From the Pulpit:

They will know we are Christians by our love, by our love.

Krista Tippett is a remarkable woman. If her name sounds familiar to you, it is probably because she is the creator of Speaking of Faith, a public radio show, which she describes as "tracing the intersection between great religious ideas and human experience, between theology and real life." If you want to hear it in real time tune in to KUT at 6:00 Sunday morning, or you can hear it on your own schedule at the website.

You are just as likely to hear a scientist as a clergy person, a politician as a theologian. Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love says, "Her intelligence is like a salve  for all who have been wounded or marginalized by the God Wars." The God Wars. I wish we didn’t all know what that meant. 

I’m afraid we all know someone who is a casualty. Someone who heard something in church or from a self-professed Christian that made them want nothing to do with Christianity. Some of us have borne those scars. Some of us are surprised to find ourselves in church. Some of us are delighted to find here a mercy wider than we thought possible, a love that accepts us for who we are, that values us for the gifts we have to give rather than a judgment that calls attention to our failings.

I saw a You Tube video this week where a guy with a microphone was stopping young people on the street, and in the first bunch of interviews he asked them what they thought of Jesus. Good guy. Nice. Wonderful person. Great teacher. OK, so nobody went so far as to say Son of God, but it was unanimous: they like Jesus. But when those same people were asked their opinion of Christians, it was a whole ‘nother ball game. Narrow minded. Conservative. Rigid. Mean-spirited. Clearly, we have work to do. 

Anybody who has had any contact with Archbishop Desmond Tutu has experienced a Christian who is anything but narrow minded, conservative, rigid or mean-spirited. Tutu was on Krista Tippett’s bucket list of the people she has most wanted to interview, and so, if you were listening to KUT this morning you might have heard their conversation. She met him at a retreat center in the Midwest and, because she was told he had a fondness for dried mango, she showed up with a bowl of the fruit. He said hello. I have water. You have water. But why do you rate the dried fruit and I don’t rate?

His laugh is infectious. He is a tiny man whose presence fills the room, and it is all punctuated with joy. He chose the title for it: the God of surprises. Remember that he grew up in a slum township in South Africa under the fierce oppression of apartheid s it was enforced by the Dutch Reformed Church. Remember that it was Christians who told him he was less than a human being. Remember that he did not cast a vote until he was sixty-three. He said it felt like falling in love.

Love is what he exudes from the heart of his very being, and it is not a saccharine Hallmark love. No, it is a love that bears scars, that has looked evil in the eye during the Truth and Reconciliation hearings in his nation, that has heard the naked facts of atrocities and has crafted the beginning of a process of peace and respect among the diverse citizenry of his nation. The love he exudes is the love of resurrection, which must acknowledge the excruciating truth of pain and suffering and deaths both physical and spiritual from which he has been raised.

We have two biblical stories to focus on today, two stories that call us to love. In neither one of them is love a feeling. In both to love is a call to action.

I’m going to summarize as efficiently as possible the marvelous story from the Acts of the Apostles which Luke considers so important that he ends up telling it three times over. That’s like the old adage: first tell them what you are going to say, then tell them what you need to tell them, and then tell them what you just said. Bam. Bam. Bam. If you didn’t get it, then you weren’t paying attention. And, no matter how unlikely it seems, you have to trust in visions.

It starts with a Roman centurion in the city of Caesarea . His name was Cornelius, and he was a good and moral and generous man, but he was a Roman. He was either napping or daydreaming one afternoon when the Lord gave him a vision, and he said, Cornelius, there’s this guy named Peter in Joppa. Send for him. And so he sent his men to go call Peter to come.

Well, Peter was up on the roof of that house in Joppa. He was praying on an empty stomach when he fell into a trance, and he saw this sheet lowered down from heaven, and on the sheet were all kinds of animals. Chickens and shrimp and buzzards and lizards and pigs, and he heard God say “Peter. Eat all of these.” But Peter was a good kosher boy.

“No way, God. I can’t eat the shrimp or the buzzard or the lizard or the pork chop.” And God said, “If I say it is clean. It is clean. Understand?” And Peter understood. That’s when Cornelius’ men arrived, and Peter realized the vision wasn’t just about food. It was about people. It was about God’s blessing being for all people, and the Holy Spirit descended upon Cornelius and his family just as it had descended upon observant and obedient Jews, and so Peter baptized them. “Who was I to hinder God?” he asked. Who are we to hinder God? Who are we to say who is worthy, who is good enough, who is enough?

Our reading from John’s gospel is the very same one we read only five weeks ago on Maundy Thursday as we washed each other’s feet and stripped the altar and prepared our souls for the darkness of Good Friday. It is Jesus’ last teaching to his disciples. He maybe ought to have hammered it home three times just as Luke repeated the story of the sheet three times. Love each other as I have loved you.

Love. It’s a commandment. Love. It’s an action, not a feeling. If we think about it, Jesus did give it the three repetitions but later, to Peter alone, tend my sheep, feed my lambs, feed my sheep. Love them all.

Jesus doesn’t say this after he has hugged them all. He says it after he’s stripped down to his undies and held their dirty feet in his hands. Love is an action. A radical and unexpected action.

We’re celebrating this kind of love today. Love embodied in fourteen adults who every week drive to Menchaca Elementary School, who sit at a table out in the hall with one little first grader who has a hole in his or her heart. These are kids with not so easy lives. These are kids who thrive on the attention of one grown up who shows up week in and week out whether they have behaved or not, whether they have succeeded in their spelling or arithmetic, whether they ate dinner last night or went to bed hungry, whether their parents told them they loved them or swatted their heinies as they sent them out the door. This one grown up has shown up, rain or shine, with the love of Christ to share.

We don’t preach Jesus with words. We can’t do that in public school, and that’s OK. Their principal, John Rocha, is here with us today. What an honor it is to have you here, John. He knows we come as church members. Their teachers know we come as church members. We are fourteen mentors. We are fourteen prayer partners. We are a whole congregation who support them and their ministry. This is what love means, and it doesn’t mean beans if it is not embodied, if it is not incarnated, if it is not inclusive, if it is not open and accepting.

Krista Tippett found what she was hoping for in her interview with Archbishop Tutu, a conversation richly colored with dark shades of earthly pain but redeemed by the bright shafts of sacred hope. Hope that defies any kind of boundary we might attempt to put around it to keep anybody out. A conversation radiant with laughter and rejoicing. The voice of a tiny man who has suffered greatly but who has been lifted high on his experience of resurrection, who has seen life rise from ashes, and who proclaims: At the center of this existence is a heart beating with love. You and I and all of us are incredible. We are as a matter of fact made for goodness.

We are as a matter of fact made for goodness.

Amen.