Chosen

You Wound Me, by Freiskamaze

Propers: The Sixth Sunday of Easter (Rogation), AD 2021 B

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Hallelujah! Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Hallelujah!

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Your calling, as a Christian, is to be Jesus for the world. The incarnation of God, the resurrection of God, continues in you: in the love that you share, the grace that you give, the forgiveness you offer, and the hope that you live. We are to be “little Christs” for our neighbor, in the words of Martin Luther; all members of one body, with Jesus as our head, according to the epistles of St Paul.

This calling is both an unspeakable joy and a terrible responsibility. We did not earn this. “You did not choose me,” sayeth the Lord, “but I chose you.” Our election is by grace—and this is no idle, arbitrary mercy but an empowerment to go and do and be. We are to free this world, forgive this world, to raise all this world up from the dead! And that’s a tall order, too much even for the greatest of human heroes. But not for God, and certainly not for God made man.

It is Christ who saves. We just need to get out of his way.

Our reading from John’s Gospel this morning picks up right where we last left off, in the midst of Jesus’ farewell discourse, given to his disciples on the night in which he was betrayed. And he continues this theme of “abiding” in him, staying with him, resting in him, the way that fruitful branches abide in the vine. “Abide in my love,” he implores us:

If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept the 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.

All this, mind you, must be framed by Judas’ betrayal, which has just occurred, and by Peter’s denial, which is soon to be. Christ is about to lay down his life for his friends—for us—and we are his friends if we do as he commands.

But what does it mean to follow the commandments? Our minds reflexively jump to Exodus, to the 10 Commandments people want posted on every courthouse wall. But for John, keeping the commandments of the Lord is both more and less than this. In his Gospel, God’s commandment is simply to believe in the Son of God, sent to save all the world that we might have eternal life; and to love one another.

“This is my commandment,” Jesus says: “that you love one another as I have loved you.”

2000 years ago, friendship meant something. It was often considered the greatest of earthly loves, dearer to us than the bonds of marriage or family. In a time when almost all relationships were hierarchical, friendship was the bond of equals. A true friend was often closer than a sibling, closer even than spouse. Friendship was to be sought above all else, and woe betide the man who lived without a friend.

In all of Hebrew Scripture, only two men are called friends of God: Abraham and Moses; and even Moses was only called such indirectly. “You are my friends if you do what I command,” says Jesus. Stay with me. Abide with me. “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.”

Do not think of the cheap friendship peddled on social media, whereby everyone’s our “friend”, everything is “liked” or “loved”. Such nonsense costs us nothing and is therefore worth nothing. Real love hurts. Real love necessitates vulnerability. We pour ourselves out, sacrifice of ourselves, in order to put the good of another, the good of our beloved, before our own. How many people do you know like that? How many times do we live like that?

You’ve heard me say it before and you’ll hear me say it again: love is not an emotion. Love is not the same thing as feeling in love. It is a choice, an effort of the will, to say not me but you. You are more important to me than I am to myself. And of course this isn’t meant in a codependent way, a sort of spineless, fawning rolling-over, because real love is strong, free, noble, beautiful, good, and true. It gives life rather than takes. It abides, and thus bears fruit.

We have been called as a special, chosen, priestly people; wild branches, grafted onto a cultivated tree. We were not chosen because we were better or smarter or nobler than anyone else; to the contrary. We have been elected purely out of love. Yet to be a chosen people can be quite the two-edged sword. Just ask our Jewish brethren. They’ve been chosen for 4000 years, and it ain’t exactly been easy. For we are chosen in order that we serve. We are loved so that we may love.

That’s how it works. God the Father, Creator of all, pours out his love into his Son, who is God made flesh, God-With-Us. And as we are joined to the Son, so we are joined in his love—an infinite, unstoppable, overwhelming love, poured into us from the Father, so that it drowns us, buries us, kills us and makes us alive again! We are filled up to bursting with the light and life and love of God, the fire and the blood of God, so that we cannot help but overflow and pour out God’s own faith and hope and love into all the world around us.

That’s what it means to have our joy complete. That’s what it looks like to be a human fully alive. The day will come at the end of the age when the Spirit of the Lord will consume and remake all of reality, the great Resurrection of everything and everyone whom God has ever made. And that day will come through us, because it comes through Christ. Until that day, we are to be a foretaste of the feast to come: a preview of eternal life lived out here and now.

And I know that’s a tall order. It’s a wonderful, mind-blowing calling, the greatest adventure we could imagine, to live in heaven while still on this earth; to choose hope amidst despair, and give witness to the victory of new life over death. But it is too much for us. Indeed, the greatest obstacle to believing the Gospel, let alone to proclaiming it, is and always has been Christians; is and always has been us.

Because we’re sinners, aren’t we? That’s why Christ called us; because we need his forgiveness. And when you gather a group of sinners into an ecclesia, into a church, well, lo and behold, we sin. We screw up. We fall short. But thanks be to God, forgiveness is at hand: forgiveness in Word and in water; forgiveness in Body and Blood; to the point that our own sinfulness, which is indeed our shame, itself becomes a witness to the mercies of our God.

For if God can work through us—well, then, he can work through anyone! Together we are the body of Christ. Together, by grace, we are Jesus for this world.

The devil would love nothing more than for us to think that we ourselves must fight him. Even a fallen, broken angel would have little trouble defeating the mind and heart of mortal man. But Jesus—Jesus the devil could never defeat. Which is why, in order to fulfill the commandment, to love one another as Christ has first loved us, we need to get out of his way. We must stop relying on our cleverness, our worthiness, our strength, and rely entirely upon the grace of Jesus Christ.

He is the vine; we are the branches. Abide in him, rest in him, and we shall bear much fruit. Apart from him we can do nothing. In him, we can do everything.

For the love of God is this, that we obey his commandments. And his commandments are not burdensome, for whatever is born of God conquers the world. And this is the victory that conquers the world: our faith. Who is it that conquers the world but the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God?

Up against that, the devil doesn’t have a prayer.

Being a Christian isn’t simply about moral improvement. It isn’t just about being good now, so that we might reap some heavenly reward and avoid punishment. Christianity, at heart, is a new life of faith, hope, and love: faith, in the revelation of who God is in Jesus, who died at our hands and rose for our sake; hope, in consistently choosing to live life as though the all the promises of God have already been fulfilled; and love, stubborn and ceaseless and pure, poured out from the Father into the Son, and from the Son into everything and everyone that he has made.

Abide in Christ, dear Christian, and through you he will save all the world.

Hallelujah! Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Hallelujah!

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.