Love Comes First

Revelation 21:1-6; John 13:31-35

I don’t know why the music of my high school years has become the soundtrack of the grocery, but the other day I caught myself absent-mindedly singing along between the spinach and the crackers
…They say in Heaven, love comes first We'll make Heaven a place on Earth…
I guess some things get into your head at an impressionable age, and just… stick with you.

And that particular refrain got stuck in my head again a day or two later, as I read that bit of the Revelation we just heard:  “See, the home of God is among mortals…Death will be no more, mourning and crying and pain will be no more…”

It’s a strong and profound picture John is painting, of all things made new so that nothing – nothing – separates us from God. God at home among us as we live in God’s presence with our whole selves, cared for absolutely and tenderly, with everything we fear gone for good. 

 

I can’t tell you how much I crave that heavenly experience right now.

It feels, some days, as if I’ve never lived in a world farther separated from God.

Mourning and crying and pain and death are nearby, even in the days of sunshine and comfort and celebration. The headlines are full of drought and fire, inflation and supply chains, politics at home and war in the world and the never-ending ever-changing decisions of a pandemic.

The problems around the ordinariness of daily life can seem intractable.

So much seems worn thin – patience with one another, with myself; hope, the environment and earth itself, all in need of renewal. 

 

It's no wonder I crave the assurance that John’s vision of God’s close and constant presence and care, of earth and heaven renewed and united, is trustworthy and true.

 

Anyone else crave that?

Feel that it would be nice if heaven were, in fact, within our reach? “A place on earth?”

Where God dwells naturally with you and me?

 

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that John recorded this vision for the benefit of a community of people who were worn down by the trouble they were living through.

 

It’s…a little less encouraging when I remember from my biblical reading that this is part of a vision of – essentially – the destruction of the whole earth; near-universal suffering and plague and sorrow and war.  

That John first paints a picture of how much worse it gets because the world actively resists the possibility of God dwelling so closely with us.

And then shows us what we read today – the banishment of pain and the renewal of life – as a vision of the end of tribulation. It’s all a vision that suggests there may be quite a long way to go before we get to there.

 

Which may be why we need to crave that vision. To want that unity of heaven and earth for ourselves, now and here.

 

When you’re feeling the weight of suffering, you need to know that the end of it is not just an end, as stopping, but something you truly long for, good beyond imagining.

 

When we’re trying to avoid suffering, we need to know that there’s a destination we long for beyond the trouble we fear: a destination we are invited to crave, to seek in spite of trouble.

(It’s the grand, universal-scale version of me needing to remember that the place I want to be and the people I want to be with are more important than how much I hate the process of traveling.)

 

We need to crave that divine closeness and care.

So that we’ll recognize it when it comes looking for us.

 

Which is what’s happening as Jesus talks to his friends, the night before he dies.

They’re confused and uncertain. Their tribulations and triumphs and deepest need still lie ahead of them. They’d like to avoid trouble if they can.

But Jesus tells them the way through it all:

Love one another.

In the same way that I love you – because I love you – love one another.

 

That’s the way that all through their “separation” from Jesus at his death – his resurrection, transformation, glorification – how all through that “separation” they will in fact be united with him. 

It’s how we – you and I – experience the closeness of God to us, here and now.

By loving one another.

 

That’s what Belinda Carlisle said, too, in the 80s and in Shop-Rite the other day.

They say in Heaven, love comes first

We'll make Heaven a place on Earth.

 

She was talking about romantic love, physical love; Jesus is talking about divine love.

But the refrain they both return to is the same truth:

Putting love first is how we experience God at home among us, wiping the tears, quenching our thirst for eternal life.

Loving one another, as God loves us, comes first.

 

It’s not a feeling, that divine love, that primary love.

It’s action. It’s attitude. It’s adopting a set of expectations that everyone you meet is worthy of God’s love, and care, and that you and I get to give that care.

Love one another as I have loved you:

like listening for the yearning heart of the child of God in front of you, even while every word they are saying is wrong (and just what you told them not to do). Just as Jesus listens to Peter, and the other disciples, and… honestly, everyone he meets, even the most annoying of the religious lawyers who argue with him.

 

Love comes first.

Rejoicing in the joy of someone else comes before that other thing you meant to do with this precious fifteen minutes.

Holding the hand of someone who slows you down comes before getting the errand done.

Speaking up for people worn down from being unheard comes before speaking your mind.

Kindness comes first. Generous honesty comes first. Building trust comes first.

 

Receiving all those things comes first, too.

Receiving kindness, trust, sincerity, empathy, justice, and joy from others, from God, comes before doing what we can for ourselves.

 

In our spending of money, in our personal politics, in our decisions about what Covid precautions to adopt and let go, in our work and family calendars, in our quiet time, in the grocery store, 

when love comes first,

when we are loving and being loved as Jesus loves us, 

we start to find ourselves living in that divine closeness and care, that renewal and life that John envisions for us,

heaven in place in earth.

