Young at Heart Message In preparation for today’s sermon, I was doing some research about love stories. I came across a list of the greatest love stories in literature. Can you guess what stories were on that list? The number one love story of all time was Romeo and Juliet. No shocker there. Next up? Pride and Prejudice. Then, Wuthering Heights, Gone with the Wind, Jane Eyre, and Sense and Sensibility. The Lord of the Rings made the list, believe it or not, for the love story between the elf, Arwen, and Aragorn. Then I found a list of “real life” love stories, which included mostly people from a looong time ago. But, Johnny Cash and June Carter made the list! My dad would be thrilled that Johnny Cash made it into one of my sermons! Do you notice anything about all of these pictures? They pretty much all look the same, don’t they? Lots of staring longingly into one another’s eyes with these deep, passionate looks about them. I’m guessing in most real-life love stories, those looks are few and far between! In all of my research (which, admittedly, was not that deep and I didn’t find any academic studies about the best love stories of all time), not one mentioned love stories in the Bible. Perhaps this is because when we think of love stories, we think of popular love stories – mostly, fictional love stories. Often, people long for their own love story. And the stories we read in books or watch in movies are not realistic love stories. They are stories in which people fall in love, and then live happily ever after. They forget to include the parts where the characters get annoyed with each other because one of them didn’t fold the towels properly, or because someone left the gas tank on empty and the other one is late for work. They don’t think about all of the little stressors that come with actual relationships that can make real life feel more like a “tolerate each other” story versus an actual love story! So, when we heard today’s scripture reading, I am guessing that “love story” wasn’t the first thing that came to mind! And yet, that’s essentially what’s happening here. We are meeting Jesus in the middle of a love story. The Message In the Gospel of John, Chapter 13, verse 23, it says “One of his disciples—the one whom Jesus loved—was reclining on his bosom.”
The narrator repeats this again a couple verses later. In fact, throughout John 13-17, we hear an epic story gushing with love. It begins when Jesus washes the feet of his disciples. He says “I have loved you” three times over the course of chapter 13 and 15 – he says it in 13:23, 15:9, and 15:21). He pours his heart out to his disciples on his last evening on earth, and this is where we see the disciple whom Jesus loved resting on his chest. In today’s passage, we hear a tone of desperation as Jesus turns toward God and prays for his friends. This particular passage almost sounds like a plea of desperation from Jesus as he begins to mourn the loss of his beloved friends as he prepares himself to leave them. The prayer sounds like a request for God to continue to guide the disciples, but it’s as much a plea for Jesus’ own comfort throughout his preparation. It reminds me of two different people I have known recently who have lost battles with cancer. In both cases, the women fought long and hard, but ended up realizing they could not fight anymore. And, in both cases, the women celebrated their lives before they passed with their friends and family. And I wonder if they felt a bit like Jesus in this passage – a bit of panic as they realized they would be leaving behind the people they loved the most. At our final Going Deeper study group this past Monday, we had a discussion about love. How do we “love” people who have harmed us? How do we “love” people who have been very terrible people in their lifetime? It’s hard to envision loving most people in the way that love is portrayed in the “greatest love stories of all time” that I mentioned earlier. Very often in true love stories, there is an element of self-sacrifice on one or both people’s parts. There are love stories that portray people who rather despise each other at first, but as they get to know each other and spend time together, they begin to experience love for one another in ways they never thought possible. So what does love have to do with it? And, does love always look like passionate, emotional love like in Romeo and Juliet or Gone with the Wind? Of course not. Love can be quite complex, and can go well beyond the emotional love we tend to think of when we talk about love. The best example of this type of love I can come up with from my own life is this: When I owned my business, I had a neighbour who caused all kinds of problems for me. Mostly, he would complain about noise because of dogs barking. He complained so much that I had to get a decibel meter set up and actually record the frequency and level of noise we were producing. Loving my neighbour in the sense we typically think about love was not really possible for me, because I barely liked the guy, let alone loved him. But, when a storm came through and blew his stuff all over our yards and the fields behind us, did I stand and laugh and tell him he deserved it? Well, maybe in my head I did a little bit. But then, I got out there and I helped him clean it all up. And I think that this is the kind of love Jesus was trying to get at. It’s not an emotion. It’s an action. This kind of love is different than what we typically think of, and it allows us to care for people, find compassion and kindness, but still hold them at arms length. It doesn’t require liking someone at all, if that’s too much to muster. This love story is one of longing and of hope. We experience Jesus longing for this type of agape love, not just for himself, but for the world. Jesus’ love proclaims the truth of the gospel and the truth about us: that we are the beloved of God, and through the examples Jesus provided us, we can know how to love deeper than what we’ve seen through books, TV, or movies. This deepness, this richness of relationship requires a deeper intimacy than any real or fictional love story one could imagine. It requires that we step out of our comfort zones, recognize people for the flawed humans that they are, and get to know them in ways that humanize them. This helps us to better understand humanity, even if we don’t always agree with others. When we bring another person’s humanity to the forefront of our minds, we can allow ourselves to love them, even if we might not particularly always like them. This call to love others is what Jesus spends 5 chapters in the Gospel of John trying to convey to us. It’s not about passionate, emotional love. It’s about a deeper understanding and joy in humanity. So, may we celebrate this love story as the greatest love story of all time - one that extends over two thousand years and meets us in this time and this place so we can continue to share it with others. Amen! Let us pray: God of compassion, we come before you with gratitude and humlity as we recognize that our human understanding of love is not always on par with your understanding of love. We pray that you would help us to learn to love others in the way Jesus showed us how to love. We know it is not always easy, and we know our human emotions can sometimes get in the way of the love we know you want us to demonstrate. God, we pray that you would help us to better understand and behave in ways that are loving toward everyone we meet, even if we do not understand them. We also pray that we continue to see your example of love demonstrated throughout the scriptures to use a model as we interact with others. May your endless wisdom guide us today and every day. In your holy name we pray, Amen.
