The Here and the Not Yet
Sermon for the Sixth Sunday of Easter
May 14th, 2023
Acts 17:22-31
Psalm 66:8-20
1 Peter 3:13-22
John 14:15-21
In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen.
Jesus says, if you love me, keep my commandments. He promises that if we do so, he will be with us forever, even though we don’t completely understand what it means for Jesus to reveal himself to us.
Several years ago, I overheard someone roughly around my age talking about what he thought Jesus’ message for humanity was. They said—Jesus is love—so just love!!! That person’s interpretation is not completely wrong. Jesus said that the greatest commandment is to “Love God and to love your neighbor as ourselves. But I think that is often easier said than done.
Because if we are being honest with ourselves, sometimes we don’t always want to do it. Sometimes, we don’t want to pray for our enemies and we don’t want to make tough sacrifices. No matter how committed we say we are to following Jesus, we inevitably fail. We can be caught up in our own agendas that we forget the fact that we are mortal beings and entirely dependent on God.
Other times though—we actually want to be good so badly and we put so much pressure on ourselves to solve all the world’s problems that we get burned out. I know that I have reflected on what it means to be good so much that it prevents me from actually loving God and my neighbor. I’m a perfectionist. I want everything to go right. I was a big fan of history and social science classes as a high school student. I believed that knowing all the right things, having all the right beliefs would help me keep Jesus' commandments.
I took Global Politics in University and have volunteered on a number of political campaigns throughout my childhood. I’ve always been obsessed with having the right facts. I truly believed focusing on knowing all the right beliefs and relaying them to others would be the best way to serve Jesus. For most of my high school and University years—I spent a lot of time thinking, talking and doing organizing work around the issue of climate change and the need to transform our economy away from fossil fuels. I had always known that God commanded us to keep and till the earth and to be caretakers of his creation. But in high school and University it was becoming clear that humanity needed to do more than plant trees and pick up trash. I could see the ways in which climate change was negatively impacting our lives. The frequency of storms increased. We had more extreme weather. There was less snow appearing in the winters. I could see the effects of climate change before my very eyes, and as someone who was pretty politically aware from a young age and read the news everyday, I knew that there were people that were already facing the burdens of climate change more than we were. Without rapid changes to the way that we live, things would get much worse. I spent quite a bit of time volunteering for candidates for public office who stressed climate action. I went quite frequently to Fridays for Future protests. Much of my spare time in both High School and University was dedicated to climate advocacy.
I’m glad I was involved in this justice work. I did not feel that my labor was not completely in vain. There were some important wins that occurred, yet it seemed like the main people in power would talk about climate change more but did not see it as the existential threat that it is. They would not walk the talk. They would continue to invest in fossil fuel infrastructure and ignore the social impacts of this catastrophe on human lives.
Because of the greater awareness and greater need to take rapid action, climate change became a frequent topic in sermons, Sunday School, retreats and other church activities. Which is good! I’m glad to see the church at large getting on board, but often in church spaces, so much of the conversation would stop at the demands. People would say things such as “God is calling people to take climate action—and look at the young people!” I think that this was well intentioned. Apathy can be a common response to a seemingly overwhelming problem in the world—such as climate change, and I’m very happy that faith communities are stepping up. But as someone who was studying this issue all the time, spending much of her free time doing organizing work and spending nights thinking about whether the world would be habitable in 2050, I yearned to hear about resurrection. About how our weaknesses and limitations were gifts and that God was working in ways that we couldn’t comprehend.
Because instead of recognizing myself as playing a role in the work that God has been and is doing in the world, works-based theology made me feel as if I and a couple of others would have to build the kingdom of God with our own hands, while God watched from above. It was as if Jesus was some guy who might have some helpful wisdom, rather than a God who deeply desires a relationship with me and the entire body of Christ. It was as if Jesus said if you love me keep my commandments, but never actually rose from the dead. And after many years of ascribing to this theology, I became extremely depressed and fell into deep despair. It was hard to believe that the world was on a trajectory of goodness and progress—in fact, it seemed like as more people became more politically aware, things got worse.
Don’t get me wrong: political organizing and social justice work is a very faithful vocation. Faith without works is dead! Regardless of what I end up pursuing as a career, I hope to be involved in creating a more sustainable world! But by putting myself and other young people at the center of the story, I was becoming more miserable. This was not helping me to love God and my neighbor.
Abundant love requires hope. Hope comes from knowing who God is, what God has done and discerning the work that God is doing through the power of the Holy Spirit. When we continue to read today’s passage we see that Jesus promises us that he will not leave us orphaned and that he is coming to us. After a bloody crucifixion, he rises from the dead. Despite the darkness that surrounded him—he defeated sin and death.
We are in the middle of the here and the not yet. The powers of evil have been defeated through Jesus dying on the cross and rising again. In a couple of days, the Church will commemorate his ascension to the right hand of the Father. He started the work, and we are called to proclaim his resurrection through our words and actions, but we are not the author of this story.
It is so easy to be stuck on what we have to do and what Jesus demands of us that we forget why he is so important. Your story may not be like mine. Perhaps you grew up in a church that stressed personal holiness—that when you accepted Jesus as your savior—you had to prove that you were becoming more holy every day. Since you saw that this was not happening, maybe you thought—is God actually powerful? Is he actually with us?
Perhaps you have technically heard that God’s love does not depend on what we do, but the societal notions that you need to be successful in order to be loved can’t seem to escape your mind. Throughout the Gospel of John, Jesus reminds his followers that he will not abandon them. I believe that it is important not to forget that God knows that we will fail to perfectly love him and that’s okay. When Jesus says, if you love me, keep my commandments—he is calling us to do our best. God is calling us to faithfulness, not perfection. God knew this at the beginning of the world.
The triune God knew that we would mess up, yet he decided that we were worth it. Yes, we will make mistakes. We are human. We should do justice, love kindness and walk humbly with our God. We should repent when we fall into sin but that should not stop us from doing good. So do not let your hearts be troubled. Go in peace to Love and Serve the Lord. His promises remain true even when we slip up.
Let us pray,
Dear God, thank you for creating us as we are—strange, weird, bizarre humans who make a lot of mistakes. Forgive us when we do not follow your ways. Remind us that we are not alone. Remind us of your glorious Resurrection, that someday it will be fulfilled. In your name we pray, AMEN.
—Kate Strathdee
*Image by Bruce Fleming