“How are we known?”

Sermon 5/9/04

Elizabeth Macaulay

John 13: 31-35

It has been said that if you are away from your home and usual surroundings for a time, it is important to pay attention to the things that first greet you upon your return. Those things have great power. Maybe it is because after a time away for reflection the tablet of your soul is so smoothed. Things have room to be noticed and present when there is soul space to give them.

I was away for ten days at a Benedictine monastery outside of Indianapolis. I was there in the company of thirty clergywomen from across North America. I was there with eighty women who are nuns.

I was there to pray and learn, away and apart from the news and the challenges of relationships.

I was there to soak in the peace and stretch of the Christ.

When I got home, it was clear that while I was soaking, the world was spinning.

Spring had happened here in my absence. Trees had exploded and the world is so very obviously potent with life.

And I met on my return a constant; a world so very potent with pain. Abuses of power carried out by our military with prisoners overseas, questions of power wrangled over by United Methodists during our General Conference in Pittsburgh. There is pain coursing through creation even as life continues to be reborn in spring.

These things I noticed. The pain and the life. And I noticed this:

I love my kids. It was so good to come home to their stories and energy and love and care.

And I love the web of relationships that is this church. It is good to be home.

It is also good to be grounded and aware of this morning's gospel text as I have reentered the world.

Jesus shares this morning's teaching with his disciples during the last supper. He has knelt and washed the feet of the disciples. He has told them that he is not going to be in their midst much longer. He has, he knows, precious little time to share with them the oh so very important things he wants for them to take to their hearts. Knowing what he does about what is to come, he must be filled with an almost desperate wish to be sure they have heard his teaching.

And, he has to feel so much compassion for these folks who are about to encounter so much pain. Pain brought into their lives because they chose to believe in and follow the teachings of compassion and justice he lived in their midst.

Jesus is sitting at table with people who know the power of the law, the Torah. Love is central in the commandments received by Moses on the mountaintop. What Jesus adds to this understanding of love as central to faith is this:

As Jesus is so intimately of God, so now are the disciples.

As Jesus loved, so too are the disciples to love. Through love that is limitless, that knows no boundaries. The mark of a follower of Jesus is that they live love.

And what of the pain of those times when love is not lived? What of denominations like ours who are wrangling and what of nations like ours who are wrangling and what of families like ours who are thick with years of resentments and hurts and what of the "not love" we can feel so powerless against?

How do we who so long to live into the way of Jesus endure these "not love" times? What practices can we embrace to keep us in the way of Jesus? Sometimes the anger and frustration of living in such a wounded world can become almost overwhelming.

That question was raised during the class I was taking.

The teacher who led us is the head of the Inter Monastic Religious dialogue. She interacts with monastic communities of faith throughout the world. She gets to drink tea with the Dali Lama and others who are passionate about blessing into existence the way of lived love.

During a teaching on anger, we feminist freedom fighters asked her about how it is she would see fit to teach us to guard against anger; it is such a good jump-start to action.

She had this to say: anger is a form of violence. It can be used to spark acting out through overt kinds of engagements like wars or fighting, or it can be used to spark acting out through turning it inward on ourselves, as so often happens with depression.

Paying attention to anger and learning from it is not bad. But stewing in it is soul warping.

She told us that there is another way to work for change. It is by embracing the practice of ceaseless prayer. By choosing a short phrase to breathe in and out, opening our hearts to the awareness of Christ present there. By quieting ourselves to work as people of peace rather than as angry people. Because, she said, when you are angry you just can't listen. To others, or to yourself, or to God.

She spoke of a rally she participated in where the participants were so convinced that it had to be a peaceful demonstration that they gathered a day early just to ground themselves and center themselves on non violence, a letting go of anger, and a welcoming of peace and love into their hearts and intenions. Each step during the demonstration was taken intentionally, prayerfully, in the way of peace.

So to work for change, we must guard our hearts and intentions. We must listen to the energies that propel us - are they grounded in the way of loving one another, or are they grounded in the way of violence?

Having looked into our hearts, we are surely called to love through action.

It is Mother's Day today. Even though Hallmark has benefited greatly from this day, they did not create it. A woman acting her love did.

Julia Ward Howe is the woman who wrote "The Battle Hymn of the Republic". She looked around her after the Civil War had ended and she was heartbroken by what she saw: widows who had children who were impoverished financially. She advocated and worked for jobs, education, pension benefits, and the vote for women. She also saw the emotional devastation endured by women and children due to the death of their husbands and sons. She saw Mother's Day as a day in which women would come together and work towards peace in all areas of life. So that no more would there be a country ravished by the unleashing of war.

She wrote this "Mother's Day Proclamation:"

"Arise then, women of this day! Arise women who have hearts, whether your baptism be that of water or tears! Say firmly: We shall not have great questions decided by others. Our children will not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy, and patience. We women of one country will be too tender of those of another country to allow our children to be trained to injure theirs. Let them meet as women, to take counsel with each other as to the means whereby the great human family can live in peace, each bearing the sacred likeness not of Caesar but of God."

Hear this proclamation not as a political statement for or against any war, particularly the one going on now. Hear this proclamation as the vision of a woman who believed that war would simply cease to be if those who fuel it with the fruits of their body - the indescribably precious stuffs of their sons and daughters - joined together and said ---------- "No more".

No more will we live the way of anger and fear. We will breathe in Christ and breathe out peace.

We will live the way of love, knowing that each bears the sacred likeness of God.

Happy Mother's Day. May we join together to give life to the vision of love.