By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.
Love is one of the most overused words and, at the same time, one of the least practiced. Think of all the times we use it and hear it: I love your hair; I love pistachio ice cream, I love the colour blue. We often use love to indicate some degree of preference. I think we could all agree that Jesus was not talking about hair styles, ice cream, or colours, yet we use love for things of little consequence all the time. And we use and practice love in the way Jesus meant much less frequently.
I think part of the problem is language. All three of our readings this morning were originally written in Koine Greek, the lingua franca of the entire Mediterranean region and Asia Minor from the time of Alexander the Great until well into the Common Era. In Greek there are at least 7 words with significantly different meanings that we translate as love. Eros is, of course, romantic or sexual love associated with desire. Philia means deep friendship, affection, and camaraderie, from which we get the suffix phile as in bibliophile – a lover of books. There are also words for playful love or flirtation, for longstanding love born of association, for love within families and for love of self. But Agape is the word in both John and Acts. It conveys unconditional, selfless, universal love – giving love with no regard to cost or return.
Let us turn to the reading from Acts first because it is an illustration of the demands God makes of us in living Agape. Our reading from Chapter 11 is Peter’s report to the Church in Jerusalem that had heard and was appalled at stories of Peter consorting with Gentiles. The account of that consorting appears in Chapter 10.
Consorting with Gentiles, leave alone sharing a meal with them, in the morés of the time, rendered the guilty party as unclean as if he or she had eaten pork.
You will recall that throughout the Gospels, Jesus is reviled by the religious authorities for eating with outcasts and sinners. In Matthew Jesus says:
‘Listen and understand: it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but it is what comes out of the mouth that defiles.’…. Do you not see that whatever goes into the mouth enters the stomach, and goes out into the sewer? But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this is what defiles.
But even Jesus is sorely challenged by the Canaanite woman. When she asks for his help for her daughter, he replies:
‘I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.’ But she came and knelt before him, saying, ‘Lord, help me.’ He answered, ‘It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.’ She said, ‘Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.’ Then Jesus answered her, ‘Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.’ And her daughter was healed instantly.
Even the earthly Jesus grew in his sense of the demands of Agape.
So let us go back to our passage from Acts. The death, the resurrection, the ascension has occurred. The Holy Spirit has descended upon the apostles. They are about the building of the church. Peter, the Rock on which Jesus will build his church is in Joppa, the present day Jaffa to the immediate south of Tel Aviv. Joppa is well within Jewish territory. In a vision all manner of animals and birds appear to Peter all of which are unclean, but God commands him to kill and eat. Peter is horrified, but God says What God has made clean, you must not call profane.
Shortly after, the agents of Cornelius, a Gentile centurion from deep within Gentile territory in Caesarea arrive in Joppa to find Peter to bring him to Cornelius. Cornelius sends his agents at the command he received from God in a vision. Peter is alerted to the arrival of the agents by the Spirit and is instructed to go with them. At Caesarea, Peter says to Cornelius: ‘You yourselves know that it is unlawful for a Jew to associate with or to visit a Gentile; but God has shown me that I should not call anyone profane or unclean.”
One cannot overestimate what a radical change this was for Peter. Everything in all his personal, spiritual, and cultural history has been turned upside down. While he was with them the Spirit descended on the gathered Gentiles, just as the Spirit had descended on the apostles on the Day of Pentecost. This is so much more than a pair of ancients burying the hatchet, it is a radical transformation towards universal inclusion in a way that, heretofore, would have been worse than an anathema. The most important line in our reading from Acts this morning is from Peter right at the end, “…who was I that I could hinder God?” For we that are Gentiles, this is where we were brought into full relationship with the God of Israel. It is remarkable that there is not a special feast day to mark such a radical act of inclusion. Perhaps there is not because once in, we began to restrict who could follow. For two thousand years, the church and church people have rarely asked the question, “Who are we that we could hinder God?”
Let us move on to our reading from the Gospel of John. The passage we have this morning is part of what is known as Jesus’ Farewell Discourse. It occurs right after Jesus has washed the disciples feet and indicated that it was Judas who would betray him. Our passage concludes with a very well known statement: 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. Our passage from Acts reveals that the one another is not some small closed group, but everyone, for as God says to Peter, What God has made clean, you must not call profane. There is no one who is not our neighbour. Our challenge is to extend Agape – selfless, universal love to everyone.
