The 1st United Methodist Church of Napa

¹ Thus says the LORD to his anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I have grasped to subdue nations before him and strip kings of their robes, to open doors before him—and the gates shall not be closed: …

⁴ For the sake of my servant Jacob, and Israel my chosen, I call you by your name, I surname you, though you do not know me. … ⁹ Woe to you who strive with your Maker, earthen vessels with the potter! Does the clay say to the one who fashions it, “What are you making”? or “Your work has no handles”? ¹⁰ Woe to anyone who says to a father, “What are you begetting?” or to a woman, “With what are you in labor?”

Will you question me about my children, or command me concerning the work of my hands?

¹² I made the earth, and created humankind upon it; it was my hands that stretched out the heavens, and I commanded all their host. ¹³ I have aroused Cyrus in righteousness, and I will make all his paths straight; he shall build my city and set my exiles free, not for price or reward,

says the LORD of hosts. … ¹⁹ I did not speak in secret, in a land of darkness; I did not say to the offspring of Jacob, “Seek me in chaos.” I the LORD speak the truth, I declare what is right.

⁹As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love. ¹⁰If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love. ¹¹I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete.

¹²“This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. ¹³No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. ¹⁴You are my friends if you do what I command you. ¹⁵I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father. ¹⁶You did not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask him in my name. ¹⁷I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another.

Equality in marriage has really become an important issue in recent years – and I'm not necessarily talking about the rights that should be provided gays and lesbians – it's led to some very positive changes in the roles given to both men and women in the context of family life. As is too often the case, sadly, that equality has been viewed solely in terms of power, with who has it and who doesn't being the pivotal issue. An alternative is offered us in Jesus' discussion of love here in John 15. Imagine the possibilities for mutual love if we were to think of marriage equality in terms of what we gave away and not in what we took!

I remember seeing a cartoon, years ago, by Nicole Hollander where she has "Sylvia" listening to a news report on TV that announced: "A four-year study of couples found that men who did housework were healthier than those who didn't." Sylvia responds to her television set by saying, "Their wives let them live."

Well Hollander's dry wit makes us chuckle, but we know that relationships, as well as individuals, are healthier when every area of life reflects equality. Doing the tasks of a "servant" does not imply inferiority if that work is shared, but more importantly, if it's done in love.

Unfortunately there's probably no more destructive myth in our culture than the one that says love just comes naturally to us. The kind of love that Jesus offered and exemplified shows how much you and I need to work at it! But think for just a moment: if you were to ask somebody how to become a good baseball player or pianist – even someone who works well on a computer – they'll tell you without hesitation that taking steroids won't do it for you, it takes practice, practice, practice. And yet we've been led to believe that love is something that we just fall "into" and "out of" as if it were a hole in the ground! We need to be reminded that love is something we've got to work at, nurture, and sustain with a lot of patience. A commitment to love has got to begin with a commitment to such sensitivity as well as a willingness to listen to each other.

Years ago the Roman Catholic theologian, Morton Kelsey, related the story of a suicide that happened on the campus of Notre Dame University. He commented that such an incident was truly unusual for a catholic college where students are taught that suicide is not an acceptable way of solving problems. He pointed out that the university has all kinds of priests, as well as other very highly skilled lay persons who are trained to supervise students in compassionate ways. The suicide was deeply troubling to everyone, but not more so than for the dean of student affairs, who called in other students who'd attended classes with this young man or lived near him in the dorm. What he discovered was truly shocking: nobody knew this student who'd taken his own life. This young man's despair went undetected simply because no one had taken the time to get to know him – to listen to him, let alone become his friend.

We all like to be noticed, don't we? There's nothing more frustrating than trying to talk to somebody who isn't listening. We all want to feel that somebody understands, that somebody can empathize with what we're going through. So a commitment to love, while it has got to always begin with a commitment to being sensitive and caring, it also has got to mean that we're willing to listen to each other. It means, however, accepting that other person for who he or she is. So whenever we decide that we're going to change that person – to fit our own needs or belief of how he or she should be – love is destroyed. Creating love requires an entirely different way of being.

