Rev. Rachel Lewis Cooley
“Vulnerable, Unconditional Love”
Eastwood Christian Church, Nashville TN December 20, 2020
John 15:9-17
9 As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love. 10 If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love. 11 I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete.
12 “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. 13 No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. 14 You are my friends if you do what I command you. 15 I do not call you servants[d] any longer, because the servant[e] does not know what the master is doing, but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father. 16 You did not choose me, but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask him in my name. 17 I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another.
Good morning Eastwood. It is almost, almost Christmas. Does that feel kinda-crazy to you all too? Waking up this morning | thought about how it is almost the longest night of the year. The darkness tomorrow will be from about 4:30 pm to 7 am— about 14 and % hours of the day. Maybe it feels this year that we’ve been in a long, long night like this. And it’s good and right- as we are loved by God- that we honor any heartache, angst to get out of this, questions as to how this could be happening, or even numbness we experience. AND it’s good and right - as we are beloved co-creators with God- to look too at what the night is teaching us, or how it is forming us. Perhaps these periods of “wintering,” both seasonally and in the arc of our lives have things to offer. Might the darkness hold gifts?
From this darkness— both right now and throughout this year— it certainly seems to me that this isa moment to lean in to fove as we do on this fourth Sunday of Advent. When the pandemic first started in the US, we were all on our noon zoom calls or in our Sunday school classes and small groups talking about how we were now talking with our neighbors more, and about how much our interconnection to each other matters. We were wearing our masks to protect each other, because we love each other. As the Louis Armstrong classic What a Wonderful World says we were shaking hands with friends and neighbors saying “how do you do?,” but we were really saying “I love you.” Sharon Frech brought that song to our attention recently, both in a fellowship hour and her Monday prayer gift last week. It’s been speaking to her during this time, when music’s been keeping her a bit more grounded in hope, peace, joy, and love.
Well, we are still wearing masks because we love each other, even though we may not be talking about it quite as much. We may not be talking to our neighbors quite as often, but maybe we can again. Especially during this holiday season, how can we keep trying to be love and show love, being part of God’s inbreaking of love through Jesus the Christ, through creation, and through each of us.
I’ll now read our scripture, from John chapter 15, verses 9-17. I’m reading from the Common English Bible translation, which I’ve been loving lately. If you’re a visual learner, you can follow along in your bible, or with the words on the screen if you’d like. It includes male, father language for the God we know by many names. Hear now the words of Jesus:
9“As the Father loved me, I too have loved you. Remain in my love. 10If you keep my commandments, you will remain in my love, just as I kept my Father’s commandments and remain in his love. 11I have said these things to you so that my joy will be in you and your joy will be complete. 12This is my commandment: love each other just as I have loved you. 13No one has greater love than to give up one’s life for one’s friends. 14You are my friends if you do what I command you. 15I don’t call you servants any longer, because servants don’t know what their master is doing. Instead, I call you friends, because everything I heard from my Father I have made known to you. 16You didn’t choose me, but I chose you and appointed you so that you could go and produce fruit and so that your fruit could last. As a result, whatever you ask the Father in my name, he will give you. 17I give you these commandments so that you can love each other.
Herein we seek understanding and inspiration. Will you pray with me?
Creator God, giver of present and coming hope, peace, joy, and love, May the words of my mouth, and the meditations of all of our hearts, be pleasing and faithful to you this Advent Sunday, as we wait for your son to come in love.
Amen.
So this is the Sunday of love. where should we begin talking about a thing, a feeling, so universal, yet so hard to define. Love seems to be a thing we know through experience— and we can experience it in so many different ways. Through a sense of God’s love, in friendships, in long-term relationships, in romantic relationships, in kindness shown by a neighbor, and also in acts that co-create with God justice and compassion.
If we’re not careful, it may feel lofty and distant to talk about love. But it is something we experience here on the ground, in our flesh, in our gifts and faults. If Jesus became flesh to be God’s word and love on earth, becoming a vulnerable human to love us here on the ground, surely there is something here, now, imperfect, and alive about love.
