The Rev. Virginia W. Nagel
Episcopal Diocese of Central NY (Retired)
Today is the Sunday before Ascension Day, which comes on Thursday: forty days
after Easter, Jesus ascends into heaven. Traditionally, the Sunday, Monday,
Tuesday and Wednesday just before Ascension Day have always been called
Rogation Days. It was customary, in the days when most farms were small,
family enterprises, for the parish priest, together with an acolyte carrying the
processional cross, to walk the boundaries of farms, followed by the farmer and
his family. The fields, flocks, herds and farm buildings would be blessed, and
the priest would read the Litany of the Saints as he processed around the
boundaries, with the acolyte and family answering "We beseech Thee to hear us"
(which in Latin is Rogamus...that's where the name, Rogation
Days, comes from) after each petition. Nowadays, family farms are few
and far between, and the Rogation Days have special collects asking God's
blessing on the earth and the environment, the factories and offices, and the
workers in those places, as well as the farms. Some priests go out and bless
farms, parks, factories and lakes...and fishing vessels, bulldozers and so on.
The point is to remember that all good, including our ability to work and earn,
and take care of the earth, comes from God.
Today's epistle and gospel are the final lesson for us, this Eastertide, in
how to live as Easter people. Today, the Church focuses on telling us how we
should build our relationships, with God and Jesus, and with one another. I
think we all need that lesson, since the words "love" and "friend" have lost so
much of their original meaning, nowadays.
The first Epistle of John is almost a textbook an this business of building
relationships, up and down between God and us, and side to side, between us and
other people. Did you notice that properly built relationships of both kinds
form a cross?
Here are the points of John's instructional manual on relating to God and to
others:
Everyone who believes that Jesus is God's Son is a child of God, born
again of God.
God loves us, so once we really understand this, we learn to love him
back. That means worship of God, and it also means loving God's other
children, because God loves them.
We can be sure that we love God's other children when we treat them as
God has commanded...that is, according to the Ten Commandments and the
Golden Rule.
Obeying God's commands is proof that we love God, also.
God's commands are not difficult to keep, but they do go against some of
the desires of our human nature.
Keeping God's commands strengthens us and makes us able to conquer the
world, through the faith God has given us to obey him.
Jesus repeats many of these same ideas in the Gospel for today. It is part of
Jesus' great high-priestly sermon that he gave at the last supper, just before
he set out for the garden where he would be arrested. He was giving his last
instructions to his closest friends, the disciples. Jesus explains that he,
Jesus and God the Father are one and the same. If we love Jesus, we are loving
God too. And if we love Jesus, or God, we will obey his commandments, which are
mostly about loving each other.
It is important to remember that love, in the sense that Jesus and John are
talking about it, is not romantic love. There are several kinds of love, as we
all know. Mark Twain, in one of his books, said that young people of his day
(the late 1800's), didn't know the difference between the kinds of love. Many
other languages have different words for the different kinds of love. Think
about it: there is romantic or sexual love that leads to marriage, there is the
patriotic love of country, there is the parents' love for their children, there
is the strong love of two good friends for one another, there is love of a pet,
love of a hobby or of learning, love of a kind of work....and of course there
are the less good kinds of love, such as greed, lust, and ego-love. But love as
it is used in the New Testament means caring enough about another person
to want the best things possible for that person, even if it means giving up
those things ourselves...like a mother giving up a new dress so that she
can buy shoes for her children. Like Jesus giving up his life on the cross so
that we can be cleansed from our sins and have eternal life.
We need, too, to think about what a friend really is. FaceBook and modern
social customs have cheapened the word friend and made it almost
meaningless. Older people will remember that, up to about the 1950's or 1960's,
we met people in a rather formal way. We did not use their first names, only
Mr., Mrs., Miss, Doctor, and the like, with their last name. We did not hug or
even touch others, except to shake hands or to hold one another in a dignified
dance, or maybe to take someone's arm to help them across the street. We waited
until we had a chance to get to know one another before we called them
friends....before that they were acquaintances, people we knew but
were not sure yet that we had enough in common, or trusted enough, to be friends
with them. When someone said, "Oh, please call me Jim," or "You may call me
Mary," that meant we had crossed a major bridge...we were considered trustworthy
enough to be admitted to the person's inner circle. A friend was someone you
knew a good deal about, someone you could trust, someone whom you would help
without a second thought in time of trouble, someone you would treat like a
sister or brother, someone you could share your secrets and deepest thoughts
with. Not like today, when some people proclaim that they have 453 friends on
FaceBook, when everyone hugs people the first time they meet, when even store
clerks and the nurse at the doctor's call us by our first names without
permission (even though we may prefer our nickname)!
God loves us all much more than we can understand. That's parental love. Kids
have to obey their parents, so we are given the commandments to obey, to help us
follow the rules of God's family. But more than that...Jesus says that he
doesn't want us to be just his students, just his brothers in God's household,
any more. He wants us to be his friends! God wants us to be his friends,
as well as his children. That's a privilege. We are no longer acquaintances, or
small children learning God's ways. He wants us to be even closer than that. He
wants to come and live in us and let us live in him! God doesn't send out
FaceBook invitations saying, "Will you be my friend?" No. God sent himself,
Jesus, God the Son, who without even asking us, accepted punishment for all our
wrongdoing, so we could be free to love God and live God's way in loving others.
God wants us for deep, trusted, beloved friends in the old-fashioned meaning of
the word. We are already his children, and we all know families where grown
children are close friends with their parents...that's what God wants us to be.
So. There it is, Jesus' final teaching for his beloved disciples: I no
longer call you followers but friends. And, If you love me, you
will obey my commandments. And you notice that he leaves it up to us as
to whether or not we accept the invitation to become his close, dear friends, to
share our lives with him and share in his life too. It is up to us whether we
will remain acquaintances of God and Jesus...or friends. Which do YOU choose?
Amen.
