Life Unleashed:
Unreasonable Love
John 15:9-17
Rev. Dr. Amy Butler
May 17, 2009
(Audio)
Okay, let’s pretend we’re all Christians here.
Since we’ll assume for the next few minutes that we have all personally decided to be Christians, that is, followers of Jesus Christ, we’ll now speak frankly about what being a Christian is like in America in 2009.
For one thing, we certainly have a lot of choices, since most everyone we meet in our day to day life has some kind of Christian reference, even if they wouldn’t identify formally as Christian. Phrases like, “I have decided to follow Jesus” roll off our tongues with no problem. We know that we have the freedom to look at all the options out there and decide, for example, if we like this church or that one, this tradition or another, what kind of music we prefer, if the people are friendly enough, if the pews are comfortable, if the service times fit the optimal weekend schedule.
And we also know what the practicalities of being a Christian are, because we’ve all heard the words, “that’s not a very Christian thing to do” from time to time (some of us more than others). And most of us know what’s expected when you say you’re a Christian: things like going to church, not saying bad words, reading our Bibles, living fairly morally respectable lives, being nice to people (even people we don’t like), praying.
There are certain standards of behavior that go along with being a Christian, certain lifestyle choices and rules we know we’ve got to adhere to—and we do pretty well most of the time, because the institutional church has defined for thousands of years what the parameters are and for the most part we know what we’re supposed to be doing or not doing.
There are, of course, some more fring-ey Christians, some of us who like to push the envelope a little and call ourselves things like “different,” but at the end of the day our shared cultural understanding of Christian faith mostly wins out.
And that’s okay, because don’t forget we’re all individuals here. Each one of us relates directly to God and our faith is a private faith. We gather as community, of course, to share resources and ideas, but in the end we’re each responsible for our own adherence or nonadherence, as the case may be, to God’s expectations. When all is said and done, as we’ve learned in Sunday School, it will all boil down to whether or not there’s a place in heaven for me, personally!
With a good 2000 years of Christian tradition behind us, we certainly know what it means to be a Christian, don’t you think?
But Jesus’ first disciples—the first Christians—didn’t.
Not really.
They’d been wandering around after Jesus for three years but they hadn’t really made the practical connection between his message and their lives. This was understandable, of course, as up until that time Christianity did not even exist—they certainly didn’t have 2000 plus years of church tradition informing their ideas; their perceptions of what it meant to be faithful people were determined by the culture in which they lived.
And so, having grown up in the devoutly Jewish culture of the area surrounding Jerusalem, they knew that faith was defined by rules given by God that helped structure their lives. They knew, for example, that certain behavior, certain prayers, certain sacrifices were part of living holy lives and they did their best to follow the carefully defined guidelines of faith as they knew it.
But the trouble they kept bumping up against was that what they knew as religious practice was different than what Jesus came to teach them about relationship with God.
And so, though the disciples had been faithful followers, our text today finds them now at the end of their time together, with Jesus still rather concerned that they hadn’t heard everything he had to say, that they weren’t exactly clear on what it meant to be Christians.
The disciples didn’t know they still weren’t getting it, and they certainly didn’t know time was short. But, Jesus did. So in these chapters in the Gospel of John we’re reading during the season of Easter, Jesus gives a sort of farewell speech during which he tries one more time to sum everything up, to condense it all down, to give them instruction for what he knew would be a challenging time ahead of them.
I will fully admit that the age of cell phones has changed my life. Though it was only a few years ago that I lived without one, I can hardly remember what my life was like before I had the ability to be instantaneously accessible all the time. In our house this means we’re always connected, and I don’t have to worry anymore if I forget to remind somebody to take the dinner out of the freezer or some such critical instruction upon which important activities hinge! With the ease of my cell phone I can just remember what I meant to tell them, pick up the cell phone, and let them know—just like I would of if I’d been reminding them in person.
