(Note: This blog entry is based on the text for “True Love”,
originally shared on May 14, 2025. It was the 359th video for our YouTube Channel, Streams
of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my
wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)
What
is true love? It’s nothing that the world can prepare us for, and today we’re
going to find out what it is.
The
world spoke Latin briefly last week: “Habemus papam”. Or, “We have a pope”.
Pope Leo XIV, the
newly elected leader of the Roman Catholic Church, is the first pope born in
the United States, and the first pope of the Augustinian Order.
I once read that
one of the strengths of the Roman Catholic Church is that it has a variety of
religious orders where there can be diverse approaches to being Roman Catholic,
while maintaining unity within the Roman Catholic Church. There are
Franciscans, Benedictines, Jesuits, Dominicans, Carmelites, Augustinians, and
so on. But there has never before been an Augustinian pope.
How will being an
Augustinian influence Pope Leo’s approach to the work of the Roman Catholic
Church?
I read a post on
Facebook by Clinton Sensat in the days after Pope Leo’s election that said,
“These are all over-simplifications, but if Franciscans find God in nature,
Dominicans in study, and Carmelites in prayer, Augustinians find God in
community.”
Augustine of Hippo
(a city in North Africa), aka St. Augustine, who lived from 354 A.D. to 430 A.
D., who nominally founded the Augustinian order, is well known to Catholics as
well as to Protestants and to people of other religions and to people with no
religion at all for his influence on Western as well as World Civilization.
Many people read his works, “Confessions” or “City of God” as part of world
history courses in high school or college.
You may also be
familiar with an Augustinian monk who had some influence on the world: Martin
Luther, the 16th Century Church reformer who protested against the
abuses of the Roman Catholic Church of his day and so became the world’s first
Protestant.
I admit that I have
never thought much about how my being a Lutheran, influenced by Martin Luther
as an Augustinian, has influenced my understanding of being a Christian.
But I have
grown to see the fundamental nature of Christianity as being built on
relationship. Our relationship with God is the expression of our faith, and the
expression of that relationship is seen in how we treat one another.
And what are
our Christian communities but parts of the Christians Church, the whole body of
Christ bound together across time?
And what are
those communities, but visible and active expressions of our relationship with
the one true living God, that is, of love? (More about that in a minute.)
And what is
that love, but a very specific kind of love, what the original Greek language
of the Bible calls “agape”, or selfless love. The kind of love that is the very
nature of God, the love with which God loves us, the love that that can only
come from God? Agape.
In fact, this love
is at the heart of the Gospel lesson that will be read in the vast majority of
churches in the world this coming Sunday.
But if it sounds
like you’ve heard it not too long ago, you probably have. It was read in
churches on Maundy Thursday, just about 4 weeks ago, on the night marking the
night in which Jesus was betrayed, and then tortured, and executed three days
before he took his life back again on Easter Sunday, John 13:31-35,
31 When he
had gone out, Jesus said, “Now the Son of Man has been glorified, and God has
been glorified in him. 32 If God has been glorified in him, God
will also glorify him in himself and will glorify him at once. 33 Little
children, I am with you only a little longer. You will look for me; and as I
said to the Jews so now I say to you, ‘Where I am going, you cannot come.’ 34 I
give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved
you, you also should love one another. 35 By this everyone will
know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”
So why are we
hearing this text again, and so soon?
I think it’s
because the love that Jesus spoke of looks different to us on our side of the
Resurrection.
Before Jesus gave
his life for us and then took it back again to show us that he was God, the
emphasis was on Jesus’ words, ‘Where I am going, you cannot come.” Jesus was
announcing to his disciples that he would soon die.
But, after
the Resurrection, when Jesus took his life back again, the emphasis is now on
how we live: we embody his love for us in our love for one another.
We live in two
relationships of love.
First, we live in
the love that God has for us, shown most plainly on the cross. Jesus said to
Nicodemus in John 3:16,
16 “For God so loved the world that
he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but
may have eternal life.
Second, we live in response
to that love through Christian community. We believe that the risen Christ is
present among us today. Jesus said in Matthew 18:20,
20 For where
two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.”
What do we need in
order to have a relationship with God? At least two or three. Jesus is present
when at least two or three people are gathered in that living relationship, in
Jesus name.
To be gathered in
Jesus’ name is not to use the name of Jesus as a magic word to get what we
want. It means to be gathered in his reality, his true self. It is
transformational.
And a community
only requires two people. I think that that is because two is the minimum
number of people needed for a relationship. Like the HOV lane on the freeway,
the “High-occupancy Vehicle” lane. Two is the smallest number greater than one,
but that’s considered high occupancy in L.A. and it makes a community in the
Christian Church.
Like religious
orders in the Roman Catholic Church, Christian churches provide the
opportunities for a diverse people to find diverse expressions of God’s
presence.
And what does God’s
presence among us mean? Love. It is transformational love. It is God’s nature,
and God’s nature is what defines us as Christian communities.
