[Propertalk] Draft of sermon on John 15:9-17 for May 17

[Joe Parrish]

Here is a draft of my sermon on John 15:9-17 for May 17.  God willing, a final version will be posted at our church web site under the Worship-Sermon Archives tab by early next week at http://sjnj.org

Peace and Easter blessings,

Joe 

 

St. John's Episcopal Church

61 Broad Street
Elizabeth, New Jersey 07201

The Sixth Sunday of Easter (B)

May 17, 2009 - DRAFT

A Sermon by the Rev. Joe Parrish

The Holy Gospel according to

John 15:9-17
     

     You have shown us your love, Dear Lord, so we may show it to our neighbor.  Amen.

 

     H. King Oemig, a senior writer for the Sewanee, Tennessee-based Synthesis publication, notes that "a child learns through affection, through love, through patience, through understanding, through belonging, through doing and through being."

     We are all learners in God's Kingdom.  None of us "has it down pat."  We are all becoming like God, learning to do as God does, behaving as God would, and seeing others as God sees them.  It is a life-long learning experience.  We don't have a Love University that has courses on How to Love Better, How to Be Patient I Mean Now, How to Forgive, How to Be a Loving Example.  These life long courses are what life is all about.

     Our first tendency is to be suspicious.  We don't know what that person 'over there' is thinking.  We often do some prejudgment based on what they are wearing, where they are looking, how they seem to behave, how they talk, and so on.  But as any one will generally admit, these presumptuous summaries about another person are usually far off base.  We cannot really understand another until we have gotten to know them for quite some time.  But knowing a person seems to be a first step to loving that person.  Few times do we experience spiritual love on sight.  It takes time.  We are not to 'fall in love' as in the physical sense, but we are to 'fall in love' in the spiritual sense.  We need to see how much God has invested in getting that person to our presence, in getting us to that other person's presence, in simply allowing the two of us to meet.  Each encounter is a divine one, I believe, so how we learn from it what God is trying to tell us is as important as life and death.  Perhaps we are the only one who will let that person know they are loved.  Maybe we will be the only person who will be compassionate to them.  Or, just suppose, we may be the last person they will speak to, ever.  What will we say?  What should we say?  What can we say to let them know we love them?

     The language of love is complex, yet so simple.  We try to engage another in some way that will let them know how much we value them, how important they are to us.

     I have always been impressed by our Bishop's complete attention to another person as he is talking with them, as though no other or nothing else can get in the way of their dialogue.  He seems never to be looking around for someone else to speak to, or something else to do.  He focuses directly on the person at hand, and gives them his full attention.  It is actually remarkable to see.  And by this single-minded behavior, he communicates to that person how important they are to him, the first stage of love.  If someone is not important to us, then our tendency is to ignore them, put them down, or do something even more rude.  This is oftentimes the rule of the road and highway, when we are constantly making decisions about another driver in front of us, behind us, or beside us.  We have to gage their speed, their intent, their direction, and now with cell phones, we have to make some judgment call about how attentive they are to what they may be doing.  That even is true of walkers nowadays.  We see so many walking down the street in somewhat of a daze, fidgeting with their cell phone, texting someone, talking to someone.  They are really not present to themselves but they, and we who do the same thing, are in a 'world of our own'.  The message we give out though is that none other beside or in front of them or us matters in the least.  All these others are merely objects to avoid, especially avoid eye contact with. 

     I have seen people in great rages talking loudly on pay phones, and sometimes on cell phones, and the atmosphere is charged with anger.  It is a fearsome sight to behold.  One wonders sometimes if they are really speaking to a human being on the other line!

       How many times have you answered a phone call from a telemarketer?  Until I learned that one needed to say "No" at least three times, clearly, in order to facilitate ending the call, it became very tense to decide how to be respectful of the person, and to try to separate out their desperate attempt to sell me something so they can feed themselves.  I doubt that most telemarketers make much money.  And some have pleaded with me to buy this or that so they would not be sacked, fired.  The sales pressure they are under is immense, if they are surviving by getting one "Yes" out of maybe twenty to thirty phone calls.  Probably most people just hang up abruptly.  I love Caller ID!  That way, if I don't know the person, usually it is by simply seeing an 800 or 866 number on the Caller ID, then I don't even answer the phone.  But it can still be tricky!  And once you have engaged in a telephone conversation, the caller is desperately trying to keep you on the phone until you say "Yes" once, or "No" three times.

     Anonymity is a sign of our times!  We can encounter so many more people in a day now, by email, telephone call, or mail solicitations.  It is often stimulus overload!  And we have more opportunities to be superficially engaged with others through Twitter, or Facebook, or a variety of other techy means, or should I even say, tacky!

