Peter Bankson
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May 10, 2014, Mother's Day

Text: Acts 10:44-48
Psalm 98
1John 5:1-6
John 15:9-17

John 15:9-17

As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father's commandments and abide in his love. I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete. "This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.
No one has greater love than this, to lay down one's life for one's friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you.

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. You 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.
I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another.

INTRODUCTION

This time between Easter and Pentecost seems like “chrysalis time.” When the caterpillar has spun it’s cocoon and is being transformed into a butterfly. It’s a time when things are changing, even if some of them are out of sight. I’m reminded of coming here to the Potter’s House for the dedication and feeling the massive changes that had gone on for a long time, out of sight for many of us, changes that are now just becoming evident out on the street. Yesterday as I joined the Faithonomics conference here, and at the Festival Center I was aware of how much vital, transforming energy is flowing through our faith communities.

And today is the day that our culture reminds us to give thanks for our mothers. Frankly, I’m grateful for that reminder. Thanks be to God for the awareness that even as our world is changing every day, we still can celebrate the women who carried us from conception to birth, and brought us into this reality able to acknowledge and celebrate our life together in this Body of Christ!

Having spent several years a decade ago inside the chrysalis of the building where Seekers Church now makes its home I have some sense of the painful love that long,, slow transformations like that require.

Living together through those chrysalis times can open our eyes to realities we may never have imagined. But waiting like that can be really hard to bear alone. We all need loving community to help us weather the storm and stay on the path as we learn to love one another ever more deeply.  

The Gospel for this week speaks of loving one another as Christ loves us. Today I’d like to offer a few recent reflections on Jesus’ invitation. Why do it? How can I do it better? And, who does Jesus mean by “one another?”

LOVE ONE ANOTHER: WHY?

On the question of “Why love one another?” Jesus offers us at least one good reason: “So my joy may be in you and your joy may be complete.”

One important way for me to experience that joy is to watch for God’s presence “in us and around us and through us.” God is everywhere and God is love. So if I’m open to love then I can expect to catch glimpses of God anywhere. Anywhere! Here’s an example from the Endoscopic Surgery Centre of Maryland.

I spent Thursday morning there having a colonoscopy. I’d been there before and knew what to expect but still there was a bit of apprehension. The week of preparation for that procedure, including all those temporary dietary adjustments, did tend to focus my attention on my own body and what the doctor might find deep within me. Although I was hoping for competence and kindness I wasn’t really looking for love as I checked in early Thursday morning.

When I got to the prep room dressed in one of those open-back hospital gowns, I was in a pretty vulnerable place. The prep nurse was cheerful and engaging, just the sort of positive, gently welcoming presence you’d hope for in a place like that. While she plugged me in to all the wires and tubes the team would need to make sure I was OK, she asked me what I did.

When I mentioned that I’m part of a small but very active church in Washington DC, she smiled engagingly and mentioned that her mother was part of a big church but that she herself didn’t really feel comfortable in big churches.

As she inserted the IV and attached the heart monitor pads, I was so engaged in the conversation that I almost forgot where I was. I told her about some of the activities around Seekers Church, including Carroll Café and the Guatemala pilgrimage.

She observed that we seem to be focused on “missionary work.” I could hear that, but tried to explain that we’re more focused on helping each other find and accept God’s call to “Ministry in Daily Life,” to help bring peace and justice into the ordinary structures where we live out our lives.

”Oh,” she said, “I pray every day that I’ll be able to touch someone’s heart here at work!”

My response was quick and from the heart: “You’ve already done it today,” I said with a grin, and offered a high-five that threatened to tangle all those wires and tubes.

It was clear to me that she fit into her place at the surgical center and did her part … with a loving heart. I could see her joy and feel it welcome me into her community at the surgery center. Why love one another? Because it welcomes us into community together; it strengthens our connections; it helps us understand how we fit in as part of the Body of Christ.

Another perspective on “WHY?” comes from the new book by David Brooks, “The Road to Character.” David Brooks is a regular op-ed columnist for the New York Times.

In his careful reflection on the deeper values that should inform our lives Brooks considers our current cultural focus on what he calls the Big Me, and calls for a conscious return to the values we can identify as those Jesus was referring to, the values that lead us to love one another, values like kindness, bravery, honesty and faithfulness. Here’s an image of the “Big ME” that is so dominant in the world around us.

