A Lectionary Reflection for the people of Thankful Memorial Episcopal Church for worship from home, May 2, 2021 Year B, 5 Easter

Acts 8:26-40
Psalm 22:24-30
1 John 4:7-21
John 14:1-8

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

Mothers’ Day is still a week away but the texts we read for this fifth Sunday in Easter, with their emphasis on love, have me reflecting on the lessons that my own experience as a mother has taught me over the past decade.  One of those lessons is this: Love starts with one person.  That is to say that, though there may be a few examples of love between two people springing up at precisely the same moment, most of the time, that’s not the case.  Most of the time, love happens first as it does between a parent and a child: one way. 

If you’ve ever had the privilege of being the primary carer of an infant, you will know that every baby tends to be a hot mess – lots of drool and spit-up, crying often, sleeping a lot less often.  But for some reason, we fall in love with our babies despite all of that.  In fact, we love them for no reason at all.  I mean, there’s not much left once you get past the drool and the spit-up and the crying, but moms love our kids anyways.  We love them simply because that’s what good parents do. 

And here’s the crazy thing: the kids don’t love us back.  At least not right away.  Not in those first few months.  Hopefully, by the time they’re toddling and talking our love has begun to be returned, but at the very start, babies don’t love us grown-ups.  They need us, but they aren’t even developed enough emotionally for love.  But that’s not the point.  We don’t love our children because our children love us or because we expect that someday they will.  Good parents love their children because that’s the side where love starts.  And while we do hope that, eventually, the children will love us back, that’s their choice, a choice that children have to make again and again in their lives: given that our parents love us first, how will we react?  Will we love them back?  Whatever choice children make, however they decide to respond, it’s just that, a response.  Because love starts with the parent.  Love almost always starts on just one side. 

And if that is true for human parents, how much more true is it for our divine Parent?  Love, you see, begins with God, for God is love, as the first letter of John reminds us.  God is love.  And so, God loves us and that’s where all love, all creation begins.  God, our heavenly Mother, loves us and leaves us the choice of whether or not – and how – to respond. 

The first letter of John gives us one way that we might choose to respond to God’s love: “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.”  In other words, let us respond to God’s love by loving God back, and the only way to love God back, is to love one another.  For, “the commandment we have from him is this: those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also.”  And then God, who loves and who is love, that God will be abiding in us, and will be alive to others through us.

These words from the first letter of John are a paraphrase of what Jesus says in the Gospel of John this Sunday, too.  The letter explains what Jesus says in a metaphor: “I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinegrower.”  Jesus is the vine; we are the branches, the very branches that make up the vine itself.  We are the body of Christ when we abide in Christ and He in us.  And that’s what Jesus says: “Abide in me as I abide in you.” 

But what a way to say it!  Imagine, for a moment, the vine.  Imagine how a vine grows and spreads up the side of a house or along the fencing of a vineyard.  Picture the branches.  How they climb over one another, each one entwining itself around every other one, all of them springing from the main stem of the vine.  This is how love works.  It builds upon itself.  And there is real intimacy here.  Not just intimacy between the individual and the Christ, but intimacy among all the branches. 

And when they all grow together like that, think about how strong that vine becomes, how quickly it can take over a whole wall, how much it can cover, all twisting together in power and strength.  With that image in mind, it is no wonder that the first letter of John proclaims, “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear.”  Of course it does.  That makes perfect sense.  When we love one another as intimately as those vines all wrapped up upon each other, when we love others as well as God loves us, then there is no room left for fear.  When we come to know another that we might love them, then we begin to understand what moves and motivates them, where they hurt and what they long for.  And such understanding makes us unafraid. 

I think this is what we see happen in the story of Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch that we read in Acts this Sunday.  Here are two people so very different from one another.  They are divided by their social, economic, racial, sexual and religious status.  They share so little in common that their encounter is itself almost shocking.  Imagine a poor, white, evangelical street preacher all of a sudden ending up in the limo of a wealthy, black, queer politician.  Now imagine that, instead of fighting with one another, they just talk to one another and actually learn something from each other about their shared God – the one thing they do have in common.  That’s very like what happened to Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch.  

What could make them overcome such differences?  Because, let’s face it, we have learned to fear difference.  We have come to believe that our differences necessarily put us at odds with one another; we have learned to feel threatened by another’s contrasting experiences or perspectives.  “But perfect love casts out fear.”  When we respond to God’s love for us by loving even the one that challenges us to go beyond our comfort zone, all things become possible and there are no obstacles for the creation of God’s kingdom before us.  “Look, here is water!” says the eunuch.  “What is to prevent me from being baptized?” 

The answer, of course, is nothing.  Nothing – no uncertainties, no differences, no fears – nothing prevents us from making sacred the bonds of our shared membership in Christ with one another.  Nothing keeps us from establishing God’s kingdom here on earth when we are rooted in God’s love. Nothing can come between us, between you and me and all of God’s beloved children, when we love each other as intimately as God loves us.  Nothing can separate us from the love God our Mother has for us first, while we were “yet unborn.”  And when we abide in that love and choose to respond to it, we grow together as strong and powerful as a vine that covers the land and produces abundant fruit.  Thanks be to God.  Amen.