If You Keep My Commandments: To "be" rather than to "do" -- A Homily for Easter VI

Homily for Easter 6, Year B, 2009
Sunday, May 17th, 2009
Holy Trinity Anglican Church, Thornhill, ON
The Rev. Daniel F. Graves
Text: John 15:9-17

“If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love.”

--John 15:10

To keep the commandments of God; this is what we take to be the essence of our Christian life. Indeed, back in the fourteenth chapter of St. John, Jesus himself says, “if you love me, keep my commandments.” The keeping of commandments seems to suggest the taking up of a task, the doing of certain duties, the following or keeping of a code. I suggested last week, in our reading of John 15:1-8 (Jesus’ words about the vine and the branches) that we might be overly tempted to understand the concept of “bearing fruit” as the concept of living out a life of good works. I do wonder, though, if we miss the point of his words if we unduly focus on Christian “duty” rather than Christian “being.” Now, there will be many that will respond that “good works” are the natural response of those who respond positively to the gospel of Jesus Christ, and they would not be wrong in their assertion. The Church has long maintained this theological position and indeed, faith without ensuing good works would appear to be a meaningless dead faith. To this view I wholeheartedly subscribe, and yet there seems to me to be something of a chasm between faith and the work of faith, and this chasm is exacerbated by our societal obsession with doing. The evidence of our value and worth in this world is that we produce something of value. I expect that this is the ultimate result of the Industrial Revolution and the age of consumerism. Unless I produce something that people want, find useful, and will pay for, I am of little value to the rest of humanity. Is it so far a stretch, then, to ask if this loathsome estimation of our human worth as participants in a society obsessed with productivity is not frequently applied to our spirituality and life of faith?

As a Church that finds at least a portion of its identity formed in the womb of Protestantism, we are clear that “good works” do not buy us our salvation. We are clear that is by God’s grace alone and through our faithful response to that grace that we find ourselves to be his redeemed children. Yet, why are we so obsessed with works? On the one hand we may say that they have nothing to do with the attaining of salvation, yet on the other we still count ourselves worthless if our faith appears to bear no fruit. The problem seems to me to be that we have a very narrow understanding of what “bearing fruit” might mean. This skewed understanding is intensely shaped by a world that identifies intrinsic value in productivity. Thus, the evidence of a lively faith will seem to be for us a proliferation of churchly activity, of service to the community, of endless programme opportunities, of doing, doing, doing. The implication being that if our lives are full of doing this will be the evidence of a faith-filled life. The corollary, of course, is that if I do not pack my days with good works and productive activity, I have no evidence of my faith. I wish to reiterate, I do not see good works as bad. On the contrary, a lively faith will indeed lead the Christian person to an intense desire to live out the gospel in works of charity and activity. Yet, good works are simply that, a living out of the gospel, not the evidence of faith.

What then, does Jesus mean when he commends us to keep his commandments? Of what does he speak? He speaks, of course, of love, “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.” Love is more than doing. Love may cause us, and even drive us, to act in certain ways, to do certain things, but at the core of its essence, love is really about being. Thus, we can say that “I am in love,” or “we are in love.” Love transforms us, changes us, and affects our very being. Love works on us, on our very being and our very existence. This is the reality to which Jesus speaks when he says you did not choose me, I chose you! To be in love is to be in Christ, for it is Christ who affects our hearts, inhabits our being, and transforms us. If you keep my commandments you will abide in my love. The commandment is not so much an order to “do” but a invitation to “be.” It is the experience of the abiding presence of our Lord with us always. What is more, we experience the same love of the Father for the Son, for as they abide in each other; so now in Christ the Father abides in us and we in him. In this is the joy of Christ made complete, and is our joy made complete. And consider this: “joy” is another word of being rather than doing.

Thus, as I asserted last week, the fruit that we bear is Christ abiding eternally amongst us in the world. It is the fruit of love and the fruit of joy of which we, and those around us partake. The fruit is not to be hoarded, just as it (unlike so much in our modern age) is not grown for personal gain. It grows and ripens for the purpose of sharing, the purpose of nurturing, and the purpose of existential and eternal fulfillment for the whole world. If we try to hoard the fruit of love, the fruit of joy, and yes, even the fruit of hope, we will fail. The fruit will fall to the ground and rot, its life-giving purpose perverted. The fruit of the vine is for the life of the world and the healing of the nations. To this end, Jesus says “I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another.”

Love is something to be given away, not hoarded. When love, the fruit of the vine is given away, more will grow. When love, the fruit of the vine is given away it nourishes the one who receives it and it gives life. Love begets love. It is something to be enjoyed and something in which we abide.

