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St. Andrew's Church
An Anglican Church • Grimsby, Ontario, Canada
Preached by
Stuart Pike
Rector
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Easter 5 C - Love as I have loved
Acts 11: 1-18
John 13:31-35
St. Andrew's Church, Grimsby
6 May 2007
The first term of my final year of Seminary I spent doing a field placement in Uruguay in South America as I have mentioned at other times in my sermons. We left in mid-August and returned home just before Christmas. They were formative months for me. The people that I met there, the way that people were together gave me examples of how communities might live in faithfulness to Jesus' way.
Not that it was all perfect. I have seen in every cross-cultural experience I've had, that the opportunities for misunderstanding and the strife which goes along with that seem to be limitless. People in missionary situations have such high expectations and lofty goals, that sometimes their experienced reality disappoints. But, as the Beatles' song goes, people are people wherever you go.
Some of the first people that I met were attached to the Anglican Cathedral in Montevideo. Most of the people working in the missions were British ex-pats. A new experiment which Bishop Bill Godfrey started was to take an old store room in the basement of the Cathedral and to transform it into a soup kitchen or "comedor" as they say in Spanish.
The bishop's son, Matthew, helped to make the kitchen counter-top and to whitewash the walls. An old propane oven and stove was donated, along with a refrigerator. The word about the Comedor de San Lorenzo got out and soon there were from ten to thirty street people who were coming every day to be fed an evening meal.
What a mix of people came. Most were men whose ragged clothes and even their skin were blackened by their lives on the street. But there were sometimes women and occasionally some kids.
Most of them didn't have the fine manners which I was used to among dinner companions. They had bits missing: teeth, fingers, an eye or an earlobe. Most of them smelled. Some of them had psychological problems. Some of them drank away what little money they could scrape together. Yet, we gathered together around a rough wooden table with old mismatched chairs and had a meal together which I and other volunteers managed to cook. We became a family of sorts. We got to know many of their ways and manners. It didn't matter who came to the door - all were invited in to eat. This was a place of welcome.
It was only after returning to Canada that I realized how exclusive and staid we can be in the Anglican Church. I hadn't really thought of it much before. I lived in St. Thomas at the time and one of the features of the town was a nearby psych hospital. Frequently you could see people on the streets of St. Thomas who had just recently been released back into the world after their stay at the hospital. They would look odd, or they might talk to themselves. Most of them looked poor.
Just at the beginning of one of our services one of these men walked stiltedly into the Church and was immediately spied by one of the wardens who sent him out of the Church! Thank goodness the man simply doubled back and tried coming up the side aisle at which point my mother invited him to join us in our pew.
At times I ask myself who we include and exclude from our community. Who will we tolerate and who will we spurn? What kinds of unwritten rules of behaviour and civility do we have?
St. Peter had to ask himself this question when the sprit was guiding him to break all the rules which he had lived with since his birth. His religion had all kinds of rules about keeping onself pure to be able to be in relationship with God. The rules were about what and who were clean or unclean. The rules about unclean food were echoed in rules about unclean people. So when Peter has a dream about eating unclean food it prepares him for an encounter with a family of Gentiles whom he finally realizes are to be included. He even has them baptized much to the shock of the early community of Christians. His peers demand of him an explanation of his actions.
Who's unclean today? Who do we push away from the table? In what ways do we try to keep ourselves pure by excluding others?
The theologian Marcus Borg says that Jesus introduced a new idea about belonging. Instead of the commandment from Leviticus "be holy, for I am holy" (Leviticus 19:2), which the religious people of his time practised, Jesus said "be merciful, just as your Father is merciful" (Luke 6:36)
In today's Gospel lesson Jesus says to the disciples: "I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another."
Man, that sounds impossible doesn't it? I mean, there are so many people who aren't in my comfortable little group. How am I to love them? There are people who just aren't even likeable. How am I to love them?
I am reminded of Elspeth, one of the volunteer missionaries from England who was in Uruguay for a year. What an incredible complainer she was. She was ever so much an Eyore. She seemed to have an ever-present storm cloud which followed her around. One of her main problems was that she really didn't like people in general. People would see her coming and would steel themselves for the waves of pessimism and misery which would soon wash over them.
Elspeth didn't like people and that made her for the most part unlikeable herself. Some of us responded to her by turning our bows into the wind and being resolutely cheery. Perhaps we could force a ray of sunshine into her miasma of apathy. Why on earth did Elspeth volunteer to be a missionary, I would sometimes ask myself.
But many of us started to notice an incredible thing about Elspeth: she was really good at helping people. Complaining all the way, she would find people places to live. She found new sources of free or cheap food. She would deliver supplies to an ever-increasing number of families who needed help just to make ends meet. She organized other volunteers to help with her tasks. I wondered if people gave her free food and provided lower-cost shelter just to get rid of her and her complaints. Here comes Elspeth: quick, give her that case of melons over there and send her on her way.
Elspeth helped me to see that Jesus' command was not to like everyone as he has liked us, but it is to love one another as he has loved us. Elspeth, even though she didn't like too many people, certainly loved them by giving her time and her energy to help them.
It was G.K. Chesterton who said, "Love means loving the unlovable——or it is no virtue at all."
As a community let us consider: what are the limits of our welcome? Who should we include or exclude? And what are the limits of our love? For Jesus said: "By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another." Amen.