I recall the story of one couple who were once asked how it was that they'd managed to stay married for so long. They both recounted an incident that had taken place during their courtship days many, many years before. The woman had wanted to attend a certain concert, but she'd never been able to show up on time for anything before, so her fiancé was dubious about making such a date. He finally offered to buy the tickets, though, but on one condition: she needed to be ready at least fifteen minutes ahead of time. If she weren't – and they both agreed on this – he'd go to the theater and give the tickets away to anybody who might want them.

Well, when he got to her house that night, fifteen minutes before the deadline, he was met by the woman's mother who just shook her head sadly and said, "She just got in. She'll never be ready in time." In fact she did miss the deadline, and while he hung around hoping, it finally got too late, not only for them to make the concert on time, but to even have a chance to give the tickets away. The man stopped pacing the floor and threw himself in a chair. He happened to pick up a book, and his eyes drifted to this inscription on the flyleaf:

For every problem under the sun, there is a remedy, or there is none. If there is one, seek until you find it. If there be none, then never mind it.

His anger and disappointment suddenly washed away and he laughed out loud. He realized that there probably wasn't anything that he could ever do to change this woman's attitude toward deadlines – this woman that he loved – it would only end up making them both miserable over something at least he could not change. Since that time, remarkably enough, neither of them has ever tried to change the other or worried or gotten angry over what one or the other could not change, and their marriage has lasted well over sixty years.

Jesus is presented in today's gospel lesson as a person who sacrifices himself for his friends. He's shown them and told them everything that he knows of God, now he's chosen them to carry on the same kinds of enduring acts of love. Such acts of love, though – done over and over again for a long, long time – have as their context a healthy knowledge of one's self. You and I have got to come to know our "shadow" selves (as Carl Jung^³ would call it) just as well as we know our light-filled side.

A young nun, Anna, that we come across in the early pages of Sara Maitland's novel, Virgin Territory, knew who she was only by the ways in which she'd constructed a goodness about herself. In fact she's described as "keeping her shadows to herself." The book is a tale of her painful journey into reality:

She did not know how to admit weakness; she had learned only how to be strong for others – love is patient, does not insist on itself, love is not irritable or resentful. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. It is her duty and her joy at all times to stand witness to the security of the living Christ….It is more blessed to give than to receive. She has no right to receive. … She did not know how to admit unhappiness….^⁴

In verse fifteen of today's gospel lesson we read that Jesus said this to his disciples:

I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father.

Unfortunately our New Revised Standard Version of this has used the word "servant" for the Greek word, doulos, which literally means "slave." In one sense Jesus' meaning becomes clearer if we were to use that word, slave, because it's a much more powerful image that has some connection to reality for us – even at it's been experienced here in our own country. The contrast is much stronger, and it expresses the depth of love that Jesus really had for his followers – if we truly know that we are no longer slaves but friends.

When Sethe, the main character in Toni Morrison's novel Beloved, recalled her own days as a slave, at a place ironically called Sweet Home, she remembered that the way she and the other slaves were treated was very different from the way slaves were treated at other plantations. The slaves' owners, the Garners,

…ran a special kind of slavery, treating them like paid labor, listening to what they said, teaching them what they wanted known.^⁵

Even so, the Garners did still own the slaves, and the slaves' freedom had to be bought. Sethe, though, took matters into her own hands; she stole her freedom. Six months pregnant and alone, she sneaked away from Sweet Home one night and spent weeks struggling to make her way from Georgia to Delaware where she claimed freedom for herself.

