This sermon explores a small passage that leads to the rooms love builds in our lives. It’s a passage of just four words from the gospel of the day (Easter 6B) that leads into the house of so much room and so many dwelling places (John 14:1-6).
John 15:9-17
As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love. I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete.
This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father. You did not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask him in my name. I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another.
Sometimes our spiritual discipline hangs on just a few words, a phrase we can cling onto when life is difficult, when we are tempted, when we are distracted, when we could go another way. Abide in my love is one such phrase.
As the Father has loved me so I have loved you: abide in my love. There is the hint of an imperative here. Abide in my love. Abide – a funny word these days. It’s not a word we use much unless we turn it into a negative in saying “I can’t abide you/him/her/them”.
Abide. Sometimes, the strangeness of a word can make us alert to its fuller meanings. In the word abide are the elements of waiting, expectation, delay and survival. The Oxford English Dictionary admits the word is “somewhat archaic” but underlines its meaning of waiting defiantly and withstanding particularly when it comes to combat.
I prefer the fuller meaning of the archaic. Abide in my love. We might prefer to roll the phrase “stay in my love” around our hearts and minds. Or “dwell in my love”. I suggest, whatever works for you – particularly when you’re anxious, or tired, or threatened. That is when we need to hear Jesus saying to his beloved community, Abide in my love, stay in my love, dwell in my love, don’t let your hearts and minds be tempted to be anywhere else.
In our work, in our comings and goings, as we consume the news media (with its not wholly honourable commitments) – in our everyday there is that calling of Jesus, Abide in love.
Love has no chance to build when we choose to dwell in anxiety, or while we nurse our hurts and grievances, or while we wish we were in someone else’s shoes, or when we get washed away on a tide of hatred, or while we are indulging our obsessions, addictions and greed. There’s a discipline to staying in love – and, note the word, there is disciple in the word discipline. When we choose to stay in love rather than any other state we are following Jesus, learning from Jesus as disciples of Jesus, giving love her opportunity.
Love builds for those who are looking for such a place to stay. Love builds around those who make love their choice, around those who have chosen, above all places for their hearts and minds, the place of love as the place to stay. Around them, love carries on building. When love builds we find ourselves entertaining the very people we could not abide, the people we had no time for.
Love builds her place around those who abide with her. She builds room by room, shelter by shelter, so that those who stay there find themselves the people others turn to for help and shelter. Her place gets bigger and bigger as the person who stays there discovers all the people they can abide in spite of their many dangers. The family grows, there’s room for strangers – and even room for enemies.
Love builds room in our lives. Love prepares the place for the time of our lives.
I don’t know about you, but I have always been troubled by Jesus’ “father’s house” as told in John’s gospel (chapter 14). You know the passage. Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me. In my father’s house there are many dwelling places. You may be more familiar with the translation of the Authorised Version: In my father’s house are many mansions. How does that work? So many mansions in one house! It’s not helped my reading of this passage that this is a favourite for funeral services and has perhaps become for us just a promise for when we’ve died.
But the place he prepares for us is here and now, down to earth, not there and then, pie in the sky. Being alive is very much about the place of love in our lives here and now and our decision to dwell in that place permitting love to carry on building in our lives till in the end we find room (time and space) for what we never imagined that we would be able to abide or find room for.
This isn’t about romance. The landscape Jesus and the gospel writers paint is not one of romantic walks, or staring lovingly into the horizon. Abiding in my love is about staying in love in times of trouble, even when our inclination is to do anything but love one another. Such love doesn’t come cheap. It takes our life in so many more ways than one. A cross marks the spot.
I’ve just finished reading a novel by Ken Follett which is set in 14th century England at the time of the plague of Black Death. One of the heroes is a woman called Caris. Her very name, Caris, carries the meaning of love, full of grace and truth. She lives up to that name. In spite of being condemned by the church as a witch, she finds sanctuary in the nunnery. Their hospital is a place for the sick to lie while they die.
The monks flee the town when the plague hits. But Caris rallies the nuns, stays in love with the town in their suffering. She adopts modern measures for dealing with the plague – including the wearing of PPE, social distancing and lockdowns. When the plague dies down the monks return – and they take over the hospital, scoffing at Caris’s methods. The town helps Caris to build a new hospital for her to run. When the plague returns after a few years – guess what the monks did – they ran for their lives. When the temptation was to run, Caris stayed in love. People turned to her for help. They flocked to her and were guided by her. They found their protection and care in the rooms love had prepared for Caris.
There is always room for Caris. There is always room for grace, for the love that stays. Even when the world turns against those who stay in love, even when they silence them, kill them and crucify them love carries on building their place in our lives – in the thin spaces, in the places of pilgrimage, in hospitals, in shelters, love carries on making room.
As long as we keep Jesus’s commandments we stay in his love. He only gave us one commandment, that is that we love one another as he has loved us. When we stop doing that then we have left love’s building and then there’s plenty of room for hate. Love can only build in our lives when we abide in his love.
Abide in my love. Just four words about the place to stay. A four word phrase to cling onto when life gets difficult, when we are tempted to go another way. Abide in my love – such a small passage for our lives, but a passage for us to walk in, a passage that reaches deep into love’s building, to the many rooms love builds with us and for us.
Note: Ken Follett’s book is World without End, part of his Kingsbridge series.
Grits and Grains 