6 Easter, 2026-A: It all boils down to Love

Lectionary: Acts 17:22-31; Psalm 66:7-18; 1 Peter 3:13-22; John 14:15-21

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. 

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. 

Beloved Dame Julian of Norwich, Medieval mystic, speaks of this so eloquently. Here are her words: 

 “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.

5 Easter, 2026-A: Pondering God in us

Lectionary: Acts 7:55-60, Psalm 31:1-5, 15-16; 1 Peter 2:2-10; John 14:1-14 

En el nombre de Dios: creator, redentor, y santificador. Amen. In the name of God: Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier. Amen. 

I’m a big fan of classic English literature. I love how the characters in those stories sat in reflective thought for hours just pondering. For example, in Charlotte Brönte’s novel, “Villette” the main character, Lucy, spends three hours reflecting upon a single conversation she had with Dr. Bretton. (
Smith, Elder, & Co, UK, 1853)

Three hours! Can you imagine? There is wisdom in this, though. Taking time in reflection often leads to a fuller understanding.

It’s a lost art I wish we would reclaim, and church can help us do that. As it happens, our lectionary writers provide us the perfect opportunity today by leading us to revisit the Last Supper, even this far into the 50 Days of Easter, and reflect deeply on what is being re-presented.

Before the resurrection, the disciples heard Jesus’ words, but we’re told, they didn’t fully understand them. After the resurrection, everything Jesus said and did has new, more profound meaning. The church is invited to spend some time listening deeply and letting God guide our understanding, because these events will be the foundational guide for our life choices, just as they were for those first disciples.

Last Sunday, Good Shepherd Sunday, we heard Jesus claiming himself as the gate, who, as Susanna+ preached, is a different kind of gate – a gate that opens out to welcome in, instead of closing in to keep others out. This week, Jesus says that no one can come to God except through him.

This statement has often been used by the Church as an exclusionary text. Unless you are Christian, or a particular kind of Christian, you cannot enter. Sadly, that totally misunderstands who Jesus is, as the second person of the Trinity, and does harm by excluding the very people Jesus died and rose to reclaim.

By using the I AM statements in this gospel, Jesus is claiming his divinity, which is now intimately and innately tied to his humanity. I AM is the name God used to identify God’s self in Exodus. In Jesus, the fullness of the Trinity of God is now revealed to us in human form.

By this revelation, Jesus invites us into a new relationship, one that moves us beyond a literal, earthly understanding and into an expansive, spiritual understanding. The literal listeners, symbolized by Thomas in this story, ask, ‘Where are you going? How can we know the way?” In other words, how do we follow you? Remember, this is before Thomas has touched the divine wounds in the resurrected Christ.

Jesus responds with amazing compassion, gently addressing the very human hesitance to move from earthly to spiritual understanding. He clarifies that what he is speaking about isn’t a location, but a relationship: “where I AM, there you will also be… because I AM in God and God is in me… If you know me, you know the fullness of God also…” Trust me, Jesus says, but if you can’t trust me, trust the works themselves. They, too, reveal God.

You’ll notice I changed the word “Father” to “God” when quoting this gospel. The reason is, the centuries-old habit of the church using the term “father” exclusively for God has led to both a denial of the feminine aspect of God and the diminishment and value of women. The outcome, with which we are still contending today, is the ongoing subjugation and exploitation of women and others who lack power or privilege: children of all genders, LGBTQIA2S+, immigrants, the poor, and the vulnerable.

The word Jesus used in this gospel, which has been translated only as “father,” has multiple and layered meanings and opens up to us the vastness of the nature of God. The word actually translates as nourisher, protector, upholder; nearest ancestor, progenitor of a people, the founder of a race or tribe.

Jesus, the Christ, who proclaims himself as “I AM,” God, is our progenitor, our nearest ancestor. Through Jesus, the second person of the Trinity, we have been given a new relationship with the Trinity of God, Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier, who dwells in and acts through humanity.

Jesus was the firstborn, the progenitor of the state of coexistence of divinity and humanity. We are the next born of it, because where Jesus is, there we are also. Jesus, who is God, dwells in us and we in him.

When we ponder these words of Jesus, they reach deeply into us, moving us beyond our earthly understanding and into a deeper, truer, broader spiritual understanding. This will definitely take some time, probably more than a single 3-hour ponder session.

Moving into this new relationship with God will require us to open ourselves as we reflect, and to respond to God each time They tap us on the shoulder and call our attention to Them. When we do, our understanding grows, matures, expands... and we realize that the truth God is revealing to us will affect every decision we make and every action we take.

The story of the stoning of Stephen is a perfect example of how earthly ears resist hearing the truth of God. The world will kill speakers of the truth to maintain the status quo, the agreed-upon storyline.

I remember when I was about five years old, and I would try to tell my family and the nuns at my Catholic school about my spiritual experiences of God: how the trees sang a song of heaven to me; how forest critters, including snakes, drew close and hung out with me like family; how the healing power of God opened my awareness to illness and injury in other people’s bodies, or how God my Mother would hold me in her lap and heal me from the continuing abusive experiences in my childhood.

I learned very quickly that these were not welcomed discussions, especially my experience of God as Mother, which I had before my Christian educators taught me that God could only be Father. It didn’t stop these experiences from happening - it only stopped me from talking about them.

It’s probably no surprise then how much I love the maternal metaphor in Peter’s epistle, where he says: “Like newborn infants, long for the pure, spiritual milk.” Long for the nourishment at our Mother's breast, that leads to a spiritual understanding that will work and live in cooperation with earthly understanding because by it we “grow into salvation.” In other words, by it, we mature in our eternal and temporal relationship with God.

If ever you “have tasted that the Lord is good…[Peter says] let yourselves be built into a spiritual house, ...a holy priesthood…” Like Jesus, Peter isn’t talking about a location when he says “be a spiritual house,” and he isn’t talking about an ordained office when he says “be a holy priesthood.” He’s talking about the fullness of the human-divine relationship that is in all of us, because of Jesus.

The spirit of Jesus lives in us, and that truth affects how we hear Jesus say,” the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these.” It’s hard to imagine doing greater works than Jesus did - raising the dead, healing the man born blind, calming the storm on the sea… but only when we listen with literal ears and from an earthly understanding.

In fact, we’re already doing these works. Whenever we accompany someone through a time of transition as they let go of their old life or their old self, or a loved one, and step into a new life, God, who dwells in us, is doing Their work raising the dead back to life. When we speak the truth of God in Christ by our lives or using words, and someone finally gets it, God has done Their work in us, bringing sight to the blind. When we walk willingly into someone’s nightmare, bearing the peace of Christ to them by our very presence, God has worked through us to calm the storm in their life.

Jesus concludes this portion of his farewell discourse with a statement that truly deserves reflection: “If in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it.” Jesus isn’t promising that we can have whatever we want. Quite the opposite.

Jesus is promising that when we enter into the intimate, innate relationship with God who dwells in us, what we desire will begin to reflect God’s desire, and the will of God will be done on earth as it is in heaven by God in Christ who works in and through us.

I pray we all spend time reflecting often and deeply with the one who is the Way, and the Truth, and the Life in us so that we will be guided by God in every circumstance and teach our young ones how God’s will is accomplished on earth as it is in heaven. Amen.