Our new Associate Pastor, Rev. Rachel Small Stokes, preached her first sermon with us this Sunday. You can read the text below, or watch it on our “See Us Now” page.
Hey, I Just Met You, and This Is Crazy, But…
Introductory Sermon to Union Church
Sept. 16, 2012
John 15:9-17, Colossians 3:12-17
Well, Hello, Union Church!
Can I just tell you for a minute how very glad I am to be here?
For the past two weeks, as we’ve been settling in to our new house and meeting so many people, Leslie and I have found ourselves just grinning goofily, uncontrollably. Your warm welcome and embrace has been unparalleled to anything we’ve experienced before.
At our doorstep when we arrived were not only five members of Union Church ready to help us unpack our crammed car and traumatized cats, but also a giant basket of healthy and delicious food – and a refrigerator full of the same! We’ve received flowers, cards, emails – all with offers of help and little tips for how to survive in Berea. Some even gave us their phone numbers!
Now, I gotta tell you, this unbounded hospitality is a little disconcerting for someone who’s just spent the last four years in New York City. There, the custom is to greet your neighbors by pounding on your ceiling with the broomstick when their music is too loud.
We lived in our last apartment for three years, and I knew two neighbors by name when we moved out. I’d talked to each of them maybe three times. I don’t know if it’s that there were just too darn many people there that meeting your neighbors felt exhausting, or that it’s really a much more individualistic culture, or what, but it’s a very anonymous place.
Honestly, I welcomed that anonymity. As an introvert, it made life much easier for me to just come home, and have no one care about my comings and goings. It felt safe NOT to be known; it felt freeing. The hardest part was that it got a bit lonely; our nearest friends were fifteen minutes away, and then after that, everyone else we knew was an hour away on the Subway. We never got home until about 8:30 or 9 each night, and we were usually too tired for socializing, anyway.
I liked life there, even though it was tiring. It was exciting, and everything you could ever dream up to want was there in that city. If you are a do-er, it’s the place to be!
But I’m learning now, from what you all are teaching me about hospitality, that maybe I didn’t even know what I was missing. Maybe, just maybe, there is something to this whole knowing and loving your neighbors thing. Because, even though it feels weird for people to be handing me their phone numbers and bringing over flowers, I keep having this goofy grin on my face…
It makes me think of this pop song that has been playing rather nonstop all summer on top 40 stations, and in Kroger and Walmart and Radio Shack, and blasting from car windows and being parodied on YouTube. It’s a song that has felt like it’s been chasing me down all summer. Maybe you’ve heard of it – it’s called “Call Me, Maybe,” by Carly Rae Jepsen.
My understanding of the way this song took off is that it was promoted by Justin Bieber and became a big hit, and then, it became a YouTube sensation when the Harvard Men’s baseball team made a video of themselves dancing to it.
The dance they created was simple, so I’ll teach it to you. (I like congregational participation!) It goes like this:
Right fist up and down.
Left fist up and down.
Both fists crossed in an “X”
Okay, so let’s do this while I sing you the chorus of the song. If you know this song, sing along with me loudly!
Hey, I just met you
And this is crazy,
But here’s my number
So call me, maybe. (x2)
The song is about a woman who meets a man that she’s so enamored with by sight that she tries to find all sorts of ways to give him her phone number.
It kept playing in my head as I received all of this hospitality, especially the “this is crazy!” part. It felt so strange! So… known. But also, so… loved.
So today’s passage from the gospel of John seems particularly appropriate to this point in our new relationship together. It’s one of the most basic statements of Jesus’ whole message, that we love one another. You are already showing me what this is like. I hope there will be ways I can help you with it, too.
One of the gifts I might bring to this relationship is some geeky knowledge. Something you’ll learn about me quickly is that I am a stickler for grammar. In college my friends would bring their papers to me for editing, and I would hand them back covered in red ink – they called me “the knife!”
Grammar is very important, you know. Some of you may have seen a little image that Kent recently posted on his facebook page of a grandmother running and screaming. At the top of the picture it said, “Let’s Eat, Grandma.” At the bottom, it said, “Let’s Eat Grandma!!” The caption reminded us: Grammar saves lives!
There’s a way in which knowing the proper grammar of this passage might be salvific, too.
I want to share with you an insight from this passage that only comes from studying the Greek translation of a preposition. Sounds fun, everyone, right?
Well, give me a chance. Here is part of the passage again:
As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my 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.
Now, to the English speaker’s ears, this sounds pretty straightforward: you are commanded to love one another. No questions asked. Whether it’s hard or easy, whether they’re being a total jerk, or pigheaded, or just plain wrong. Right?
Well, maybe…
But the Greek tells us something a little different, and I think, a whole lot better. A more accurate translation is not “This is my commandment: that you love one another,” but “This is my commandment, that I give to you so that you can love one another.” And what is the actual commandment that allows this kind of amazing love between humans? The answer is in a previous verse: “Abide in my love.”
