Answering Jesus' Question 5/5/19 Easter 3C

Rev. Dr. Rebecca L. Kiser

ANSWERING JESUS’ QUESTION TO US

5/5/19  Easter 3C

Love Me Tender; Bye Bye Love; Sea of Love; She Loves you Yeah, Yeah Yeah; Love is a Many Splendored Thing; Love letters In the Sand; All You need is Love; Crazy Little Thing called Love; Can’t Help falling in Love; I Just Called to Say I love you;  I Wanna Know What Love Is; All Out of Love; Loves Me Like A Rock; Love train; Only Love can Break Your Heart…..

Really, these are just SOME of the rock songs with Love in the title - if we included love as the topic of the song, it would be about 99%.  Rock songs, Country songs, folk songs, classical songs. Madrigals - is there any kind of popular songs of any era that don’t lean on the trials and the bliss of love as a main topic?  People often think on love, dream about love, wish for love, are upset about love...Articles and books and novels and movies all have themes of what love is, what love isn’t, betrayed love, whatever…..I mean, there are other things in the world besides love, although you wouldn’t easily know it. 

Mostly we ponder and sing about romantic love and our passions, for which the Greek used the word Eros.  Eros isn’t a bad word - its actually about our deep desires and things that make us passionate.  Not just physical acts.  We can feel passion about all kinds of things - this past week many of us went to Art Fields, and if you listened to any of the artists talking about their work, you heard their passion about it.  Writers are passionate about their craft, as are musicians, and spiritual seekers, ecstatic worshippers perhaps, too. 

Another Greek word for love is phileo - like in our city Philadelphia, city of “Brotherly love” as we used to call it.  Deep friendships, strong connections, even a level of intimacy that isn’t physical intimacy.  Positive family ties, ties of kinship - these are phileo. 

A third Greek word also translated “Love” is agape - “a universal, unconditional love that transcends and persists regardless of circumstance. It goes beyond just the emotions to the extent of seeking the best for others.  Within Christianity, agape is considered to be the love originating from God for humankind…..the covenant love of God for humans, as well as the human reciprocal love for God; the term necessarily extends to the love of others.”  (Wikipedia)  Loving kindness, charity, self-sacrificing love. 

An interesting point in the Q & A between the risen Jesus and Peter is that Jesus asks, Do you agape love me? This is the word Jesus uses the first 2 times he asks.  Peter responds saying Yes, I phileo love you.  The 3rd time Jesus says Do you phileo love me, and this is the time when Peter is hurt.  I don’t know if the Aramaic they probably spoke in had these distinctions, but the Greek certainly does.  Agape is the word for love Jesus uses when he says God loves us, and when he commands us to love God and love our neighbor.  Some commentators consider it the highest form of love; in which case its notable that Peter uses a different word - still a strong word and a strong connection, just not agape. 

But Love, for us English speakers, is a tricky thing to speak of,... we are nervous perhaps, in using it about people in a serious sense. It marks a change in a relationship when one partner says I love you, for example - it implies a deeper commitment.  We can talk easily about loving God in a non-specific way, too, which becomes more complicated when we are confronted with ACTUAL PEOPLE and what it means to love them.   

There’s a kind of nervous or tentative undertone, to me, in the dialogue between Jesus and Peter, when Jesus asks, “Do you love me?” How do you feel about me? What is your connection to me? Can I count on you? 

It reminds me of those movie scenes when one partner says “I love you” and the other partner hems and haws a bit, saying you’re a great person and I admire you and so on and so on, but can’t bring themselves to say “I love you” back again.  Whadda ya mean, Jesus? How can you ask me that? Of course I love you!!

Of course, that’s just my projection on the scene... let’s imagine Jesus asking this of us – we are looking at Jesus, a middle-eastern looking guy who we’ve followed around for several years, seen him killed, and now see him raised.  Whew!  We know he’s a powerful figure, maybe even God.  Imagine Jesus asking us that question, “Do you love me?” I’d probably answer, “Sure, yes, I love you, Jesus.” That’s the right Christian answer - you’ve done so much for me, you’ve sought me and found me, you poured out your love and life for me, even to the death.  You bring me into your kingdom.  Of course I love you! 