Here’s a summary observation on why love one another from the “Humility Code” near the end of the book:

The things that lead us astray are short term – lust, fear, vanity, gluttony. The things we call character endure over the long term – courage, honesty, humility. People with character are capable of a long obedience in the same direction, of staying attached to people and causes and callings consistently through thick and thin. People of character also have scope. They are not infinitely flexible, free-floating, and solitary. They are anchored by permanent attachments to important things. In the realm of the intellect, they have a set of permanent convictions about fundamental truths. In the realm of emotion, they are enmeshed in a web of unconditional loves. In the realm of action, they have a permanent commitment to tasks that cannot be completed in a single lifetime.

Brooks, “The Road to Character,” pg264

I hear echoes of our life together in Church of the Saviour throughout the book. This section sounds to me like it could have been written by Gordon Cosby … or Elizabeth O’Connor … or Marjory Bankson.

And, Jesus gives us a simple, satisfying reason to love one another:

I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete. "This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.

That is, another reason to love one another is to help build up the Body of Christ: to help turn the “BIG ME” that dominates so much of the world around us into the “WE” of the Gospel.

So, why love one another?

  • Because it welcomes us into community;
  • Because it helps us turn the Big Me that dominates our culture into the WE of the Gospel; or maybe
  • Just becauseJesus calls us to it!

LOVE ONE ANOTHER: HOW?

It makes sense, at least to me, to love one another. But sometimes the practical question of “HOW?” gets complicated.

Jesus said, “Love one another as I have loved you: Follow the commandments.” And what ARE these “commandments?”

In the Seekers’ School of Christian Living we just finished a 6-week class on “The Ten Commandments: Laws of the Heart.” We used a DVD and book by Sister Joan Chittister to provide input for our reflections. In the series of short videos Sr. Joanreflects on the 10 Commandments, which she prefers to call “laws of the heart,” and concludes by looking at the two great commandments, Jesus’ teachings on love.

Sr. Joan refers to the Ten Commandments as guidelines that help us learn to love. She renames and expands them to incorporate our evolving understanding of Creation. Here are three examples from her list:.

Honor your father and your mother is widened to “Caring: “
(Respect the past; stay in touch with your roots.)
Thou shalt not steal is deepened to “Sharing.”
(Stealing is a social sin. To take what we do not need, to destroy what is useful to another, to deprive those in the community of their basic needs is stealing.
Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s goodsis raised to “Assurance.”
(As you can release your hunger for things, you will be open to God.)

Her broadened understanding of these laws of the heart seems to fit right in beside David Brooks as I thought about Jesus’ encouragement to “Love one another as I have loved you: Follow the commandments.”

Sister Joan’s reflections on the two “greatest commandments,” offers another view of the “how” of loving our neighbors:

When we love God with our whole soul, there is nothing on earth that can possibly destroy our spirit,or confuse our direction. Or, as Charles Swindoll put it, “It helps me if I remember that God is in charge of my day – not I.”

Ten Comandments: Laws of the Heart, pg 141

As David Brooks says,

There’s joy in a life filled with interdependence with others, in a life filled with gratitude, reverence, and admiration. There’s joy in freely chosen obedience to people, ideas, and commitments greater than oneself. There’s joy in that feeling of acceptance, the knowledge that though you don’t deserve their love, others do love you; they have admitted you into their lives.

Brooks, pg 269.

Another way to learn to love one another is to lay down our life for our friends … one day at a time, like the prep nurse at the surgery center.

A related “practice” in learning to love seems to be to trust our ability to “Stumble” and keep growing. David Brooks focuses on stumbling as one of the important personal qualities of one who is on the road to character.

The stumbler scuffs through life, a little off balance here and there, sometimes lurching sometimes falling to her knees. But the stumbler faces her imperfect nature, her mistakes and weaknesses, with unvarnished honesty, with the opposite of squeamishness. She is sometimes ashamed of the perversities in her nature – the selfishness, the self-deceit, the occasional desire to put lower loves above higher ones.

But humility offers self-understanding. When we acknowledge that we screw up, and feel the gravity of our limitations, we find ourselves challenged and stretched with a serious foe to overcome and transcend.