To see this love in the details and the everyday—which we may experience in our relationships and various interaction with others—I turned to this book: Living L’Arche: Stories of Compassion, Love and Disability, which I read for a class last year. A particular story came to me in the middle of the night, awake and thinking for a bit before falling back to sleep. When I’m awake, probably between sleep cycles, and thoughtful lately, I’m calling it “middling,” which is apparently what some folks at some point in human history called it. Don’t ask me when in human history—because | heard this on an NPR interview about a new book called “Wintering” recently and | couldn’t find the details again—but at some point, humans embraced this middle-of-the-night waking as something expected, and even good: to have time to think and feel in the quiet darkness that which we often don’t have time to process during the day. To them, “Middling” was not something to fight, feeling frustrated that you’re not getting enough sleep. It’s natural to feel this way in our busy lives with alarm clocks and things to do. But can we sometimes embrace the periods of darkness in the middle of the night?
So I was thinking about love, and my relationships, and this story came back to me. This is Trent and Katherine’s story. Trent is what they call a “core member” in a network of intentional communities called L’Arche which is French for “the ark.” Core members are folks with varying disabilities, as we call them, though it’s really strange to lump the variety of experiences, needs, and gifts of all these people into one bucket term called “disability.” But what these core members have in common is that they need some level of help and community support from each other and from “assistants” who live as members and caretakers in the community.
Core member Trent is a man who is blind and cognitively about 5 years of age, and Katherine is an assistant in their community. Trent and Katherine had a special relationship. “I had a real love for Trent,” Katherine says. “A connection with him. I could calm him down, I enjoyed him.” You can follow along with her narrative as she continues on your screen:
“One night | was giving [Trent] his bath and | was drying off his back. He says, ‘You're my friend, right?' | stopped for a minute. What occurred to me is how many people had bathed this man, complete strangers. How many people didn’t see this sacred life in front of them, just wanted to get the job done. How many times he had to put up with that. What he’s really saying is, ‘Can I trust you? Are you safe? Are you my friend?’ it occurred to me that this man probably lived through hell. Abuse. People being incredibly insensitive to him. Yet he can love. He can still trust. I could never ask somebody to be my friend. I realized that I was in a transforming moment, knowing that I’m more broken than Trent. I could not be this vulnerable. I thought that I was being authentic but realized he was teaching me something that I hadn’t learned. God was really present in that moment. That is when I could say that I didn't choose L'Arche but L'Arche has chosen me. That's our spirituality.”
Herein, we seek understanding and inspiration.
Here, God was present with Katherine and Trent in a vulnerable moment of sharing and receiving love. it was just bathing at the end of the day. But it became sacred, with love enfleshed because of Trent’s courage and tenderness in being vulnerable.
So if we’re looking for a definition of love, as my fellow staff members Josh and Sam and I have the past few weeks as we look to preach on these Advent themes, I think Katherine and Trent’s story is one. My googling also brought me to Brené Brown, who y’all know I love. I thought I remembered her saying once that nobody in research really tries to define love all that often, but she loves writing her own definitions, and she loves a challenge, so this is what she came up with. You can see the graphic from her website on the screen.
Love
We cultivate love when we allow our most vulnerable and powerful selves to be deeply seen and known, and when we honor the spiritual connection that grows from that offering with trust, respect, kindness, and affection. Love is not something we give or get; it is something that we nurture and grow, a connection that can only be cultivated between two people when it exists within each one of them—we can only love others as much as we love ourselves. Shame, blame, disrespect, betrayal, and the withholding of affection damage the roots from which love grows. Love can only survive these injuries if they are acknowledged, healed, and rare.
Brené Brown
Notice how she kind of comes at defining love from the side, offering how we cultivate it, what’s required for it, and what it is not. It requires “we allow our must vulnerable and powerful selves to be deeply seen and known”--in all our gifts and limitations, confidences and uncertainties.
Loving ourselves and others as well as showing our vulnerability and power can be difficult or seem fleeting in our day to day lives. And yet it does break in. And we can nurture it.
Maybe it breaks in because it comes from God, and the divine shows up sometimes when we least expect it, and also when we choose to attune ourselves to it. Love from God certainly showed up unexpectedly, and with vulnerability, in the birth of Jesus here on earth. Whatever you believe about Jesus’s identity as divine made flesh; or a human, like you and me, who was in tune with God and became a leader and expression of God’s love, the story tells us that Jesus was born into poverty, to refugees, to folks oppressed by empire, and in a stable among hay and animals because there was nowhere else for them to turn. This is a story—a definition—of nitty, gritty, on the ground love. Love with skin and bones, weaknesses and gifts. Whatever I “believe” from one moment to the next about Jesus’s identity, this story always draws me to awe, and wonder. And I think it always will.
