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Sunday, June 20, 2010
Identification Please
By Rev. Jerry Herships
Scripture: John 15:8 – 12
8My Father is glorified by this, that you bear much fruit and become my disciples.9As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love. 10If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love. 11I 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.
John 13:34 – 35
34I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. 35By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”
How do you identify yourself? What makes you….you? In our society, we have a lot of things that we use to identify who we are. We use titles like mom and doctor and custodian or where we live: Greenwood Village, Downtown, or Colorado. We also describe our cars: Volkswagen, Jeep, Humvee. All these things tell us a little bit about who we are or at the very least, how we project who we are.
Another part of us is the community part, the people with whom we associate. With our community associations, we say to the world, at least in part, “this is who I am.” I am a member of Greenpeace, or a member of the NRA, or a republican or democrat. I am a member of St. Andrew UMC or Cherry Hills Community Church.
Like it or not, all of these things make a statement to the outside world about who we are. They are of very little interest to God. In these two scripture passages, God tells us what we need to do and, by doing it, what the outside world will see and say about us.
I have talked about John 13: 34-35 before but tonight I am looking at it from a different angle. Why we are disciples, how to know if we are disciples and what the world will think of us if we truly follow Jesus’ commandment.
Both of these passages focus on and show a connection between love and discipleship. It is really amazing how many things AREN’T mentioned pertaining to the qualities of being a disciple of Christ.
Harvey Martz is doing an excellent series right now about what we promise when we become members of the Methodist church. We promise our prayers, presence, gifts, service, and witness. These are all things that can lead us to being better disciples.
Thousands of years earlier, Jesus didn’t make anyone take membership vows. He didn’t need to. He used one measuring stick to define someone as being his disciple or not. Do they love? Both verses tell us that this is how they will become and how the world will spot them as disciples. It is the “bearing of fruit,” the “doing” of love that is the visible, meaningful, nitty-gritty, proof-is-in-the-pudding sign of discipleship.
If we are to abide in God’s love, we have to, as individuals and as a community, bear fruit. Abiding in Jesus’ love, just like Jesus abided in God’s love is about as good as it gets. Another word for abide is dwell. We dwell in God’s love. No wonder the verse tells us that when we do this our joy will be complete. Yea, I’m thinking that’s true. And we find that joy, we find our discipleships, we find our connection with God and Jesus through service in the world, love in action.
We struggle with this idea that service can bring us joy. Service is so often tied to work and, let’s face it; it is called “work.” For so many people work and joy are not things that just naturally go together. But what if we looked at service as not drudgery but rather as simply a road we take leading to discipleship and leading to God’s joy? Not too shabby huh?
Rabindranath Tagone, Indian poet, playwright and essayist won the Noble prize in literature in 1913. I hadn’t heard of him prior to this week. He wrote these words. “I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy.”
This is an old concept but not one that I heard a lot about growing up. Many dads got up, went to work, did their time and came home. (For the record, moms did, too, but it’s Father’s Day so they get the shout out.) What is interesting is that if we dig just a little bit deeper, we see that the REASON the Father did this was for the joy of his family. It was bringing others joy…even when the work was less than fun.
Our Father wants the same thing (and yes, I realize the masculine language, if I was giving this on Mother’s day….She would want the same thing)…our joy to be complete.
Our job is to find the way that our love manifests in the world. This will become our calling card. Not the car or the neighborhood, or the job title. We will become the thing that we use to make into the physical Jesus’ love for us and our love for him.
I have mentioned commentaries before. They are the gigantic books that biblical scholars write to talk about the Bible. Sometimes there are entire books written about ONE book of the bible. It is fascinating but it’s not what we know that makes us disciples.
I just spent four days at the Rocky Mountain United Methodist Annual Conference here in Denver. We have been doing it over 100 years. Not me personally, but honestly, sometimes, it can feel like it. It is the structure and the order that keeps the United Methodist Church running. It, too, is necessary but it’s not what makes us Disciples of Christ.
I am now on The District Committee of Ordained Ministry. We are the first panel who grill, for lack of a better term, the people who want to go into ordained ministry. It is an important part of the ordination process to make sure people have had the proper training and have given enough time to discerning God’s call in their life. But it’s not what makes any of us disciples of Jesus.
I sometimes think I had more faith and more comfort and more appreciation of God BEFORE I got all this other stuff into my life: the formal education, the conference politics, the committees and boards and panels that help to run the system. It is easy to get caught up in all of that and forget what it is that God and Jesus ask us to do.
Love each other. Love the world. Find a way to show that love in doing something for others and through that, we will find our joy. When we do that…we will find ourselves living out what it means to be a disciple.
As we have seen before, when God wants something to stick to our hearts, God makes sure we can’t miss it. I had my awesome assistant Kathy print up these sheets that show us a good number of verses that point to this one great commandment. Pull it out whenever you get caught up in too many committees, reading too many books, attending too many things and remember, all you have to do is love on people. Find the best way to do that so you affect the most people in a real tangible way and you will be doing what God commands of us. You will be a disciple. No one will have to come to you and ask for identification as proof of being a follower of JC.
House Where Nobody Lives by Tom Waits
There's a house on my block
That's abandoned and cold
Folks moved out of it a
Long time ago
And they took all their things
And they never came back
Looks like it's haunted
With the windows all cracked
And everyone call it
The house, the house where
Nobody lives
Once it held laughter
Once it held dreams
Did they throw it away
Did they know what it means
Did someone's heart break
Or did someone do somebody wrong?
Well the paint was all cracked
It was peeled off of the wood
Papers were stacked on the porch
Where I stood
And the weeds had grown up
Just as high as the door
There were birds in the chimney
And an old chest of drawers
Looks like no one will ever
Come back to the
House were nobody lives
Once it held laughter
Once it held dreams
Did they throw it away
Did they know what it means
Did someone's heart break
Or did someone do someone wrong?
So if you find someone
Someone to have, someone to hold
Don't trade it for silver
Don't trade it for gold
I hav´got all of life's treasures
And they are fine and they are good
They remind me that houses
Are just made of wood
What makes a house grand
Ain't the roof or the doors
If there's love in a house
It's a palace for sure
Without love...
It ain't nothin but a house
A house where nobody lives
Without love it ain't nothin
But a house, a house where
Nobody lives.