A sermon for the fifth Sunday of Easter in 2025.

Love is not a light undertaking.

Love will break your heart. Love will ask you to move mountains. Love will require that you sacrifice your most closely held prejudices, melt down your idols and break their pedestals. Love is stronger than death, stronger than life.

When Jesus says to his disciples, “You should love one another,” he is not being cute. When he tells them, “Just as I have loved you,” he hints at how much love will cost them.
When he says, “By this, everyone will know that you belong with me,” he promises that love will be enough.

The way that Peter’s story is told in the book of Acts is almost humorous in its repetition. First, Peter has the vision, exactly as it is described here. Then, when it is time for the lesson of the vision to be applied, he repeats its description exactly, almost word for word. It makes me think that there is something in the repetition, in the telling of it, that is as important as the vision itself.

After all, if God wanted to declare all foods clean, or at least to invite to the table those who did not keep the food laws, why not give everyone the same vision all at the same time? Why not make it abundantly clear to everyone in the church and in the community, that What God has made clean, you must not call profane?

The people to whom God has sent repentance and declared the forgiveness of sins; their sins you shall not retain. The people whom God has invited to the table you shall not send away. The people whom God loves, and the people whom they love, you also must love; by this, they will know that you belong with and to God through Christ Jesus our Saviour and Lord.

But God did not send the vision to everyone everywhere all at once. Only to Peter. Peter, who had worked so hard to overcome the shame of his denials that night of the trial. Peter, who had worked miracles in the name of Jesus. Peter, who still carried his prejudices and held the keys to the kingdom heavily, perhaps a little too tightly?

I heard a study some years ago, when my children were still in school, that found that giving older children the task of teaching, tutoring, or mentoring younger children helped the older students absorb and understand and retain the material they were learning together. As the ten-year-old struggled to explain fractions to the seven-year-old, he needed to make sense of it all in a new way in order to be able to express the magic of mathematics to his young disciple, and it formed new pathways in his own mind.

So with Peter, perhaps, having to make sense of the vision not only in the moment to receive his Gentile visitors, but to be able to explain it, preach it to his peers: that caused Peter to learn and translate and embody, ensoul in a new way the knowledge that God’s love is not to be conditioned or categorized. When we preach to others we are always preaching to ourselves, and hoping for transformation.

I had a mentor who once told me that when people were driving them to the brink of madness and beyond, they would try to remember that God loved those people, that they loved those people. It made it easier to bear the frustration, they said, if they could remember to love them. Love takes practice.

No, love is not faint-hearted. Love is not weak-willed. Love abides in the meek, in the frail, in the exhausted, as easily as in the strong; maybe it’s even easier to see in the dark. Love is a flame that will not be extinguished, but that will not drain the room of oxygen, that will not consume but enlighten, like the bush that burned before Moses and erupted with the voice of God, with every leaf and twig still intact.

Love – listen. If we believe that Jesus knew whereof he spoke, what he was talking about, then he knew that he was giving this commandment to love one another against the backdrop of a vicious and pernicious Roman occupation. He knew that the local police were about to arrest him on trumped-up charges in the Garden. He was not naïve. His closest circle of disciples included both a zealot and a tax collector; a collaborator and a conspirator. Still, he believed that love was the way, the only way. “Love one another, as I have loved you.”

Loving like Jesus heals the sick, frees the bound up, sets the sinner on a new path, brings good news, real good news, to the poor. Brings new life to those left for dead.

This is the love that Peter committed to, that Peter committed. And even he needed to have his vision expanded, if he were to understand and embody the love that would mark him out as an undeniable follower of Jesus.

Love, the love that Jesus commands of and offers us, is not sentimental but sacrificial. It stands by itself, and it does make all the difference in the world.

It may sound naïve to say that love will save us, when still we hear of war and rumours of war, destruction wrought by man and devastation wrought by storms.

But throughout this season of Easter we have been reading from the Revelation to John on the island of Patmos. Exiled; in modern parlance, deported from his community because of persecutions, he nevertheless persisted in his vision of God’s faithfulness, God’s love for God’s people,

See, the home of God is among mortals.
He will dwell with them as their God;
they will be his peoples,
and God himself will be with them;
God will wipe every tear from their eyes.

Even in the midst of Resurrection, we have been reminded time and again not only that the work of love continues, and that it will continue until the kingdom come, but that God is with us, still with us, still Emmanuel. That nothing, not death nor life, angels nor demons, powers, princes, persecutions, paranoia, nor privilege can get in the way of God’s saving embrace. Love may not be for the faint of heart; but love will endure.

Readings include Peter’s vision in Acts 11, part of John’s Revelation on Patmos, and Jesus’ new commandment: to love one another (John 13).