A Sermon for Easter 5 - A 'New' Commandment

Readings: Revelation 21:1-6; John 13:31-35

Two elderly gentlemen had been best friends for years, and they both live to their early 90's, when one of them suddenly falls deathly ill. His friend comes to visit him on his deathbed, and they're reminiscing about their long friendship, when the dying man's friend asks, "Listen, when you die, do me a favor. I want to know if there's baseball in heaven."

The dying man said, "We've been friends for years, I'll do this for you." And then he dies. A couple days later, his surviving friend is sleeping when he hears his friend's voice. The voice says, "I've got some good news and some bad news. The good news is that there's baseball in heaven."

"What's the bad news?"

"You're pitching on Wednesday."

As most of you probably know by now, I love baseball. I love playing it and watching it, and I especially enjoying visiting new ballparks I hadn’t previously seen. I used to go to games fairly regularly at Coca-Cola Field in Buffalo. During March breaks I’d visit a handful of different parks where MLB spring trainings were held. I’ve even taken a few trips specifically to see the diamonds in Chicago, Milwaukee, and Detroit. One of the things I really enjoy about baseball is how the different ballparks facilitate a different experience of the game. A trip to Wrigley Field in Chicago, for example, is like travelling back 100 years in a time machine to get a feel of what the game was like back then.  Baseball is a game full of rich tradition, and yet many are also enjoying the positives in innovation, both to ballparks (I for one, would not want the Dome to model their bathrooms after Wrigley's trough system!) and to the game itself (as sentimental as it is to see a pitcher hit, I'm always worried about them injuring themselves as they flail meekly at balls zipping past them).

The readings we heard this morning speak of innovation both to the context (or ballpark) in which Christians 'play', and the 'rules' or standards characteristic to their life together (the game itself).

In our reading from the Revelation to John, the early Church is promised a new 'ballpark' in which to live that requires a radical shift in thinking about the cosmos and one's day-to-day life.  Many people think of heaven as a place to go when we die. With clear gnostic influences, Christian teaching has often emphasized the idea that this earth is of secondary importance to the heavenly realm.  Many a Christian have justified abuse of the environment with an ideology that says, 'What happens in this world is not all that important since it is life-after-death that is of most importance'.  This way of thinking has also contributed to a callousness regarding key social justice issues like slavery and poverty – for if the human soul is of the greatest import, then why bother expending so much time and energy to these 'temporal' problems?

But in today's reading, the movement is not from earth to heaven, it is from heaven to earth:

“Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.”

In John's Revelation, people are not taken up and away from this evil world and into the next, rather, God comes to make God's home with them.  John's audience most likely were eagerly awaiting the opportunity to escape this life and its sufferings.  But the image here is one of a transformed earth where heaven and earth meet and where God becomes the home for the people.  Some interpreters of Revelation believe that the author of Revelation might have been among those refugees fleeing Palestine following the Jewish war against Rome in A.D. 66-70.  By the end of this war Jerusalem had burned to the ground, the Temple was destroyed, and many of its people were scattered or sold into slavery.  If John was one of these people, then the

reference to “a new heaven and a new earth” and particularly the reference to the “new Jerusalem” take on a highly charged meaning. For this writer may have no city in which he is truly at home. If that is true...this evocation of a new Jerusalem would touch the deepest yearnings of human beings for a sense of place, for sheer physical security. The earlier Jerusalem, now in ruins as a result of the ravages of the Roman army, derived its glory from the fact that the Temple was located there, the locus of the worship of Israel’s God. In this Jerusalem, by contrast, there will be no temple (see v. 22), for here God lives among God’s own people.

Their 'ballpark' was no longer limited to physical structures and geographical locations, nor was it a heaven far away up in the sky.  It was now among the people where God would dwell.  It was among the community of the faithful that they could find and experience God.  As they prayed together, sang songs together, shared food with one another, this group that knew so much suffering could discern God's revelatory word, “See, I am making all things new.”

That same voice, decades earlier, was proclaiming a newness to his small community of nervous disciples.  As his suffering and death lay before him, Jesus took the time to speak to the disciples, through word and action, of the commandment to love:  I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”

Ever wondered why Jesus called it a 'new' commandment? For surely it wasn't new in that the disciples would've grown up rehearsing the Shema that reminded them of the need to love God and love neighbour. But it was new in the sense that Jesus' life was bringing it a sharpness and poignancy never before seen. Let us remember the context of this teaching:  Jesus is hosting the 'Last Supper' on the eve of his arrest, torture, and execution. He has taken the role of a slave by washing the dirty, smelly feet, of his faulty friends. Judas has just left the table to go and betray Jesus to the authorities.  Peter is only hours away from denying any association with his Lord.  You would think this would be an opportunity for Jesus to reprimand his followers for their past and future failures. 

Instead, Jesus is trying to prepare them for what is to come and he promises that though he will no longer be physically present with them, they will not be abandoned.  And he's modelling for them the way of love even while he is being betrayed. He shows them that love demonstrates itself in the mundane service of one another: washing feet, sharing a meal, etc.  But he is also about to show them the greatness of love that would lay down its life for one's friends.  Love would drive him to the cross and offer the most powerful lesson the disciples could learn. 

On the one hand, loving one another as Jesus has loved encompasses the mundane; it means serving one another, even in the most menial tasks. On the other hand, this love encompasses heroic acts of great risk; it extends even to the point of giving one’s life for another. The love of which Jesus speaks, then, and which Jesus demonstrates in his life and death, is a love which extends from the mundane to the heroic and encompasses every kind of self-giving act in between.

I cannot help but feel guilty over the ways we Christians fall short in the ways of love.  Jesus says the world will know we are Christians by our love for one another.  And yet we quarrel over theological matters, focus on our differences in worship preferences, and are so often indifferent to the struggles of the people we sit next to in Church. Our culture praises busyness, sets an impossible scheduling standard for families, and little time or energy are left for relationships and forming community.

I think some of us may also be a little guilty of swinging too far to the idea of setting boundaries with people. To be sure there are many instances where this is necessary, especially in areas of abuse or unbalanced power, but I’m likely guilty of keeping people at a distance because loving them would cost me more than I’m willing to give. We’re often quick to voice our support of loved ones – but is that love conditional upon our approval or available only if it doesn’t come at a personal cost? What does the example of Jesus teach us?

But today we are reminded about what's most important.  Today we recall that God is most clearly made known in loving community; that God comes to make God's home among us, and that home is ornamented with love. That love shows itself in simple, mundane acts, and in grand sacrificial gestures.  Let us recommit ourselves to this way of life today.

“Jesus could not be clearer: It is not by our theological correctness, not by our moral purity, not by our impressive knowledge that everyone will know that we are his disciples. It is quite simply by our loving acts -- acts of service and sacrifice, acts that point to the love of God for the world made known in Jesus Christ.”