     Does the world need to know what I though about the game, the news, President Obama, who or whatever?  The answer seems to be, "Yes", you do need to know what I think about most anything, because by giving me your attention, I feel like a person again, at least a little bit.  These newest devices and systems seem to be expressing how disconnected we all are, and how little attention we can give to anyone.  So the focus is on ourselves, preserving our thoughts, and even elevating our thoughts over those of others.  Thus, in a way, these modes of communication seem to be a bit of competition between ourselves and others.  And the question, "Would Jesus twitter?" just might be important for us to think about. 

But can a "tweet" be a way the Holy Spirit may be working?  Are we reaching out for companionship, for recognition that we matter, and to say that what we are doing and thinking matters.  So many are not that "important" out of the 6 billion or so of us on Planet Earth now, at least that would be what the broadcast and written media seem to be droning into our heads.  Only about a couple hundred or thousand people matter, if one gages who is quoted, whose life is talked about, whose opinion seems to matter more than ours or anyone else's.  But is that the real reality of life, that only two or three thousand people matter?  Surely not!

     I tend to think the world is simply pushing us more and more into superficiality.  Perhaps that is a product of there being so many people that we can encounter in day's time now, more perhaps that at any other time in human history.

     One of my sisters-in-law says she gets over a thousand emails daily-she is in the written communication business.  I get up to three hundred myself.  To protect oneself from stimulus overload, we direct many messages automatically into this or that electronic file, and at some point in the hundreds of messages per day range, one directs most messages simply into what is referred to as the "Spam Folder", the electronic version of a garbage can.

     I am one of those persons who write my duly elected officials at the state and federal level quite frequently, as that is my response to messages from this or that environmental or social services or human compassion group.  And these types of letters must happen so often that the legislator/governor/president has an email system that simply sends me/us back a stock reply, by email.  Then, oftentimes, there may be follow up by a snail mail letter also of stock reply.  I am amazed at how wrong these follow up letters can be-it seems no matter what I may have sent them, I will get back some political reply about how they are so happy to agree with me about an entirely unrelated issue!  So much for stock replies!  Down goes another tree!  For naught!

     So is that where love has led us, or is it something else?

     I have had enough training in "power analysis" that I can recite the phrase, "organized power and organized money" are what make changes in society.  That is how President Barak Obama was elected, as you probably already know.  It was the 'new' community action at its best, or perhaps, depending on your point of view, at its worst!  But it seems the only way the folks at the bottom of the food chain can reach those at the top of the food chain.  If enough of us 'little people' work together, then we may be able to negotiate a 'better deal' for ourselves, for our congregations, for our communities.  That is actually what happened to make the City of Elizabeth the only "Green City" in the State of New Jersey.  Many of us here, especially clergy, got together with others to see that planned environmental disasters were not perpetrated on Elizabeth.  We stopped the building of the largest sewage sludge incinerator in the world here.  We stopped the building of the largest hazardous medical waste treatment plant in America here.  We stopped the paving of all the roadways in New Jersey and New York with heavy metal containing incinerator ash, to name a few successes.  Jersey City, on the other hand, has had so many environmental waste excesses in its city limits over the years that it will take decades if not centuries to remediate.  And similarly for many parts of the Meadowlands, which probably have more discarded mercury and PCBs per square foot that any other place on Planet Earth.

     Bishop George Browning, an Australian bishop who heads the Anglican Environmental Network, links almost all of the world's problems, from poverty to disease to hunger to homelessness directly to environmental excesses all over the world.  And I would have to agree with him.  The poor get dumped on.  And they will keep getting dumped on until there is a worldwide recognition that we have to handle our waste properly, generate much less garbage, use our limited resources more wisely, and develop better means of generating clean energy that is both efficient and cheap, oftentimes mutually exclusive goals!  And we need to share our riches with those who have nothing or next to nothing instead of just throwing "stuff" away.

     The antidote, in other words, to world poverty is to love others, really love them, care about their needs, their health, their social necessities.  We need to treat others as though they really do matter.  They, we all, are children of the Most High God.  And anonymity is not a part of that equation.  God loves us equally.  God sees each of us as the precious creation we all are.  God loved us so much that he sent his right hand to live with us, to die for us, to rise for us, and to ascend to God to speak for us.  God practiced what God preached!  God simply loves us.  And when we learn we too must love all others, we may begin to see the inbreaking of a new world order, a new day, a new revelation, that Christ did not come here for his pleasure, but to tell us frankly that we need to mimic what his Father did, love us.  Thus, we are to love others as much as we love ourselves.  If we get that basic concept, then we have come into God's eternal fold.

     Amen.  


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