“Love Connections”
John 14: 15-21; Rev. G. Scott Turnbrook; Northwood United Church;
May 21, 2017
Love connections…you know how powerful they can be. I remember my first love connection: her name was Colleen and we were in our late teen years. Perhaps you might remember some of the love connections in your life? Love connections. I would suggest that love connections ~ those connections that are truly rooted in love are the most deep, precious and enduring things in life. Love connections are something that have the ability to touch the depths and heights of our humanity. Last Sunday, we celebrated Mother’s Day. And in many families, a mother’s love can be one of the ties that truly binds a family together. Through the ups and downs, through the thick and the thin, a mother’s love can be the love connection that unites their family in profoundly, almost sacred, ways. One of my precious joys in ministry is getting to know people and hearing how the presence of their love connections serve to bind them together. At the time of a wedding: it is the narrative that a bride and groom describe to me and dream about continuing to unfold in their marriage. At the time of a funeral: love connections are the narrative that families look back upon as they prepare to celebrate the life of a beloved family member who has gone before them. Love connections... Love extends beyond biological family, of course. It can extend into the larger community around us where we are blessed with special friends who become ‘like family’. As the saying goes “you can choose your friends, but not your family”. And so many of us have friends that fill deep special roles in our lives and we share a special love connection with them ~ we love them like a sister or a brother and we have a deep love connection. Further into one’s community, love connections continue. I was deeply moved by the commitment of some of the candidates who were running in the recent provincial election as I attended several “All Candidates” Meetings. Some of those candidates truly embodied a deep love for their constituents they desired to serve. It is a rare and precious thing to witness a politician demonstrating this type of care for his / her constituents. And it was wonderful to be in the presence of this type of love connection. I think the same can true for healthy churches. Many of us have made some wonderful love connections in our church family ~ we talk about church family and we value the love that binds us together as a community in Christ. In a healthy church, we love one another, like family. We may not always get along; we may differ in opinion, but the love connections within our church family endure. A rule of thumb that I was taught as a student minister, and one that I do subscribe to, is that ‘if you don’t love your congregation, it’s time to leave’ … Indeed, love connections bind us together. Love connections are the deepest and most profound ways that serve to bind our humanity to one another. Love connections are the sacred ground upon which life is experienced. They are the most precious part of this thing called life…our love connections.
As I look at the text before us, we examine a deeply theological text outlining the connections between God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, and each of us. As we begin to unpack it for our living, I would suggest that it is best looked at from the perspective of ~ love connections. Love connections are the type of theological connection Jesus is teaching his followers about. When Jesus is outlining the spiritual connections we have with God, with Jesus, and with the Spirit, he is talking about the sustaining and enduring love connections that have been established for us. I would suggest that this text offers some thoughtful insight into how we are connected with the three points of the trinity and how we are called into life. To start off, we note that this text is unique from many of the other prescribed gospel Easter lections. While most Easter readings contain a post-Easter appearance, this story occurs while Jesus was still alive. In this morning’s text, Jesus is preparing his followers for the inevitability of his passion ~ his coming death and his resurrection. This text is one where the earthly Jesus prepares his followers for the possibility of a deeply spiritual life in the future when he will have left them in earthly form. In the passage immediately preceding this text, Jesus has just emphasized that he is a channel / a way to God. In his interchange with Thomas (often called ‘Doubting Thomas’ ~ and you might recall us spending some time on Thomas a few weeks ago), we have the oft-quoted passage: “In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places”. And in this passage, Jesus reassures Thomas that God has been found in Jesus: “The Father is in me and I am in the Father”. As was customary in the day of Jesus, there was a common father-son representation in business. It was quite common for sons to do things on behalf of their fathers ~ to go before them ~ to do business on their behalf. And Jesus uses this analogy in explaining how he, like the son would be a re-presentation of God, who is like a “Father”. In Jesus, God is made known, made manifest, is re-presented. Jesus uses that language to emphasize how God has been revealed through his life, his ministry, and will soon be revealed in his death and resurrection. God’s love; God’s light; God’s Kingdom vision is seen in Jesus. And as Jesus explains the depth of love shared between the father and son, he points to the theological “love connection” found between God and Jesus.