 

Because when Jesus tells us to love one another as God loves us, 

he's telling us to know that God is as close to us, as one with us, with you, with me, as God is with Jesus, and to act on that knowledge.

That knowledge that God dwells with us, in you, among us,

just as John envisions it for us,

life so close to God that death and grief and pain and everything we’ve ever feared are vanished.

 

Carlisle sings:

In this world we're just beginnin'

To understand the miracle of livin'

Baby, I was afraid before

But I'm not afraid anymore

 

The world around us may still be in turmoil.

It probably will be.

But to put love first conquers fear.

To put love first changes the world as we live in it.

Changes us.

To love as Jesus loves is to live in the certainty that God is at home with us, dwells with us, wipes every tear from our eyes.

And then heaven is indeed how we live on earth.

Hungry or Not

John 21:1-19

I wonder if they were hungry.

When Peter decided to go fishing that night, was it because he really needed to eat?

Or was it just that he and the others didn’t know what else they should do now that everything had changed, so they went back to the work they were used to?  

John doesn’t tell us.

Perhaps it doesn’t matter.

Doesn’t matter if they were hungry, or bored, or confused. If they were fishing to make a living, or if they were fishing that night to feed others.

Because Jesus fills their net without any question about why they were fishing.

Hungry or not, Jesus feeds them.

Feeds them too much, really.

The net of fish is unmanageable.

And almost unnecessary. While Peter and the others in the boat have no fish, Jesus already has fish on the grill, ready to feed them.

He invites them to contribute to the meal, once their net is full of his miraculous fish, but there’s no doubt that it’s Jesus doing the feeding.

He never asks if they’re hungry.
He just fills their hands with fish, summons them to the table, and then places food into their hands.

And then, later, a conversation:

Feed my sheep.

Do you love me?
Feed my sheep.

Whatever else that conversation is – a rehabilitation of Peter, or a testing, or a commissioning;
whether it’s meant for Peter as an individual, or for Peter as the representative of all disciples – it’s the most literal of metaphors.

Feed my sheep – as I feed you, feed others.

As I love you, as you love me, love others.

Feed them.

Bread and fish might be a good place to start.

Nothing about asking if someone’s hungry.

Nothing about assessing need or merit, or budgeting, or how to make the most impact.

Just “Love me? Feed them.”

Food is love.

(Not everywhere, not for everyone, but in this particular conversation, in deeply important ways, feeding others is love.)

Just like Jesus fed Peter, fed the others, that very morning, when their nets were empty, and their hearts were probably hungry, too. Like when Jesus takes Peter aside to feed his soul and self by helping Peter find the depth and strength of the love he already has for Jesus.

Just like Jesus feeds us – you, me, and people we’ve never met – feeds us, now, hungry or not.

It’s all love.

It’s worth noticing that Jesus is not asking Peter to do anything Jesus himself is not already doing.

And I don’t think that it’s just a case of “I fed you, so pass it on.”  I think it’s possible, probable, that when Jesus instructs Peter (and all the other disciples then and now that Peter stands in for) to “Feed my sheep”, Jesus is inviting – commanding – Peter, us, to take part in what Jesus is actively, currently, doing. Feeding people.

Because people are hungry. People near us, people like us, people perhaps in this room, are physically hungry. Because you’re fasting before Eucharist. Or because rising grocery costs mean not quite eating enough. Because the precarious economy means having to choose, or face the choice more often, between meals and medical care, eating or electricity. 

And every single one of us needs to eat food, or we will first lose ourselves (as the need of our bodies turns our reasoning, moral everyday selves into people we don’t recognize) and then our lives. 

Some of us may have experienced sharp or ongoing physical hunger, the body’s uncompromising need for food. Some of us have never been truly hungry, whatever our appetite. 

And sometimes, you don’t know you’re hungry until you’re fed. Offered the nourishment you deeply need, and didn’t recognize, until it was placed before you. 

We all need to be fed.

And feeding people is actually a familiar activity at Trinity. Whether you bring food or gift cards to the pantry, make breakfast at St. Paul’s, make sandwiches for the Christian Caring Center or Cathedral Kitchen. Whether you bring baked goods for coffee hour or a sale, or fry sausages in the early morning with the Men’s Breakfast Group, feeding people is an important part of what we do, together.

To have someone offer you food when you are hungry – food prepared with care, with generosity, without any expectation of return – may relieve pain, restore you to yourself, free you to live fully. 

To be fed heals body and spirit.

