The Rev. Canon Dana Colley Corsello: If You Love Me

I want to begin this morning with a few lines from the prayer that began our worship—the opening collect: O God, Pour into our hearts such love towards you, that we, loving you in all things and above all things, may obtain your promises, which exceed all that we can desire.

This prayer offers a clue as to the theme of today’s scripture readings and what we’re to glean and hold in our hearts and minds as we journey through life this week: “Pour into our hearts such love towards you.” We are to love God in all things and above all things.

In John’s gospel Jesus tells his disciples, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.”  And again: “They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me.”  What we hear is that love and obedience are one and the same, inseparable. We can’t honestly claim to love Jesus if we don’t obey him. Now, if the word “obey” makes you bristle, think of it this way: in Hebrew the word means to listen closely, to listen acutely. Same for the Greek word hupakoé or “obedience” which carries the same meaning, “submission to what is heard.” Jesus is not trying to threaten the disciples, but rather awaken in them a slow-burning revolution of love. He began this quest in the chapter before this one: “A new command I give you,” Jesus says after he washes their feet. “Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.”  In fact, this commandment — Jesus’s “Maundy Thursday” mandate — is the only recorded commandment in John’s Gospel.

But this is what I ask you to listen to closely. Jesus is not commanding the disciples to love as they are capable of loving. This is not the Golden-Rule kind of love or even the kind of love described in Mark, chapter 12 verse 31: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”  No, this is a shade different and more difficult. We are to love as Jesus loves.  I hate to admit it, but my love is faulty, negligent; it’s not as selfless nor as patient as it should be. It is certainly not infinite or all-encompassing, either. For those closest to me, like my family, it is unconditional, but for those whom I think are users and abusers of people and do not hold the best interests of others in their hearts, and for those who are mean and defame others for sport, well, I fall short in the Love-as-God-does department. By the way, you just heard the judgmental side of my defective love too.

My friend and fellow priest, the Reverend Russ Ruffino, has been preaching this difference of the command to love for years. He argues against conflating the measure by which we’re capable of loving ourselves with the measure by which Jesus is capable of loving. He writes, “We could never love as much as Jesus loved. Jesus commands us to love how he loved. Love sinners. Love the outcast. Love the weak. Love the little guy. Love the suckers. Love those who take you for suckers. Love the poor, especially love the poor. Love those who are foreign to you, strange to you, different from you. Love people who are down and out, even when it’s their own fault. Love those who don’t think the way you think. Love those who don’t live the way you live. Love those who don’t believe the way you believe. Love those who persecute you. Love your enemies.” End quote.

This begs the question: Are we mortals capable of loving one another as Jesus loves us?  Maybe now it’s easier to understand why Jesus’ conflation of love and obedience feels so jarring. Essentially, he’s commanding us to love other people, whether we want to or not, whether we like them or not. Our brains are not used to thinking about love in terms of obedience to a command. So the searing question is this: Can we be ordered to love? Most of us would protest, “No!” How can loving be a duty? If it’s a duty, doesn’t it detract from its worth? Isn’t dutiful love just another name for good manners? Our instincts are correct on one point; authentic love can’t be manipulated, simulated, or rushed without suffering distortion. For some, it may seem that the commandment to love is a command to do the impossible.

I read these verses though and hear a powerful but pleading Jesus who simply asks, “Do you love me?” If you love me, all I’m asking is that you keep my commandments. All I’m asking is that above all else you try to love one another, if for no other reason than because you love me. What this means is that if we love Jesus, then we are inherently capable of loving our neighbor. We can love the unlovable for the simple fact that God loves them…because God is love. I hear Jesus saying, “If you love me, then find a way to show love and hospitality to those who are made in my image but may call me by another name. If you love me, then speak out when you see people mistreated for being made in another variation of my image. If you love me then witness to the world for those whose hope for security, peace, employment, hangs by a thread. If you love me, then advocate for those who are abused by indifference.”

As many of you know, Patrick and I led a mission team to the southern border the first week of May. We partnered with the Episcopal Diocese of the Rio Grande and its Borderlands Ministry out of El Paso and the Big Bend region. Let me tell you, these folks are doing the Lord’s work. These folks show up every day to shelter the migrants who come seeking refuge. These folks show up every day to comfort them, house them, feed them, and send them on to their next U.S. destination in safety and with dignity. At its St. Christopher’s shelter in El Paso, we met a family who walked for months from Venezuela to Texas, more than 3,000 miles. The family included a father, mother, and two children, but also the man’s 80-year-old mother, who suffers from dementia. Wrap your mind around this—this woman walked 66 miles through the Darian Gap between the borders of Colombia and Panama, one of the most dangerous stretches of jungle in the world. No roads. Just mile upon mile of knee-deep mud filled with lethal snakes—including criminal gangs who threaten violence, kidnapping, rape, and extortion. It was either that trek or leave her to starve in a collapsed country.

But it’s not only the migrants who the Borderlands team pastor to, it’s also the border patrol agents who are often caught in the political cross-current of our seemingly, hopelessly broken immigration policy (that sounds like a cliché now doesn’t it?). Our team heard it explained this way: “We were trained to be Rambo, but instead we’re asked to be Mother Teresa.” The agents have suffered the effects of policing the border, some to the point of suicide. They’ve had to search for countess lost migrants in thousands of miles of the desert, only to find them dead because the coyotes took their life savings but didn’t give them adequate water to survive the journey. One agent choked up with tears describing how a few years ago he was commanded to separate a child from the arms of her mother—a girl the same age as his own daughter. He barked at his superior, “I will quit before I do that again!”

You see, it’s politically expedient to “other” a collection of faceless, anonymous individuals. The video of the sheer numbers of migrants we’ve seen on television these past two weeks is hard to wrap our minds around. But know that it’s politically expedient—and cheap—to create fear by claiming that caravans of criminals are crawling over and under walls on their way to destroy America. It’s also politically expedient to pigeon-hole those who police the border as xenophobic, heartless oppressors.

I believe I can speak on behalf of my fellow missionaries by sharing what we discovered firsthand. We Americans do a lot of “othering.”  God calls us to love our neighbor—to recognize in the “other” one whom God also loves. It is not sufficient (or even meaningful) to profess love for Jesus while we hold our hearts hostage from certain neighbors because they are the “other” or they represent the “other” side. To love Jesus is to love every human who walks this earth. Can you imagine what Christendom would look like if we obeyed his commandment and cultivated this “impossible” love? By cultivating our hearts. Preparing and pruning them to love? Pruning to remove the judgement and fear that prevents them from becoming vulnerable in authentic ways to the world’s pain. This pruning is hard and costly, but we don’t have to do it on our own.

 Jesus’s desire is not that we try to conjure love from our own meager resources. Rather, his commandment is accompanied by a promise: “I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever” (14:16).  We must trust and open our minds and hearts to the unpredictable and imaginative power of the Holy Spirit to show us the way when we feel there is no way. And this also includes humane and just immigration legislation that our entire nation can get behind—with God all things are possible!  This Spirit, Jesus promises us, will accompany us, prodding us, making possible the startling, counter-intuitive heart-rending power to love.

I want to close where I began, with our collect for today. When we ask God to “Pour into our hearts such love toward you,” we are also praying for the Holy Spirit to make our love towards Jesus and our love for our neighbors one in the same.  If you love me… If you love me… I keep hearing Jesus say. If you love me, you will keep my commandments.” One and the same.  We forgive because we are forgiven. One and the same. We obey Christ because we are in Christ. One and the same.  We can love because we are loved. One in the same. Amen.