St. Luke’s in the Meadow Episcopal Church
Easter 5C – May 18, 2025
Acts 11:1-18; Psalm 148; Revelation 21:1-6; John 13.31-35
Homily preached by the Rev. Canon Linda S. Taylor

Jesus said, “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you should also love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”

We tend to get confused about this commandment. It’s a commandment, not a suggestion or a hint. We also tend to get confused about the whole concept of loving one another. Our confusion disturbs our relationships with each other, and it also disturbs our relationship with God. There are several sources of this confusion, and for simplicity’s sake, we can label them as fallacies.

First, there’s the holiness fallacy. We all know this one. It comes from that part of us that believes that being Christians, being followers of Christ, means that at some point in our lives, we’ll reach such a level of holiness that we will absolutely overflow with warm, loving feelings for everyone we meet. This fallacy leads us to believe that when we get to be good enough Christians, we will look at everyone we meet and see with total clarity what God loves in that person. This fallacy leads us to believe that we will some day be so close to God that nothing other people do will bother us, and we’ll be free at last to love people as Jesus has loved us. The corollary of this fallacy is that we don’t really have to make any effort to modify our behavior—that someday we will somehow magically transmogrify into little beams of sunshine, spreading light wherever we wander.

Then there’s the affinity fallacy. We also know this one pretty well. We have an affinity for some people. We like them. We feel comfortable with them.  Have you ever noticed that the people we like may have some foibles or peculiarities but that the people we don’t like have personality defects? This fallacy leads us to believe that the people we like are more deserving of loving actions than the people we don’t like. The corollary of this fallacy is that if those people would only behave appropriately, we wouldn’t have any difficulty treating them with love.

Finally, there’s the niceness fallacy. One of our favorites. Most of us learned at our mother’s knee that if we can’t say something nice: congregational response: we shouldn’t say anything at all. Most of us internalized this instruction to mean we should never say anything that makes us feel uncomfortable—anything that makes us feel less than loving. I’ve learned—and you may have had the same experience—that I can feel pretty comfortable saying the less-than-nice words to a third party—someone who has nothing at all to do with the issue. The corollary of this fallacy is that Christian love has no connection has nothing to do with the reality of our lives.

There’s a part of us that believes these fallacies. And these fallacies are some of the things that get in the way of our living into Jesus’ commandment. What these fallacies have in common is their foundational belief that you and I don’t have any responsibility for opening ourselves to transformation.

Years ago and far away, in the California diocese of El Camino Real, the Very Rev. Rebecca McClain was the speaker for our diocesan clergy conference. She shared a good bit of wisdom with us during those days, and I wish I could remember all of it. What stuck in my mind was one teaching: Practice doesn’t make perfect; practice makes permanent. In other words, what we do is what we do. The more we do whatever it is that we do, the more embedded the behavior becomes—the more the behavior becomes an inextricable part of who we are. The corollary is that what we do is what we will do. The most accurate predictor of people’s future actions is their current actions.

There are days when all of that takes me to a place of fairly deep discouragement. There are days when I despair of ever getting it right—days when I want the do-over button on a chain around my neck—days that feel like an inversion of one of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets to the Portuguese—the poem that begins How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. Sooner or later, I remember that I have a choice—that I have a choice about my behavior and about changing my behavior when I don’t like what I see in the mirror. There is no do-over button. I can’t change my actions of five minutes ago. What I can do is make a decision for a better path.

One way I’ve learned to do that is to ask myself how I want to remember a particular interaction. Do I want it to be one of those things that come into my mind just as I drift off to sleep—then keep me awake for a chunk of time? To do that requires that I take a little time out before I speak—and when I can manage that, it makes all the difference.

Jesus said, “Just as I have loved you, you should also love one another.” As we look at the stories of Jesus’ interaction with his disciples, with the people whom he met along the way, and with the people who conspired to kill him, we see something very different than the warm fuzzy affection that we sometimes imagine is the height of Christian love. Christian love is a decision to act in love. The commandment to love one another is not about a warm rush of emotion toward another person. It’s about walking in Jesus’ footsteps, treating the people around us as he treated the people around him, with respect, honesty and compassion. It’s about choosing to act with love, no matter what’s going on around us. It’s about choosing to act as if we had that warm feeling.  It’s about choosing to speak directly, respectfully and compassionately to the people around us.  It’s about choosing to live into our baptismal covenant. It’s about practicing to be the people God created us to be and Christ calls us to become.

I invite you to join with me in practicing what Jesus came to teach us. And I invite you to join me in offering our lives to that struggle. I have no illusions that we will be fixed by the end of the week—or the month—or the year—or ever. As we come to this table where we are fed, I invite you to join me in offering all that we are and all that we have to put God’s love into action in all the days of our lives. Christ meets us here—to guide us, to love us, to sustain us in the struggle.  Today, tomorrow, the next day, and the next day, and the next day, and the next….

Thanks be to God.