Abide in Love
The Sermon
1. Introduction:
2.
John
3. Last Meal
last week we heard first of 3 readings from Jesus last meal with his disciples
Reminder of context in John’s gospel
- to put it back
Disciples know that some powerful people want Jesus dead.
The end is coming and they are not sure what that will look like.
This is a tense meal.
They are filled with uncertainty and fear.
- more than that maybe
o bereft
o desperate
o terrified
when read these words need to hear Jesus meeting them in their uncertainty, terror, desperation
3 audiences to these stories
- Jesus’s audience
- community gospel writer is writing for
- us
…..
Jesus welcomes them and washes their feet,
- which if we are honest, really confuses them.
Then he says that one of them will betray him, and Judas goes out into the night.
- More confusion and disbelief.
When Judas was gone, Jesus tells them he is going somewhere they cannot come,
and that they are to “Love each other. Just as I have loved you, so you also must love each other. This is how everyone will know that you are my disciples, when you love each other.”
Not a rule,
- just how he is inviting them to respond to all that is about to happen.
- I am leaving you. Hold on to each other. Love each other.
This is Jesus the Pastor
- meeting them in their terror and confusion
Also John’s equivalent of Matthew’s sermon on the Mount
- gives instructions of being disciples
- then spends rest gospel living that out
- and after resurrection says – “now you do that”
Here Jesus has spends first 11 chapters living out God’s love
- being the embodiment of divine love
- Word of God made Flesh
- Living God’s dream and hope for creation and humanity
- The Way, Truth and Life of God
o not doctrine need to understand and believe
o way of life rooted in Gods justice, hope, and love
- now saying – this is what I have shown you
- soon it will be up to you to embody God’s love for each other
- and this world
4. Love
all of which sounds like hard work and maybe a little impossible given all that is about to happen
so he carries on
“If you love me, you will keep my commandments. I will ask the Father, and he will send another Companion, who will be with you forever.”(CEB)
or
“If you love me, show it by doing what I’ve told you. I will talk to the Father, and he’ll provide you another Friend so that you will always have someone with you. This Friend is the Spirit of Truth. The godless world can’t take him in because it doesn’t have eyes to see him, doesn’t know what to look for. But you know him already because he has been staying with you, and will even be in you!” (Message)
Question
- What are Jesus’ commandments
- talk among selves 30 sec
- plenary
Jesus is the embodiment of God’s love for world @@@
He has been teaching them to love
showed them and reminded them as he washed their feet
- I am leaving you. Hold on to each other. Love each other.
to love is abide in Jesus’s love
to love is to abide in God the Father’s love through Jesus
to love is to know we are created in God’s love
held in God’s love
God’s hard crunchy foot washing love
love longs for all creation and all people to thrive
This is Jesus’s commandment
- what Jesus has been living out
This is for John
- eternal life
- abundant life
- resurrected life now
5. Paraclete
Those disciples, like us, could not do that on their own
- Judas would betray him
- Peter would deny him
- and most of the rest of the men would run and scatter
So Jesus promises them another Paraclete, advocate, companion, helper, motivator,
He had been their first advocate
in John’s cosmology he would continue to be that advocate with the Father
he promises another to remind them
- encourage them
- motivate them
- Spirit will be with them so that they might live the commandment to love.
John also writing for his community
- community who had been expelled from synagogues
o all that meant for their sense of who they were
- community under pressure from persecution
- community struggling with fear, uncertainty, desperation
® Spirit, the companion
is with them
® encourage them
® motivate them
Spirit is with them so that they might live the commandment to love.
® as they live dream and hope of God in the way of love.
John also writing for us
® Spirit, the companion is with us as WE live dream and hope of God in the way of love.
- We too might embody this love today
- I wonder what all this might mean for us?
6. Resurrected Life in Paul and Anne Jarvis
work of Spirit of Truth, Advocate, Helper, continued encouraging and accompanying people living the way of love
- and continues on today
See that way of love lived by Paul in reading from Acts
way he engaged with leaders of Athens
- respectfully
- not antagonistic
- acknowledging their religious curiosity
- quoting their own poets
- not attacking their idols – as his Jewish tradition might have led him too.
deeply relational
So different to how too many so called Christians engage with Muslims, or Hindus and Sikhs today
7. Mother’s Day
Today is Mother’s Day
I think we can see work of Paraclete in the way of love in work of Anna Jarvis
worked with President Woodrow Wilson officially recognised Mother’s Day
- early 20th century in USA
 |
o Ann Jarvis had been a peace activist and suffragette
o who cared for wounded soldiers on both sides of the American Civil War,
o created Mother's Day Work Clubs to address public health issues.
o She and another peace activist and suffragette Julia Ward Howe had been urging for the creation of a "Mother's Day For Peace" where mothers would ask that their husbands and sons were no longer killed in wars.
o Ward Howe and Jarvis had made Mother's Day Proclamation in 1870, which called upon mothers of all nationalities to band together to promote the "amicable settlement of international questions, the great and general interests of peace."
- Anna Jarvis wanted to honour this and to set aside a day to honour all mothers because she believed a mother is "the person who has done more for you than anyone in the world".
- angered that it was commercialised so quickly
8. Questions
- what have you heard
- how WE experience the crucified and risen Christ amongst now,
- active in our world.
- how do you live resurrected lives.
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