Most of us only have some vague picture of what it means to be a slave or even a paid servant. Oh sure, we might complain or joke about a boss (even a spouse!) who's a "slave driver," but not many of us really work for somebody who expects us to do only exactly what we're told and never ask questions or offer an opinion. Even those among us who may be surviving in the worst work environments in the county probably haven't experienced what it really feels like to be bought and sold, as if a person were a cow or a horse. Nor do we truly know what it means to be treated like a nobody – whose roots and future are of no importance, totally cut off from family and valued only for our labor. As Sethe poignantly puts it:

I got a tree on my back and a haint^⁶ in my house, and nothing in between but the daughter I am holding in my arms. No more running – from nothing. I will never run from another thing on this earth. I took one journey and I paid for the ticket, but let me tell you something, Paul D Garner: it cost too much! Do you hear me? It cost too much.^⁷

These past fifty days of the Easter season had us spend time pondering the terrors of the tomb alongside the exhilaration of new beginnings – new life – all the while trying to speak about what just happened to us and understand what it might mean for the ways in which we live out the rest of our lives. So we read John, hard as he can be to understand, because something seems to have told the church that the very trouble with John might be that he's so terribly close to the truth that he's had to speak in spirals. We are people who've been baptized to love.

In spite of discoveries like The Gospel of Mary of Magdala and the wildly fictitious Da Vinci Code, we have no idea how the lives of Jesus followers ended, only that they felt absolutely compelled to bring his message of love to a hostile world. And the impulse goes on. You might say that it's never ended.

Jesus lived a short but incredibly fruitful life, full of great joy! And any who would say that discipleship – living a Christian life – is meant to be an austere and joyless existence are passing off counterfeits of Christianity, but not the real thing. Jesus told us that everything that he'd learned about the nature of God meant that he had come to give us life, and give it to us extravagantly, inexhaustibly, and in unbelievable abundance!^⁸ Whoever does not know that kind of joy about life hasn't gotten the message – or it's been stunted, perverted, interfered with (often, sadly, by the institutional church).

We must know in our bones and in our memory that this gathering here on Sunday morning, while it isn't always up to loving so that such a joy is revealed, sometimes it is. Sometimes the job does get done, and love happens. It's too bad that often it's hardest to love those we know the best. George Eliot stated it elegantly in her novel Middlemarch when she observed that love toward others increases in direct proportion to the distance of miles between them and us!

The love that we have for each other, hard-won though it may be, is but a pale reflection of the kind of love that Jesus had for his followers – a love that he called the love of God. Some of us treat this infinite love as if it were an infinite debt that we've got to work like a slave to pay back. A finite person can never pay off such a debt, though, because infinity never gets any smaller. So we simply have to let the guilt go and accept this inestimable gift of love without having to look forward to a time when we might be able to finally pay the debt and then begin to pile up credit for our loving. As this infinite love has been shared with us, we've been set free to love others in the same way. All it takes is a decision, and then the will – the guts – to act upon it.

1 Our reading from Second Isaiah is part of a section that focuses on the commission of the Persian king, Cyrus, as (extraordinarily enough) God's "anointed" – literally, God's "messiah." This portion of chapter 45 is presented as a series of "speeches" delivered, supposedly, by God to the Jews who languished as exiles in Babylon. It presupposes the shifting balance of political and military power in that part of the world during the mid-6^th century BCE. Cyrus is expanding his empire westward and is poised to defeat the Babylonians which should make it possible for the exiles to return home. That the prophet would claim a king of Persia as the Instrument of Israel's salvation, however, was almost too much to take. The people were outraged that the prophet ever would have said something like this! This reading is a portion of the prophet's response to them – in effect telling the exiles that God does have a purpose for all of this and it's not their place to question or challenge it. There is order in the universe and Israel will have a meaningful future.

2 These verses from the Gospel According to John are part of a farewell discourse that Jesus gives his disciples just before his arrest – presumably in order to prepare them for their life together after he's gone. John's perspective here actually reflects an early stage in the life of that community in which internal dissension and animosity have already begun. So it seems that the early church was every bit as divided and at odds with itself as it is today! All the more reason for us to finally listen to what these words have to say.