Love Is All We Need John 14: 15-21, 25-27 “If You Love Me….” I Wonder

Love is All We Need John 14: 15-21, 25-27

“If you love me….” I wonder what the disciples thought when Jesus opened with that phrase. What do you mean, Jesus? If? You know we love you! The unspoken protest in this section would be repeated after Jesus’ death with he gathered with the disciples for breakfast on the beach. Jesus asked Peter if he loved him, and Peter did not take kindly to having his love for Jesus questioned. This from the person who denied even knowing Jesus! But on this last evening with his disciples that was all a rather hypothetical question. They had encountered opposition in the past, and there was a certainty there would be more. But it didn’t matter so much as long as they were together, relying on one another’s company, depending on each other for spiritual and emotional support. They had no idea that soon they would be scattered far and wide, fearful for their very lives, unsure about what the future would be, not at all clear what Jesus had mean by ‘church.’ Sounds disturbingly familiar, doesn’t it?

How do we love in this strange new world? While it is definitely more challenging and not as satisfying, we can still connect with family and friends with technology the disciples could not have envisioned. We’re worshiping in a virtual world right now and are actually reaching more people than when we were confined in the walls of this beautiful building. Zoom meetings and the like are becoming the norm. Sometimes I feel permanently attached to my ear buds and laptop! These are all forms of love, all ways of staying connected to one another. Admittedly, they are rather insular, open to those with technology availability and know-how, largely limited to those we already know. But what about our call to love far and wide, to reach out into the world with the love of God? What about those who are forgotten, alone, hungry, homeless? How do we love then? Church was never meant to be about coming together for ourselves but about how we become instruments of expanding the reality of God’s love in the world. So maybe, just maybe, we have been offered a gift – an opportunity to step back and assess what it means to be Church in a broken and divided world. Maybe there’s an offering in this moment to move our focus away from a survival perspective turned inward toward a perspective of outwardly focused love and life. Does that ever make our heads spin in alarm and confusion! This is a humbling, holy, and terrifying moment as we stand at this precipice in history and ask ourselves – who are we? What is church?

The history of all humanity has been a pattern of coming together into glorious unity and progress followed by an unraveling of life as it had been known succeeded by another era of rediscovery and new life. For the lifetime of most of those who will hear this, we have been relatively unscathed. There have been terrifying times like Vietnam, the Gulf Wars, 9/11, and others, but our world remained relatively the same with little challenge to our every day. We became comfortably entrenched in how 2 we viewed Church. Now we have been thrust into an unplanned existence when it is becoming increasingly clear that we can never go back to life as it was. That is a harsh reality.

The church of Jesus Christ is a crowd, a throng, a gathering – a ‘community’ as that beautiful, old word expresses it; it is a word that we have to learn to understand all over again in a completely new way – a community that is not held together by common interests and that is not held together by common blood and convictions but certainly a community held together by a voice…..the voice of the divine Word himself, from whom the church of Jesus Christ is born and from whom she must always feed and from whom alone she may be fed.1

Those were the words of theologian Karl Barth in a sermon he gave in Bonn, Germany in 1933. Even that early in Hitler’s rise to power, Barth was in a group of pastors who were particularly alarmed at the way the church was being co-opted and losing sight of its mission. Shortly after this sermon he would become one of the authors of the Barmen Declaration, which denounced Nazism, and remains part of the confessions of the Presbyterian Church. He signed the declaration and personally mailed it to Hitler! Not surprisingly, he had to flee Germany for his life, seeking refuge in his native Switzerland. He realized that the Church could not remain the Church it had become but had to return to who she was created to be, listening only to the voice of God.

That is where we find ourselves today in this disconcerting time. It is an ever-moving world in which we live now, with the ground shifting endlessly beneath our feet. We think we have a plan for coming together again, and then it all falls apart. We begin new discussions only to have them be diverted in mid-sentence. It is exhausting and overwhelming as we try to lean on what we knew in the past to find some semblance of control, only to discover that we must find a new, uncharted way and move into unexplored country. Most fortunately, that is what it means to be the people of God. We began when Abraham left all he knew for a country he had never seen with an intangible promise. Through escape from slavery in Egypt to pride in their own country to utter destruction and dispersion to hope in a wandering rabbi to the birth of the church emerging from a tomb of death, over and over again the Church has been called to look to God, to listen to that voice, to trust that our only certainty is God.

When Jesus spoke with his disciples that last evening, love was the theme that wound all their discussions into a single last will and testament for his followers of all times:

1 Karl Barth. A sermon given at Schlosskirche in Bonn, Germany on December 10, 1933. Found in Preaching in Hitler’s Shadow: Sermons of Resistance in the Third Reich. Dean G Stroud, editor. Wm. B. Eerdmans-Lightning Source. 2013. 3

I give you a new commandment, that you love one another…. By this everyone will know you are my disciples.2 If you love me, you will keep my commandments.3 And in his prayer: I made your name known to them, and I will make it known, so that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them.4

Over and over again – love, love is all we need to make it through the joys and fears, the wonders and horrors, the complexity of life – even in the midst of a pandemic.

However comforting that sounds, it is also more ethereal than real. We can’t quite wrap our heads and hearts around how to love in this strange existence in which we find ourselves. Jesus knew that his followers would go through a tremendous cycle of unknowing before Church would begin to fall in place, and he reminded them that they would never be alone. Not only would they have the memories of Jesus, his words, and his living, they would also have the presence of God with them. Jesus called this presence, the Advocate, or more accurately, the paraclete, what we call the Spirit, the one whose loving presence would hold our hands and dance with us through life. He told them, “On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you.”5

The answers seem elusive these days, and yet there is a profoundly deep comfort in falling back into the voice of Jesus as Barth described. The voice that keeps repeating that love, God’s love, is our guide, our wisdom, our truth in the midst of all the uncertainty, in the midst of unanswerable questions. Love is truly all we need. On that night Jesus spoke to his disciples, and his voice still speaks to us today. “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid.”6 May that voice echo in our hearts now and always. Amen.

2 John 13: 24-25 NRSV, John 15: 12 NRSV 3 John 14: 15 NRSV 4 John 17:26 NRSV 5 John 14: 20 NRSV 6 John 14: 27 NRSV