Jesus didn’t have a cell phone, and thus no easy way to call and remind his disciples of critical matters after he was gone. So, he had quite a challenge of summing up the important things to help remind them one more time. What would they remember and what would they forget? It was critical, you see, because Jesus was teaching them ideas about God upon which important activities would hinge—activities like the ushering in of the Kingdom of God! Here in these verses from John chapter 15, Jesus’ thoughts about what it meant to be a Christian were summed up in three critical points Jesus so desperately wanted his disciples to remember after he was gone. And . . . what he had to say must have made them wonder if they’d really known all along what it meant to be a Christian, what following Jesus really looked like.
First, the relationship the disciples imagined they had with God was still one of rules and checklists and sacrifices. They’d imagined a servant/master relationship with God, filled with demands, expectations, and obligations.
But that’s not what Jesus said about relationship with God.
No, Jesus said God wanted to be a friend. And his insistence that God had called them friends radically challenged the way they understood relationship with God. A friend, you see, is not one who makes heavy demands or sets unreasonable expectations, only to punish or censure when those demands are not met. In fact, a friend is one who makes herself vulnerable to another, who enters into a relationship of mutual dependence.
Rather than saying God had certain expectations of them that they had better meet or else, Jesus was redefining faith for those disciples by describing a God who was . . . a friend, even a God who needed what they had to give as part of their friendships with the divine. In this unreasonable love of God that Jesus kept talking about, the disciples entered into profound relationship—friendship, even, with the God of the universe.
And, that was a little different than what they thought being a Christian meant.
Second, you know each one of those disciples could remember clear as day the moment he’d decided to put down a nets or whatever it was that occupied his life before that time, to follow Jesus. They’d made a choice in that moment; they’d chosen to risk the disdain of their communities and even their families because they were so compelled by Jesus’ message. They hadn’t fully known what they were getting into, of course, but nothing’s ever permanent. You know they must have thought if this doesn’t work out . . . or if it’s too hard on the family . . . or if Jesus doesn’t turn out to be the great political leader we were hoping for . . . or, whatever . . . there are always fishing nets to go back to.
They were free to come and go as they wished; they could always chalk these three years up to a crazy stage of life if things didn’t work out as they’d hoped. And the same had always been true in their religious practice as devout Jews. It was their choice to show up with appropriate sacrifices at Temple. They knew what it took to be devout and they knew it was their choice how devout they were going to be.
But that’s not what Jesus said about relationship with God.
Jesus told them that relationship with God was not something they picked and chose, like a huge buffet at a casino restaurant. Religious practice that flowed out of the deep relationship Jesus described was not a hobby they could fit in (or not) to their busy lives. No, it was something much, much deeper, something to do with identity and mystery and, well, God.
Jesus said, “You did not choose me, but I chose you!,” meaning: this relationship you’ve embarked on is not something you turn on and off when convenient. No, when they entered into relationship with God they became familiar, chosen, part of a relationship that was precious and profoundly interdependent. There was no consumer ease with which they could look at their religious lives anymore; God’s unreasonable love had engaged them; they were chosen; they would never be un-chosen.
And, that was a little different than what they thought being a Christian meant.
And third, Jesus wanted them to know that all the fuss about religious practice for the sake of marking off requirements or filling in boxes was really overrated. Those disciples scrambled over hillsides, climbed over rocks, gathered in as close as they could, memo pads in hand, ready to hear exactly what it was they needed to do to make Jesus happy.
But, that’s not what Jesus said about relationship with God.
All the invitations to radical living that Jesus offered were never given for the purpose of trying to appease a demanding God. In fact, they weren’t even commandments in the sense that they had always understood the commandments.
What Jesus wanted them to remember was that this commandment he gave them to love each other was different than all the commandments they’d been compelled to follow all their lives. It wasn’t a behavior requirement; it was an invitation to take the baton of God’s unreasonable love and to run it a little further down the road, closer to the transformation God envisioned for the world, offering this unreasonable love to others, just like Jesus had offered it to them.
And, that was a little different than what they thought being a Christian meant.
“Let’s pretend that we’re all Christians here.”
That’s how the story Jim Wallis tells in his book Call to Conversion begins.
