Peace.

John 14.15-31   (November 15, 2015)

I.

I was talking to someone who teaches at Princeton Seminary last week.  She said she was close to retirement and when that day came she would probably not go to church at all.  She said — and I have heard this from others — that many retired pastors and church workers are so burned out by the time they retire that they have no interest in participating in a church anymore.  There is also this relatively newly reported statistic revealing a group which has been dubbed the “dones.”  These are people who were once very active in church life, but who at some point lose their energy and enthusiasm, and maybe even their faith, and give it up.  They declare themselves “done” with church.

All this is another indication that we live in a time when the church — at least the church as we know it, or knew it — is in trouble.  This news should not come as any kind of shock to us.  Some churches are doing better than others; but more and more churches, after decades of slowly hemorrhaging members and money, after going to part-time ministers, or merging, or yoking, are hitting the wall of viability and closing.  

For small churches this is an existential crisis.  But some 500 member churches used to be 1200 member churches, and some  1000 member churches only get 300 people to show up on an average Sunday.  This is also happening to churches across the theological and liturgical spectrum: conservative, progressive, Catholic, evangelical, traditional, liberal, whatever.

It has been going on for longer than the 34 years I have been in ministry.  So this environment of decline, shrinkage, and loss, has characterized my entire career.  It is somewhat discouraging.  On the denominational level, those years have been filled with fighting and blaming, at the expense of not doing much for local churches.  And on the level of local churches there has been a profound lack of imagination.

When a person is ordained in the Presbyterian Church we promise to serve with “energy, intelligence, imagination, and love.”  In many churches perhaps it is imagination that goes first, if there ever was much at all.  Many of us still cannot imagine a church any different from the one we knew as children, and we keep trying to do that kind of church better… and failing.  Then, after a while, maybe we began to lose intelligence, as trying to do the same thing over and over and expect different results doesn’t make us look very smart.  Then, as we age and as the years slide by, we lose our energy; people just give up and stay home.   Until some congregations are left with nothing except… love.  They are reduced to a small group of people who love each other and who love Jesus.

If they don’t have that… well, then they really are finished.

There is nothing inevitable about any of this.  Churches are in different places on this continuum, and they do, by the power of the Holy Spirit, turn around and revive.  But the bottom line for a gathering of disciples of Jesus Christ is always love.

II.

Interestingly enough, love is not actually the last gasp of a church; it is the beginning.  It is what Jesus talks about with his disciples here on the night before his death.  It is the one essential commandment.  If you have that, then energy, intelligence, and imagination are still possible.  Indeed, they are only possible if based on love, at least as far as his disciples are concerned

“If you love me,” he tells them, “You will keep my commandments.”

To love Jesus is not just to admire a historical figure.  It is to love God in the One whom God sends to reveal to us our true nature.  To love Jesus is to love ourselves — our real and true selves, not our blind, lame, ignorant, violent, fearful, old selves, not the selves that have been shaped by the world, the selves our egos tells us we are.  When Jesus elsewhere quotes Leviticus and commands us to love our neighbor as we love ourselves, he means that in him we become our neighbors, we identify with and are united to everyone.  Loving our neighbors and loving ourselves is the same thing.

For the Lord, love is not just a feeling or a sentiment; it has to do with actions, and very specific actions at that: the keeping of his commandments.  And his commandments, especially in this gospel, also have to do with love.  “I give you a new commandment,” he says in chapter 13, “Love each other.  Just as I have loved you, so you also must love each other.  This is how everyone will know you are my disciples, when you love each other.”

He does not say that people will know his disciples by anything else.  Not even by their energy, intelligence, and imagination.  Not by their style of worship.  Not by their doctrine or theology.  Not by their liturgical practices or their ways of prayer or meditation.  Not by their personal morality.  Certainly not by their economic, social, or political philosophies.  Certainly not by their wealth or power or status or attractiveness or privilege or race or nation or any of the other categories we may think are essential.

He doesn’t even say they are known by their faith or our hope.  But by their love.  The author of this gospel is the same person who says in a letter that “God is love, and those who remain in love remain in God and God remains in them.”  To love is nothing less than to participate in God.  To love is to lose your small, narrow, blind, fearful self, and to realize your true, large, wide, enlightened, and fearless self, Christ-in-you.  To love is to realize that you are in everything God by the Word spoke into being.    

And the first place that happens is here, in the gathering of disciples, the community of faith.  When that happens, everything else follows.

III.  

Then the Lord immediately starts talking about how God will send the Holy Spirit to the disciples.  He says that the world can’t recognize the Spirit, but the disciples will know the Spirit who lives in them and with them.  The love that Jesus is requiring of his disciples is not possible by our own initiative in which we think according to the world’s values; it has to come from God.  It has to well up within us through the true humanity we share with Jesus. 