Thus, it is true that love will cause us to live out our lives in acts of love. Love will cause us to bear the fruit of love in our lives, and yes, love will lead us to good works. Let us never forget, though, that works are not in and of themselves the fruit of the vine, the fruit is Love itself in the person of Christ. When we find ourselves consumed by the doing of this life, and when we begin to mistake what we “do” for the essence of Christianity, then let us recall what Jesus said: “I do not call you servants but friends.” To be a servant is to work, to define ourselves by what we do; to be a friend is to be defined by what we are. To be a friend is simply “to be.” And what marvelous fruit grows from branches that abide in the friendly vine of Christ.

c. 2009 by the Rev. Daniel F. Graves

Greater Love hath No Man than This: A Sermon for Remembrance Sunday

Sermon Preached on Remembrance Sunday, 2007
Sunday, November 11, 2007
Holy Trinity Anglican Church, Thornhill
The Rev. Daniel F. Graves
Text: John 15:12-17

“I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another.” --John 15:17

What shall we do for love? To what does love drive us? How shall we show our love? Love is commanded by our Lord, and each of us, in our own way seek to live out the call to “love one another, as I have loved you.” Sometimes our different understandings of what it means to love, or what we do for love, or how we show our love, can lead to conflict amongst us. Even more poignantly, it may often lead to conflict within each person’s own heart and conscience. Each year, as we prepare to remember those who have fallen in battle, I find myself deeply conflicted – conflicted by our Lord’s promise to lead us into the way of peace and the continual call we face in our world to take up arms against injustice and tyranny that is contrary to the peace and justice of God. I find myself conflicted because I think that both those who lay down arms and those who take up arms often do so out of a sense of love. Both gestures will surely involve sacrifice and the giving over of self, possibly to the utter loss of self. Both gestures may, indeed, find themselves firmly rooted in this very gospel, “greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”

A couple of years ago, I was in a parish in which there were three “sons of the parish” fighting in Afghanistan. One was a nurse, another a military police office, and the third a gunner. One was killed. And at the same time that we were praying for them, and all members of our military, we were also praying for James Loney and the other members of the Christian Peacemaker Team who were held hostage in Iraq. One of them was ultimately killed. I recall standing and praying the prayers of the people in which we remembered all of these individuals, each acting out of the same call to love, the same sense that there is no greater love than that one should lay down one’s life for friends. The same love; lived out in very different actions. And would I dare say whose love was greater? I cannot, I dare not.

It would seem to me that each was driven by a call to do the greater good: a call to end injustice in the world; a longing for the end of violence; a passion to work for the perfect day when war shall be no more, when pain and suffering shall be no more, when mourning and crying shall be no more. Who amongst us cannot admire the courage and the sacrifice of any who shall risk their lives, or ultimately, make the supreme sacrifice for the sake of his or her friend?

At the heart of the sacrifice, whether the soldier who offers him or herself in battle, or the peacemaker who stands between blaring rifles, is the shared hope and longing that we may somehow be reconciled with those from whom we are estranged. Each earnestly desires love over hate, and peace over war. The hope and longing of either the soldier or the peacemaker is that in the act of vulnerability and risk, we might find a way through to a better world. That in offering up ourselves, others might live.

In our Lord, we find the pattern of this desire, and ultimately its fulfillment. Our Lord came to unite the estranged in brotherhood, in sisterhood, in friendship. In him we learn not only the example to lay down one’s life for one’s friends, but also the example to pray for those who hate us. As he gave up his life as a ransom for many, he expected “the many” to be, not only his friends, those who followed him, fickle as they were, but those who despised him, those who crucified him: “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” In Christ, we meet the supreme reconciler, the one who reconciles all things to each other, to himself, and to his Father in heaven. Each of us, in Christ, shares in this ministry of reconciliation.

The soldier and the peacemaker, each offer themselves in risk, in vulnerability – each willing to lay down their lives. But is it the violence of life offered up that brings reconciliation? Is it the death itself that will bring peace? No. It is the love with which a life is offered. It is the love of friend, and indeed enemy in which the life is offered that has the power to transform. It is not the death of Jesus that brings us to new life, but the love of Jesus in his self-offering, even unto death. Our salvation is in the fact that God became human and that in the Incarnation divine love became human love in order that human love might become divine. And in this offering of love, we become friends – friends of God, and friends to each other, those who love us, and those who hate us.

Today, as we remember before God all who offered their lives in the midst of human conflict, we do so not glorifying death but recalling the love with which such sacrifices have been made. And we do so with the hope that all humanity might be reconciled and united in divine friendship, no longer strangers, but brothers and sisters as children of the new creation.

Copyright 2007, the Rev. Daniel F. Graves. The sermon may not be reproduced or redistributed, either in whole or part, by any means without the express written persmission of the author.