If you love me…. – John 14:15-21

As children we tended to accept the values and practices of our parents or other significant figures responsible for our care and nurture.  If being part of a religious community was important to them, it became important to us. It was part of the fabric of our life.  For many of us, the teenage years were times for the establishing of our own personality and development of our own personal ethic and compass.  We may have found ourselves questioning the choices that our parents or caregivers had made and perhaps even choosing to reject or pull back from the formal practices associated with the particular religious community of which our family unit were a part.  No doubt these caused some turmoil in our family unit and maybe even some strong words about what our choice would mean to us personally and to the family in general.  Perhaps though, you never were part of a religious community as a child or a teen and have come in later years to a place where you have desired to express your faith in the context of a religious community.

Regardless of our journey to this point, we all find ourselves here in this place, part of this recognized religious community.  Our practice is to gather on this day and this time for worship and encouragement.

A number of years ago, I read a book by John Philip Newell called The Rebirthing of God – Christianity’s Struggle for New Beginnings. The sense of the author is that – to a large extent – we have become disconnected from the heart of our faith.  The author invites us to become participants in the rebirthing of God in our time.  For Newell every reconnection that we are to make is a reconnection of our life with the vision of God for the human race.  He challenges us  to recognize the sacredness of all life once again and to think beyond the limits of our religious expression to a vision of life that embraces all humanity. We are challenged to see ourselves as more than male or female and to recognize the oneness of creation – to seek to overcome the divisions and fragmentation of life and seek to discover a wholeness to life.  We are challenged to see the light of God in every person and to spend our time not in judgment or condemnation of those with whom we have discovered differences but rather work for a justice that seeks for the dignity and respect of all persons.  We are challenged to think of compassion not as a duty or obligation but rather a responsibility to be shared.  We are encouraged to see our life as a journey with God and to seek for ways to deepen and heighten our relationship with God and, as a consequence, with each other. We are challenged to embrace the path of peacemakers once again by seeking to follow the path of non-violence.  This does not involve a false seeking for peace but the willingness to listen and to respond to one another in a way that will maintain an open dialogue.  Finally we are encouraged to reconnect with love.

What Newell reveals – and what I have come more and more to believe -  is the recurring theme of love as the ultimate expression of the life we have been granted by God and the quality of that love which is to be expressed to God and to one another.  God so loved the world, John says, that he sent his only begotten Son – indeed he sent himself – into the world not condemn the world but to save it.  Remember the words from the beginning of John’s gospel where he speaks about the word of God. We could just as easily substitute    the word love. In the beginning was the Love and the Love was with God and the Love was God.  Love was in the beginning with God; all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made.  In Love was life, and the life was the light of humanity.  The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

The intermingling of these words – love, life, and light – gives us a picture of God that is too often overshadowed by the structure, organization and functioning of our religious communities.   Now I am not saying that rules and organization are not helpful or necessary within our communities of faith, but we are never to allow such rules and organization to cloud, hide or subvert the ultimate reason for the existence of our communities.

We are to strive for this ideal community, this ideal following, this ideal relationship with God and one another.  It is important that we not lose sight of these ideals.  If God had lost sight of the vision of  creation, there would never have been an opportunity to us to experience the love of God as expressed through the one we have learned about and have experience of – Jesus Christ.

The Gospel of John is a relational gospel. It is the gospel that most clearly speaks not of things to be followed and things to be avoided; it does not keep a list of what we are to do and the consequences for failing to do those things; it does not speak of judgment and condemnation; but rather it expresses most clearly the vision of God from the beginning of time and gives clear evidence that the ultimate concern of God is to draw us into a place where we can experience in every way and every part of our being the true nature of God.

In our Gospel lesson for today, Jesus is speaking to the disciples at the time before his arrest and subsequent death on the cross. He has come to a place and time where he knows that the people in the world who are challenged by his words and actions will seek to silence him.  But his firm hope is that the message he has brought from God will live on in the hearts and lives of the people who have chosen to believe.  But that message is not to be lived out of a fear of punishment for failure but is to be lived out of a true devotion, a true love of the one who has shared the message.

Keeping the commandments of God is to be a way of receiving blessings. It is not a way to express our fear of God but rather to express our love of God.  For the disciples to keep the commandments out of fear would have been to keep God as a cold, detached tyrant whose intention is to rule our lives with judgment and condemnation – constantly looking for ways to shame us and devalue us.  Rather the disciples are to keep the commandments out of love, emulating as close as they can the love with which Jesus loved them and others. In this way they would be able to reveal to others in the world that God is not a cold, detached tyrant seeking for people to fail but a God who is kind and tender-hearted, an involved caregiver whose intention is to have us discover and live lives that will bring peace, healing, hope and restoration to us in mind, body and spirit.

Love is what motivated God to create; love is what motivated God to come in Christ; love is what motivated Jesus’ ministry; and our response to that love is to let our love for God motivate us in our life within this community of faith and in the wider community of the world in which we live.

AMEN