This is why Jesus
says, at the end of our Gospel reading for this coming Sunday, in John 13:35,
35 By this
everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one
another.”
Back in the days of
what some refer to as “The Great Folk Music Scare” of the early/mid- ‘60’s (😊), one of the songs every Christian youth group sang was
“They Will Know We are Christians by our Love”.
I would bet that
some of us of that era could still sing it. It has been said that a folk song
is a song that a group of people can sing from memory, and I know that many of
us could do it.
There were four
verses and one chorus. Though, when Contemporary Christian Music supergroup
“Jars of Clay” recorded it, they only included two verses, oddly.
The first verse
went
We are one in the Spirit, we are one in the Lord;
We are one in the Spirit, we are one in the Lord;
And we pray that all unity will one day be restored.
The next verses are about spreading the news of the presence of God,
guarding human dignity and pride, and praising the Father, the Son and the Holy
Spirit.
And in between the verses was the
chorus,
And they'll know we are Christians by our love, by our love,
yes, they'll know we are Christians by our love.
We sang that song
in a minor key, and we were serious, and earnest, and a little bit ominous in
our delivery.
And then the
Lutherans got involved.
Well, some
Lutherans pointed out that the world must know us by our Lord before it knows
us by our love for one another. And that, I believe, is exactly what Jesus is
saying in our Gospel reading for this coming Sunday, John 13:31-35.
It’s about true
love. It’s the nature of the whole Body of Christ, the Church, because it comes
from God. It is what John describes in 1 John 4:16,
16 So we
have known and believe the love that God has for us.
God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and
God abides in them.
But is this what
the world sees in Christians. Most of the time I think that the answer would be
“Yes”, but not always.
Nowhere is this
seen more clearly today than in the war in Ukraine.
The dominant
religious group in Ukraine was the Russian Orthodox Church.
When Russia started
the war, seventy percent of the people of Russia were Russian Orthodox, and
seventy-one percent of the people of Ukraine were Russian Orthodox.
The head of the
Russian Orthodox Church in Russia declared it a holy war. The Russian Orthodox
in Ukraine said, “Wait a minute! We’re the innocent victims here.”
Church members in
both Russia and Ukraine were, and I hope continue to be, upset about this
declaration. The depth of the evil that people can inflict on each other is on
full display. Christians are killing Christians, and for what?
What witness can we
give to the world when we in the Body of Christ are to be known for our love
for one another but instead are killing one another in a war?
The plain fact is
that human beings are a mess. We have always been a mess. We are sinners. We
sin, we separate ourselves from God. We follow our own paths without God.
We can make no
claim for a righteousness of our own.
Our only witness to
the world is the cross, that Jesus gave his life for we sinners, and then took
it back again in the Resurrection to validate the power of the cross.
Christ has died.
Christ is Risen. Christ will come again. The mystery of our faith is not a
“mystery” in the sense that it’s a problem to be solved but is that it’s beyond
our understanding.
The love of God is
a gift from God that comes, and can only come, from God, and it comes while
we are still sinners.
I shared a meme
near Maundy Thursday one year that showed an angry dog captioned, “Me when
Barabbas is freed instead of Jesus.” and a picture of the same dog “smiling”
and captioned, “Me when I realize Barabbas is me…”
How does the love
of God come to a sinful humanity? Not from the East or from the West, or from
the North or from the South. It comes from above. It comes from God, in the
power of the Holy Spirit, through Jesus, who was fully the one true living God
and fully a human being: True Love.
Yes, the new pope
is the first member of the Roman Catholic Augustinian order to be pope.
But I saw a meme
online that showed a portrait of Martin Luther, and under it was written:
“Still my favorite Augustinian.” 😊
Christian communities
are also human communities. We are, as Martin Luther said, “at the same time
saint and sinner.”
But we are also a
new creation, transformed, born again. How do we live the Christian life
without becoming bitter by the lack of love we sometimes see in the
Christian community and even see in ourselves?
I think that part
of the answer is given in that Gospel reading we are sharing from John this week.
Jesus makes this statement in the immediate context of being betrayed by a very
close member of his community: Judas. What is Jesus’ response? He focuses on
what that community is called to be in the selfless love he has shown
them, and will show them on the cross, and now calls them, and us, to live.
He shows us how to
focus on the transformed life that the faithful community is called to live in
themselves, among themselves, and in the world, to allow the presence of the
Holy Spirit to lead them to get better, and not bitter. To live by the selfless
love of God.
We don’t point to ourselves. We’re
sinners. We point to Jesus, to the forgiveness and grace that we strive to
embody, and to the greatness of his selfless love.
That is the good news that points to the relationship for which
we were created, and the Christian community in which we live it.
All we can do is to receive it and to share the good news of the true love of God that never disappoints us but builds us up together in the Body of Christ.
No comments:
Post a Comment