this friendship, we hope to take on God's characteristics as our own—
and to love one another as God loves us.[3]
Jesus did not come to give us a list of rules to keep us safe from an angry God. He came to call us into friendship with God.
Love one another as I have loved you. I call you friends. If you want to be my friends, then be friends with others. Do love for others as I have done love for you.
It sounds all serious again. And heavy. And maybe not so joyful. It is not an easy calling, that is for sure.
And yet, several times, Jesus repeats “abide in my love.” Remain in my love. Live and dwell in my love. Endure, continue, last in my love. Jesus’ love is our example, but also our source. It is where we live and move, within the most abundant and inexhaustible love in existence. It is our rhythm, our dance, where we begin and end and begin again
“Abide in my love.”
“Love one another as I have loved you.”
“Abide in my love.”
Anne is a colleague, a priest in the Church of England, in Britain. One Friday afternoon, she hosted a visit to church for a class of seven-year-olds from a nearby school. They discovered all sorts of interesting things about the church and had a lot to talk about. There was one little boy in the class with special needs. He sees the world in completely different way and it is not always easy to know what is going on in his mind.
As he left the church at the end of the visit, he turned to Anne with a thoughtful expression on his face. She wondered what was going to come out. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘you’re beginning to look a bit like God.’
Anne said, “I have no idea what he meant – probably just that I was looking very, very old . . .and dressed in a white robe on that occasion. But I love the phrase anyway and it gave me a lot to think about. Wouldn’t it be good if people could look at us and think that we really were beginning to look a bit like God; that we were more loving, more forgiving, more joyful, more disturbed by injustice, more courageous about doing something about it. If that is going to happen, it will only be because we are abiding in love, and therefore abiding in God.”
Friends, you are someone God loves. God is very fond of you.
“I have said these things to you that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be full,” Jesus said.
Thanks be to God.
[1] God Was in the Laughter: The Autobiography of David Haxton Carswell Read (New York: Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church, 2005) p. 14, 17
[2] Philip Yancey, What’s So Amazing About Grace?, (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2002), pp. 68-69
[3] David S.Cunningham in Feasting on the Word Year B, Volume 2, David Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor, general editors, (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 2008), p. 500