So, too, will the definition of love that Jesus gives in our scripture this morning. This comes from near the end of Jesus’s life, from his farewell discourse in John. I know this might seem a bit odd to read on this Advent Sunday, but I felt it speaks to Jesus’s view of love on earth. “As the Father loved me, I too have loved you,” he says. We are loved by God, and thus we love. How are we transformed by the love of God? How are you transformed by the love of God? Does knowing God’s love and the love of Jesus help you embrace your natural human vulnerability, and thus give and receive love here on earth more fully and deeply?
“This is my commandment,” Jesus says: “Love each other just as I have loved you. No one has greater love than to give up one’s life for one’s friends.” This may seem a lofty goal, and indeed it can be an act of great significance. But it can also look like showing “equal regard for others” as you do yourself. Maybe that doesn’t feel natural or like something we can accomplish, but I actually think it’s something we often do. Brené Brown reminded us that we can only love others as much as we love ourselves. Maybe we can act our way into loving ourselves and others through caring, as Katherine and Trent did for each other in their daily routine, getting ready for bed one night. Love happens in the daily things we do to care for ourselves and others.
Kevin S. Reimer, the author of Living L’Arche also talks about Trent and Katherine’s relationship as a place where one person sees “the kind of person[another] wants to become, and then helps that person to grow into their ideal.” He cites a study with married couples, where researcher Stephen Drigotas describes how as they know each other better, and reflect what they sense back to one another, they help each other know themselves— in their gifts and vulnerabilities—more fully. They then help each other live out their best selves—gifts and vulnerabilities included. They love each other for their vulnerabilities. Do you have anyone who loves you for the seemingly foolish, strange, or unique things you do that make you who you are? Do you love anyone for their foolish, strange, or unique traits? I bet maybe you do. This is an embodiment of unconditional love— of love which believes in another and walks alongside them. A love which sees the best and the quote-in-quote “worst” and accompanies someone in their journey toward what they envision as their ideal self.
Jesus seems to offer a vision for ideal living and loving for his disciples in this scripture. He says that they—and perhaps we—are his friends, which translates from the Greek expression for “ones who are loved.” “I call you friends, because everything I heard from my Father I have made known to you,” he says. How does Jesus continually reveal Goa’s love to us, and to you? How does this help us to bear the fruit of love, the fruit that lasts, as Jesus puts it?
I think Jesus throughout the scriptures shows the kind of unconditional love talked about in Living L’Arche, and lived in those communities. This is a love where he co-creates a vision of the ideal for each person he encounters and loves, and supports them into their living it. In his powerful work Jesus and the Disinherited, Howard Thurman—a black theologian and spiritual teacher of the last century in the US—writes about how Jesus lived this love ethic with the woman who is brought to him to be stoned because she is accused of adultery. Many of us likely remember Jesus’s famous response in John 8: “Let any who is without sin among you cast the first stone,” and the way the people then slowly disappeared, walking away without hurting the woman. Jesus then says to her: “Neither do I condemn you. Go, and sin no more.” Plain and simple. No questions about her past, nor perhaps expectation that she will never waiver again. As you can see on your screen, Thurman reflects on this interaction, saying:
"[Jesus] met the woman where she was, and he treated her as if she were already where she now willed to be. In dealing with her, he "believed" her into the fulfillment of her possibilities. He stirred her confidence into activity. He placed a crown over her head which for the rest of her life she would keep trying to grow tall enough to wear.
Free at least, free at last.
Thank God Almighty, I'm free at last."
I think that’s what Jesus is doing with his disciples in our scripture for today too. I think that’s what Jesus—born to us this week in vulnerability for the possibility of friendship and love with us—is doing for us too, by loving us and by journeying with us to love more fully, often, and deeply.
“I have said these things to you so that my joy will be in you and your joy will be complete,” he says. May you choose and know joy this week, however your Christmas holiday looks, and however you and others show up during this difficult year. May it be as it will be, and may we have joy in whatever is, and in the love which breaks in.
Amen.