Love As the Christian Identity

5 Easter   C      May 18, 2025
Acts 11:1-18 Psalm 148
Revelation 21:1-6 John 13:31-35

Lectionary Link

Each week a preacher is given a collage of biblical readings from which a sermon or homily has to be crafted.  If a preacher were to do justice to all the assigned readings, then it would end up being a very long commentary on readings that often are diverse and unrelated in themes.  But one looks for some devices to unite some of the topics which arise from a reading of the appointed texts.

The Psalmist is a poet and perhaps a musician; one who has a different kind of literary license than a mere reporter of common sense experience.  The Psalmist is free to anthropomorphize all levels of being in the universe and assign all beings a singular task.  No matter who you are, whether angel, or king, or man, or woman, or old, or young, whether it is every astronomical entity in the heavens, or whether it is sentient animals on the earth, all people and all heavenly invisible beings, all animals, mountains, rivers, and trees, yes, everything and everyone, has but one vocation, to praise the Lord.  That is, according to Psalm 148.

The Psalmist is perhaps ecstatic on the collective effervescence of everything all at once.  It is ecstatic and intoxicating to contemplate what it means to be together with everyone and everything and to profess a participation in this greatness by applauding it with everyone and everything, by imagining the entire array of entities in this universe as being applauding spectators of the One Wholeness of everything.

To be applauding beings of the Lord, the Great One, implies a deep respect, a profound gratitude for merely being, here.  Altogether.  The mystery of such a profound effervescence makes the Psalmist enthralled and enthused and compelled to worship and lead a worshiping congregation with verse which projects the praise capacity of everything that exists.

If God is worthy of universal praise, respect, love, gratitude, and honor, such praise also needs to be manifest in love, honor, respect and order, in short, in total harmony of all things.

This vision of harmony is but the hope, dream, and wish of people everywhere, because the actual condition of the world, though having the outlines of harmony found in observed consistencies of natural laws, also shows the competition and harm happening between the varieties of systems of being.  Stars and comets burn out.  Earthquakes, floods, and fires, following their own internal laws, happen to catch people in cities in the wrong place at the wrong time causing harm and destruction.  All forms of human and animal life live in predator-prey relationships.  Humans of nations are or have been warring peoples. Scriptures even say that fallen angels and interior beings like demons reek havoc on the lives of people.  People divide themselves into tribes and then fight and kill over ownership to lands, homes, and food supplies.   The Psalmist believes that the worship or praise of God through harmonious behaviors can heal us or provide some temporal and contextual simulations of harmony to inspire meaningful purpose.

If we fast forward to the time of Jesus and his aftermath as the experiences of the Risen Christ in the church, we find the world of the Roman Empire where harmony is called the Pax Romana, peace because the Emperor and his forces suppress any opposition.  Within the Pax Romana, there was a plethora of deities along with the cult of the deified Emperors.  These deities were patrons for a variety of associations who gathered in temples for their commemorative liturgies and meals.  The synagogues and Jesus Movement gatherings came to have social significance within the Empire, and the Jesus Movement was institutionalized enough to have circulated writings for teaching and group formation purposes.  The writings instantiated their living paradox; namely, they believed in the imminent ending of the current world order inherited from their apocalyptic based beginnings while at the same time they had to develop and institutionalize to adjust to the fact of the permanent delay of the apocalyptic ending.   The book of Revelation is proof that apocalyptic mode of living prevailed for people of these Jesus associations at various times in the first two centuries.  Things were so dire that the wish fulfillment came to the visionary stories of a new heaven, a new earth, a new Jerusalem, and the end of death and sorrow.  The book of Revelation is the expression of ultimate world weariness of perhaps a persecuted writer and his group, such that there was a verbal cursing of the entire Roman world order.

However, there was also a resignation that came with the survival of the Jesus Movement within the persisting Roman world, and a reality set in: "Apparently we're going to be around for awhile so we should organize to promulgate our Christly values."  The very appearance of writings is proof regarding this settling in mode of being.

What does settling in as a permanent movement mean in the Roman Empire situation?  It required pockets of harmony within the church associations.  And what would harmony be called within these associations?  Love and reconciliation.  Why?  The New Testament writings indicate to us that parties within the Jesus Movement did not always get along.  Peter and Paul had their disagreements.  There were disagreements on if and how the Gentiles could be admitted into the salvation plan of the God of Israel.

The Acts of the Apostles includes the writing purpose of reconciling the ministries of Peter and Paul.  From the writings of Paul, we know that he clashed with Peter over Peter's behaviors of not honoring equally at table the Jewish and Gentile participants in the meal.  But we have in the account of Acts, that it is actually Peter who first received a vision about not demanding Jewish dietary restrictions for the Gentile followers of Jesus.  Why?  Because their baptism with the Holy Spirit meant that the inner spiritual identity was the determining factor and not outward ritual practice.

The last supper account in the Gospel of John indicates the recommendation for table behavior for all Christian association: Love one another, as I have loved you.  By your love you have your Christ-like identity as disciples of Christ.

Where does all this leave us today?  Apparently, universal harmony continues to elude us.  What probably is and will happen includes lots of mixtures of good and bad, conflict, health and harm.  What it means for us is that we need to be local pockets and clusters of people who model love each other so as to be involved in a collateral domino effect of spreading love beyond our local clusters to others who need to know the reconciling harmony of the love of Christ.

With the practice of the love of Christ, we can participate in the healing of the world so as to live toward the ecstasy of the Psalmist: Let everything praise the Lord!  Amen.