Rogation Sunday
Acts 10: 44 – 48 / Psalm 98 / I John 5:
1 – 6 / John 15: 9 – 15
This is the homily given at St. John’s, Huntingdon,
by Fr. Gene Tucker on Sunday, May 9, 2021.
“DO SOMETHING!”
(Homily
text: John 15: 9 – 15)
“If
you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love.” We hear, in this
morning’s appointed Gospel text, these words, spoken by our Lord during the
course of the Last Supper. The writer of the Fourth Gospel tells us a bit later
in our appointed text that the Lord seems to repeat Himself, saying, “You are
my friends if you do what I command you.” (Surely seems like the Lord really
wants us to hear and learn that lesson!)
If
we could summarize these two statements, we might boil them down to this: “Do
something!”
The
Christian faith is never a matter of being an observer or a passive part of
those who have gathered around the marvelous work of God that we know in the
sending of our Lord Jesus Christ to live and die as one of us. The Christian
life is never simply a matter of thinking to ourselves, “Well, I’m getting what
I want out of church, or out of my religious observances, so little else
matters.” Consider where we would be today if that original body of Apostles
had chosen to harbor their wonderful experiences with Jesus in their own
hearts, cherishing them as the most wonderful chapters in their lives. What
would have happened if they had chosen to keep their association with the Lord
to themselves? I think we know the answer, it would be an obvious one, wouldn’t
it? No, those Apostles were motivated by the coming of the Holy Spirit (an
event we will commemorate in two weeks, on the great feast of Pentecost) to go
out into the world, going far and wide, to share what God had done, and what a
difference the coming of Jesus had made in their own lives.
If
we trace the experience and the pattern of the Apostles’ lives, we can glean
some insights into the shape that our own faith walk will take.
The
Apostles’ experience of God, come in the flesh in the person of Jesus, began
with a personal encounter with Him. Likewise, each one of us must come to a
personal encounter with the risen and eternally-present Jesus. Head knowledge
alone won’t do. Nor will having some knowledge, some idea of who Jesus was, do
either. Nor will being baptized without living into the solemn vows we’ve made
to God in our Baptismal Covenant. No, what we’re talking about here is a
knowledge that is deep, and is getting deeper and deeper as we live our lives
in Christ. The original band of Disciples-become-Apostles began with a
personal, face-to-face encounter with God through Jesus Christ. We, too, must
emulate their experience.
Those
original followers learned. They learned by virtue of their associating with
Jesus, day in and day out, through hard and challenging times and in times of
celebration (yes, there were some of those). We, as mature Christians, are
called to a life-long pattern of study and learning. The necessity of learning
and its central role in the formation of a mature faith is one reason we read,
mark and learn (as the Prayer Book states) what Holy Scripture has to tell us
about God and about Jesus, and about the experiences of the saints of old who
succeeded in following where God had led, and about the failures that we human
beings are all too prone to repeat. After all, the Bible is very open about the
mistakes and the blunders that God’s people had done in ages past. The Bible is
very candid about such things.
They
learned to love. The ancient world was a very unloving place, I have the
feeling. Many people living in the Greco-Roman world into which the Gospel was
proclaimed knew it to be a place that was a harsh, uncertain, unloving place.
Many in that world found themselves in slavery, living far away from their
homes and their loved ones, whom they would never see again. Our world today
looks a lot like that world from 2,000 years ago. Our world today is a lonely,
uncertain, unloving place for far too many people. And yet, the early Church
welcomed such people into its midst, it said it didn’t matter if a noble man or
woman sat next to an unwashed slave, for each one called the other, “brother”
and “sister”. Such an attitude and such a practice posed a direct challenge to
the structure of the society of the first century. Yet, we, too, are called to
do the same thing, to offer a generous and radical welcome to all who come to
us. We are called to invite those we know and associate with into a
relationship with God in this place we call St. John’s. After all, if the early
Christians were known to be those who “loved one another”, then St. John’s also
ought to be known, above all, as a place where we love one another in the Lord.
Those
early Disciples-become-Apostles went out and did things. Practical things. They
cared for one another. I am reminded of the wonderful Letter of James. It’s a
very practical, short letter. In it, we read this: “If a brother or sister is
poorly clothed and lacking in daily food, and one of you says to them. ‘Go in
peace, be warmed and filled,’ without giving them the things needed for the
body, what good is that?” (James 2:15) Doing things like that for others in
need is nothing short of sacramental living, a Sacrament being defined as an
“outward and visible sign of an inward and invisible grace”. We are showing by
the things we do that the love of God dwells within us.
A
warning is in order here: The Christian life consists of far more than simply
“doing good stuff”. Works (practical acts of love, mercy and kindness) are
necessary to the proper and full living of the Christian life, as we read in
James 2:26. But it is our relationship and our continual quest to be molded and
shaped into the full image of Christ that comes only by having an intense,
personal relationship with God through Christ, and our quest to learn more and
more, in order to be fully formed in Christ’s image, that must come first. If
we lapse into thinking that a Christian life that consists of little more than
a casual knowledge of God and an easygoing relationship with Him is enough,
then the good works we do will make us little more than “religious busybodies”.
Our
Lord Jesus’ life, work and witness is sacramental in nature. For He it is who
said that He would demonstrate His love for us by being willing to lay down His
life for our sake. (See John 15:13 in this morning’s text.) We return, then,
to the basic definition of a Sacrament, and there we see that our Lord didn’t
simply say that He loves us, He proved it. “Go and do likewise,” we are being
told in so many words this morning, go and lay down our lives in service to the
Lord and to others. “Do something!”
AMEN.