Heals even when you’re not hungry; when you’re more than capable of feeding yourself. Think about when someone brings you a fresh, home-baked treat – and it’s a sacrament of welcome, or of comfort, or friendship. When someone invites you to a meal, and it’s a sacrament of relationship, a physical experience that facilitates the deeper, spiritual, experience of friendship, acceptance, care, or opportunity.

Food is complicated, often, and for many of us. 

Jesus wants to make it simpler. To help us receive and give healing and love, both when we’re hungry and when we’re not. To feed others with him, and be fed by others, with him, as acts of love.

So he meets disciples on the beach, with food. 

And after telling that story together, after listening to that conversation between Peter and Jesus, after tasting a wafer of flour this morning, and remembering other stories of Jesus feeding us, you and I can’t feed people without thinking of Jesus. Of loving Jesus.  Of what Jesus is already doing, for others, and for us.

Can’t eat, ourselves, without paying attention to what Jesus is doing, to Jesus’ love.

As you shop, as you volunteer; in your own kitchen or in restaurants or here – anywhere you’re feeding people and being fed – Jesus is already involved. Already feeding others, feeding you.

It’s not always as obvious as a net overflowing with unreasonably large fish, but it’s happening. 

So look for the links between food and love, everywhere. 

Look for Jesus providing the food we need, you need. 

Look for Jesus providing the food you don’t really need, too.

Literal food, and metaphorical food.

There’s a heated conversation going on right now on social media – and probably in traditional media, too – about student loan debt. Stories and opinions about need, and merit, and fairness. People who work hard to pay off their student loans without help. People who have suffered for years with debt that starved them of opportunity, or hope, or choices, or actual food. People who haven’t “earned,” or don’t “need” relief. People who “deserve” help.

Jesus feeds them all, whether they’re hungry, or not. Whether they can feed themselves, or not. Jesus stands in a long and holy tradition, reaching back long before those years in Galilee, as God feeds people whether they “earn” it or not, commands us to feed people whether they “need” it or not.

And for most of us, that’s such good news.

Because, with Jesus, we’re free to feed others, to give of ourselves, without weighing merits and scrutinizing need, without having to know everything and judge perfectly. 

Free to be fed without dissecting our own merits and deserving.

If you love me, Jesus says, love others as I have loved you. Without reservation, unearned, abundantly. Feed others as I have fed – unconditionally, with abundance and delight.

Because feeding others, with Jesus, feeds our own souls.

It’s an extraordinary gift of freedom Jesus is offering Peter, and us.

The opportunity to just give, just love, without having to count and judge, knowing that we are giving, loving, feeding others out of the bottomless well of Jesus’s own love – out of our love for Jesus, which comes from the same bottomless well as Jesus’ love for us. 

To love people freely, knowing we don’t have to figure out if they deserve it.

To give joyfully, knowing the gift matters whether the receiver “needs” it or not.
To feed anyone.

And to receive all that, whether we need it or not.

To be fed with care, and welcome, whether or not we can feed ourselves.

To be loved, without measure, whether we deserve it or not.

“Come,” Jesus says, “and have breakfast.”

Don't Hold On

John 20:1-18

Don’t hold me.

That’s… not what you want to hear, not what you expect to hear, when you’re reunited with the most beloved person in your world. When you’re reunited with one you thought you’d lost forever.

 

But that’s exactly what Jesus says to Mary, in exactly that situation this morning.

Don’t hold on to me.

Ouch. 

 

That’s not what you came to hear this morning, is it?  

Many of us have had more than enough of “don’t touch”, “don’t get close”, over the last two pandemic years. So many of us have felt abrupt separations in our important relationships, and the hurt when re-connections break down. 

We don’t need that from Jesus, too.

Especially this morning.

 

This morning you came, perhaps, for the reunion. Came to this story for the restoration.

When Mary, standing alone, weeping, begging for some hint of the presence of her beloved, God-filled teacher and friend, hears her name.

Just her name.

Mary.

And that’s it, the moment we’ve been waiting for, even if we didn’t know we were waiting.

What was lost is found – a missing body, a teacher, a friend in need is right here again. What was dead is alive – Jesus himself, Mary’s hope, both now vibrant and renewed. 

Joy returns.

It would be enough to end the story there.

 

But that’s not how, or where, the story ends.

Into that moment, Jesus speaks, saying, Don’t hold on.

Don’t hold me.

 

It seems like those words, that moment, don’t belong in this story, in this morning of restoration and joy and promise, of hope restored.

Don’t hold on to love returned? Let go??

It sounds a little… heartless. Abrupt and cold.

But perhaps it’s not an interruption, not a distancing.

Perhaps, in the moment, those are words of love and promise.

Don’t hold on, Mary. You’re free to let go.

 

Perhaps, there outside the tomb, in the silence between the sentences John wrote, Mary and Jesus have been holding each other. Standing in that frantic and comforting hug you snatch someone into when you thought you’d lost them. Perhaps they’ve wept together in joy, tightening and loosening their hold in that cycle of remembered pain and glorious relief and mutual support and comfort that sometimes goes on until you don’t know what to do anymore. 