Brooks, pp 268-69.

This passage shines a bright light on my own journey, since much of my self-image as an adult has been grounded on the foundation of being a good Boy Scout. You know: “Trustworthy, loyal, …”And now, as I get older, I’m discovering that I can’t quite cover over the cracks in my capabilities.

So, a second spiritual practice in learning to love is finding how to let myself BE loved even in my stumbling imperfections. And one essential part of being able to live, and learn, through my stumbling is the assurance that comes from being in a loving community.

I recently had an interesting awakening about learning to love: a fresh understanding of an important difference between “seeking” and “finding.” Although it seems to fly in the face of that perennial wisdom “Seek, and ye shall find,” it seems to fit closely with the stumbling pattern described by David Brooks.

The insight came from “Siddhartha,” by Herman Hesse. You may remember that old book, a slim novel that digs into the journey of a man of high birth who leads a life of proud humility on his way to enlightenment late in life. I’m working with his journey as I contemplate my own, and was deeply absorbed in the story when I came across this passage, where Siddhartha is talking with a long-lost friend from his early years, a friend who spent most of his life seeking enlightenment on the path of the Buddha:

"When someone is seeking,” said Siddhartha, “it happens quite easily that he only sees the thing that he is seeking; that he is unable to find anything, unable to absorb anything, because he is only thinking of the thing he is seeking, because he has a goal, because he is obsessed with his goal. Seeking means: to have a goal; but finding means: to be free, to be receptive, to have no goal. You, O worthy one, are perhaps indeed a seeker, for in striving towards your goal, you do not see many things that are under your nose.”

Siddhartha,” pg. 113.

As I reflected on this I was struck by the importance of silence, reflection and retreat as spiritual practices in our Church of the Saviour tradition, and how challenging it can be to simply listen, and let myself find the path to love from the silence.

May I offer one more idea about how we can learn to love one another? This one focuses on the learning we are given as we respond to God’s call. Part of our tradition in Church of the Saviour is that we believe we are each called to some particular place of mission or ministry.

Gordon Cosby spoke of call as being “seized by the power of a great affection.” He was convinced that we are not people who understand God’s call as a mandate to some burdensome, tiresome obligation. We live in the mystery of Christ’s teaching that while he carried the cross, his yoke was easy and his burden was light. To walk with Christ in an obedient life of service is to find rest for our souls and joy in our hearts by responding to God’s call on our lives.

In “The Road to Character” David Brooks offers an interesting amplification of this basic idea:

No good life is possible unless it is organized around a vocation. If you try to use your work to serve yourself, you’ll find your ambitions and expectations will forever run ahead and you’ll never be satisfied. If you try to serve the community, you’ll always wonder if people appreciate you enough. But if you serve work that is intrinsically compelling and focus just on being excellent at that, you will wind up serving yourself and the community obliquely. A vocation is not found by looking within and finding your passion. It is found by looking without and asking what life is asking of us. What problem is addressed by an activity that you intrinsically enjoy?

Brooks, pg. 266.

So, there are several suggestions here about how to “Love one another: How?”

  • One seems to be to follow the commandments.
  • Another is to let myself BE loved even in my stumbling imperfections.
  • Or, I can let myself find the path to love from the silence.
  • And, I can freely chose obedience to people, ideas, and commitments greater than myself

I’m sure that most of these are already in the box of crayons you use to illustrate your spiritual journey.

LOVE ONE ANOTHER: WHO?

This leads me to a final reflection on “Love one another.” Who is this “another” Jesus is talking about? Is that a typo, that should be read “Love one, a Mother?”

Scripture has a lot of references to loving others: Honor your father and your mother. Love your enemies. Love your neighbor as yourself. Love the alien … the stranger … your friends. And love God with your whole heart.

There seems to be a commandment to love everyone. But for most of us – at least for me – there’s a limit. I know that as hard as I try, I still run into times, and people, that I distrust or fear enough to dam up my love.

I think one of the major growing edges in our lives together as sister faith communities in Church of the Saviour is helping us learn to learn to love more fully, more deeply, and challenging as it seems, more broadly. These days we have a lot of focused effort brought by different programs and mission groups on getting past our pre-judgements and discovering that we really CAN love more broadly.

