During this Easter season we have been working our way through the First Epistle of John. At the core of this letter, as we have been hearing, is love: God's love for us, and in return, our love for others. As it was so beautifully put in last week's reading: Beloved, let us love one another for love is from God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love. Those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.
Love is not exclusive to John's Epistle, of course. It is the center of Jesus's teachings in the Gospels as well: What is the greatest commandment? Love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, and soul, and love your neighbor as yourself. On these two hang all the law and the prophets.
This focus on love does not begin with Jesus. In responding to the question about the greatest commandment, Jesus is quoting the books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy. When we begin to see how central love is to scripture, we can see it is there even when it is not explicitly named. We see that love has been there from the beginning. As Desmond Tutu so wonderfully puts it in his retelling of the creation story for children, he says that creation happened because God's love bubbled over.
We see love in our Gospel reading today. I give you a new commandment, Jesus says, that you love one another as I have loved you. This is a different standard than the greatest commandment. In the greatest commandment, we are told to love our neighbors as we love ourselves. There are so many little ways you can wiggle out of that one, aren't there? For example, what if you don't really love yourself, or know how to love yourself, or how to truly love your neighbor? But this new commandment is different. We are not to love as we love ourselves with all the flaws that might entail, but we are to love as Jesus loves: love one another as I have loved you. Jesus gives the new commandment at an important junction in the story. It is right after Jesus washes the disciple's feet, and right before his death on the cross. He is giving us the lens through which we can interpret his actions. They must be interpreted through love through this new commandment. The footwashing and the cross are embodiments, they are incarnations of love. Jesus is reminding us that love is not just a word or a feeling. Love involves action.
There are many ways to love, and we have been discovering new ways this past year as we have all sacrificed our normal patterns and desires to be near one another. We have been maintaining our physical distance, and wearing masks. And now with the vaccine we have a new way to share our love by getting poked by a needle. There is some self interest in getting vaccinated, of course, because we want to keep ourselves safe. But it also an act of love for others because every vaccine given helps stop the virus from spreading. Even if we do not feel at risk ourselves, we do it in love for others. I give you a new commandment, Jesus says, that you love one another as I have loved you. Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and God is love.
Keeping our distance has been one way of embodying love in this past year, but love is also what has made that distance so hard. When we love others but cannot be with them, we miss them. I miss you. I miss seeing you. I miss talking to you. I miss shaking your hands after church. I miss sharing a meal, whether Shepherd's Pie in Berktold Hall or bread broken at the altar. I miss sharing those meals with you. In that loss of being together there is grief, and that grief around the loss of seeing one another, of being together, is an embodiment of love as well.
God is love. Those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them. God is in every act of love that we offer. Every time we are willing to love like Jesus did, God is there. Every time we gather up the courage to put those masks on again, God is there. When we make an appointment to get a vaccine, God is there. God is also there in the grief that we feel as we patiently wait to return. And return we will, soon-ish, and we will find new ways to share our love with one another, to love as Jesus loves us.
AMEN