And then this is a gift:

Don’t hold on, Mary. You don’t have to hold on. It’s okay to let go.

 

More than okay.

It’s the next step, the step forward into life, into resurrection.

Because we can’t stay here.

Mary – and you and I – can’t stay at the tomb any more than Jesus can stay in the tomb.

 

For all the joy and release and relief and hope in that moment of recognition and reunion, we can’t live there.
Can’t get stuck there, where the joy and relief come from looking back.  New life – resurrection – insists we move forward.

The restoration of what was, what used to be, is not enough.
[[Restoration doesn’t erase the past, the loss, the revelations that have changed us, changed the world.]]

A return to normal is not the resurrection Mary needs; we need.

What we need is the transformation that shatters normal, and makes way for something new.

What comes next is the point.

 

That’s what Jesus says to Mary. I’m going to my father and your father, my God and your God. It’s a reference to what Jesus has previously promised – that his friends, you and I, would be transformed into the same close, trusting, intimate relationship with God that Jesus has had all along. That we’d become one with Jesus, as Jesus is one with the Father, unbreakably united, sharing God’s love and power. 

 

This moment of reversal and impossibility at the tomb is a fragment, a fraction of the so much more that we have been promised. The so much more that comes next, that is ahead.

 

Don’t hold on. Let go.
There’s so much more.

 

If Mary had held on then, had clung to that moment when she got Jesus back – when things were back to the way they used to be – then you and I would not be here today.
We wouldn’t be celebrating and singing and feasting today. No widely recognized holiday, no chocolate bunnies and no hundred varieties of marshmallow Peeps (that last might not be such a bad thing). No lilies in the church – no church at all!

 

If the story ended with a happily-ever-after fade on that restoration at the tomb, we’d have gone back to normal. Back to the normal of Temple politics and the daily grind and people cranky about Jesus’s radical ideas and shocking self-sacrifice and healing. Back to normal with death at the end, as the end.

 

The story has to go on in order for Peter, and the beloved disciple, and all the friends of Jesus to be transformed, to be filled with the Holy Spirit, commissioned to change the world. Mary has to move forward, they have to move forward, to bring that same transformation, that same freedom and power and joy to you and to me.

 

Normal isn’t enough.

Restoration isn’t enough.

Not then, not at the tomb or in Jerusalem after Jesus dies, and lives again.

Not after Jesus’ murder and death pointed out the holes and flaws in the first disciples’ hopes of Jesus ruling Israel.

Resurrection demands transformation. Demands that the disciples enter a world they’d never imagined, rebuilt on a foundation of abundant, undeniable life for all.

 

Normal isn’t enough, restoration isn’t enough for us.

Not after a war that shows us the holes and the flaws and the lack of safety and trust in the balance of power before.

Not after a pandemic that shows us the holes and the flaws, the lack of safety and compassion, the lack of economic resilience and of basic human kindness, in the way it was before.

Resurrection demands transformation. Demands that we let go of what was, and let go even of what’s been restored to us, and move forward, toward God, with God, to a world where protecting ourselves doesn’t come at the cost of risking others, where generosity and trust are the foundations of abundant, undeniable life for all.

 

We might not have come for this much transformation this morning.  You might, in fact, have come looking for a sense of “normal” to be restored. But here’s Jesus, restored to us, insisting that we can’t hold on to that. We must let go, and step into the glorious, risky, unknown.

 

Let go of normal impatience and frustration with the world as it is, and live as if our workplaces and grocery stores and court systems are meant to be life-giving instead of soul-draining.

Let go of normal protective pessimism and realism, and live knowing that the actions of care, generosity, and love that are within our reach really do make a difference. And discover that there’s more purpose and hope, more positive power to change the world, within our reach than we had ever dreamed. 

Let go of the normal frantic rush to do it all, the normal anxiety of our days, and live in the transformative trust that God has already done all we need.

Let go of the normal fear that we might not be good enough, might not be smart or strong or capable enough, might not be lovable enough, and live knowing that we are loved beyond all measure. 

 

We’re re-united, this morning, and it feels so good.

We bring our own losses, our own griefs, our fears, to this moment of reunion to be restored and healed.

But that’s not where the story ends. It’s not even half the story. 

So Jesus says – with all the joy of Easter in his voice and in our hearts – Don’t hold on.

 

Those are words of love and encouragement, today. A promise of abundant life and love beyond our wildest dreams.

 

Don’t hold on, beloved. Rejoice.

For what you can hold is not enough. There is so much more.

Embrace the joy with all your heart.

And then let go. 

Open your arms, your heart, your life, your soul, to what comes next.

To life and love, beyond all measure.