This sermon was updated following a funeral on Saturday, so I've taken down the pre-recorded video and invite you to go to the Emmanuel YouTube channel to see it delivered live at the 9:30 am service. The updated text is below.
En el nombre de Dios: trinidad en unidad. In the name of God, Trinity in Unity. Amen.
Beloved Dame Julian of Norwich, Medieval mystic, speaks of this so eloquently. Here are her words:
Our gospel today is the next section of Jesus’ farewell discourse, and like last week, we are reading from his teaching given at the Last Supper in order to reflect on it from the perspective of his resurrection.
This part of Jesus’ teaching begins with “If you love me you will keep my commandments...” Is Jesus saying that his love is conditional to our obedience?
At first glance, it might seem like that, but I don’t think he is. In the first place, the word we translate as “if” isn’t a conditional in Greek. It’s a word that implies a future possibility which experience determines. And the word “keep” refers to preserving, maintaining, or continuing something.
It isn’t talking about obeying at all. That’s a whole different word in Greek.
So we might restate what Jesus said like this: When you love me, you will discover that you will maintain and continue what I have enjoined you to do. Then the question becomes, what did Jesus urge us to do? The answer is: to love.
Love one another as I have loved you. (Jn 13:34) Love your enemies. (Mt 5: 44) Love.
Once, when he was asked which was the greatest commandment, Jesus held up two: to love God with all our hearts, minds, strength, and souls (Deut 6:5), and to love our neighbor as ourselves (Lev 19:18) . On these two, he said, hang all the guidance and inspired teaching.
Granted, keeping those two commandments isn’t easy to do, especially in the midst of the kind of grief of loss the disciples would experience when he was gone from them, a loss he said would happen “in a little while.” So he promised them another comforter, translated here as Advocate, both words being accurate even in their distinction.
We can sense when people near us are beginning to panic. We can see it in their faces and body language. We can feel the energy of it building like static electricity around us. Perceiving this among his disciples, Jesus speaks directly to it, saying, I will not leave you comfortless or alone with no one to love you, take care of you, protect you, and celebrate you. I am coming to you - to comfort you and support you forever.
As with our gospel reading last week, we are invited to contemplate this teaching of Jesus with spiritual understanding. One day, Jesus says, we’ll get it! We’ll know that God is in Jesus, who is in us, and we are in him, and through him, we are in God.
Get it?
I remember when I was in my seminary Greek class, and we were all feeling so overwhelmed by how vastly different Greek was, from the alphabet to the layers of meanings, and the many conjugations and tenses. Our professor assured us that one day, we’d just get it, and he snapped his fingers.
Oh sure, we thought. Easy for him to say! But he was right. One day, it suddenly all fell into place and the learning began to happen at lightning speed, like a vortex was opened.
Jesus was promising the same thing… On that day you will know that I am in God, and you are in me, and I am in you. When you know that, deeply... spiritually, you will walk the path I have begun and you will be able to preserve and continue this way of being in the world.
You will know love, divine love. You will know that you are loved by God, and by me, and I will be revealed to you in ways you couldn’t have understood before, and it will change everything!
The knowledge Jesus is talking about here is that intimate, innate spiritual understanding that comes from living as the next born of the coexistence of humanity and divinity I preached about last week.
I want to return to one important phrase Jesus said: I am coming to you. Then Jesus speaks of the Advocate, the Spirit of Truth.
Last week, Jesus claimed himself as I AM (God), the way, the truth, and the life.
All of this time, Jesus has been trying to guide the disciples into knowing him as God Incarnate – a tough thing to comprehend - even now. In this gospel moment, Jesus is introducing the third person of the Trinity – even harder to comprehend – but so important.
Jesus is God who is Trinity in Unity. One God. Three persons. ONE GOD.
Jesus says I am coming. The Spirit is Jesus, who is I AM (God). And Jesus does come again – in a big way - at Pentecost and breathes his own divine spirit into those first followers and ever since into us. That was not what anyone was expecting, but God has a very long history of accomplishing God’s plan of love outside our expectations and beyond our understanding.
Our Jewish forbears handed to us an apocalyptic expectation of a day when the world would end, when the Messiah would come down to earth on a cloud to give a final judgement and end the world. The vestiges of that live on in current Christianity, but God had something else in mind, and Jesus accomplished it in a way that exceeded all human understanding, hope, or desire.
First, the final judgement has already happened through the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus when the Triune God judged that the whole world would be reconciled to Them by the forgiveness of sin.
In this gospel, which is ahead of the crucifixion and resurrection, the disciples could never have imagined what was about to happen. Jesus is preparing them for the unexpected, unanticipated thing God was about to do saying, I will leave you, but I am coming to you – and he did – as the Spirit of Truth, the Third Person of the Trinity.
The second coming has been and continues to be accomplished by the Trinity of God. As we say in our Advent wreath candle-lighting prayer, Christ is coming. Christ is always coming. That’s why Jesus compels us in this gospel to live as he urges us to live, no matter what happens around us.
I am coming, so love one another as I have loved you. (Jn 13:34) Love your enemies. (Mt 5: 44) Love.
“I desired in many ways to know what was our Lord's meaning. And fifteen years after..., I was answered in spiritual understanding, and it was said [to me]... Know it well, love was his meaning. Who reveals it to you? Love. What did he reveal to you? Love. Why does he reveal it to you? For love. Remain in this, and you will know more of the same.” (Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, Chapter 86)
Icon written and copyrighted by Anne Davidson and commissioned for my ordination. Used with permission.
This is the love in which “we live and move and have our being” as Paul quoted from the poets of his time… the love who “holds our souls in life and will not allow our feet to slip” as the psalmist says. It all boils down to love: divine, eternal, sacrificial, joyful, mutual love.This doesn’t change the fact that we will know suffering, doubt, and darkness throughout the course of our lives. In addition, we may get it, as Jesus said we would, then lose it again, and get it again, over and over in the course of our lives.
Knowing this love with spiritual understanding means that we will never be alone in any of the “changes and chances of this life.” (BCP, 133) We will never be comfortless. We will always be, as Dame Julian says, clothed in the love of God, which “wraps and holds us… enfolds us for love and will never let us go.”
We also have each other. Prayer not only “fastens us to God,” as Julian says. It also fastens us to one another, connecting the love of God in you to the love of God in me. Those connections are real, and through them God acts to change the world, working in and through us.
Since Julian of Norwich has been so present in this reflection, let’s close with the prayer assigned to her feast day, which was on May 8.
Let us pray: Lord God, who in your compassion granted to the Lady Julian many revelations of your nurturing and sustaining love: Move our hearts, like hers, to seek you above all things, for in giving us yourself you give us all; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
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