The concern in the hearts of Jesus’ followers, as Jesus’ end comes near, is over what life will be like after Jesus’ death. How will they be connected to God after Jesus has left? How will God be present for this community? How will they soldier on? Jesus uses a saying that was common in the day when a disciple would lose their teacher ~ he uses a reference to being “orphaned”. To their fears of abandonment, Jesus says: “I will not leave you as orphans; I am coming to you”. He reassures his followers that they will not be left alone, that they will have continued access to God even after he has gone. But how will this look? How will his followers continue to be connected? This passage, along with the following four other “farewell discourses” provide the answer. Jesus says that He will ask God to provide something for us. He will ask God to provide “the paraklete” to be with us.
So, what is a ‘paraklete’? … In verse 15, Jesus says: “I will ask the Father, and he will give you another ‘Advocate’, to be with you forever”. The word we see translated into English in the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible as “advocate” is the Greek word ‘paraklete’. Other biblical translations render various words for ‘paraklete’ ranging from “the counselor, the comforter, the helper, the mediator, and even the broker”. One interesting approach is found in the New Jerusalem Bible which chooses not to translate it, choosing the translation “I will ask the Father and he will give you another paraklete. What I like about this approach most is that it invites us to consider what Easter gift Jesus sends us in our faith. Jesus will not leave us orphaned, so the ‘paraklete’ is sent to us that we might have an enduring connection with God. I wonder…what is it that you need God to send you in your faith. Do you need the connection with God in a way that is the counselor? Or the comforter? Or the helper? Or the mediator? Or the broker? My suspicion is that there might still even be other spirit connections that people might name in how they have a love connection with God. How do you continue to have deep connections with God in your faith?
Now, as we explore this love connection with God through the ‘paraklete’, there is a dynamic which informs our living as a result of this love connection. Just like my earlier reference to the deep and sustaining human relationships in our lives, there is a powerful dynamic alive in this spiritual love connection. In the context of sending the ‘paraklete’, Jesus teaches: “if you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another ‘paraklete’, to be with you forever”. It is interesting… on the surface, this seems to be an “if – then” relationship; whereby the coming of the ‘paraklete’ is dependent upon the disciple’s actions of loving Jesus and keeping His commands. But the more we ponder what a love connection is about, we are reminded that one who truly loves Jesus can’t help but striving to keep His commandments. In “The Interpretation of Cultures” Clifford Geertz argues that there is a problem in mixing “if” with “then” in this case because it mixes a culture’s worldview (the small group of followers of Jesus’ Way) with its larger ethos (the world of imperial Rome). For the Jesus community, their normal responses would be actions like believing, loving, abiding, and keeping the commandments. It is not that they do this in order to receive the payoff of a love connection with God. They act this way, in as much as they can, because they love Jesus and that’s how Jesus’ people act! Geertz cites the example of the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche ~ someone who was deeply critical of the Jesus community, as using this call to a double love of God and neighbor as being “a symbol of a weak, insipid ethic”. And indeed, to the rest of the world who value consumption and success, and who looks in on the actions of a Jesus community, we must look quite odd. But that is what Jesus’ followers do, isn’t it? We love God…and we love neighbor…without measure. (Period). We don’t do it to receive, we do it because we love Jesus, because we love God, because that’s how we express who we are. One commentator I read spoke about this from the perspective of expansiveness. When we experience this spiritual love connection, it almost expands our spiritual reality, our ability to perceive the other, to care for, to comfort, to love. Indeed when we have a deep ‘love connection’ style of faith, we can’t help but to live any other way, can we? One of our spiritual pieces of work in Easter is to try and make sense, for each of us, of what it means to be Jesus’ Easter people. To be people who live between memory and hope; to ponder how we are intimately and inexplicably connected with God following resurrection’s mystery of the empty tomb. This morning we are reminded and reassured of the love connection that Jesus has established for each of us. A connection of we find in our serving and in our caring, in our loving and our being-loved, in our living and in our dying.
Thanks be to God.
Amen.