Love others as I have loved you. We’ve heard these words quite a few times lately and each time I have heard them, I always wondered how they were delivered. Sometimes I think they were said out of exasperation. Jesus had just sent Judas out, knowing that he would be betrayed. He trusted Judas. Judas was the group’s treasurer and still Jesus was about to be betrayed. And so I wonder if from that frustration he wanted to make it easier for his disciples, and for us, to understand what it was he was saying all along: Just love.
And it is a simple message to understand, because love is easy.
Love is easy when you’re falling in love; it is easy when holding hands and it is easy in that moment of anticipation, just before a first kiss. It is easy when you’re flying down I-4 heading west from Orlando on your way to Tampa, singing along, poorly, to top forty songs on the radio with a girlfriend who you knew would someday become your wife.
Love is easy when holding your child for the first time, when you turn your back to the room with your son in your arms and you promise him that you will always be there for him; that you will always love him and you will always strive to protect him from the vagaries of the world.
Love is easy going on walks with your daughter and it is easy to love her as she talks about the things that are important to her, as she pantomimes her day, her eyes always open wide, excited, accepting love.
Love is easy and it is easy to love as a child does. And I am thinking now of my own childhood, because I was blessed and I had a great upbringing. I was raised by parents who loved me without question and a brother who I idolized when I wasn’t punching him in the face.
I had the freedom to roam. I would ride my bike down to the brook at the end of my street in Ansonia and build dams and search for frogs. Other times I would ride up to the Nature Center to learn about the world around me and the importance of conservation.
And on some weekends the family, all of us, would pile into our 1978 Plymouth Valare and we’d head down to a yellow house on a cul de sac in Upper Montclair New Jersey where my grandparents, my mother’s mom and dad, lived. I loved my grandparents and it was easy to love them.
In the summer, my father would go into my grandfather’s garage and emerge with a wiffle ball and bat and we’d play on a perfect green lawn which, in retrospect, wasn’t very big, but to me, a boy of 7 or 8, it was Shea Stadium’s equivalent. And we’d play under the warmth of the sun and we’d play as my grandparents and the rest of the family watched and it was easy to be loved.
And when the daylight faded and the evening came, we would sit down to dinner in the formal dining room at a table set with china, a blue oriental carpet covered the floor beneath it. My grandfather, a normally taciturn and somewhat stern man, would then start to hum as he sliced his lamb into pieces all the same size and he served himself his peas just so, and he doled out his mint jelly with exactitude. Watching my grandfather prepare his dinner was like watching Baryshnikov dance, Picasso paint; it was art and it was beautiful.
And when his meal was settled he would regale us with stories of his time with my grandmother in Kenya, or tell us tales of Pakistan or share about his time just after the war when he would return prisoners of war back to Japan in LST’s that he piloted. And I would listen in awe to his stories and I wanted to live in Africa too and I wanted to see Aden too, never mind I had no idea where it was, I wanted to be there! And always, I would realize that this man, my grandfather, was my hero and that I loved him completely and that when I was with him I did not question if I was happy, I just knew and it was easy to love him.
Love others as I have loved you. Sometimes when I read these words, I wonder if they were said with such a sense of great urgency, for Jesus’ time on Earth was growing short and he knew that Judas would betray him and he knew after so many years of preaching and so many miracles and great and kind works there was still so much more to be done.
Yes. Love can be easy, and Jesus tells us to love each other, but then he adds: “…just as I have loved you”. And there it is. He is not asking for the love of a child or envisioning romantic love, but he is commanding us to love each other as he loved us and that is not easy, in fact, it is work. Jesus’ love is an active love. He reached out to the people of his time and he continues to reach out to us today. Yes, love is work.
Looking out today, I see some of us in our work clothes, ready to clean up the church grounds, to wash the windows, to clean the kitchen. We are doing this work out of a sense of love, a love of this little brown shingled building, a love for the community within it. We are doing the work required to maintain it so that we can continue to share our love and worship a God who commands us to love. And we are doing it so that we can continue to grow our love.
And we see this in our actions. Not just today but in so many days throughout the year. Just a couple of months ago, 21 kids, 21 young adults gathered together not for a movie nor a school dance but to deny themselves food for 30 hours. 21 kids. 30 hours. And they did this out of a sense of love so that they could better identify with the hunger that surrounds us. They denied themselves food and at the height of their hunger, they prepared a meal. They worked to mix the tuna. They worked to cut the celery. They worked to serve the meal.
That meal, however, wasn’t prepared for themselves. They served it to those more hungry than them. 21 hungry kids worked to ease starvation, to ease the agony of the day, a day in the life of the homeless. Love is work, and when preparing food while full of hunger, it is hard. But no matter how hard it is to love sometimes, the effort is still worth it, for we have the potential to realize so much more of a reward from that effort, an effort that involves our community, ourselves and our family. We must work to love.
