Sunday, May 5, 2024, Sixth Sunday of Easter/ Confirmation

“Life After Easter: Living a Life of Love”

Psalm 98:1-9; Acts 10:34-38; 1 John 5:1-8; John 15:9-17

Divine Service III with Holy Communion, with the Rite of Confirmation

Hymns: #688 “Come Follow Me, the Savior Spake”; #783 “Take My Life and Let It Be”; #570 “Just As I Am”; #664 “Fight the Good Fight”

Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,

     Grace, mercy, and peace to you, from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus.

     This is the Sixth Sunday of Easter on our Church calendar, the last Sunday of Easter before we celebrate the Ascension of Jesus next Sunday. We’ve been talking through all our Sundays of Easter about how we’re God’s after-people, children of Christ’s Resurrection, raised up with Jesus, living by faith, and living with the sure and certain hope of living with Him forever. We’re after-Easter people -- after-Confirmation people! --  living our lives between Jesus having come, and Jesus coming again one day soon. So what do we do now? What do we do in the meantime? What do we do with the rest of our resurrected lives? What do we do with whatever time our Lord has left for us to live on in this world? “Live a life of love,” as St. Paul says. But how do we do that? What is love, anyway? How do we even know what love is? How do we define it, so we can love the way our Lord wants us to love? Love is a commandment, you know, not just a suggestion. “This is My command; love one another,” Jesus says.

     Love is a feeling, of course; love is an emotion, and a very strong one. Love can make your heart flutter, or your knees knock, or your face turn red. Love can bring a feeling of joy to your heart, or a tear to your eye. Love can fill your heart, or love can sometimes break it. There’s love at first sight, if you believe in such a thing. There’s the kind of love that can leave you tongue-tied, and love that has you doing stupid things. That kind of emotional, “carried away” kind of love, the one all the singers sing about, can be good, for a little while, for as long as it lasts. But love that’s only a feeling, love that stops there, isn’t the love Jesus is talking about, nor is it the love we need. Love may start with a feeling, but it calls for so much more. Love, so they say, isn’t something you fall into, but something you grow. Ask anyone who’s been married for forty of fifty or sixty years, and they’ll tell you it’s true.

     The Greek word our Scripture readings and Jesus use for love is “agape.” Agape love is “love that always seeks the good of another.” Agape love is unselfish, self-giving love. It’s not the kind of love that says, “I’ll love you so long as you’ll love me;” it’s love that says, “I’ll love you forever no matter what; and I’ll always forgive you and keep on loving you, no matter what you do.” (That’s how those 40-50-60-year marriages last as long as they do; by patience and forgiveness and giving grace). Love that stays on the inside and is never expressed isn’t really worth much, and doesn’t do much or amount to much. Real love is more than a feeling; it’s a doing. Real love is love that does, love that shows in what you do for someone else, and in what someone else does for you.

     So, “This is how we know what love is,” says John: “Jesus Christ laid down His life for us.” Jesus didn’t just look down from heaven, and look at our suffering and grief and troubles and tears, and sadly shake His head and say, “Oh, isn’t that just too bad?” He loved us so much, that He put His love into action for us. He came down here to earth to lay down His life for us, to die on a cross for us, to pay for our sins and save us from them. God is love; and Jesus has shown us His love by what He’s done for us on the cross. Jesus loved us so much, He gave us His own body and blood for our food. And since God so loved us, says John, “We ought to lay down our lives for one another.” That’s what agape love is; the kind of love willing to lay down its life for someone else.

     In our reading from Acts 10, St. Peter talks about how God doesn’t show favoritism.

That’s what God’s love is like and what it does. God doesn’t show partiality. He takes us at face value; He takes us as we are. God loves us for who we are, because He made us as we are. (Keep in mind, though, that He also loves us enough not to leave us as we are). His love for us doesn’t depend on what we look like on the outside, or on where we’re from, or how we talk, or whether we’re tall or short, or fat or thin, or rich or poor. And there’s nothing we have to do to qualify for His love. He loves us like a Father loves a child - joys and sorrows, faults and flaws, warts and all, He loves us. And all He asks in return is that we love Him back, and that we show that same kind of patient, forgiving, unconditional love to one another.

     If we’re going to live as God’s people in this very broken world, a world where the love of so many people has grown cold, that’s the kind of love we’re going to have to do our best to show, if we’re going to make any difference in this place at all. And make no mistake, we are called to be different, very different, from the world around us. The God who made us and loves us has put us here for the very purpose of being the counterpoint, the polar opposite, the balm, for all the meanness and ignorance and hate in the world. If God’s love isn’t in us, and doesn’t come pouring out of us into the world, where else will it come from, and what hope will this world have?

