John 15:9-11
Pastoral Prayer: Loving Father, our home and place is with and in You. Jesus, give us Your Word this day that clarifies that we are Your branches and, as such, cannot help but, by Your Spirit, love who You love, bringing Your joy to its fulfillment. May the words of my mouth and the meditation of all our hearts be pleasing to You, our Love and Our Joy, and all God’s people say, Amen.
For some reason, several of my Facebook friends shared a church policy. I included it in my weekly email. Trinity Southern Baptist Church circulated its Loud Children Policy. Evidently, the original explainer needed a follow-up, as this one includes:
Please consider this your official notice of policy clarification.
Their policy offered parents considering bringing loud children to church one of the following options.
The Family should bring the kid.
The Family should make sure to bring the kid.
The Family should ensure that the kid comes to church.
The Family is to see that the child is brought to church.
The kid is absolutely welcome and expected.
It is odd that any church would need to publicize a policy of this kind. After all, five times Jesus uses children as he teaches about welcoming people into the Kingdom of God and what the Kingdom of God is like.
Whether this policy that is making the rounds is mythical or real, it makes the point that Christian churches are full of people. And as such, we don’t get to choose who comes. Unless we are creating a cult, we will include people that we must absolutely trust Jesus that His love will make us able to love them.
Jesus told the disciples,
I AM the Vine. You are the branches.
If there is no Vine, there are no branches. And the branches do not determine which branch grows next to them. If your amygdala presses you to take flight when you find yourself near a branch you would rather not be near, then pray that the indwelling Spirit will make you stand and fight with all the resources of the love of the Father, through the Son by the Spirit, lest your lack of faithfulness call into question if Jesus has a Body on earth.
And if for some reason we ever believe that there is not enough love available for us to love all others, then hear Jesus’ words again.
As the Father has loved me, I have loved you.
The genealogy of love begins with the Triune God’s determination not to be God without us. That is, to put it another way, we cannot put the love of God on a chronological timeline, thinking it only shows up with the arrival of Mary’s Boy in a manger or that only becomes clear as Jesus becomes Pilate’s victim. Love, God’s Love, is prior to “Let there be . . ..” And God’s Love is before “Let us make man in our image . . . so he made them male and female.”
John tells us in his first letter,
We love since he first loved us.
Remember, Jesus’s farewell words include from the beginning. And that beginning in the Story of God in the life of Jesus is prior to Jesus seeing any of them mending their nets sitting on the family fishing boats, or sitting under a fig tree, or manning Rome’s tax booth.
Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.
“To the end.”
If that isn’t a harbinger of things to come in its own right, we cannot forget that Jesus has been telling his disciples he will be leaving them. Thus, Farewell. Telling those you love Farewell is difficult for both the one telling and the one hearing. Here Jesus has been giving the disciples the news they need and will need when He is gone. There is no “build a monument to me.” Instead, it is to love one another in the face of death.
Clearly, Jesus sees what is in his future. And despite his various references to his suffering and death, he spends his final words talking about love. The Cross that lay ahead for him does not diminish or distract from the love of the Father for him nor his love for us represented in the disciples. It is the opposite. The Cross reveals the depth of His love, suffering human resistance; the breadth of His love as we find him praying for all of us who know not what we are doing; the height of His love, for we cannot count on anyone daring for a good man to die; the length of his love from beginning to end. For Jesus will pray to the Father in John 17 and for us who are in the long genealogy of the love of Father, Son, and Spirit.
I pray not only for these, but also for those who believe in me through their word.
Jesus isn’t just praying for the branches hearing him in the Upper Room and the Garden of Gethsemane; he is praying for us too!
As the Father has loved me, I have loved you.
Jesus has already told the disciples,
By this everyone will know you are my disciples when you love one another.
So consider these few verses a policy clarification. The Father loves the Son and the Son loves you. This is not a competition. Jesus is revealing the Father to the disciples. Having already told them that He and the Father are One, Jesus is making the Father’s love real to them by letting them know that when they encounter the love of Jesus, His Love, they are at home in the love of the Father.
Now that they are at home in the love of the Father, Son, and Spirit, Jesus says again,
Stay with me. Stick with me.
Or we could put it this way,
Stay in my love!
You, we, have a home and a place in that home. Safe at home with a place in the Father, Son, and Spirit, we want to love one another. Stay in my love! Where is Heaven? If it is a place, Heaven is life in the Father, Son, and Spirit. Where else would we want to be but in and with the One who loves us?
