Sermon for the Sixth Sunday of Easter

Sermon for the Sixth Sunday of Easter (May 9, 2021).

View the scripture readings and the Collect of the Day: Easter 6B

Preached at St. James’ Episcopal Church in Skaneateles.

Manuscript

Actual sermon may vary!

“The United States suffers from a deficit of imagining the lives of other people.”

How does that strike you?

It certainly stopped me short. This sentence from a recent article in the Atlantic by a reporter who spent time with some of the millions of folks in the US who are refusing the COVID-19 vaccine. He discovers that one of the only questions that seemed to make at least a few of these folks reconsider their stance was the argument: What if you being vaccinated could protect your grandmother, your uncle, your vulnerable neighbor? What if this wasn’t just about you and your immunity?

Questions like this transform us. They are invitations to broaden our circles of care. We were created to respond to these invitations with love, to consider one another in the decisions we make for ourselves. And when we don’t care for one another, we suffer. That’s the word in the sentence that caught me up short.

We suffer from a deficit of imagining the lives of other people. We suffer because without one another, without love and friendship and mutual care, we are incomplete.

In our Gospel today Jesus reminds us that he wants us to be complete. “I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete.” Love one another, that my joy may be in you, and your joy may be complete. Without that love, we won’t know joy; something will be missing.

And when he goes on to say, “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends,” he means that we’re willing to let go of our own self-centering. We’re willing to put ourselves aside just long enough to imagine the life of another. To place others in the center of our circle of care. To ask ourselves: how might my choice, my attitude, my word, my time, my willingness to listen—how might it change someone else’s life for the better?  

This was the question, the invitation, that led Jesus to lay down his life for us: not out of masochism or misguided martyrdom. But for the mystery that by letting go of his own way, his own life, he could give life and give joy to the world.  Because in letting go of his own interest, he became completely free to share himself, to give himself away.

Every day in our own communities and around the world, people do lay down their lives so that others can live, or live more fully. They rush into burning buildings. They stand up for justice in the face of state violence. They spend the days of their lives in homes for the sick and the elderly, giving others the gift of dignity. But we don’t have to be Jesus, or a firefighter, to lay down our lives and know that joy. We know it when we set aside the plans of a busy day to listen to someone who is grieving. We know it when we set aside our own judgement long enough to ask real questions of someone who’s making a choice we don’t agree with.

When you hear the word joy, is there a person, living or dead, whose face comes to mind?

Joy.

Chances are that this person is a person who helped you see what it is to lay aside your life for your friends. Chances are that this person kept Jesus’ commandment that we love one another. On this Mother’s day, perhaps its someone who mothered you, who parented you, who gave themselves away to you freely, out of love, and out of joy in you. Someone who treated you as a gift from God, not an obligation. Perhaps its someone who let you love them in that free and self-giving way. Every one of us deserves that love. Every one of us was born to share that love. Every one of us is loved that way by God.

We suffer when we fall away from each other, but we don’t have to suffer that way. We weren’t created to be incomplete, isolated, self-centered. We were made for the joy of relationship, by a God who loves us first and whose true glory is our selfless love for one another. When we love one another, God just beams with pride and joy. Just… complete.

As you move out from this worship into your day, your week, your year ahead…  hold the memory of that person of joy in your heart. Ask God how you can share that joy, that love, that friendship, that freedom in what you do and say today. Go forth and love. Amen.