May 10, 2009 Fifth Sunday of Easter, Festival of the Christian Home, Mother’s Day, Blanket Sunday
First Congregational Church in Thetford, Vermont, UCC
I John 4; John 15:1-13
The gospel of John gives us the beautiful image of the branches and the
vine as a metaphor for our relationship to Christ, the Holy Spirit and the realm of
God. As long as we are connected to the vine and abide in it, its sap, its energy,
its force flows through us.
The force that flows through us if we connect to God’s vine has many
names, like life and light and love. They are some of the same words that you
might read on a sappy Mother’s Day card, but the love Jesus taught us about is as
far from that sappiness as Julia Ward Howe’s “Mother’s Day Proclamation” is.
According to today’s passage in the gospel of John, the love Jesus is
talking about is a love that must be connected to God or die. It is a love that must
bear fruit or die. It is a love that must love as Jesus did, who laid down his life
and died for the sake of those he loved. The First Letter of John says, “those who
love God must love their brothers and sisters also.” There is no limit or
selectivity to this love. It is not a sappy, sentimental, soothing love. It is a
demanding, daring and dangerous love.
Beverly Roberts Gaventa and Richard B. Hays teach at Princeton
Theological Seminary and Duke Divinity School, respectively. They have edited
a book of essays by many other scholars entitled Seeking the Identity of Jesus: A
Pilgrimage, which summarizes a project the scholars undertook together.
Gaventa and Hays wrote that one of the recurring themes of their project was the
recognition of Jesus as “a disturbing, destabilizing figure. In his own historical
time he was a controversial figure who generated a movement that the guardians
of order considered a threat to the status quo. For this reason, he was executed as
a dangerous revolutionary. And it has remained true across time that Jesus’
teachings and presence have a way of…calling people to radical and costly
service.” (Christian Century, November 4, 2008 p 31)
How can love be so dangerous? Because to abide in God’s love is to
undergo a radical reordering of the way we see the world. God’s love shows the
underlying truth. Where society tells us materialism is the end of life, love shows
us that there is something far deeper and more meaningful and enduring. Where
society tells us that violence is the way to peace, God’s love reveals that all such
hope in violence is founded on a myth. The myth is that violence will end
violence, but throughout history it has led only to intervals of a damaged, fragile
truce, followed by yet more terrible levels of violence. God’s love reveals this
truth and commands us to live by it, no matter what society says or does, and so it
leads us into conflict and danger.
People who are branches attached to the vine and have God’s love flowing
through them may not see the truth all at once, but as they continue to look at the
world through its lens, the truth becomes clearer. Julia Ward Howe wrote the
“Battle Hymn of the Republic” at the beginning of the Civil War, when she hoped
that through its violence the abolition of slavery would be accomplished, and the
world would be more like the realm of God. But as the corpses piled up, as so
much that was good was destroyed, she came to see that the cost of war is never
worth whatever good it accomplishes. At the start of the war Julia Ward Howe
watched the marching union troops and wrote that Christ “hath loosed the fateful
lightning of his terrible swift sword,” and wrote, “as he died to make men holy,
let us die to make men free!” But after the war she wrote her Mother’s Day
Proclamation, saying, “We, the women of one country, will be too tender of those
of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs,” and saying,
“Disarm! Disarm!”
She was not the only supporter of a war ever to say such a thing after
witnessing its horrors. World War II is held out today as the model of a good and
just war, but listen to the words of three Presidents who were leaders in that war
and saw and judged its good and evil first hand. President Franklin D. Roosevelt
wrote in his last speech when victory was finally within sight, “The work, my
friends, is peace. More than an end of this war—an end to the beginnings of all
wars. Yes, an end, forever, to this impractical, unrealistic settlement of the
differences between governments by the mass killing of peoples.” President
Dwight D. Eisenhower, who had been America’s top general in the war, wrote,
“Disarmament, with mutual honor and confidence, is a continuing imperative.
Together we must learn how to compose differences, not with arms, but with
intellect and decent purpose.” And President John F. Kennedy, who fought in the
war, said simply, “Mankind must put an end to war or war will put an end to
mankind.”
But how can we possibly disarm and end all war? The military-industrial
complex, as Eisenhower called it, is more powerful today than ever. We have
pumped over a trillion of our tax dollars into its pockets since 2001. How can we
speak of disarming and putting an end to war without being scorned or crucified?
Well, we probably cannot. Scorn and crucifixion are probably exactly
what we can expect. We are forced to choose whether to be stopped by that
threat or to follow Christ, because again today the lectionary confronts us with
the teachings about love that led Christ to be scorned and crucified. Again today
we hear his extremist language, saying that to abide in God’s force of love is life,
and to turn away from it is death. Again today we hear how disarming this love
is.
