Year B

John 15:9-17

The Very Rev. Denise Vaughn

Love Like A Servant

In my opinion, it does seem that in our world today far too many speak a lot about love but this talk is accompanied by a great shortage of love in action. In a sermon about love the great St. Augustine wrote: “the discipline of love, dear friends, its vigor, its flowers, its fruit, its beauty, its charm, its nourishment, its drink, its food, its embraces—we can never have too much of these!” We can never have enough of the love that all our text’s today speak about and call us to show. We are not called to just like, we are called to servant love. Love, as it is defined by our faith, is both a revered cure-all, and an underemployed practice. Yet, to say that the answer to the world’s problems is for people to love each other sounds wonderful and grand. It sounds simple, but it’s not, it can be and is very hard.

Author and theologian Frederick Buechner observed: “In the Christian sense, love is not primarily an emotion, but an act of will.” We are not able to have this self-giving, servant love on our own. We cannot muster up a feeling of love for others. We can only be channels of that love to others, by abiding in the love of God. When we decide to stay connected to God as we heard last week concerning the vine and the branches and what it means to abide in Jesus, we experience the love of God as we have come to know it in Jesus Christ. Without a constant connection with God, we find our faith decline into a system of rules. You must love God and your neighbor! Today our texts invite us to reflect on how we can keep the love of God and neighbor alive and vital in our lives and world.

The gospel today is a continuation of last week’s reading from Jesus’ farewell talk with his disciples at the Last Supper. Jesus is sitting with his disciples after eating the Passover meal and washing their feet. Judas has left and soon they will go out to the Garden of Gethsemane. With all that is to come…betrayal, denial, judgment, and death, it will be hard, shocking, and tragic. It would be easy for his followers to point fingers and abandon this now lost and leaderless group of disciples. To prepare them for this shock, as he says good bye, Jesus issues a single commandment: “Love one another.” This is not a sentimental love but one that will hold them together through the very worst that is to come.

This is a love that comes through the connection or abiding to the ultimate source of love, God, as seen in Jesus’ example of self-emptying love on the cross. Jesus commands his disciples to this same self-emptying love by abiding in his love, to tap into the source of all life and love and keep that connection going. If they don’t stay connected, which they did do, there is a good chance their love could have withered and died. We stay connected and faithful though the holy disciplines of prayer, study of God’s word and through service to others. This love is freed from laws that can become more burden than gift and it shows genuine love.

Jesus showed genuine love through obedience and abiding in God his whole life. From his baptism, to the wilderness temptations, to healing the sick, to being with the outcast and unclean, to challenging Israel’s leaders, and finally to giving his life on the cross-Jesus’ life was one continuous “your will be done.” Jesus asks his followers to seek the same obedience to God’s will and to love one another in the same way he has loved them, and such obedience brings great joy, a sense of purpose and fulfillment so that “your joy may be complete,” a joy that is seen most clearly in the way of self-sacrifice.

Jesus laid down his life for us: thus we are to be ready to lay down our lives for others. In this way a new relationship is established. Disciples are no longer “servants”- they are now “friends” as they obey his commandments and share love. As friends, they have everything required for them to be fellow workers with God for the salvation of the world. Jesus goes on to make clear that their discipleship is not something they planned and carried out, but by God’s love in them they are able to bear fruit that will last. That disciple will be given what is needed to love like Jesus, to bear fruit.

These words are echoed today in the text from 1 John, where we read that we are children of God by loving and obeying God’s commandments. These verses of 1 John explore the interweaving of faith, love and obedience, all centered on Jesus. Loving God is inseparably bound to believing that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and loving God’s other children. The writer binds together faith in Jesus, love of God, love of one another, and obedience to God. Throughout history texts as this one have helped us diagnosis our faithlessness. To quote St. Augustine again who captures this diagnosis says, “With love, the faith of a Christian, without love, the faith of the devil.” 

Jesus brings a new way of life through the Spirit which continues to help us overcome the world in us and through us. The faith that overcomes, like the faith of Jesus, presses us to live for God at every moment from our baptism to our death. We see this witness, to the fact that this love of God through Christ is to be lived and extended to all, in the Acts of the Apostles. Today’s text is taken from the story of the Roman centurion Cornelius, the first Gentile convert recorded in the book of Acts. Cornelius, “an upright and God-fearing man”, had a vision in which an angel told him to summon the Apostle Peter. He sends three members of his household to Joppa to find him.

 In the meantime, Peter also had a dream in which he was commanded to eat food considered unclean. Peter accepts what God has asked of him. He travels to the home of Cornelius and as he proclaims the Gospel message to the household of Cornelius, the Holy Spirit came upon the Gentiles. Peter ordered that they were to be baptized in the name of Jesus. This passage marks a dramatic moment in the spread of the Gospel. Now the saving grace of Christ was to be offered to all. Thus the message of God’s love through Christ can truly be preached to the ends of the earth, and the gift of the Holy Spirit and Baptism is extended to all who accept the love of God through Christ.  

Jesus invites us today as his friends into a community of love, forgiveness, healing and hope. The same Spirit that was with Jesus is now working in our lives, to bring us to God and to help us experience God’s love. There is a joy that comes into our lives when we know God loves us. This love helps us obey his commandment to love and serve each other and as we do this, we grow to love each other. Therefore, with the Psalmist today, we can “break forth into joyous song and sing praises” for all the “marvelous things” that the Lord has done.