Easter 7

           It’s been quite a week at Emmanuel! This last week, in addition to our regular buzz of activity — Verizon working in the bell tower, Nasons working on the HVAC system, Gnazzo starting with the mortar and pointing, painting and lead abatement ongoing in the apartments, hydroponics monitoring and harvesting, Community Garden dreaming and planting, pollinator garden spring care, and we had Salve interns with us every day. We’re sharing these civic engagement interns with RENEWport in a program led by political science professor Mary Anderson, and these amazing young women will be back with us again all this coming week. 

           We’ve been praying with and for the McBean Foundation as they met Thursday to consider, among other things, our application for fund increases for the window restoration and mortar project. Emmanuel and Newport Classical’s Joint Operating Committee met again, working together collaboratively to build our future in this amazing shared space. Our Salvations are graduating this morning — or playing in the band, or supporting chosen family, and we can feel their absence today. We are so very grateful that Suzanna and Ali are here to support us with their amazing musical gifts. Suzanna, we’re grateful for you every single day, and Ali, welcome home. And Friday night we held the third annual Swing Into Spring dance concert with the Larry Brown Swinglane Orchestra, bringing the whole community together to celebrate how we’ve grown bigger and closer. 

           All of these aspects of our abundant life together in community — grants, building operations, growing, graduating, and even dancing — are the culmination of long preparation, effort, missteps, tears, recovery, laughter, and prayer. All this happens while we accompany each other through life’s lifiest moments — illness, loss, grief, disappointment, conflict, possibility, hope, holy opportunity, and great joy. In the broad tapestry of our lives together, I can really relate to where we find the apostles today in our reading from Acts. They’ve been talking with Jesus, who’s been back among them in these days of Eastertide. 

           And now today (or really Thursday of this last week on the Feast of the Ascension) — as we remember and celebrate Jesus’ ascension, we catch up to the Apostles up on the Mount of Olives, just across the Kidron Valley from Jerusalem — about a 2-3 hour walk. This is the moment Jesus is lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight.  So there they all were — like this — looking up in the sky, dumbfounded. And they stay that way! — gazing up toward heaven, until two men in white robes appear and say,“Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven?  This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.” What does that mean? Stop staring up at the sky trying to figure out what just happened. Jesus will come back exactly as you saw him ascend — when you’re all together living out Jesus’ new commandment: Love one another. 

           Not that the theology of ascension — Jesus’ return to the divine glory he shared with the Father before the world began — is not a worthy area of our focus and inquiry. It is important. But if we keep our eyes on the skies — or looking back to what just happened and how we came to where we are, we’re missing the vital connection of community, which is where all the holiness happens. If we lower our gaze, no matter how holy our upturned attention, we encounter each other.   

           Love one another. It’s a simple message, and super clear, repeated four times in John’s gospel alone, and 13 times in the New Testament. Love one another. Just do it! Easy peasy, right? But is it? What does loving one another look like out in nature, as we walk and live it every day? John’s gospel gives us an example, as John’s Jesus says in chapter 15, No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.  That does seem like a really high bar, because we know that Jesus actually did lay down his life for his friends. 

           What does that mean for us as we try to carry out this commandment to love one another? Is Jesus asking us to be superheroes, rushing into dangerous situations to protect our friends from physical, emotional, political, legal, or economic harm? I don’t think so. As my friend former All Saints’ Atlanta rector Geoffrey Hoare often said to the All Saints’ vestry — usually to talk us down from one of our latest ideas to save the world (or the at least the Midtown Atlanta block where All Saints’ was situated), “the job of savior has already been filled; Jesus saw to that.” 

           So what does it mean to lay down one’s life for one’s friends? I wonder if it means something much different from actually dying for each other, maybe something both less extreme and much more difficult for us to do. I think that this commandment is not about death at all but maybe about abundant life. What if laying down one’s life for one’s friends — the very greatest love in Jesus’ thirteen-times-repeated command to love one another — means to lay aside our own selves and preferences and our own way of doing things for a minute to really listen to each other? What if it means responding to another’s vulnerability or trouble not with what we want to say, but with what they need to hear to live their best life, as the Gen Z among us might say? What if laying down one’s life for one’s friends means to compromise, to imagine, to loosen our grip on the way it’s always been done in our own experience and really hear about another’s context in love and curiosity? 

           What if the greatest love — laying down one’s life for one’s friends — means an astonishing, radical inclusion, bigger and more wonderful than we have ever imagined? During Eastertide, we read from the Acts of the Apostles, the book of all that happened among Jesus’ followers in the first days, weeks, and years after the resurrection. This was a time when the disciples and all who walked with Jesus were still struggling to get their minds around this resurrection thing — what had just happened — and what it meant for everyday life. They were not meeting to figure out whether to use purple or blue vestments during Advent, or whether the 8:00 service on Sundays should be Rite I or Rite II. They were wondering how to live together — how to take care of one another, how to work, raise their families, and listen and share across a variety of divergent experiences and backgrounds as people came together in community. 

           Our challenge and opportunity today is to loosen our grip on our own experience and background to really hear each other’s experience and try to understand another perspective. This gracious friction in our different contexts and needs connects us. It almost sounds too easy. Love one another. Do it 13 times over as scripture says, and then repeat. I’m going to try. I can’t wait to see what happens. Amen