To abide in this love is to be led to disarm on all levels of our life. We are
not abiding in Christ-like love as long as our hearts and minds are swayed by
violent impulses, like greed and lust and pride. We are not abiding in love when
our lives are so stressed out, so driven by desire and fear that either we explode
with rage and wound others, or we suppress our rage and harm our own health
and sanity. Love looks at our frantic, manic-depressive society and says to every
heart and mind and life, “Disarm! Disarm!” The weapons of our own driven-
ness are killing us. Christ-like love begins by insisting on peace in the heart.
Another level of disarmament that love brings about is in our
relationships, moving out from our heart to our home and community. Humble
love is patient and kind and does not insist on its own way, as Paul wrote in I
Corinthians 13. Such love does not perpetrate violence. It does not take
revenge. It seeks peace between us. Such love enables us to see the truth that we
are one human family, that the flaws of one are present in the hearts of all, that
we all have the capacity for both good and evil. Such love leads us to have
compassion on criminals and enemies as well as neighbors and members of our
family. Such love is completely disarming, not only of our hostility toward
others, but ultimately of their hostility toward us. This is the reason why the wise
and the saints recognize it as the most powerful force in the world. The great
nonviolent movements of Gandhi and King were built on this love. Any crude
weapon can kill an enemy, but only this kind of love can turn an enemy into a
friend.
And so finally, this kind of love leads to the logic of a world without
weapons and without war. As love disarms the forces of violence in our hearts
and in our personal relationships, it removes from our hearts the inclinations for
war, and it removes from our relationships the reasons for war. Imagine what a
nation abiding in love after an attack like that of September 11, 2001 would do.
Love would try to have compassion and forgive those who attack us, and find
ways to change the conditions that lead them to hate us. But then, if we as a
nation abide in Christ-like love, if that becomes our foreign policy, if we are
constantly looking for ways to lay down our national self-interest in order to
serve the interest of the rest of the world, we will be far less likely ever to be
attacked. If we as a nation abide in love, and love leads us to seek global
“disarmament with honor and confidence,” we will live in a far safer world.
Is this way of love reasonable or practical? I think it is the only
reasonable or practical way we will ever disarm and end all war. But to ask if it
is reasonable or practical is the wrong question. Jesus did not call us to seek the
most reasonable and practical way to live. He called us to establish and live in
God’s realm on earth as it is in heaven. Jesus said, “Love your enemies, do good
to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who do you
wrong.” (Luke 6:27f) As Martin Luther King Jr. wrote from a jail cell in
Birmingham, Alabama, Jesus called us to be extremists for love, and to abide in
that love as he did, even if we find ourselves crucified for it. The question Jesus
asks is not how to love reasonably and practically, but how to love without
compromise in our own time and place.
Let us resolve in our hearts to abide in Christ-like love with the same
courage and fervor that Julia Ward Howe communicated so effectively in the
“Battle Hymn of the Republic” and the “Mother’s Day Proclamation.” But here
is a paradox: the way to have that fervent movement of the Spirit rushing through
us, the way to connect to God’s vine so that Christ’s powerful, world-changing
love pours out of us, is to be still. “Be still and know that I am God.” (Psalm 46)
All of our bold struggles for peace in the world need to be grounded in peace in
the heart. Let us be still and abide in God’s vine so that we may fill with God’s
disarming love. Let us pray in silence…
(On the next page is the sermon hymn, sung to the tune of Julia Ward
Howe’s “Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory of the Coming of the Lord.”)
God and Earth and Love Are Crying Copyright 2009 Thomas Cary Kinder
tune: Battle Hymn of the Republic (PH#443) 15.15.15.6.8.8.8.6.
God and earth and love are crying for the coming of the day
When the myth of violence will be forever cast away,
When our hearts and homes and towns and nations rise as one to say:
“Let there be peace! Disarm!”
refrain:
Rise, then, mothers, sisters, daughters!
Rise, you brothers, sons and fathers!
God and earth and love are crying,
Disarm! Disarm! Disarm!
Hearts besieged by craving greed and pride, and souls that reek of fear,
Minds that march and drive compulsive lives, too frantic now to hear
Pain that God and earth and love are feeling, pain whose cry is clear:
“Be peace! Live peace! Disarm!”
refrain
We defend ourselves and take offense, and judge, resent and blame.
Yet we are one human family; our flaws are all the same.
Humble love would serve us better as the wise and saints proclaim:
“To live in peace, disarm!”
refrain
From a devastated earth a voice is crying out, “No more!
Violence is not the way to peace! The answer is not war!
Spend your taxes not on spilling blood, but heal and feed the poor.
Love! Justice! Peace! Disarm!”
refrain
Christ revealed a way to live together few have ever tried.
We have compromised and reasoned, warring on while millions died.
Nor will change come till we choose his love, though we be crucified.
Christ’s way is peace! Disarm!
refrain
Sermon 05/10/2009