The Greatest Power: God’s Love
Gracious God, help us always to seek the truth, come whence it may, cost what it will. Amen.
It’s been my experience in life, and certainly as a priest, that some of the most memorable and meaningful conversations happen in times of transitions in our lives, when it seems as if we’re leaving one chapter of our life and moving into another. Certainly, I’ve been at many bedsides as people were transitioning from their earthly life to their eternal life. But there are so many other times in our lives—we’re in such a time now. It’s graduation season, inevitably causing major transitions in the lives of graduates and their families everywhere. Closer to home, tomorrow, we will host the Commencement Service for Wesley Theological Seminary.
I suspect any of us who’ve ever delivered a commencement address worked extremely hard on it. We really wanted people to hear the best we had to offer on how to live a life of meaning that matters and makes a difference. In today’s gospel lesson, Jesus is having one of those transitional conversations, and he doesn’t want the disciples to miss it. In John’s Gospel, it’s known as the Farewell Discourse. This is his last meal with the disciples, and he’s telling them and reminding them of the things that are most important, that he wants them to remember when he’s no longer physically present with them. Jesus says, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.” Then he goes on to say that he won’t leave them or us orphaned, that he will ask the Father, and the Father will send another Advocate, the Holy Spirit—the word in Greek is Paraclete—to be with them always, to remind them of all that he taught them and to be their comforter, their helper, their advocate, their source of courage when they need it to follow those very commandments that Jesus lays out for us. Then he says, because I live—present tense—you also will live.
What were those commandments? If you think about Jesus’s life and his teachings, he was asked: what are the most important commandments? You know the answer. It’s the Double Love commandment: “Love God with all that you are and all that you have and love your neighbor as yourself.” And then, if you back up just a little bit in John’s Gospel, at the end of the thirteenth chapter, he commands the disciples, after washing their feet to “Love one another, as I have loved you.” Now, this wasn’t a sentimental kind of love. It was a sacrificial kind of love, the sort of love that is called upon to lay down one’s life for another. That’s a tall task, a hard thing. But some of the most important things in life don’t come easily, do they? It takes work. It takes trust. It takes courage from the One who came so that our lives would never be the same.
Writing about this passage, theologian Nancy Ramsey said this:
“…all he asks of them is their embrace of the love he has lived among them as the goal for their own lives. Coming quickly to the close of his earthly ministry, he can only speak of love and the assurance that the God he knows so intimately as Father will continue to accompany them through the Paraclete [the Holy Spirit], who will also be their advocate in recognizing that God’s love is what is most true…John’s Gospel was written in an age of empire, for people surrounded by agents of the emperor, images of imposed dominion, and the weapons to enforce the imperial power. We find in John’s Gospel this strikingly different claim about the power and order that love brings to life and relationships…The love to which God calls us does not intend hierarchy…Jesus not only claims that God’s love is true; he also claims that God’s love is the source of life. This love is both the source of our lives and the goal of our lives.”1
We too live in divided times, in chaotic times. It seems more important than ever to hold fast to that which we know to be true: the love of God that surpasses all understanding. Our power lies not in weaponry or in threatening words. Our power lies in that love of Christ, the one God sent so that our lives would never be the same. When people seek to sow division, push back! Our power is in the Spirit of God that abides in us. That love is more powerful than anything else in the world.
If you were to think about words that you would want to share that have been meaningful to you—if you were giving a commencement address, for example—what would you say? What’s been a guiding principle in your life that you would want to impart to others? I was reminded of the power and the possibility of this question while reading a newly published book with writings by one of my favorite public theologians, Rachel Held Evans. The title of the book is Braving the Truth: Essential Essays for Reckoning with and Reimagining Faith. Some of you may be familiar with Rachel Held Evans. She was raised an evangelical Christian. She began blogging around 2008 and was very open and vulnerable about her faith journey including her questions and her doubts—inviting all of us into that conversation. Millions of people followed her. Tragically, she died at the age of thirty-seven.
This new book is bringing her voice back. There’s so much wisdom in it. She was so smart, so wise, so open. And she was incredibly funny. Who’s not to like writing like that? Just as an example, her husband writes about how he still keeps her whiteboard up, and she would put things on it to inspire her when maybe she had a writer’s block or to encourage her. One of the things that she wrote was “The next sentence does not live in the refrigerator.” I resemble that remark!
But what I want to share with you today is a story on a commencement address Evans gave. As background, she went to a conservative evangelical Christian college, and her classmates invited her to give the commencement address. Now she was the valedictorian, and that may have had a little bit to do with it! She titled her blog post, “Let the World Change You: A Commencement Address Do-Over.” She wrote:
“I admonished my classmates the way any other twenty-one-year-old evangelical would admonish her peers:
I told them to go out and change the world… that the world is dark, and we are the light, that the world is sick, and we have the medicine, that the world is lost, and we know the way.
…But if I had it to do over, if I could somehow transport thirty-four-year-old Rachel back to that sunny morning when things were simpler and I thought myself so much smarter, I would add: Class of 2003, let the world change you too.
Because that’s exactly what happened after I descended that platform and walked into a world inhabited not by the straw figures I’d been taught to defeat and convert, but by flesh-and-blood human beings who didn’t stick to the atheist/Muslim/feminist/gay/liberal/poor/skeptic/foreigner script, a world less characterized by black and white certainties than by mile after mile and year after year of thick, impenetrable gray.
I thought I was called to challenge the atheists, but the atheists ended up challenging me.
I thought God wanted to use me to show gay people how to be straight. Instead, God used gay people to show me how to be Christian.
I thought the world needed my answers, but as it turns out, I needed the world’s questions. I needed to learn how to doubt well, listen better, and be humbled by how little I know. I needed to discover that evangelicalism is just one table in Christ’s banquet hall, the Great Cloud of Witnesses far more sprawling and diverse than I’d ever imagined.
The world, it turns out, is not all weeds. There is evil growing, certainly, and fear and hate and prejudice. But I’ve found life sprouting out of all sorts of unlikely soil, wheat enough for a lifetime of harvests….
So if I had it to do over again, I would tell my classmates:
Before you can make your mark on the world, let the world make its mark on you. Be curious. Stay open. Nurture the humility it takes to admit you can get it wrong.”2
You see, when Jesus talked about loving one another as I have loved you, he envisioned the great gift of diversity that is God’s creation. It’s not a monolith. It’s not just black and white. There’s a lot of gray in the world. We are called to love and to learn and to respect one another for there is enough wheat for a lifetime of harvests in the kingdom of God that God has created.
So, when you feel yourself being pulled in divisive ways, hold fast to the core teaching of Christ: that God loved us enough to send us Jesus so that we would know the Way, the Truth, and the Life. Love generously. Stay open. Be humble. As our former Presiding Bishop, Michael Curry always says, “If it’s not about love, it’s not about God.” Amen.
1 David L. Bartlett, Feasting on the Word, Year A, Volume 2, (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2013), 490-494.
2 Rachel Held Evans, Braving The Truth: Essential Essays for Reckoning with and Reimagining Faith, (San Francisco, CA: HarperOne, 2026), 60-63.