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SERMONS

The Fifth Sunday of Easter
May 18, 2003

According to the Associated Press, at the First Lutheran Church in Greenwich, New Jersey, you will not hear a sermon. The church's minister is trying a new way to draw people into the fold: an express 22-minute service that he says provides all the spirituality of the regular service in half the time. In the first two weeks the size of the congregation more than doubled-from nine to twenty-three.

The Rev'd John Kleist states, "It really is ideal. The service is not rushed at all." The shortened version eliminates sermon and sacrament, but retains most of the elements of a regular 45 to 60 minute service, including a greeting, statement of faith, apology for sins, prayer, an interpretation of the weekly Bible reading, and a song.

Parishioner Penny Bonawitch, who attended an express service with her two young children pronounced it a success. "You get it all in twenty minutes, and that's just about the time the kids start acting up," she said.

What more could anyone want? How much more do you need?

Ours is an impatient culture. We want what we want and we want it now. We have fast food and microwave. We have on demand television and overnight mail. We have high-speed internet access and twenty-four hour news. If anything important or sensational happens we have uninterrupted coverage and instant analysis. At any moment we can know what is happening anywhere in the world.

In our faith lives, we want to become holy and we want to become holy now!

This impatience stands in stark contrast to the gospel words we just heard. The setting is that upper room where Jesus is gathered with his closest friends on the night before his crucifixion. There Jesus tells his disciples, "If you love me, you will keep my commandments."

This commandment, as Jesus has just told them is the commandment to love. "A new commandment I give to you," Jesus said, "love one another as I have loved you."

The love that Jesus commands is not some abstract ideal. It requires a concrete object to love.

Mark Twain is reported to have said, "I love humanity, it's people I can't stand."

But John the evangelist writes, "How does God's love abide in anyone who has the world's goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help? Little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action."

For John, and for Jesus, we cannot love in the abstract. We are called to love specific others. To love my brother or sister means to act in certain way towards him or her. Anything else is a misplaced romanticism.

To keep the commandment of Jesus to love one another also requires time-it requires commitment and practice. One of the best formal workshops for learning this love is the Benedictine community.

Benedict of Nursia lived in the fifth and sixth centuries in central Italy. Dismayed by the decadence of Roman society he became a monk and founded a community in Monte Cassino. In the year 540 he wrote a rule - a set of guidelines for the monks who had gathered around him. This rule, the Rule of Benedict, has become the basic source from which other monastic rules have been derived.

One of the aims of the Benedictine life is the development of holiness. A hallmarks of Benedict's Rule is the notion of stability. Benedictine monks and nuns spend their lives with the community to which they make their monastic vows. There they spend their days in prayer, study, and work. They live their lives with the same people.

At a recent conference on Benedictine spirituality Rowan Williams, the new archbishop of Canterbury spoke on the monastery as "God's workshop." He stated:

The holiness envisaged … is entirely inseparable from the common life. The … work [is] bound up with the proximity of other people-and the same other people…. None of this is learned without the stability of the workshop. The community that freely promises to live together before God is one in which both truthfulness and respect are enshrined. I promise that I will not hide from you - and that I will also at times help you not to hide from me or from yourself. I promise that your growth towards the good God wants for you will be a wholly natural and obvious priority for me (here is perhaps the best definition of love that I have ever heard); and I trust that you have made the same promise. We have a lifetime for this. Without the promise, the temptation is always for the ego's agenda to surface again, out of fear that I shall be abandoned if the truth is known, fear that I have no time or resource to change as it seems as I must. No-one is going to run away; and the resources of the community are there on my behalf.

The community that Archbishop Williams describes is not necessarily limited to the monastery. What he says about that place might just as well be said about Christian marriage, or the Christian family, or a parish community such as ours.

What would our families be like … What would our churches be like … What would our communities be like if we refused to withdraw from them when life became difficult … If we promised to hang in there with one another no matter what came … If we sought to live together before God in both truthfulness and respect … If your growth towards the good God wants for you were a wholly natural and obvious priority for me … And if my growth towards the good God wants for me were a wholly natural and obvious priority for you?

Archbishop Williams goes on to ask "How often do we understand the promises of baptism as bringing us into this sort of group? How often do we think of the Church as a natural place for honesty, where we need not be afraid?"

What would such a parish be like? What would the lives of its members be like? What differences would it make in the lives of its neighbors?

The church at its heart is a laboratory - a place where we learn and practice and perfect what it means to love as God loves. We won't accomplish it immediately. We won't accomplish it twenty-two minutes or even in an hour.

But what better place to start practicing than here? And what better time than today?

"Little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action…. This is [God's] commandment, that we should believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ and love one another."

David Christian
The Chapel of the Cross
Madison, Mississippi