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The Message When you think of the word “slave” or “servant,” I imagine that something fairly specific tends to come to mind. The first thing that comes to mind for me is the images of slaves that I saw when I went on the Moravian Church’s racial justice pilgrimage to Montgomery, Alabama. I see images of chained Africans crossing the Atlantic on ships in spaces that gave them enough room to stretch out, and that’s about it. I see housekeepers and field workers, working until their bodies could quite literally not do anything more, but having to keep going because it was their only choice. I see the images of slaves and servants we see portrayed in movies and media, who are not invited to the table despite their hunger, but instead are expected to prepare and serve the meal, and find their own sustenance after their masters have been cared for and fed. I do not typically picture a servant or slave becoming friends with their master. And yet, this is exactly what we see Jesus do in today’s scripture. More accurately, we see Jesus talking not as master to servant, but as servant to servant. Even though he says, “I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead I have called you friends…” Jesus is not putting himself above his disciples. Rather, he is speaking to them on the same level. He is a servant of God, and he sees them as servants of God as well. Jesus modeled servanthood in every way, and he called others to do the same. Doing so resulted in him being harassed, persecuted, and eventually put to death, but he modeled it nonetheless. We may need to consider letting go of the view of servanthood or slavery that we hold based on what we know of history’s definition of servanthood or slavery. For some people, especially those in many of our favorite biblical stories, having the title of “slave” was a deep honour. For example, Moses, Joshua, David, Paul, and James counted it as a privilege to be considered a slave of the Lord. We have to remember that the disciples did not choose Jesus as their rabbi. Jesus sought them out. Jesus called them to service. For much of Jesus’ ministry, he taught, acted, and modeled the way he expected all of his followers to think and act. So in some ways, they were apprentice-servants under Jesus’ guidance. Now, in this passage, they receive this shocking news that they were being taken into a much deeper relationship with Jesus: he no longer considered them servants, but instead, he considered them friends. Why? What did this mean in reality for the disciples? Jesus would essentially be depending on his friends to be the hands and feet for the mission of God. He reminds them, especially toward the final days of his ministry, that everything written about him in the Law of Moses and the prophecies had to be fulfilled. Jesus spends much of his ministry teaching his disciples, passing on knowledge, and, in a lot of ways, encouraging them to step well outside of their comfort zones so that they could understand scriptures and the work he expected them to do through a missional lens. He needed to help them understand that from the beginning to the end, the mission of God is the epic story they needed to be a part of. They move from servants to friends of Jesus because Jesus doesn’t just need servants who follow orders blindly. Jesus needs friends who feel equally as called to mission and service – friends who feel just as passionate and excited about their call as he does. We understand that it is possible to be a servant without being a friend. In fact, most people who are servants or slaves likely hold some kind of negative feelings toward the person or people they consider “masters.” But, it is impossible to be a true friend and not be a servant. Christ gave us a new command: to love each other as he loved us. This theme is repeated so often in scripture that as a pastor, I sometimes feel like I’m preaching the same message over and over again – love each other. Just love each other! Love your neighbours as you love yourself! God says to love one another! Do you think Jesus thought this was an important command? As the Father has loved us, so we will love. As the Father sent Jesus, so he sends us as servant-friends to bear fruit. I do believe it’s possible to serve others and love others without being friends with them. We can serve people we have only just met, regardless of whether or not we will ever see them again. But, we do not keep true friends for very long if we do not also set aside our own needs on occasion and serve their needs as well. I have been in friendships with people who do not serve my needs well, and they do not last long. It is not because I am selfish and only want to be friends with people who will serve me and only me. It is because it doesn’t feel like mutual friendship if I am the only one serving. It becomes exhausting, if you have never been in a relationship like that before. I think this is what Jesus is getting at with his disciples. He does not consider them merely servants, expecting them to serve him without their own needs being met. He is telling them that as his friends, he serves them as much as they serve him. He is modeling this love-in-action to them so that they can take that love and spread it to the world. He is teaching them, just as they are trying to learn. Jesus is in their service as much as they are in his service. So, as you leave here today, I invite you to ask yourselves these questions: Who are you servant-friending today? How are you modeling Jesus’ command to love each other as he loved us? May we all leave this place and go into the mission field ready to be friends and servants to those around us, modeling the love of Jesus outwardly to everyone we meet. Amen. Let us pray: God, we are grateful to have a friend in Jesus, and that we are more than merely servants. We ask that you continue to guide us in the direction you would have us go, helping us to servant-friend others in ways we may never have considered before. Help us to live out our faith in meaningful ways that honour your love for us and the model of care and compassion you gave us in your Son, Jesus Christ. We pray all of this in your Holy name. Amen. |
AuthorRev. Jamie Almquist is the pastor at Good Shepherd Moravian Church in Calgary. Archives
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