How will we feel when Jesus asks it a second time?  Are we taken aback? Does he doubt me? SHOULD he doubt me?  Have I pondered just what it means to love Jesus? Which is really asking, do I love God?  I look deeper into my heart, and I look at my life, and I answer, Yes, Jesus, I’ve loved you. I’ve listened for your words in the Scripture, I’ve stayed worshipping and serving in your church despite some times where I was so mistreated by those sheep and lambs you’re telling me to feed and shepherd, that I’d be justified in throwing up my hands and going off.  I’ve worked on myself about lying, stealing, coveting, being faithful to my spouse, stewardship, working hard, and all those commandments.  I’ve prayed and cried over your people, over mission to other lands, over the terrors and evils in our world, for our leaders.  I’ve followed where I heard your spirit leading in regards to opening my heart to various kinds of people, various races, various theologies, various styles of worship… pursuing joy in my spiritual life - trying my best to follow.  Yes, you are important to me, faith is predominant in my life.  Haven’t I shown that I love you? Hey, I’m Presbyterian, more left-brained and analytical perhaps, more quiet in my devotion than demonstrative and loud.  Its not my tradition to shout and call out, or do what my mom called “emote” over things.  Still, my feelings run deep, and my commitment is sure.

Many of us here today can answer the same way - following Jesus has ordered our lives and our priorities; we’ve been faithful to God’s church, and joining in the good works of caring for one another that our church does.  We’ve studied the Scriptures, learned, and taken seriously what we have heard in it.  Perhaps we have regular devotional practices and prayer times in our spiritual lives.  We’ve served as deacon or elder when asked, helped in those tasks that keep the church running.  Perhaps we do some of those things better than we do others….

But then…..Jesus turns to us and asks a third time – Do you love me?  Are we uncomfortable with this? Do you love me? Where does this question go in our psyches? What does our heart hear this time he asks?  Jesus keeps asking us to delve more deeply into our selves, our feelings, our commitments.

For some reason, there were some years when I woke up from sleep or dreams, hearing a knocking sound, and hearing that very question in my mind, Do you love me?  At first I wondered what I’d been dreaming; but as it kept happening, I began to wonder what was going on in my unconscious mind, or if God was asking me to ponder this.  It happened so often and for so long, that I knew it was important, and from the Holy Spirit.  I felt just as awkward as Peter - what was God asking of me? Or preparing me for?  I never really knew the answer - the question still sits in the back of my mind.  I was reminded of this time period when our choir presented their musical program on Palm Sunday, especially the song, If You Love Me, Keep My Commands.  If you love me, if you love me, if you love me – then follow.

Do you know the musical Fiddler on the Roof? There’s this song where Teyve sings to his wife and asks, Do You Love Me?  Their daughters are marrying without the help of the matchmaker, finding that they love men of their own choosing, and saying, “But I LOVE  him!” So he looks at his faithful wife, chosen for him in the traditional way, and asks, do you love me? What is this love thing?

Being asked the third time makes my earlier answers sound defensive, or self-justifying perhaps. It seems to me that God is asking us for more emotional depth than even the commitment to obedience - I might use the word, do you long for me? Do you seek me with your whole heart and soul? Am I your primary allegiance, your central value, in other words, am I your all in all? Because that’s who God wants to be to us. 

It seems to me that Jesus wants more  - God wants a relationship that involves our hearts, our devotion, our longing, and feelings. God wants to be that which moves us, inspires us, calls us forward; God longs for us to return the fervor and the fire that kept Jesus sweating blood as he strove to stay true to the end of his life.  We’ve know that kind of fervor - we’ve felt a shadow of it for another person, felt that kind of longing for connection to another person: a passion to know and be known, an intimacy of love and acceptance, a giving of one’s heart outside of ourselves. Christian mystics have called Jesus “lover” and both Old and New Testament use the metaphor of marriage for the love between God and believers.  We are God’s beloved - God is asking to be our all.  In the Revelation of John, God spits out the church of Laodicea because its neither cold nor hot, but just lukewarm towards God.  Are we just lukewarm, following the traditions and living what the church has said is the right way - Is there any fire?  Do you love me?

Friends, the vibrancy and depth of our own faith, our own relationship with God, is what will make God’s church alive.  Because if we love God, we will follow Christ in service, in laying down our own lives in this godly, self-sacrificing love for the world.  Going through the motions isn’t going to keep the church alive.  Trying to follow what some book tells us has worked somewhere else, isn’t the same thing as loving God with the fervor of our hearts and listening for what God says to us in particular.  Without the wind of the Spirit in our sails, this boat will never go anywhere.  Without the fire of the Spirit in our hearts, those who live in the cold as strangers to God will not find warmth their souls. 

The invitation to us today is to look into our our hearts for that longing for God that first brought us to faith, and stir it up. Have we relaxed into a certain complacency in our prayer or our reading?  Ask the Spirit to show us and lead us, to awaken again that love for God in our hearts, to let us imagine what what God wants from us, to speak to us, bring ideas to us, or people who challenge us, or whatever it takes to cause us to live more deeply into our discipleship.  Do you love me? AMEN.