I still find this challenging. I want to be open and inclusive, and where I’m conscious of my borders I try to broaden my understanding of “one another.” I remember an early awakening to the attractiveness, the lovability of a different culture. I was heading into the 8th grade when I moved to Japan with my family for three years. For our first year in Tokyo we lived in a Japanese house in Shibuya. I went to an American school on the military base not far away but I had a lot of contact with people whose language I could not understand and whose customs seemed very, very strange.

Many of my American classmates were frustrated to be away from America, where television was just going nationwide. For some reason (thanks be to God) I was fascinated by many things “Japanese.” I thought geta, and zori, and taking off your shoes at the door so you didn’t soil the tatami floors were really cool. And hashi! I remember teaching my kid brother, who was five years old at the time, how to eat with chopsticks by seeing who could finish their bowl of popcorn first. (It didn’t take him very long to be beat me at “popcorn with chopsticks pretty regularly.)

That curiosity and wonder over finding a different way to do familiar things led me to a deep understanding, one that still informs my learning six decades later: If there are two ways to do something we all do, who knows how many other ways there might be?! Looking back, I might have stumbled into some form of “multi-cultural diversity” long before I had much language to talk about it.

But falling in love with chopsticks aside, there’s a long thread of unconscious concern that goes way back in my history. Here’s an observation that I wrote in1984, just over 30 years ago.

Peace with Justice

 

The world is closing in around us.

More people than there’s room for,

     wanting more of everything

                 until the very globe groans

                             from the wrappers of their getting.

Desert places, where the emptiness

     reminds us of how small we are,

                 retreat before the concrete truck.

We look at one another with suspicion.

     I wonder if your greed

                 for what I’m sure you do not need

                             will stop my getting

                                         what I know I have an inborn right to.

And then there’s THEM.

     THEY want the world.

                 Oh, not my part, I tell myself,

                 they’ll let me be.

     I’d rather not consider

                 what they’ll make me pay

                 for their humiliation.

Free enterprise

     has taught us something

                 terribly important:

                             There is not enough to go around,

                             but I can have full measure

                 if I help you get a little bit,

     keep THEM from taking anything away,

and make you think you have enough.

But something happens when I know I have enough,

     some Spirit wind

                 brings rain clouds on my inner spaces,

                             makes the desert bloom

                                         with flowers I can give away,

                                                     and grants me time to care

                                                                 if even THEY

                                                                             have flowers on their table.

What is enough?  What does it take

     to fill your life with meaning,

                 satisfaction,

                             and the love to give again another day?

Peter Bankson, April 1984

So who ARE these “one-anothers” I’m called to love?

Well, certainly my family and community, but more important, those who live and love in the world beyond the threshold of my comfort zone.

CLOSING

So, where does this all lead me?

First - why love one another?  Because it welcomes us into community; because it helps us turn the Big We that dominates our culture into the WE of the Gospel; or maybe just because Jesus calls us to it!

Second - how do I learn to love one another? There are lots of recipes. One seems to be to follow the commandments. Another is to let myself BE loved even in my stumbling imperfections. Or, I can let myself find the path to love from the silence. And, I can freely chose obedience to people, ideas, and commitments greater than myself

And third – who is “one another?”Certainly my family and community, but more important, those who live and love in the world beyond the threshold of my comfort zone.

In the end, I think the biggest piece of loving one another boils down to a fundamental choice about how I express my own identity: do I need to stand out as a faithful servant of God, or find where I can fit in to serve God in community?

To stand out or fit in. To seek the status of hero for the oppressed or find the vocation you can follow with passion within a loving community.

It seems to me that while we may see different places for ourselves and each other, we’re all pretty clear that we’re in this together. 

And what I find, buried deep in the soft transforming tissue of the chrysalis that is my community may well change my life. If it really is “my community” I need to put my weight down, make my commitment to its call, and find my place to follow the vocation that will serve both me AND the wider world.

The challenge for all of us, I think, is to link arms as we stumble onto new ways to turn the “Big ME” on its head, to transform “ME” to “WE.”

And if I’d made this glass plate say “MOM,” just think what it would say now. WOW!

Love one another. That’s the Way.

AMEN.