St. John Chrysostom Episcopal Church – Delafield, WI
7th Sunday of Easter/Mothers’ Day – May 13, 2018
V. Rev. Steven A. Peay, Ph.D.
 
               Years ago John Lennon wrote a song with some rather fancy musical dynamics, but pretty straightforward words. The essential message was: all you need is love. I won’t sing it for you – though as I read these words I bet you’ll sing it in your head, because I have the whole time I worked on this – but here are the words:
Love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love.
There's nothing you can do that can't be done.
Nothing you can sing that can't be sung.
Nothing you can say but you can learn how to play the game
It's easy.
There's nothing you can make that can't be made.
No one you can save that can't be saved.
Nothing you can do but you can learn how to be you
in time - It's easy.
 
All you need is love, all you need is love,
All you need is love, love, love is all you need.
Love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love.
All you need is love, all you need is love,
All you need is love, love, love is all you need.
There's nothing you can know that isn't known.
Nothing you can see that isn't shown.
Nowhere you can be that isn't where you're meant to be.
It's easy.
All you need is love, all you need is love,
All you need is love, love, love is all you need.
All you need is love (all together now)
All you need is love (everybody)
All you need is love, love, love is all you need.

 

I’m not sure if John Lennon realized it, but he was singing what Jesus taught and lived.

John, the Gospel writer, records Jesus saying, “Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them, and make our home with them. Whoever does not love me does not keep my words. . .”  Those words from John 14 preface what we’ve been hearing the last several weeks.  What is being said here is that the essence of Christian faith is not about theological niceties – though that doesn’t mean that we’re not to be concerned about them. Rather, the truest theology is going to be lived out. Those who “get” what Jesus is teaching will live it out. God rest him, but John Lennon sang a good game, but didn’t live the essence of love. Because it’s not that easy, that’s where the words are wrong, it’s not that easy. Love that transforms, love that abides and is consistent – even when the loved one isn’t – that kind of love is very hard. That kind of love is also accountable and responsible. Jesus taught that kind of love and, more importantly, lived it – right to the Cross and through the Resurrection. He loved us, so that we might know, in a tangible way, how much we are loved and how we are to love in turn. It will do, that love, all the things the song talks about, but it isn’t easy, it’s work and it’s work that has to be done every day.

Jesus talks about he and the Father “making their home” with those who are living in this love. Jesus, elsewhere, will talk about “abiding” in him and in his love. When we live as we’re called to live we’ll be “at home,” comfortable in the everyday, ordinary showing of who God is by being who we are. Jesus invites us to share in the community that is the Trinity, to make our home with God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Augustine speaks of it this way in one of his Tractates on John’s Gospel:

The saints are distinguished from the world by that love which maketh the one-minded    Unanimes. to dwell [together] in a house. In this house Father and Son make their abode, and impart that very love to those whom They shall also honor at last with this promised self manifestation; of which the disciple questioned his Master, that not only those who then listened might learn it from His own lips, but we also from his Gospel. For he had made inquiry about the manifestation of Christ, and heard [in reply] about His loving and abiding.

You and I, we, are supposed to become the very dwelling place of God. And when the Church, God’s family, God’s community is gathered for worship, then that community is made real, manifest to the whole world. Here, among us, is where people should know they can find that love that is all you need – how sad that we, as Christians, too often fall short. We talk a good game, but don’t always live it out (especially if someone does something, or says something we don’t like). But there’s that love again, lifting us up, holding out the promise of forgiveness, of transformation, and of real change. We can “learn how to be you in time,” it’s not easy, but all we need is love.

            What we hear in John’s Gospel today is Jesus’s “high priestly prayer,” in which he is commending us to the Father. Continuing, and deepening, that love relationship we are to have. Part of that deepening is to really mean what we pray when we say, “thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth, as it is in heaven.” Jesus asks the Father to sanctify us …make us holy…in the truth, which is God’s own word. Which means doing and living as God wills, as God wants.

I came across another way of expressing this reality in a story by the Roman Catholic priest-sociologist-novelist Andrew Greeley. He told this story:

Once upon a time back in the last century there was a young woman from Ireland who had lost her parents and all her family. Some kind people wrote to their relatives in America and said we have this fourteen year old orphan here who is very bright and very pretty and very hard working, We don’t want her to go to the orphanage because she won’t have any opportunities there to develop her talents. Would you ever consider hiring her as a servant girl. You’d have to pay her way over on the boat, but she’ll work for nothing until she earns her fare. You won’t go wrong with her. So the Americans, who could afford a serving girl, but never had one and weren’t altogether sure what they would do with such a person talked about it and said, well, what have we to lose. So they sent the fare for the boat and the train. And waited for the young woman to come.

 She sailed from Kinsale. The last she saw of Ireland were the twin spires of the church as they faded into the background. Weeks later, sick and thin and exhausted, she arrived in the city where her master and mistress lived. They took one look at the poor child and said, Dear, we don’t need a servant, but we have room for another daughter. When they brought her home the other children hugged her and said, hooray! We have another sister. With their help she grew up to go to college and university and become very successful and was a great credit to those who took her into their family. (The Trinity is a family into which God has invited us) 

Jesus came among us to invite us into the family, to say to us, “Be at home with us” and to open us to the wonder of what we were created to be. To come to that, to accept the invitation, to made truly in the image and likeness of God; well, love is all you need.

It is appropriate to talk about this “abiding” and “home making” as we celebrate and honor mothers.  Mothers put up with a lot, but that love and desire to make a home keeps the door open. Love can find a home and love can make a home in us and then will make a difference. Perhaps that’s why there are so many medieval texts, including the Showings of Julian of Norwich that refer to Jesus as “mother”? That’s because God is not only our Father, but also our Mother and our Brother…..God is our family.

Today celebrate love that has built many a home and changed many a life. Love – unselfish, self-giving, open-hearted – love is all we need. It is offered to us freely by the God who is Father, Mother, family to us, if we will but respond and learn to be who we really are. Love is all we need. All together now……….everybody………all we need is love. Amen.