He says he was sitting in a conference in New York City discussing social justice with theologians, pastors, and other people of faith. A man there stood up and said, “Let’s pretend that you are all Christians here. If you were really followers of Jesus, you would not accumulate the way you do; you would share everything you had; you would actually love each other; you would treat each other as if you were a family. Why don’t you do that? Why don’t you live that way?”
Assuming we’re all Christians here, these hard questions are for us to hear too, because it seems that even despite our smug assurances of our 2000 years of tradition and convenient and easy cultural reinforcement, it might be we still don’t really understand what Jesus came to teach us.
And, assuming Jesus still doesn’t have a cell phone, there’s no way we’re going to get the message about what we’re forgetting unless we go back and take a look at what it was Jesus thought critical to remember. That is, if we’re going to call ourselves followers of Christ. A really good way to do that might just be taking another hard look at Jesus’ words from John chapter 15 and honestly measuring our own ideas of faith against the radical message Jesus wanted to be sure we got.
The truth is, we’re just as bad as the first disciples, and we might be even further from what God had hoped for us.
We imagine a God who’d like us to meet certain moral obligations, to fulfill expectations and to make sure we cover all the bases of what it means to be a Christian. It’s easier that way, to know who is in and who is out!
Jesus says nope. God wants to be our friend, to be in an interdependent relationship of love where we behave as if we are, in fact, friends of God and that God is a friend of ours.
And, that might just be a little different than what we thought being a Christian meant.
We talk about choosing our faith, and we’re consumers of the highest order. We choose our churches, we choose the level of our faith practice, we choose how much we let God and all the commitments that come with institutional religion fill up our lives.
Jesus wants to remind us that’s not what he had in mind at all! Instead, Jesus said that God chooses us . . . that we walk along this journey of life and faith engaged in deep relationship with God—not us, picking and choosing and compartmentalizing our faith practice, but God, engaging us in life-encompassing relationship.
And, that might just be a little different than what we thought being a Christian meant.
We’re people who know you never talk about politics or religion in polite company, and while we take our faith seriously we’re pretty private about it. After all, it’s a personal decision how you practice religion, and our own eternal destiny is, as we know, our own responsibility.
Jesus says our faith is not personal. Relationship with God is never meant to be kept to ourselves. Instead, being a Christian compels us to love and love and love, to a love that multiplies and spreads to those around us who in turn spread it to others until it covers and transforms the whole world.
And, that might just be a little different than what we thought being a Christian meant.
So, let’s assume we’re all Christians here. Are we really willing to let go of the cultural definitions of Christian faith that have led us to sanitize and personalize the great challenge of following Jesus? Like that commenter at Jim Wallis’ conference pointed out, there’s not much about the way we live that practically reflects the great challenge of Christian discipleship.
Assuming we’re all Christians here, we’ve signed on to follow Jesus, who taught us that God is the one who constantly and thoroughly engages the very core of who we are as people, a God who has chosen us and folded our lives into God’s larger campaign for wholeness and healing and hope in this world. We’re following the one who taught us to love as Mother Teresa said, “until it hurts” and who, in fact, loved us so much that he wouldn’t stop sharing God’s offer of reconciling relationship over and over and over again, against huge odds, until he died because his challenging message made so many powerful people angry.
This love, he wanted to remind us one last time, is nothing contained or respectable or appropriate. No, it was far more unreasonable. It meant that being a Christian pushes us into places of discomfort and radical difference from the world around us. He wanted us to know that the love God has for each one of us, unreasonable though it may be, is the same kind of radical, unreasonable love with which we should be actively living in this world.
Not exclusive and rule-bound, but generous and interdependent.
Not consumer driven, pick and choose, but utterly all-encompassing and irrevocable.
Not personal and private and hoarding and scarce, but lavish and abundant with plenty to share, especially for those from whom we traditional Christians have worked so hard to keep out.
If Jesus could pick up his cell phone and call to remind us, this is what he would say.
This is what he did say.
It’s a good reminder, because if we listen closely we might have some serious changes to make in how we live our lives.
That is, assuming we still want to call ourselves Christians.