Love others as I have loved you. When I read these words, I wonder if they were said with such desperation, for Jesus knew he was about to be betrayed and he knew that although he had committed so many acts of kindness and performed so many miracles, there was work left to be done, and still he would be denied by Peter three times in a single night and it is hard to love.
Soon after my grandfather had passed away, about a year actually, when he had gone to a place I could not follow, my grandmother wished to travel again, to stretch her legs once more and experience the world anew. She signed herself and me up for a trip to Morocco. We found ourselves in a hotel in Marrakesh, talking, each of us sitting on the edge of two twin beds facing each other. She was my roommate and we were talking. She was talking of her time with my grandfather and she was talking of the not so good times and sometimes, even those that were bad. She paused and I broke the silence. “Surely you loved him, though”, I asked. “Of course I loved him”, she replied, “Sometimes it was just harder to do”.
Love is hard and not so easy for after all of the work we put into it, there is the opportunity that that love may not be returned. And on that day with the sunlight flooding into the hotel windows, my grandmother told me that love can be hard and still we must love.
For you see, my grandfather was an alcoholic. Now, it’s important to note that he was not a mean drunk; he did not strike my grandmother. He was not irresponsible, he did not leave his family and he did not fall down or pass out, he never forgot his dignity. In fact, my mother used to say that she knew he had been drinking because that was when he would tell her that he loved her.
But alcoholism is an insidious disease and it can take over a person’s life. It can cause someone to take another drink, rather than go to work. It can eat away at the body; it can destroy the mind.
As it progressed, my grandmother watched my grandfather slide for a bit and then she took action. She asked him to seek help. She worked to find him the help he needed and when he did not listen, it was hard.
But, eventually, her words, her work, did help and when my grandfather found the clarity to forgive himself for all of his absences and for all of his intrusions, he finally sought the help he needed and he then asked for forgiveness from his wife, his family, his God.
All of this happened before I became conscious to the world around me. All of this happened before and after it happened, I was the one who was rewarded with the fruits of all of my grandmother’s labor.
Love others as I have loved you. Sometimes I wonder at the impossibility of that task. How, God, can I love as Jesus loves us and who loves us so perfectly? I do not know, but I know if we aspire to that love, if we work as hard as we can towards that love then, yes, we are promised with salvation, but the more immediate reward is the fact that we can overcome any obstacle and we could quite possibly experience the simple and utter realization of the divine here among us.
And this I know, because when I was a child, in the summer we’d all head down to that yellow house on a cul-de-sac in Montclair New Jersey and my father would go into my grandfather’s garage and emerge with a wiffle ball and bat and we’d play on a perfect green lawn which wasn’t very big, but to me, it was Heaven on Earth. And we’d play under the warmth of the sun. And we’d play under the clear-eyed and sober gaze of a man who I loved.
Amen.
And it is a simple message to understand, because love is easy.
Love is easy when you’re falling in love; it is easy when holding hands and it is easy in that moment of anticipation, just before a first kiss. It is easy when you’re flying down I-4 heading west from Orlando on your way to Tampa, singing along, poorly, to top forty songs on the radio with a girlfriend who you knew would someday become your wife.
Love is easy when holding your child for the first time, when you turn your back to the room with your son in your arms and you promise him that you will always be there for him; that you will always love him and you will always strive to protect him from the vagaries of the world.
Love is easy going on walks with your daughter and it is easy to love her as she talks about the things that are important to her, as she pantomimes her day, her eyes always open wide, excited, accepting love.
Love is easy and it is easy to love as a child does. And I am thinking now of my own childhood, because I was blessed and I had a great upbringing. I was raised by parents who loved me without question and a brother who I idolized when I wasn’t punching him in the face.
I had the freedom to roam. I would ride my bike down to the brook at the end of my street in Ansonia and build dams and search for frogs. Other times I would ride up to the Nature Center to learn about the world around me and the importance of conservation.
And on some weekends the family, all of us, would pile into our 1978 Plymouth Valare and we’d head down to a yellow house on a cul de sac in Upper Montclair New Jersey where my grandparents, my mother’s mom and dad, lived. I loved my grandparents and it was easy to love them.
In the summer, my father would go into my grandfather’s garage and emerge with a wiffle ball and bat and we’d play on a perfect green lawn which, in retrospect, wasn’t very big, but to me, a boy of 7 or 8, it was Shea Stadium’s equivalent. And we’d play under the warmth of the sun and we’d play as my grandparents and the rest of the family watched and it was easy to be loved.
And when the daylight faded and the evening came, we would sit down to dinner in the formal dining room at a table set with china, a blue oriental carpet covered the floor beneath it. My grandfather, a normally taciturn and somewhat stern man, would then start to hum as he sliced his lamb into pieces all the same size and he served himself his peas just so, and he doled out his mint jelly with exactitude. Watching my grandfather prepare his dinner was like watching Baryshnikov dance, Picasso paint; it was art and it was beautiful.