Abide in my love.
What does that mean, to abide? Jesus gives us an image right before this passage. He says, “I am the vine, and you are the branches.” The branches are rooted in Jesus. They are grafted onto the vine. They are branches cut from another plant and joined to this new vine. They will not survive if they don’t really attach and soak up the life force of the vine. In the grafting process, they are given a new hope, new energy, new fuel for growth. They abide — they live fully – in God’s love.
Abide in my love.
That is the commandment of God that allows us to love each other.
Let your joy be complete in the true gratitude of being fully and wonderfully loved.
Take into yourself the knowledge that you, just as you are, foibles and all, are beloved of God. Swirl it around in your mouth like the most delectable gourmet chocolate.
Revel in the knowledge that any love that you might feel for another person – in this room or out of it – is only a fraction of the love God has for you. And God’s joy in seeing you act out that love by loving others? That’s gotta be off the charts amazing!
Abide in this love.
The key, I think, to living in a community of Christians – all of whom are incredibly fallible – is to make it your commanded duty to honor your own belovedness.
When you are fully immersed in it, then there is no other possible action than to love one another, out of gratitude and joy.
The beginning of my ministry here with you is the beginning of a covenant. You have in good faith entered into this covenant with me, in the hopes that I will walk with you on your journeys of faith. This kind of difficult covenant only works when we make it a three-way covenant: You, Me, and God.
The promise of this passage is that, whether if it’s in relationship with your minister, or your wife, or your best friend, or your child – if both people first know that they are truly and fully loved, the rest will find a way to work out. My hope is that, in covenanting together as a church, you and I can continually remind ourselves of this belovedness as we work together on helping make that love tangible in our community and world.
Geek alert again: I’m about to quote my favorite church patriarch (translation: my favorite old guy who talked about the bible). That would be Gregory of Nyssa, from about 400CE, who described our relationships with God and one another as spokes on a wheel. The hub of the wheel is God, and each spoke is the spiritual journey of an individual. The closer you get on a spoke toward God, the closer you are to every other spoke. As we each move toward God, we inevitably move closer to one another.
It is this moving toward the hub that makes all the other relationships possible. When we are steadfast in our belovedness, when we abide in this love and take care of ourselves as truly beloved treasures, to love the other becomes easy.
It becomes easy, as Paul said to the Colossians, to “clothe yourselves in love… and let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts… and be thankful.” It becomes easy to bear with one another and to forgive each other. It becomes easy to bear the fruit that Jesus promises – the fruit of love for one another.
What is not easy is the continual remembrance of this belovedness. The journey to the center of the wheel is not usually smooth; we have powerful deterrents constantly pulling us away from the hub. We can be distracted by all sorts of things: we can put on the clothes of desire for prestige or power, clothes of desperation to be “right,” clothes of stress about money, or clothes of fearing not being good enough. All of these things might come from legitimate places, but if we are not careful, they can also pull us away from that hub of God’s love, and away from being able to love one another, too.
But the way forward through these times, when we realize that we are being pulled away from others and from God, is not to berate ourselves with “shoulds” or “musts,” or commandments to love when that seems impossible.
It is, instead, to return to the nurture of our own belovedness, and to focus our attention back on the hub of God’s love. The power of that love, when properly sought, will fuel the power of our love for each other. It will become the sustenance we need to make it through whatever conflicts arise. It is the beginning and the source of reconciliation.
How do we do this? You will each have your own way. For some it might be taking communion, for others reading devotionals, and for others doing yoga in a field and connecting to the life force of the earth. You might find it in laughing with your goofy children, or by offering a hug to a friend in need. One of my new favorites is running through the pastures here in Berea, as the rising sun greets me with a reminder of my belovedness. Whatever it is, it must be nurtured. It must be given priority. Like branches grafted on a vine, we need to get that life force into us. We need it to survive.
And we can help each other with that! It is, after all, what churches do. We remind each other of our belovedness, and hold each other accountable to nurturing it. The Faith Development and Community Life and Growth boards, as well as Worship and many others, stand ready to offer many opportunities for this growth, and to listen as you tell us what you need in order to abide in God’s love.
And so, armed with this revelation provided by a simple bit of grammar, I stand before you, ready to be in ministry with you. I bring my gifts and graces, and I bring my foibles and mistakes. I bring them all here, in all their humanness. And I hope that you will bring yours, too – all of it. I hope that you will bring all of your imperfect and totally beloved selves and join me in the journey to the center of the wheel. Together, if we abide in God’s love, I know that God will lead us on an exciting and revelatory adventure, and our joy will be complete. Will you join me?
I mean, hey, I just met you, and this is crazy. But here’s my number, so call me, maybe?
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