MCCNY
May 5, 2024

As God has loved me, so I have loved you. Now, abide in my love. If you obey my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have obeyed God’s commandments and abide in God’s love. I have told you this so that my joy may abide in you and that your joy may be complete. My commandment is this: Love each other as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this: that you lay down your life for your friends. You are my friends if you do what I command. I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know the owner’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, because everything that I learned from God I have made known to you. You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you to go and bear much fruit – fruit that will abide. Then God will give you whatever you ask in my name. This is my commandment: Love each other.

Do any of you remember all of those stories about the greatest commandment, those stories in every other gospel where someone comes up to Jesus trying to trick him and asks some version of “Oh hi, Jesus, I didn’t know you’d be here” all nonchalant, “no reason, just out of curiosity, what’s the greatest commandment? Asking for a friend.” And they’ve actually planned this out and are asking because Jesus is calling them out for abusing their power and exploiting people’s faith and obedience, so they want him in trouble. And no matter what answer Jesus gives, they know someone will think some other commandment is way more important, and they hope it will be worth fighting over, and they want Jesus to be discredited or worse in the backlash. But in every version of the story, Jesus always says that the greatest commandment is to love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself. And folks generally find that hard to argue with.

In every version, that answer means that love is the fulfillment of all commandments, all the law. Especially Matthew, which has its Jesus actually say the words, “On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets.” If we act always in love, we will be always on the right side of God’s laws, according to Matthew, and according to Romans 13, and according to this John gospel two chapters ago with the new commandment by which everyone will know you are a Jesus lover if you love each other, and also according to Matthew when its Jesus says the Golden Rule is the fulfillment of all the commandments.

Matthew and Paul and John and John and Matthew are saying explicitly and repeating that we won’t break the law or contradict the law and prophets if we act in love. A lot of us bible nerds further believe that the second law, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” is essentially a how-to manual for obeying the first law: “Love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.” That the way to love God that much is to love our neighbor; and in fact that loving God and loving our neighbor are the same thing.

The reason I’m talking so much about the greatest commandment stories is that I think today’s reading from the John gospel is the John version of them. John always does it sideways, you know; its Jesus talks way more and usually makes less sense. But it’s in verses 10, 12, 17 here: “If you obey my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have obeyed God’s commandments and abide in God’s love… My commandment is this: Love each other as I have loved you… This is my commandment: Love each other.” John’s super-talky Jesus is also saying these are the same: to obey God’s commandments means to love.

The John gospel talks about love a lot. You probably already know this. The bible does, generally all of it, the Hebrew and the Greek, generally a lot. But maybe especially John and the John letters. It makes sense if so much is riding on love, if love is the greatest commandment. All the commandments. The thing is, I don’t always know what it means, love, in John or anywhere. I use that word, love. I say it to people I’m deeply fond of. I say it to people I’m lightly fond of. I usually reserve saying it out loud to people I feel safer with, people I trust. But people who said they love me have caused me lasting harm and in some cases continue to do so. And I love some of those people, as well, some of them very much; and not all of them are part of my life today.

I want to say that again so that we understand each other. There are people who have hurt me and others a lot, and I don’t allow them to have contact with me anymore, and I love them. This feels important to make clear while we try to make sense of love. Because of this I know that love is not necessarily tied to feeling or being safer, or to trust. Because of this, love isn’t synonymous with feeling happy. Because of this I know that forgiveness, whatever that is, is closer to loving than to forgetting, that maybe forgiveness is as much grief as mercy. Because of this I know that when we talk about love, we’re talking about something that is not simple, something so messy, that cannot be held by a single word. That we will need more words.

John definitely gives us more words. One of them is abide. The John gospel is exasperatingly unclear, and I would argue that’s the exact reason it’s a favorite of fundamentalists and dogmatists: there are so many definitive statements and so much ambiguity. But it is also so often so beautiful, compelling, so evokative. Abide in my love. Abide in God’s love. There is no litany of love’s attributes, what it does, what it doesn’t do, what it means to lay down my life, but there is a sense of something enormous and surrounding, something we can live in, be immersed in and embraced by – something great, something lasting that envelops us and holds us and our lives.