Our faithfulness and obedience do not evoke God’s love for others. Instead, now that we are at home in the Love That Is God, we want to obey. Our desire becomes faithfulness. Often we are tempted to rely on our obedience as the ingredient that attracts God’s love. It is as if we think our obedience warrants God’s love, earns God’s love. We forget He loves first. When we rely on our obedience as the key to unlocking God’s love, we often take it upon ourselves to judge other branches. Whether conscious or not, this is a self-justifying practice. Rather than love others, they become the objects scrutinized in a way that puffs up our pride in our own pieties.
Those people near us come under our judgment as we decide who needs pruning. We know better than the Gardener, so we judge some branches as dead and in need of being cut off the vine. Once it becomes easy to take up being the Gardener instead of the branches, we assess all other branches of the Vine. Even more, it is an easy step to do the same with all others, those not yet branches on The Vine that is Jesus. All others. Often what results is our finding in others our own lack, which spawns our resistance to God’s love in us and through us such that we cannot see who God loves. We can only decide for God who he should love. We long for God’s judgment to fall on them.
After all, it’s those loud children. If they would just be quiet, we could worship the way we want.
For Trinity Southern Baptist Church, some decided loud children are the “they” that need to fit “our” expectations. Others, even us here, may decide the problem lies with some other annoyance, some condition, or notion. A recent survey by the Billy Graham Center makes plain that young people tire of the partisanship that dominates Christian conversations. Gen Z is considered the most repulsed. “Where are the young people?” churches ask. Too often our first ask is what will attract them, but our second is rarely, “What have we done?”
In what seems almost another lifetime, the much younger me was having a conversation with an even younger youth minister. Those working with the young minister noticed the developing habit that he spent a good bit of time planning events, creating experiences, and making busy. But he was not making connections with the young people. Yes, the youth had fun. They could be seen and heard, and they were glad to have activities. But those who needed an ear, to know someone cared for them, that someone was in their corner, could not find that in the young youth minister. We were chatting one day about this, and with an air of hyperbole, I suggested,
“Young people will sit and watch paint dry with you if they know they are loved and cared for. They will want to be where they know they are loved.”
Jesus tells the disciples that the love of the Father made obedience natural. Now would the love of the Son create the kind of home and place from which they would keep Jesus’s command to love others? Yes! For Jesus insists and persists in telling the disciples,
Stay at home in my love!
Jesus tells them, insists they stay with him in His love. He tells them this knowing Judas will soon arrive with those who will take him away from the disciples. We then must hear these words, Jesus’s words to us: Stay in my love, as words we will need when trouble and trials come our way. Even more, when trouble and trials come to those God loves, we who are His Body become those in whom the Spirit has created a home, where we give the words of Jesus: “Stay with Jesus!” Not as a desperate appeal to keep numbers up, but as the very Voice of the One whom the Preacher in Hebrews notes,
For the joy that lay before him, he endured the cross, despising the shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.
Jesus knew the Father loves Him; therefore, he could face the future he could see, knowing Judas had set in motion his future. And that come what may, He could trust his future to the Father. While Jesus has been telling the disciples he will leave them, we cannot ignore that Jesus has also told the disciples that along the way they will follow him. And that meant that his future would be theirs too. Trouble and trials will come. They needed to be assured He loves them. And that in them by the Spirit, they would have Jesus’s joy knowing that come what may, the Love That Is God, the Love of the Father, Son, and Spirit would be their future.
Not only was Jesus pointing to a future that includes trouble and trials, but that his future is their future. That is, when the Father raises the Son, they will know they will be raised too. This reality is the words said over us as we are baptized: We have been buried with Christ, raised to walk in a new way of life.
The Apostle Paul puts it this way,
Since you have been raised with Christ, seek the things above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things. For you died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you also will appear with him glorious.
Recently we sat around a table in the heat of the afternoon to share a visit, fellowship as it were. One friend said to another, “I have been there. And if it weren’t for my church family, I don’t know what I would have done.”
Over the years, I have heard this testimony over and again. You are being commended for being the mystical Body of Christ on earth today. Yes, we are family. Jesus, the Preacher in Hebrews, tells us Jesus is our brother. At the same time, the Spirit of God makes us together the Body of Christ, given the words of Jesus by the Spirit to declare, “Stay with Jesus’s Love!” And by the Spirit we love those God loves.
For God so loved the world.
The Love the Father has for the Son, the love the Son has for us, is the policy clarification that gives us the home for which we have looked, a home where, despite and in spite of our resistance, we are loved. We now have a home where the Love That Is God births in us an obedience to that Love that compels us to love who God loves.
For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world but to save the world through him.
Excellent Todd, excellent!