St. Charles’ Episcopal Church – St. Charles, St. Charles, IL

May 6, 2007 5^th Easter ~ Year C

Leviticus 19:1-2,9-18; Acts 13:44-52; John 13:31-35

The Rev. Elizabeth Meade

"I give you a new commandment: that you Love one another.”

A New commandment. What’s new about this commandment?

In today’s reading from Leviticus, we have God Himself speaking to Moses saying, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” The Golden Rule comes straight out of the Old Testament. So what’s new about what Jesus is saying?

Let me tell you a story that I hope will help us answer that question.

Friday night, I was at our Interfaith Prayer Gathering in Wheaton. It’s co-sponsored by our church and the Fox Valley Islamic Society – and spearheaded by our own Ed Manning and a Muslim woman named Mazher Ahmed. It’s a wonderful gathering – and a prophetic one – where people of different faiths come together and pray for peace. On Friday, I heard Mazher speak to this very thing – the Golden Rule. At all of these prayer meetings, we remind ourselves that we have the same God and have the same human desires for peace.

We pray for what joins us, setting aside the theologies that divide us.

All of us – the world over – seem to want peace and love and a general return to Eden – whether we call it Nirvana, Heaven, or a state of Enlightenment. At the Interfaith Gathering Friday night, a man from India came forward – he was a Sikh – and he told us that in the Sikh religion, they, too, have one universal and nameless Spirit – something I did not know about them.

He led us in a meditation, where we were instructed to intone the words, “Wah-Guru” which, loosely translated, mean: “Wow, Great Spirit.” Over and over we chanted: “Wah-guru” “Wah-guru” – and there was something genuinely inspirational about all those voices coming together in one celestial vibrational prayer. But I confess, I was disquieted by it – and I quietly stopped chanting, when God tapped me on the shoulder. Suddenly I felt an overwhelming sadness about the prayer. For me, as a Christian, I realized that Jesus was missing. I find that whenever I forego claiming Jesus as “my way, my truth, and my life,” something feels amiss. As I listened to “Wah-guru” chanted over and over again, God moved me to start praying: “Jesus, remember me.” The instruction was a clear as day.

I did so quietly, but my breath prayer became: “Jesus, remember me.”

What’s this got to do with “Love each other” being a new commandment you may be asking.

Well, what occurred to me at that prayer meeting Friday night was that Jesus is the NEW thing in this old commandment. The new wine in the old wineskin.

The command to love our neighbor is not a new one. The need to return to Eden is not a new desire. These are universal things. We are all, after all, human beings. Human beings with the same basic needs, hopes and desires for ourselves and for our families, and for our world. We all want peace. We all want a decent standard of living. We all want poverty eradicated and an environmentally sustainable planet.

But somewhere in all that glorious diversity and tolerance, we are called to make a commitment to one thing or another. We are called to say who we are.

Are we Christian or are we Sikh? Are we Muslim or are we Buddhist? Are we Unitarian or are we Trinitarian? While we are called to respect the dignity of every human being, we are also called, somewhere along the line, to commit to what we are. We need to commit to something Other, something greater than ourselves and say: “I am this.” For me, that is: I am a Christian. I am a follower of Jesus Christ.

Jesus Christ took that old Golden Rule, from the Torah, and made it new.“I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you should also love one another.”

What is new, is that predicate phrase: “As I have loved you…..” We have an EXAMPLE in Jesus.

Buddha did not die on the cross for me. Jesus did. So Jesus becomes the One who I must follow.

It isn’t mentioned in today’s gospel, but contextually, we need to know that Jesus issued his New Commandment just after he had washed the disciples’ feet at the Last Supper. This is the foot washing we re-enact every year on Maundy Thursday. For us it is a simple act of service, and most of us come with fairly clean feet. But for Jesus – the One who scripture tells us is Lord of all – washing really dirty, road weary feet was a shocking act. Jesus, Lord of All, the one for whom every knee should bow, and every tongue confess – THIS Jesus defied social convention. He loved in radical ways.

Jesus’ new commandment takes out the wiggle room of just loving our neighbors so we can quibble about how much we have to love them. Jesus is saying, love as radically as I have loved you. Love MORE than you probably think you can get by with. We Christians don’t just have the Golden Rule – we have Jesus!

We don’t have people preaching about loving and enlightenment – we belong to the One who LIVED IT!

He laid down his life for us.

That’s what we need to remember during these great 50 days of Easter. Jesus calls us to love each other as HE loved. Not just to be kind to each other when it suits us – but to love with reckless abandon. This is why the church is the only relief agency left in the tsunami ridden areas of Indonesia. This is why the Church as the only relief agency left in Bay Saint Louis and Pass Christien, Mississippi. The Red Cross has gone, FEMA has gone… but the Church continues its work. Radical love. Just as I have loved you, you should also love one another.

We Christians follow the One who raised the bar on how we are to love each other – and we have the stories to prove it. We see He ate with tax collectors and prostitutes. We see him forgiving the adulteress, and questioning the motives of the self-righteous ones. He calls us to do the same. We see him noticing people in the branches of fig trees, and noticing blind men who have been told to “BE QUIET!”    He calls us to do the same. In an age where women and children were merely considered to be property      and utterly marginalized, he beckoned them to Him. He calls us to do the same.

What kind of radical hospitality is Our Lord calling you to? In an age where even within our own church there are factions who won’t come to the table with us because we disagree on polity, we must ask ourselves, what would Jesus do? How would Jesus respond? We have the template. We have this New commandment. Now we must return to the Book, see how he lived, see how he loved – and commit to go and do likewise.

Amen.