THE SIXTH SUNDAY OF EASTER

Fr. Dan Weir preached this sermon on the Sixth Sunday of Easter, May 25, 2003.

"As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love." (John 15:9)

Last Sunday, we sang a hymn by the seventeenth century English priest and poet George Herbert. Each time I have sung that hymn, including last Sunday, I am struck by the thought that it is far easier for us to sing certain words than to say them.

What incredible language of love and even intimacy Herbert used in addressing his Lord and ours; language that echoes that central message of this morning's Gospel: "Abide in my love."

We are, admittedly, most of us, a bit reticent when it comes to expressing our love for Jesus. It is a subject that is difficult for many of us to discuss openly, even with our closest friends. And maybe it isn't all that important that we talk with one another about our love for Jesus, anymore than it is all that important that I talk with any of you about my love for my wife Jan. Perhaps intimacies are best kept intimate. But if it isn't all that important for us to talk with one another about this love, the love we have for the one whom "we love because he first loved us," (1 John 4:19) it is important that that love be there and that that love find expression. It is important that somehow in our hearts, in that deep secret place of thoughts and feelings which we may never share with anyone, even a spouse, that there we know both Jesus' love for us and our love for Jesus, that there we find our own words to echo George Herbert's, our own words to express our joy and thanksgiving as we abide in Christ's love. And it is important that somehow in our actions, in the way we live each day, we show, and not necessarily to the world around us, but to the One who sees in secret, that we show this love.

But maybe, just maybe, this reticence we have about talking about this love, maybe this reticence is wrong, or, at least, something which can cause us some trouble in our relationship with Jesus and with one another. I'm not suggesting that we wear our hearts on our sleeves, but it seems to me that our reticence may well lead us and others to get the wrong idea about the nature of our faith and about the nature of this community that we call Saint Matthias Church. Maybe our reticence misleads us and others about why we are here, misleads us and others into believing that this community has been drawn together by something other than the love of Jesus Christ. Maybe our reticence misleads us into thinking that we are a community of like-minded people, with similar tastes in music and liturgy, a community held together by upper middle class, or, at least, middle class values, or, worse yet, a community drawn together by the talents of the parish's clergy, both past and present.

"Abide in my love." It is in obedience to that command that we are here, knowing that somehow it is in the context of this community that we will be better able to abide in him. There is nothing else, really, that matters. All the rest is window-dressing. It is nice window-dressing, to be sure, even widow-dressing that can help us to see and experience that incredible love, but it isn't the music or the liturgy or this beautiful building or all the obvious similarities which we have as members of the most privileged society in the world, it isn't anything else but the love of Jesus which makes any sense of what we are doing here this morning. And we need to know that.

But if I don't really know that God's love is all that really matters, if I let myself forget it, and begin to think that what I really need in my life is something other than that love, something like your approval or that of the Bishop or of my colleagues, things which aren't bad, but can't substitute for that love, if I let myself depend upon something else, then I'm in deep trouble. Very deep trouble, because those things won't last, won't satisfy, and because those things can get in the way of my becoming open to the essential thing, to the love which led Jesus to die for me. And if you don't know that, if you let yourself forget that it is God's love that is the foundation of your life, then you also will be in deep trouble.

I have found that this trouble often manifests itself in two different ways. One is overactivity on the road to burnout. We burn out when we forget that we are loved and try to do good in order to earn God's approval. But there is another way in which our forgetfulness of God's love can cause trouble in our lives. Not experiencing the depths of God's love for us, we end up limiting the scope of our own loving to a very small circle. There are those whom we will love, those whom we may think of as somehow deserving of our love, and then there's everyone else - or what Matt's godmother once called, the great unwashed.

How she came to use that expression is an interesting story. Our parish had opened up what is sometimes called here in Western New York a dining room, although in Massachusetts we called it by the much more common term, a soup kitchen. It was open on Sundays for dinner, and Jack and Karen, the couple who were the driving force behind the program, tried to make it as much like Sunday dinner as possible. They used china and parishioners waited on folks. A lot of our guests were older folks who liked the company of friends at dinner, but couldn't afford to go out to a restaurant. Others were parishioners who enjoyed the chance to eat together. A few were really poor. One family that came to dinner in time became members of the parish, and they were the folks whose presence in the parish gave rise to the expression, the great unwashed. Violet and her children became members because one of the waiters at dinner also taught Sunday School and invited the kids to attend. Shirley and the other teachers must have done something right, because the kids kept coming and in time most of the family was worshipping with us.

Now to say that Violet and her kids didn't quite fit the mold of the typical Episcopalian would be an understatement. The number of last names that the children had was only one indication of how unstable Violet's life had been. But most of us took that in stride, welcoming them, helping them to make their way through the liturgy, and helping them out in a number of more material ways as well. When I discovered that none of them, including Violet, had been baptized, I invited them to be baptized at the Easter Vigil. The service was one of the most chaotic and most joyful ones of my life. With Violet and six of her children and four others being baptized, it's no wonder that at one point I put down one child and could think of nothing else to say but "Next."

Most of us took their presence in stride, but not all of us. There were a few members, and fairly vocal ones at that, who seemed to always have minor complaints about the family. The most common complaint was that the kids were unruly and disturbed the worship of older members. The complaint was not unfounded, but the complainers seemed to me to have no real interest in helping the children to settle down, but only in seeing them leave. Although the conflict over the presence of Violet and her family did not, thank God, reach major proportions, it was a problem for awhile. During that period of conflict, Matt's godmother said, with a chuckle, that it was about time that the Episcopal Church made room for the great unwashed.

Although I was able to deal with the conflict with some humor, I was, for the most part, hard on the complainers, and even prayed that they might leave, for Violet and her family were not the only targets of their complaints, and I ended up not doing a very good job of helping them and other members of the parish become more welcoming. When I left that parish to move to Buffalo in 1988, I was concerned that Violet and her children would no longer be welcome. I would like to be able to say that my concerns were unfounded, but within a couple of years Violet and her children were no longer part of the parish. Whether they had drifted away, not an uncommon experience in the Episcopal Church, or had responded to subtle messages that they were no longer welcome, I can't say. All I can say is that something that was good for them, belonging to that parish community, had been lost and, as far as I knew, nothing better had taken its place.

I am sad about this story because I think that it's a story about our failure to love, our failure to open our lives to new people and to will for them what is best for them. I'm sad because I also think that, from God's perspective, Violet and her children were a gift to that parish community, a gift which enriched our common life, but a gift which we had real difficulty receiving. I trust God's love enough to believe that there can be other community's of welcome for Violet and her children and that others can bring that parish the gift of diversity which they brought, but I'm still sad that we didn't do better.

I know that at the heart of our failure was our forgetfulness of God's love, and I know that what will change those failures is not more effort, but remembering. Remembering and experiencing that incredible love which has made us God's children. When we remember and experience that love, we have the strength to love others. When we are confident of that love, we are able to take risks in our loving.

We have spent a fair amount of time this past year discovering how we might be more welcoming, more inclusive. Years ago, someone shared with me an image that suggests one aspect of an inclusive community. When we as a community are strong at the center, firmly rooted in Christ's love, we are free to be soft at the edges, welcoming, inclusive. But when we are weak at the center, uncertain about God's love for us, then we are tempted to become hard at the edges, self-protective, and inhospitable. God is calling us here at Saint Matthias to become strong at the center so that we might be soft and welcoming to all whom God sends to us.