(1 John 4:7-21) -- Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, God is love. God's love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us.

By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit. And we have seen and do testify that the Father has sent his Son as the Savior of the world. God abides in those who confess that Jesus is the Son of God, and they abide in God. So we have known and believe the love that God has for us.

God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them. Love has been perfected among us in this: that we may have boldness on the day of judgment, because as he is, so are we in this world. There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love. We love because he first loved us. Those who say, "I love God," and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen. The commandment we have from him is this: those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also.

 

John 15:1-8 -- Jesus said, "I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinegrower. He removes every branch in me that bears no fruit. Every branch that bears fruit he prunes to make it bear more fruit. You have already been cleansed by the word that I have spoken to you. Abide in me as I abide in you. Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me. I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing. Whoever does not abide in me is thrown away like a branch and withers; such branches are gathered, thrown into the fire, and burned. If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask for whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. My Father is glorified by this, that you bear much fruit and become my disciples."

  

May my words serve you, oh Lord, and have some truth to them.

Happy Mothers Day.  Thank you for so much, our mothers, our children’s mothers, our grandchildren’s mothers
Congratulations, graduates.   My name is John DuVal.  I teach in the English Department at the University of Arkansas.

    Today I get to say what I’m not supposed to say and I don’t say standing in front of my classes at the University: I get to say:  I’m a Christian.  I believe that it wasn’t enough for God to love us as a father and a mother, but that he actually became one of us in the person of Jesus, thereby experiencing personally the bewilderment, the wonders, and the suffering that it is to be part of the physical world as a human being, with the purpose of atoning – there I’ve said it, atoning, a word in today’s readings and a word many Episcopalians feel uncomfortable with – atoning somehow for all the unhappiness, great or trivial,  that every one of us causes, consciously or inconsiderately, and that we so rarely have any power to amend by ourselves. 

    That said, let us turn to the assignment for today, that is the readings we have just heard.  Our featured author is my namesake, John, both in his first letter and in his gospel.   Most Christian scholars believe that John the apostle did not actually write his epistles and gospel, but that disciples of his, after their teacher was no longer alive, reconstructed it from their memory of his teachings and his stories about Jesus.  Nevertheless, in the readings for today, we do hear the voice of one author, and whether that voice comes through John’s writings or through his spoken words recorded after his death, I believe the voice is the voice of the apostle John, a writer (or speaker) who genuinely knew Jesus and learned from him.   I also suspect that this personal friend of Jesus, more than the other gospel writers, is so passionately committed to his idea of who Jesus the Christ is that, writing in the manner of most biographers of antiquity, he expresses his own ideas about the nature of Jesus by putting those ideas into the mouth of Jesus, whether Jesus actually said them or not.
    In these two readings from John lie all the promise and all the challenge of the Christian life.  We probably feel uncomfortable where John has Jesus say, “Whoever does not abide in me is thrown away like a branch and withers; such branches are gathered, thrown into the fire, and burned.”  But we know that God is love.  John just told us so in his letter.  Better yet, we know that everybody, from the mass murderer to the holiest of saints, abides in God, and God is love, and love is Jesus.  “In him,” says Saint Paul, “we live and move and have our being.”  The branches that are being pruned off and burned, like the suckers on a tomato plant, – I think I once heard Lowell say this in a sermon –  are not individual people, but all those envies, grudges, greeds, resentments, angers, fears, fraustrations, and cravings for recognition that sometimes seem to make up the sum of who we are and that keep us from bearing prize fruit.  God prunes us, in other words, because he sees lots of good in us even when we can’t, he loves us, he continues to love us, and always his love makes us lovable.

    Anyway, you graduates, and those of you who have graduated, and those of you who will someday graduate, this is as good a time as any to remind you, now that I’ve congratulated you, that all the awards and honors and degrees in the world, those achieved and those only hankered after, count for nothing compared with the love of God.  When I stand naked before my maker at the hour of judgment, to watch the two videos that God will have set up for me to watch, one of the happiness I allowed in other people’s lives, one of the unhappiness I caused, I do not plan to say, “God, let me introduce myself.  I’m Doctor DuVal.  Here’s my résumé with all my books and articles, and here’s a record of the important conferences I’ve attended.”

    I’ll try to keep quiet instead – not easy for a professor.  But God is love.  Whether I speak or be silent, God will get me past all my foolishness.   Because if God loves us, we really don’t have to be afraid of being foolish – of coming into class with one pant leg pulled up from our bicycle ride or (as happened to me in my first year of teaching) fumbling through a lecture on Othello, not having read it past the third act.)

    We can forgive ourselves even for our hurtful foolishness – cutting remarks for the sake of a laugh, slighting remarks behind other people’s backs to boost our own prestige – because God loves our victims, too, and will atone where we cannot atone and will redeem where we cannot redeem.  If we remember God’s love and remember that we abide in love, we can risk foolishness.  We can pray to the Holy Spirit that she move us to the kind of spontaneity that inspired Philip in Acts of the Apostles.  Like Philip, we can risk being foolish.  Philip runs and bursts in on a rich man’s privacy – interrupting his Bible-reading time! – and risks making a fool of himself talking with a foreigner and a eunuch, and makes a new friend, and shares the love of God.

    So what I would like to ask of you graduates, and others, is, at every moment of success and achievement of your life, when you are most congratulated and worthy of congratulations and most satisfied with yourselves, to remind yourself that God loves you, too, even though God’s love may not feel so necessary then.  And when you fail, when you find yourselves in a rut, when the woman you thought admired you, nay, worshiped you,  looks you in the eye and tells you you’re a jerk and you don’t even have the presence of mind to explain to her that there’s nothing essentially wrong with being a jerk – then when you feel most unloved and unlovable, remind yourself that God loves you better than you can imagine.

    The second thing I ask of you is to keep in mind the last sentence of John’s epistle that I read for you today: “those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also.”  Our literal brothers and sisters and family members, the people of our community, the people of our world now and in future generations – these are the people whom we must love actively by serving them.  As we achieve more – education, wealth, power, happiness – we will be better able to help those who need our help most, the uneducated, the poor, the powerless, the unhappy.  And I ask you to pray for all of us that we may continue to recognize God’s love abiding in us and that with our service God’s love, as John puts it, may be perfected in us.
    So graduate, never stop learning, read poems, care for others, never give up on yourselves or the love of God; and always, like the Ethiopian we just read about, fresh and bright from the waters of baptism, in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, go your ways rejoicing.