This point is reinforced in our reading from Revelation: I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. Alpha and Omega are the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet. So beginning and end makes sense, but alpha and omega also suggest an embracing of the entirety of creation. So we can only fully, unconditionally love God if we can extend our love, our Agape to all creation. Once again radical inclusion is the message.
Instead, how often have we practiced radical exclusion?
I’d like to read you a short passage from ‘The Christian Life’ in the Legacy of the Middle Ages by Maurice Powicke quoted by Diarmaid MacCulloch in Christianity the First Three Thousand Years: (I apologize for the male-centric language. He wrote this in 1926.)
Organized Christianity came into existence, and exists to preserve a treasure, a command to be executed, a promise to be repeated, a mission to be fulfilled. This treasure belongs to the past, present, and future; it is potential, yet active; an object of contemplation, yet the inspiration of right conduct. An unfathomable mystery, it must be related to all knowledge. And in their endeavours to guard and transmit their trust, its guardians have raised the most perplexing issues. They have caused endless destruction of life in the name of universal peace. They have built up the most realistic of political systems in the effort to establish a kingdom not of this world. In the exploration of the recesses of the soul, they have developed the arts and sciences, and constructed theories of the universe. And in their desire to satisfy the deepest needs of mankind, they have raised up against themselves the visions, prophecies, and extravagances of excitable and obstinate men, and the dislike of many sensible men.
Powicke goes on to say:
The treasure which has caused all this activity was cast into the world with a few simple sentences: The principle one of those sentences is Thou shalt love the Lord thy God and thy neighbour as thyself. I am sure he would have been happy to include on his list the sentence with which I began this homily: By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.
In summary, Powicke suggests that there has been immeasurable good in art and science and in hope, while there has been unspeakable hurt and violence, and there has been the most enormous amount of perplexing clutter when all we were asked was to love one another.
We are among the guardians of the treasure of Jesus’ call to all who would know God. But like the guardians in the quote I just read, we have raised the most perplexing issues – most of them related to who is allowed in and who is not, who is included and who is not.
We now live in a time when in our small churches in these Island and Inlets we practice a level of inclusion that would have been unthinkable only a decade or so ago, most notably everyone in this room is welcome to come to this table to eat the body and drink the blood. You are welcome at this table even if this is the first time you have ever been in a Christian church. That is radical inclusion at work. And it is simply not yet true in most of the churches of this world – including much of the Anglican Church of Canada.
But let us not get too quick to self-congratulate. We are pretty comfortable at the line from Matthew: 'Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.' We are a long way from perfect, but we have made strides in serving the “leasts”. But what about the “greatest” of these brothers and sisters of mine? Jesus did not ask us to love just those poorer than we. Jesus commands that Agape should extend to everyone. It is comparatively easy to feel and act Agape to the homeless person on the corner, and very important so to do. But can we feel and act Agape to Donald Trump and others like him? Jesus would have us do so. And there’s our challenge for the time that remains to us. One cannot see or hear the news without realizing that those in control – the rich, the powerful, the driven, the ego-filled, the tyrants – need the treasure left to the world by Christ as much or more as the most destitute, for their own sake and for that of creation. Have we so weakened the message with our attempts to contain it, define it, own it that it can no longer be heard among the powerful. Let us be clear, it is easy to contemplate one’s own passing when one has only modest resources to leave behind. But what a temptation to attempt to exist beyond the grave using riches for ego-driven, falsely omnipotent, tyrannical schemes. There is a privileged cohort, victims of their own privilege who Canute-like imagine they can turn the tides. Even as I use the analogy, I defame Canute, because he knew it was nonsense. But it would often appear that the oligarchs of today do not.
We must do everything to increase our Agape by every Godly method we can imagine. It is Agape – universal, selfless, giving love to which we must continually rededicate ourselves. We must love more deeply and more widely. With God’s help, we can succeed or at least we will be able to do more than we can imagine.