And when his meal was settled he would regale us with stories of his time with my grandmother in Kenya, or tell us tales of Pakistan or share about his time just after the war when he would return prisoners of war back to Japan in LST’s that he piloted. And I would listen in awe to his stories and I wanted to live in Africa too and I wanted to see Aden too, never mind I had no idea where it was, I wanted to be there! And always, I would realize that this man, my grandfather, was my hero and that I loved him completely and that when I was with him I did not question if I was happy, I just knew and it was easy to love him.
Love others as I have loved you. Sometimes when I read these words, I wonder if they were said with such a sense of great urgency, for Jesus’ time on Earth was growing short and he knew that Judas would betray him and he knew after so many years of preaching and so many miracles and great and kind works there was still so much more to be done.
Yes. Love can be easy, and Jesus tells us to love each other, but then he adds: “…just as I have loved you”. And there it is. He is not asking for the love of a child or envisioning romantic love, but he is commanding us to love each other as he loved us and that is not easy, in fact, it is work. Jesus’ love is an active love. He reached out to the people of his time and he continues to reach out to us today. Yes, love is work.
Looking out today, I see some of us in our work clothes, ready to clean up the church grounds, to wash the windows, to clean the kitchen. We are doing this work out of a sense of love, a love of this little brown shingled building, a love for the community within it. We are doing the work required to maintain it so that we can continue to share our love and worship a God who commands us to love. And we are doing it so that we can continue to grow our love.
And we see this in our actions. Not just today but in so many days throughout the year. Just a couple of months ago, 21 kids, 21 young adults gathered together not for a movie nor a school dance but to deny themselves food for 30 hours. 21 kids. 30 hours. And they did this out of a sense of love so that they could better identify with the hunger that surrounds us. They denied themselves food and at the height of their hunger, they prepared a meal. They worked to mix the tuna. They worked to cut the celery. They worked to serve the meal.
That meal, however, wasn’t prepared for themselves. They served it to those more hungry than them. 21 hungry kids worked to ease starvation, to ease the agony of the day, a day in the life of the homeless. Love is work, and when preparing food while full of hunger, it is hard. But no matter how hard it is to love sometimes, the effort is still worth it, for we have the potential to realize so much more of a reward from that effort, an effort that involves our community, ourselves and our family. We must work to love.
Love others as I have loved you. When I read these words, I wonder if they were said with such desperation, for Jesus knew he was about to be betrayed and he knew that although he had committed so many acts of kindness and performed so many miracles, there was work left to be done, and still he would be denied by Peter three times in a single night and it is hard to love.
Soon after my grandfather had passed away, about a year actually, when he had gone to a place I could not follow, my grandmother wished to travel again, to stretch her legs once more and experience the world anew. She signed herself and me up for a trip to Morocco. We found ourselves in a hotel in Marrakesh, talking, each of us sitting on the edge of two twin beds facing each other. She was my roommate and we were talking. She was talking of her time with my grandfather and she was talking of the not so good times and sometimes, even those that were bad. She paused and I broke the silence. “Surely you loved him, though”, I asked. “Of course I loved him”, she replied, “Sometimes it was just harder to do”.
Love is hard and not so easy for after all of the work we put into it, there is the opportunity that that love may not be returned. And on that day with the sunlight flooding into the hotel windows, my grandmother told me that love can be hard and still we must love.
For you see, my grandfather was an alcoholic. Now, it’s important to note that he was not a mean drunk; he did not strike my grandmother. He was not irresponsible, he did not leave his family and he did not fall down or pass out, he never forgot his dignity. In fact, my mother used to say that she knew he had been drinking because that was when he would tell her that he loved her.
But alcoholism is an insidious disease and it can take over a person’s life. It can cause someone to take another drink, rather than go to work. It can eat away at the body; it can destroy the mind.
As it progressed, my grandmother watched my grandfather slide for a bit and then she took action. She asked him to seek help. She worked to find him the help he needed and when he did not listen, it was hard.
But, eventually, her words, her work, did help and when my grandfather found the clarity to forgive himself for all of his absences and for all of his intrusions, he finally sought the help he needed and he then asked for forgiveness from his wife, his family, his God.
All of this happened before I became conscious to the world around me. All of this happened before and after it happened, I was the one who was rewarded with the fruits of all of my grandmother’s labor.
Love others as I have loved you. Sometimes I wonder at the impossibility of that task. How, God, can I love as Jesus loves us and who loves us so perfectly? I do not know, but I know if we aspire to that love, if we work as hard as we can towards that love then, yes, we are promised with salvation, but the more immediate reward is the fact that we can overcome any obstacle and we could quite possibly experience the simple and utter realization of the divine here among us.
And this I know, because when I was a child, in the summer we’d all head down to that yellow house on a cul-de-sac in Montclair New Jersey and my father would go into my grandfather’s garage and emerge with a wiffle ball and bat and we’d play on a perfect green lawn which wasn’t very big, but to me, it was Heaven on Earth. And we’d play under the warmth of the sun. And we’d play under the clear-eyed and sober gaze of a man who I loved.
Amen.