I will love you... unless. Sermon on John 15:12-17

I wanted to share a sermon I gave last Friday. It got more criticism than some of the others I've given but I feel like I needed to say it anyway.
Because here's the truth: I'm a Christian. I support marriage equality. I believe that ALL people are made in the image of God and that homosexuality is part of the natural variation on our (and many other) species.
I've lost friends over this issue and that has hurt but then, I also lost friends when I said I felt called to ordained ministry so this is nothing new really.
So here's my sermon, imperfect as it is, a laying bare of a bit of my soul: I Will Love You... Unless.

On one of the happiest days of my dad’s life he stood at the front of his local church, and he waited. He saw a glimpse of white and the cheeky smile of a flower girl and he nodded to his mate Stan who hit the play button on the stereo. 

My mum, the bride, entered the church and everyone stood as the music began, the song she loved more than any other.

(French National Anthem begins)

Now, my mum’s parents had driven out to Port Pirie for this wedding, their first trip up to their daughter’s new home town. They were supposed to have come earlier but my grandmother had broken her ankle two weeks before and so they hadn’t arrived until the day before the wedding. They and my dad’s parents had never met before that day.

As those notes rang out through the church I am told that both the parents of the bride and the groom looked at one another and thought, “Oh no. They’re marrying a Frenchy.” But the next thing they said to each other, so I’m told, was, “We can love a Frenchy.”

Of course my mother wasn’t really walking down the aisle to the French national anthem. It was All you need is Love, by the Beatles. And while both sets of in-laws may have sighed with relief, that doesn’t change the fact that they had made a split second decision to love no matter what.

As it turns out they all get along really well, my two grandmothers take holidays to the beach together and spend the whole time completely sozzled. They were best mates by the end of the reception. That doesn’t change the fact that they made a decision to love regardless of cultural difference and social stigma. 

I like to think that it wasn’t just the bride and groom making a promise that day, it was two families. A church full of people. A church full of people promising to obey God’s command. To love.

Its funny, because I feel like today’s gospel reading is so self-explanatory. Christ tells us to love. To love even to death. To sacrifice. That this is the greatest thing. That it is a command, not an option. 

It should be straight forward. But we just don’t seem to get it. 

We say, “I will love you, unless...” 

I will love you, unless if you vote against me at parish council. 

I will love you unless if your kids are disruptive in church, 

I will love you, unless you’re an evangelical, 

I will love you unless you’re an atheist or a muslim or a Catholic, 

I will love you, unless you’re gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender. 

I will love you unless you’re disabled, or mentally ill. 

I will love you unless you’re a refugee, or an Aboriginal. 

I might pity you. I might feel obliged to help you, I might not. But I won’t love you because the label I have given you somehow makes you less human than me.

We say “I will love you, unless...” to people every day, in so many ways. Usually when we just pretend they don’t exist. Sometimes in a way that is a lot more confrontational than that. It always hurts them. It always hurts God.

Because it’s a command. It isn’t a serving suggestion. It has no provisos, no clauses. Jesus commands us to love one another “as I have loved you.” 

Jesus loved his disciples, his friends, knowing that they would fall asleep when he had asked them to pray with him on the eve of his death. Jesus loved Peter, knowing he would deny knowing him. He loved Thomas, knowing he would doubt. Jesus loved his friends genuinely and to the point of death even though they so often missed the point of the parables, and squabbled, and asked silly questions. Jesus loved them knowing they would argue over how to run the early church, over what to allow and not allow. Jesus loved them, fully, generously for who they were. Warts and all.

And he told us to do the same.

Even if it meant death.

There are many people these days who talk wistfully of the greatness of laying down one’s life for one’s friend. It is an amazing thing but in 21st century Australia it just isn’t part of our world. 

We’ve romanticized it. 

But what if we said that there was no greater love than laying down your career or reputation for a friend. What would happen if we decided to risk our good standing and stand up for the people we love, or to leave behind our prejudices and publicly try to love those who we once considered unlovable?

I have two friends who some years ago took a stand against homophobic jokes in their workplace. They challenged the fear that lay behind the supposedly “light hearted” taunts even though they weren’t being aimed at them. 

It eventually cost them their jobs. 

They were shunted from department to department, passed over for promotion and eventually their positions were made redundant. They weren’t provided with good references and it took them several years to rebuild their careers. 

It wasn’t laying down their lives perhaps, but it was a sacrifice. And it was done for love.

Love’s a funny word. Our society has really sexualised the word love. Love is kissing and passion and your heart skipping a beat when they enter the room. And it is, it can be. 

But love is also the overwhelming feeling you get when you hold your baby for the first time and the overwhelming feeling when you realise they’re all grown up. 

Love is standing by a friend as they face their demons, accepting someone for who they are, waking up to the same person and the same morning breath every day for twenty, forty, sixty years. 

Sometimes love is letting go.

Love is hugging someone and forgiving them even when they’ve tried to make themself unlovable. 

But love is more than that. 

It’s helping someone who falls in the street, stopping for a chat with someone you know is lonely, letting personality quirks slide because you know they can’t help it, saying sorry first. 

Standing up for someone, speaking on their behalf, advocating for them. 

Because they are a fellow human being. 

Love is more than that too. But I’m supposed to keep this sermon short.

There is a word I’ve been hearing, the last couple of weeks, here at St Richards, and it’s a word which I haven’t heard much of since I left high school. At school we had a verse in our school song which went “Integrity and loyalty are part of our tradition, to walk the ways of Jesus and fulfill our Christian mission.”

Integrity. 

Intergrity means being honest, upright, moral, virtuous. A person with integrity gives up their life for their friend. Integrity is love.

And it seems to me that when we talk about “Proper immigration procedure” or “Human sexuality”  or any of the other “issues” of the day, we’re missing the point. We should be talking about having relationships of integrity. We should be talking about love. 

God came to earth, became human, walked among us and said, “You are my friends, I love you.” 

There was no unless. 

My pop once told me that “Love is the easiest thing in the world and really bloody difficult” but he was willing to love, really genuinely love as a daughter, a French person, if that was the person who made his son happy. 

My grandparents are now all perfectly ok with French people, I should add. It turns out that they’d never really met one before. They have now. They got over their prejudices through relationship.

It’s funny how we build up false ideas of what people are like though, isn’t it, based on the labels we give them. 

But when we actually make the decision to enter into relationship with them, to engage with them honestly, with integrity, when we become friends, when we decide to love, Suddenly, then, we see them as human, the way we are human. 

Just the way God wants us to.