The Spirit is the way Jesus will continue to be present with the disciples.  Even after his death, he will continue to live in and with them by his Spirit.  And because he continues to live after death so they also will live, and be able to keep his commandments which is the indication of their love.  The Holy Spirit is the love of God as it is poured out upon and within the disciples; it is the Spirit that reveals to them Jesus’ continued Presence, and sustains the love they share for each other and for all.   

The disciple named Judas, whom we are assured is not the same as Judas Iscariot (who has departed to betray Jesus) asks about why he will reveal himself to them and not to the world.  It is a reasonable question, one that many have asked in every generation.  If Jesus is the Messiah, the Savior, the Redeemer, how come only those who trust in him know this?  Wouldn’t it be way more effective if everyone could see this truth?  Why doesn’t Jesus do something so public and objective that everyone could see it and therefore believe in and follow him?  Why doesn’t he reveal himself to the world?

Jesus doesn’t really answer the question.  His response is to keep talking about how important it is that his disciples, this little community who trust in him, keep his word.  He says that God himself, the Father, will come with him and together they will make their home with them.  They will become the Temple of God’s Presence.  They will become the place where people meet and encounter the living God.

So Jesus Christ  does reveal himself to the world.  He does it in the love shared among the disciples.  The world will see the disciples and thereby come to see him.  That is, the world will see in them the living Presence of God.  They will be the proof.

This is an incredibly high expectation he is placing on the church.  They are to be the living example, the visible manifestation, the actual Presence of God.  The world, that is, people still caught in the death-spiral of their own ego-centricity, are supposed to be able to look at the church and see something otherworldly.  They are supposed to see the love of God.

IV.   

This is why there is nothing more important than for the church to be the church.  There is nothing more important than for the church to gather together and discern God’s Word by the power of the Spirit, and live in obedience to Christ’s teachings, which are all about love.  

So, in this age of apparent decline, the one thing necessary that we have to hold on to, the one thing we have to cultivate and protect and nurture and encourage, is love.  For the church is not dying… it is being pruned.  It is losing many dead and dying branches, branches that maybe forgot their connection to the trunk and the root.  The church has had many, many members who were here for reasons other than love.  For 1500 years the church was a center of power and privilege, and people would hang out among us for lots of reasons.  We are being pruned.  And the branches that remain will be those who participate in the love of God revealed in Jesus Christ.  The ones who remain will be the ones who love each other.

And love does not require a lot of the institutional baggage we have imagined are essential to the church.  Love does not require a minister.  Love does not require a building.  Love does not require a minimum number of members to be viable.  Love does not require someone’s evaluation of what is sustainable.  For love we only need each other and God, in God’s Word and Spirit.

So in this very bad week, in which hundreds of people were murdered in Paris, and Kenya, and Beirut, and Baghdad, and hundreds more murdered in the normal wars we tolerate and even forget about, what is our job?  What is our response?

We know what the world wants.  The world, under the sway of the Evil One as it is, wants more violence.  Retribution, punishment, more drone strikes, boots-on-the-ground (which is really people on the ground), invasions, bombing.  The world can only think in terms of hatred, deterrence, threats, and force.  The world is shot through with darkness and fear, permeated by cycles of anger and brutality, thinking this will solve everything.  When, for 10,000 years, having tried this approach repeatedly and nearly exclusively, it has solved exactly nothing.

The Lord Jesus sends into this world, as he was himself sent by God, a community of people commissioned to keep his commandments and love each other.  Among his commandments is the one about “Love your enemies and bless those who curse you.”  

And if we complain that such a naive, unrealistic approach might lead to our deaths, he says, in effect, “So?  Haven’t I also showed you what death is about?  Haven’t I also showed you that death is powerless to separate you from me?  Haven’t I said that whoever lives and trusts in me will never really die?

V.

“Peace I leave with you,” he promises.  “My peace I give you.  I give to you not as the world gives.  Don’t be troubled or afraid.”  Jesus comes to bring peace, shalom.   Peace is just the globalized form of love.  Peace is what it looks like when God’s love spreads from soul to soul and starts to infect a whole society.

Our mission as a church is that of every church and congregation.  It is to witness to and exemplify and embody in our own lives and life together the love of God, and to shine that love into people’s lives.  It is to be in the world like salt, or light, or leaven, as an influence, a catalyst for goodness and compassion.  It is to be a welcoming, embracing, forgiving, and healing presence; it is to be people of joy and truth.  It is to break down barriers of mistrust and bigotry, and it is to minister to all who suffer, no matter who they are.

God is pruning us so that we will function in this way.  God needs the church to be the church, a living witness to Jesus Christ, the Word and love of God.

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