They’ll Know We Are Christians By Our Love
Psalm 16
John 21: 1-19
My friend Kaki is one of many of my peers who has experienced the painfully human part of the Christian church. She grew up in the South and was frequently bombarded with religious fervor, hypocrisy and judgment. She does not find nourishment in the institutional church, yet she is a seeker. While I of course am somewhat of a church nerd, looking for new experiences of church wherever and whenever I can and believing deeply that the Christian church in all its flaws can indeed be a life giving, life saving place. Kaki and I have fabulous conversations as we have learned to love our wildly different ways of looking at the world. And what she has invited me to see is how far many of those of us who call ourselves Christians have moved away from acting like Jesus. It isn’t all that surprising. After all, Jesus lived over two thousand years ago. And we have just a few books in our Bible chronicling who he was and what he aimed to show us about God. Added to that we have a few hundreds of years of commentary and writing about how we are supposed to respond to what scripture tells us about who Jesus was and the traditions of a church that has imperfectly and often painfully tried to live out the call to continue his work here on earth. So it isn’t really too shocking that the gap between where we are as Christians and where Jesus calls us to be as his followers can sometimes feel more like a canyon. This distance has afforded us the space to construct our own images of God instead of diving deeper into the God we know through Jesus of Nazareth. This constructed God throughout history has taken on suspiciously human qualities like excluding people with whom we disagree and fail to understand or extending grace to just those in our inner circle, none of which are qualities we see in Jesus. The God we know through Jesus is a God that invites us to follow through the messiness of humanity not around it or over it, beside it or below it. Following Jesus means that we are invited to love those whom the world has cast aside.
My friend Kaki is not alone, time and time again, I find myself in a conversation with yet another person who was labeled as unworthy of the church. I have heard story upon story of people who have been hurt by the Christian church- people who have been pushed out and cast off, for a whole variety of reasons. And in such conversations I find myself thinking of all those with whom Jesus spent his time- people of all kinds who were not invited inside the Temple walls, prostitutes and lepers, adulterers and children, women without family, people whom the world cast aside. Following Jesus means that we are invited to extend a love so radical that it is beyond judgment, a love that offers a tiny glimpse of the kind of love God extends to us.
These experiences make me think of a hymn we shouted out in song growing up in my little congregational church in Eastern Washington. “We are one in the Spirit, we are one in the Lord, We are one in the Spirit, we are one in the Lord, And we pray that all unity may one day be restored, And they'll know we are Christians by our love, by our love, They will know we are Christians by our love.” And I wonder what it might it look like for us to be singled out, to be labeled- labeled as Christians by the love we extend, by our love of strangers and friends alike, by our love of those we understand and those we do not, by our love of those who are labeled as enemies and those who are called our adversaries? What might it look like for us to be known by our way of loving those who have been hurt and are without family, those who have been cast aside and left out? They will know we are Christians by our love.
Yet Christian love, love of the kind Jesus required of his disciples, isn’t a candy coated, Hallmark stamped, conditional kind of love. This Christ like love is a love that compels us to look out and up, to look beyond the paths we so easily travel. Christian love is a love that pulls us right out into the thick of human living. For Lent, we are jumping into the core tenets of our faith. We started with prayer, last week our Holy Bible and today we explore the call of outreach, of caring for God’s creation, of being Christ’s loving hands in the world. It is the real raw stuff of Christian living. It is messy and awkward, uncomfortable and full of questions. One of my friends in ministry tells the story of her mission trip to Ecuador. It was an outreach of the congregation and a place where the community of faith had committed thousands and thousands of dollars as well as a lot of time and energy. Large groups from the church had been traveling there and sending money for years. It was easy for the group to see that this mission project was the right thing to do. It was easy for the group to see that this mission project was a way of giving back. It was easy for the group to see that they had so much and the people for whom they were caring had so little. But what was altogether new and a bit frightening to embrace was the notion that they were there to serve as Christ’s hands. It is so fleshy, so messy, and so incarnational. They were there not for themselves, but so God could use them to care for the orphaned children. They will know we are Christians by our love.
And this group is not unique. For many of us, the idea that God wants to use us to care for the vulnerable is an over the top, are you sure? kind of idea. Many of us find the Christian vocation of outreach and mission to be a tad odd- the idea that God, that our God could want to use us, to us our very hands and feet, to use our words and smiles to change the lives of another, well that can seem like a wild idea. It is unglamorous, often thankless and down in the trenches kind of work. And the motivation is much more than doing good in the world. As Christians our motivation has little do with how good it makes us feel or the results we can see. Jesus does not ask us to “care for others, to turn our cheek, to give the shirt off our back, and to give to those who beg, because we have compassion.” Rather, we are called to this work- we are called to radical love because God has compassion. We are called out into the world because of who God is. If it was something within us, something merely philanthropic that invited us out, we might find that there is never enough energy or time and there is always something more pressing and deserving of our attention. We are called into the world because of the kind of God we praise. We are called to serve the poor because our God holds a place for us all. We are called to feed the hungry, because it is our God who nourishes us all. We are called to love those who are labeled as outcast because our God is a God who sets no limits on grace. They will know we are Christians by our love.
At one of the congregations where I worshiped in seminary, I witnessed a living parable one Sunday. It was just before the service and people were milling around in their usual particular spots around the church. A group was gathered visiting around the coffee table in the fellowship hall, the choir rehearsed in the sanctuary and the ushers were positioning themselves for their task of handing out bulletins. I was working my way toward my spot when I noticed a homeless man who was looking for a bathroom. The gentleman nearest him was completely baffled. It was a moment I will never forget. He didn’t help the man find the bathroom. He rushed to another person in desperation, “What should we do?” The homeless man smelled. He clearly had not shaved or showered in quite some time. He stood out in this wealthy Bay Area suburb. Yet, it was as if Jesus himself walked in and no one knew what to do with him. They didn’t greet him with peace and show him the bathroom. They didn’t introduce themselves and offer him a cup of coffee and a cookie. They didn’t see him as a gift from God, as a chance to encounter the living Christ. They will know we are Christians by our love.
In our reading from the Gospel of John today, Jesus appears to be getting pushy. He has already been resurrected, God has triumphed and yet his most beloved disciples are making the same mistake that many of us do. The faithful followers fail to understand that our God can never be separated from those in need of God’s love and nurture. Jesus takes Peter aside and asks him not once, not twice, but three times, “Do you love me?” And all three times Jesus waits for Peter to say yes, to offer a real yes, and then Jesus says to him, “Feed my sheep.” Loving Jesus can never be separated from caring for human beings, caring for the hurting and lonely, for the vulnerable and left out. So as we say yes to Jesus and love him and follow him together, Jesus says to us, so who are the sheep you are feeding? Who are the voices crying out for your love? Who is waiting for you to be my hands to them? And as we join God’s vision for us, we remember that the God we know through Jesus, our living Christ is a God that invites us to follow through the messiness of humanity not around it or over it, beside it or below it. As we continue to grow in our love of God, and answer yes to Jesus, how will we grow in our love of God’s vulnerable? We can join Norman and the Miracle Kitchen crew to say yes to Jesus. We can bring food for the food bank to say yes to Jesus. In the fellowship hall, you will find large pads of paper waiting to receive your wildest dreams of outreach and mission. Dream big to say yes to Jesus. Following Jesus, and saying yes means that we are invited to love those whom the world has cast aside. They will know we are Christians by our love. Amen.
To Begin at the Beginning, Martin Copenhaver pp. 236-237.