The Buddhist teacher Tara Brach says, “When we trust that we are the ocean, we are not afraid of the waves.” I remembered this because I’m afraid of so much, and definitely afraid of waves, and because it felt like a new way of rehearing and remembering the lesson about mindfulness and the sky. You might know it. A teacher draws a round M on a board and asks what it is. The students say, It’s a bird. The teacher responds, It is the sky with a bird in it. Mindfulness is abiding in the sky or the ocean, the thing that is constant, and knowing that the bird is temporary. The weather is temporary. Mindfulness is less about “This, too, shall pass” than it is “Not always so.” I just said it’s less “This too shall pass” and more “Not always so,” and I know that’s a subtle difference, and I’m sorry. Also, mindfulness isn’t exactly the particular thing I’m thinking about when I’m talking today about abiding in love, but it also very much is.

A “this too shall pass” framework comes across a lot, maybe most times, as focused on the future. It feels dismissive to me of the present, both in the words themselves but also in the tone I usually hear it spoken with: already making what is into what isn’t. When I hear it, I tend to hear that now isn’t important, not a big deal, doesn’t matter. Framing impermanence and mindfulness differently, as “Not always so,” subtly and significantly attends to what is. The present moment is now, and we can be fully with it, and it will change, and we can be fully with it. How we feel will change. And that change may feel better or may feel worse, easier or harder, more spacious or more dreadful. Mindfulness encourages us and asks us to practice neither holding onto the good or pushing away the bad, sitting both with our skillfilness and compassion and also with our anger and impatience and mess; to be here, right here now. It’s awful, I hate it. It’s sobriety; eghch.

And this is so pertinent to what I’m thinking about when I’m talking today about abiding in love: Mindfulness asks us to have a heart that is ready for anything. It asks us to attend. It’s Rumi’s poem, you may know it already: This being human is a guest house. Every morning a new arrival. A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor. Welcome and entertain them all! Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows who violently sweep your house empty of its furniture, still, treat each guest honorably. He may be clearing you out for some new delight. The dark thought, the shame, the malice, meet them at the door laughing, and invite them in. Be grateful for whoever comes, because each has been sent as a guide from beyond.

Maybe the John gospel’s beautiful, exasperating language of abiding in love can be clarified in this way. Imagine that love is an ocean that is us. Imagine that we are not separate, not boats, not ships or fish. We are the massive body of water, we are a body. Imagine this; close your eyes if it helps. Feel yourself as water with everything alive. We talk about community a lot, we talk about relationship a lot and I think *this is what we always mean, but imagine that this is the Atlantic. The Indian, the Arctic. Bigger than what we often think of as relationship. Bigger than what we usually think of as community. Bigger than our corner of the ocean; oceans don’t have corners. A bigness that contains us all, but also not an abstract sense of big, not just an idea of big, but this concrete thing. An ocean, and everyone is it, and I am it. Imagine this, please. You are this ocean that is all of us. You are very important, your difference and uniquenesses is essential. Your autonomy and your dignity is sacred. You are one in a million, a snowflake; I’m kidding and not kidding, right? Your you-ness is precious, and you are enough.

And you are not separate, maybe from anyone. I think Jesus is saying not from anyone. Paradoxically and oxymoronically you are a sea that is all of us, where I am and am not I, and you are and are not you, and we are. Where, Thich Nhat Hahn says, there is no place where I stop and you start.

I think that’s abiding. I think that’s laying down our life for our friends. I think when Jesus says to lay down our life, he literally means for us to die for one another, to die for what is just, to die trying to make real more safety and more surplus and more ease for more people. And I think that there also is a laying down our life in becoming an ocean with every other life. By attending as very deeply to one another as we tend to do for ourself, for our friends and lovers, to do this as deeply for all. There’s an awfulness to the bigness of that, and a wonder. That is also a finding our life by losing it.

Abiding in love, I think, is attending to this recognition that we are connected. We are an ocean together. If I abide in and live and move and speak and make decisions from an ocean that is us all and regards us all, it *must affect what I do and say. It *must no longer be possible for me to disregard anyone else. There’s another Buddhist lesson you may already know: A teacher gives a chicken to each student and says, Go somewhere that no one can see and kill the chicken. The students leave and one by one they come back with their dead chicken. Finally, the last student returns but has not killed the chicken. The teacher asks and the student responds, Everywhere I go the chicken sees. Abiding in love regards everyone, all life, every living being. It is neighborhoods and cities and countries of mostly Black and brown folks who live most impacted by the consequences of economic exploitation and extraction and overextraction and these effects on climate. We must regard.