     So Jesus, there in John 15, gives us His good “love as I have loved you” commandment. A world that’s becoming increasingly un-Christian is only going to get worse as time and the years go on, and as the time gets closer and closer for Jesus to come again. So this is our purpose, our marching orders from Jesus, our “this is who we are and what we’re here to be.” Jesus says, “As the Father has loved Me, so I have loved you. Now remain in My love.”

     A better translation of that word “remain” is the good old-fashioned church word “abide” (as in “abide with me, fast falls the eventide”). To abide means to be steady, to be steadfast, to stay and stay and stay and be really stubborn about it. To abide means to hang on tight and never, ever let go. This really gets us to the meaning of what love, and especially agape love, is. It’s love that stays, and love that lasts, and love that never gives up. Again, it’s the kind of patient, forgiving love that makes marriages and relationships and friendships last. “Love that will not let me go,” one of the old Gospel hymns calls it. So that’s how the Father loves His Son, and that’s how His Son loves us, and that’s how we’re commanded and called to love one another.

     So how do we remain and abide and stay in love like that? Love is hard, after all. Not the falling-in-love, love-at-first-sight kind; that’s easy. I mean the stay-with-it, stick-with-it, year-after-year, abiding kind of love. That kind of love takes work, and more patience that most of us naturally possess. It’s not anything that will come to us naturally or that we’ll find on our own; it’s the gift of God. God in His mercy pours His love into us; we by His grace pour His love back out into the world.

     Now Jesus, in our Gospel, brings up another old-fashioned word, or at least an old-fashioned concept, called “obedience.” “If you obey my commands, you will abide in My love,” Jesus says. What do love and obedience have to do with each other? Children, if you love your parents, you’ll obey them and do as they ask. You can’t say, “Mom and Dad, I love you,” and then ignore what they say and do whatever you want. And Christians, we can’t say “I love Jesus” without also being willing to do what Jesus asks of us. If we go around claiming to love God, but people see that our actions don’t match our words, and that we’re no different in any real way from anyone else, and that our love is only talk and there’s no doing in it, they’ll write us off as liars and fakes and frauds. So do you see how important real love is? The apostle John wrote to us: “If anyone sees his brother in need and has no mercy on him, how can the love of God be in him? Dear children, let us not love just with words and tongue, but with actions and in truth.”

     So, Jesus commands us to love. He doesn’t just suggest or recommend or encourage us to love. Love for us isn’t optional, and it never has been. This isn’t a matter of “love if you want to.” This is a commandment, and more than that, what Jesus called the greatest commandment of all: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind and all your strength… and love your neighbor as yourself.” And if you do this, Jesus says, if you’ll obey this one great and indispensable “love commandment,” then your life will be full of joy, and you’ll be a joy to live with and a joy to be around. “I have told you this,” says Jesus, “so that My joy may be in you, and your joy may be complete.”

     The same is true for all God’s good Commandments, by the way, from those familiar Commandments one to ten, to all God’s other good commandments that don’t have a number. God’s commandments are good, because God is good, and He’s given them to us because He loves us and wants us to be happy. What happy families, what a peaceful country, what a wonderful world we’d have, if everyone would get about the business of doing what God says, and doing our best to keep God’s Commandments by loving one another like God loves us. 

     “Love one another as I have loved you,” says Jesus, “and your life will bear fruit, fruit  that will last.” The good fruit Jesus is talking about is love that’s expressed and given and shared, and produces more love. And the fruit is faith that reproduces itself and produces more faith, as the Good News is passed from my lips to your ears to your heart; from your heart to your lips to the ears and heart of someone else. 

     The kind of love Jesus calls us to, this agape love, isn’t going to be an easy thing. It’s going to take work, and patience, and prayer. And again, love isn’t something you fall into, as much as it’s something you grow. Your Confirmation today isn’t a graduation.

This isn’t the place where you finish, only the place where your life in Christ begins. There’s a particular promise you’ll make in your Confirmation vows, the one about being willing to “suffer all things, even death,” rather than fall away from your faith. All of us here have made the same promise, at some point in our lives. And we’re all trying, as best we can, with God’s help and by His grace, to live up to it. From now until Jesus comes again for us at last, Lord, help us to do this. In Jesus’ name; Amen.