A sermon for the Fifth Sunday of Easter at the Church of the Epiphany. 1 John 4:7-21; John 15:1-8

God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.

Jesus tells his disciples, you cannot bear fruit unless you abide in me. Jesus is the love with which God so loved the world as to become incarnate, to live and die among us, to give his life for his friends, and whom did he call friend? Sinners, tax collectors, Pharisees, fishermen and women alike. Indiscriminate in his love, he demonstrated in word and in prophetic action what the love of God looks like. He showed in his body the wounds it is prepared to suffer. He showed in his life its defiance of the powers of evil and death.

There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. 

Whom shall we love? I tell you, it has become a fraught question in these divided times. Shall we love our enemy? Shall we forgive our friend? Shall we pretend that we are practicing “tough love” when we choose to turn away, when we prefer not to choose love; when we are afraid to choose love? Afraid of the judgement of others, of being accused of being soft on sin, of showing the cracks in these hearts of stone, the erosion that love causes.

This is not the same thing, by the way, as assuming that everyone is equally correct, that every opinion, every action, every faction stands on similar moral footing. Jesus did not excuse the political authorities that put him to death, nor did he seek to appease their oppression. Never did he justify their breach and denial of all that is holy, still less their violence. But he forgave them, from the cross.

It makes us uncomfortable, doesn’t it? The thought that our love might truly have to extend to our enemies, mercy to tormentors, grace to the inexcusable? What does that even look like, we wonder, when we still have a world to live in with innocent lives to preserve and protect and when the truth seems more vulnerable than ever to violence?

I’ll tell you something that happened to me a long time ago, on another continent. I was a teenager alone, far from home, staying for a little while in a divided city in a divided country. I took a taxi home one night, because it was late and dark. The driver looked at me in the rearview mirror as though I were his niece or his daughter and said, “You should be careful. Always call me for a ride. Do not get in a cab with one of those other men. They will … and kill you.” I thought it sounded a little extreme, but I said nothing.

A few days later, I was on the other side of the city, and I needed a ride. I flagged down a cab driven by one of those other men. He looked at me in the rearview mirror and sighed when I told him the address. “You should be careful, he said. Always call me for a ride. Do not get in a cab with one of those from over there. They will … and kill you.”

It struck me hard, how they used the same words for one another, that they saw each other, their closest neighbours, not even as enemies, but as animals, when each of them had exposed themselves as nothing but human to me.

Jesus, Son of Man, the perfection of humanity tells his disciples, you cannot bear fruit unless you abide in me. Unless you remain so rooted and grounded and grafted to me so that my sap runs in your veins, you will shrivel. You will find yourself putting out sour grapes instead of sweet; your bitterness will consume you; or else you will become brittle, breakable. But if you abide in me, nothing will be impossible for you.

The call to love recognizes that if we seek vengeance, it will be a poor parody of God’s justice;
if we seek superiority, we might as well admit that we, too, are only human;
if we seek morality, we had better find mercy for our own shortcomings first;
if we seek to hate only sin, we had better be careful that hate does not end up planting its insidious seeds in parts of our hearts and minds that we had thought were reserved for finer things; for weeds grow, too, among the vineyards;
if we celebrate cynicism, we will find that our grapes are sour, while the fruit of the Spirit: hope, faith, love, is sweet.

The call to love is the call of the cross; the call to be true to God’s mission of redeeming love for the world in the face of all that is against it. It is the memory of Jesus in the Garden, resisting evil not with violence but with a healing touch; submitting his own human will for control to the knowledge of God’s power to create new life even out of the compost of this world’s decay. Rooted and grounded in him, what could we become?

God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.

Love does not deny the truth, and love does not rejoice in wrongdoin. But love does remember our humanity, and the love of God that createds, sustains, and redeems it. 

Do not be afraid, then, to love, in the Name of the One who loves us first; for perfect love casts out fear.

Amen