When we are an ocean, we have to resolve conflict in ways that are mutually and complexly beneficial. I’m certainly referring to Gaza, and achieving a reality that Jonathan Lovett describes where Israel is free because Palenstine is free, and Palestine is free because Israel is safe, and Israel is safe because Palestine has hope for a better future. Even as Israel has made incomprehensible and horrifying decisions. As divestment and other accountability actions are silenced and policed and yet persist. It is possible and necessary to act. It is possible and necessary to do this in ways that account for us as an ocean, in ways that know that everywhere we go the chicken sees. I’m certainly referring to Gaza. I think I’m also referring to Ukraine. If Israel and Palestine, then Ukraine and Russia. If Fergusen and Sandy Hook, then India, Honduras, and Niger. We must regard.

If we trust that that we are the ocean, we will not turn away from the waves.

But we needn’t do it all, we can’t. There’s a tension in that which also requires vigilance. We are an ocean, and we must attend; we can’t do everything, and it’s not a justification for indifference and inaction. This is a reality, and it’s a very personal assessment. We don’t have the capacity to organize and contribute to every injustice. And we can attend to them all, give them our thought and care and support those who are showing up for that work. We can’t attend to the wellbeing of the people who have harmed and are no longer granted access to us. I won’t; that’s not what forgiveness is. That isn’t my work. But in this ocean and my place in it with them, I need and trust that they are not alone and are loved and embraced by somebody. Somebody else. Sometimes I ask to be sure.

Paul describes love with a gorgeous richness in his letters, you probably already know this: he says love is patient and kind. It does not envy or boast, it is not proud, rude, or self-seeking. It is not easily angered. It keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. But I have kept a record of wrongs by some folks, and I don’t always trust some folks, and I don’t always hope about some folks; but I love. I love. *I just can’t do it: I don’t speak to my mother, but my brother does. I check in sometimes, has he talked to mom recently. He always has. That’s how I am connected to my mother, in an ocean of love with my mom, where my tender deeprooted scarred compassionate mourning is alive and active for her. But through my brother. I don’t know if it’s abiding enough, loving enough. I wonder often if it’s enough. I think that’s part of my grief.

Abiding is relentless, unending. It’s the bridemaids and their lamps who are given no quarter, at all hours; we are immersed at all times in and in love with everyone. What is our capacity? What is our need for rest? What will harm our own wellness? How do we balance these questions with every gospel’s Jesus’s call to come die? How do we balance them with every gospel’s Jesus’s call to live abundantly?

I don’t know what joy is, either, verse 11 there. At this point I don’t know if we really need to talk about joy this morning or if now I’m just feeling confessional. But as long as it’s in there in verse 11, I’ll confess that I’ve been thinking about joy a lot lately because it’s been a cussably hard few weeks and I have given some thought to what is joy, what is the enoughness, or brightness or whatever, that endures beyond the difficulty of the moment. We probably do need to talk about joy. This is joyful work, I know you know this experience of seeing the life in a neighborhood block party, of the comradery of a marathon or of grassroots protest or a West Indian parade or Dyke March. But joy is also a guest most at home when least expected, Alan Shapiro writes; he calls it “vagrant balm of Gilead.” It’s part of the promise here but it’s hard to imagine doing this work of loving so immersively and so comprehensively without being exhausted by it. Abiding in joy may not be a reward, after all, it may simply be a recognition of what is lasting, what will endure beyond the strain of loving so fully.

The John gospel and its Jesus make abiding in love sound so compelling, so beautiful, the slow and rhythmic call of the sea, and I think it is, but like any discipline it’s not easy or simple or wholly peaceful. It’s very much a taking up our cross to follow. It’s selling everything we own and giving it away. It’s loving our “enemies,” the people who hate us and hurt us. It is the hard work of discipleship – and we know, every time, where discipleship leads.

I love you. Peace.