Loving

(Even When We Don't Feel Like It)

Sermon by The Rev. David R. Anderson

John 14:15-21

 

“If you love me, you will keep my commandments.”
We’re all in favor of love. But someone quipped, “If love is the answer, what’s the question?” I’ll tell you what the question is. It’s “How can I live in what the Bible calls blessedness, happiness?” And love is the answer.

But listen again: “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.” Jesus uses an if-then statement that conditionally links love and action. Uh-oh. I don’t know about you, but I like it better when love is linked to good intentions, or lovely sentiments. As sophisticated folks we know that love is what we feel. You can’t make someone have a feeling. Either I love you or I don’t. No amount of commanding will make it otherwise.

Not so, according to Jesus. His notion of love doesn’t begin with feeling. He begins with action. Do the loving thing, Jesus says (whether you feel like it or not!). Just do the loving action that I command you and you’ll reap the benefits of love: you’ll likely feel good. But when we begin with our feelings—and doing what we feel like—it’s a slippery slope into depression and despair.
The world is full of people who have everything that ought to make them happy, but they’re not, because they’re living on their feelings, trying every day to get up and do something to make them feel good. That’s an exhausting dead end.

That’s why Jesus commands us to love. These words in John 14 come just as the disciples are loading the dishwasher after the Last Supper. “A new commandment I give you,” Jesus says as he kneels to wash his disciples’ feet, “that you love one another.”

“A new commandment I give you,” Jesus says as he gives his own flesh and blood as food for the soul, “that you love one another.”
At first, no one feels like assuming the slave’s role and washing feet. No one feels like offering up their very life. Just do it! Jesus says. And keep doing it. And one day you’ll realize it’s transforming your life.
C.S. Lewis said, “Do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbor; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him.” In the program they say, “Fake it till you make it.”

But faking it for one day doesn’t cut it. You’ve got to do it day after day after day. I think of great marriages that deepen over many years, where two people make a commitment to love each other every day. That’s the kind of love commandment Jesus is talking about. Because a lot of days you don’t feel like loving the other person, but you do it—you love—just because it’s your vow.

(Reminds me of that couple celebrating their 60th wedding anniversary, and they’re cutting the cake and people are smiling and clapping. And the wife says to her husband, “I’m proud of you.” And the man says, “What? Oh, I’m tired of you too.”)
It’s what Eugene Peterson calls “a long obedience in the same direction.” You just do it. When other people have lost interest, or lost heart, or gone after some shiny new thing, you just stay in relationship, you just keep loving.

“If you love me, you will keep my commandments.”
On March 24, 1996 the father of Leon Wieseltier died. Wieseltier was then 44 years old. As the literary editor of The New Republic, he was among the political and literary elite in Washington and New York. Like so many sophisticates, he had left behind the Jewish faith of his youth. Nevertheless, he decided to do what mourning sons are commanded to do.

“In the year that followed, I said the prayer known as the mourner’s kaddish three times daily,” he wrote, “during the morning service, the afternoon service, and the evening service, in a synagogue in Washington and, when I was away from home, in synagogues elsewhere. It was my duty to say it.” (Kaddish [New York: Knopf, 1998], p. vii.)

I always thought that the Hebrew kaddish must be prayers for the dead, prayers for those suffering the loss of a loved one. But it’s not. It’s about God—about God’s beauty and majesty. “May his great name be blessed always and forever. Blessed and praised and glorified and exalted and honored and uplifted and lauded be the name of the Holy One.” Three times a day, every day, this is what Leon Wieseltier prayed. Whether he felt like it or not. If he was home or on the road.

Pretty soon, he discovered something happening in his inner life. He was being changed.  “It was not long before I understood that I would not succeed in insulating the rest of my existence from the impact of this obscure and arduous practice. The symbols were seeping into everything. A season of sorrow became a season of soul renovation” (p. vii).

He was commanded to pray, and so he did. And the “soul renovation” followed like germination follows faithful planting and long waiting.

In this community of faith we need to be honest with one another: You cannot love when you feel inclined. You cannot pray when you feel like it. You cannot worship when you have spare time. You cannot serve others only when you need to assuage the existential guilt of privilege.

We need to say this honestly to one another because we live in a hyper-stressed culture where we literally do not have time to breathe. And yet Christ has commanded us—yes, even us—to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength, and our neighbor as ourselves. To do that we need divine help. We need to be in a constant relationship with God that transforms our lives, changes our thinking and slowly converts our hearts. We need the help and accountability of a community. And we cannot do that when we feel like it. We’ve been commanded to love—that is, to live a new being.
As disciples we have a discipline, a daily practice that puts us in the path of peace, weaves us into the way of love, day after day . . . imperceptibly . . .  day after day.  It’s utterly simple, but that doesn’t make it easy. If you need help in establishing a daily/weekly practice for yourself, for your family, call me or any of the clergy. That’s what we’re here for.

“If you love me, you will keep my commandments.”