Sixth Sunday of Easter C

In 2010 the sixth Sunday of Easter was also mother's day. Here is a sermon that relates the dilemma of trying to raise a healthy, whole and loving child with God's desire to be in relationship with us.

The Sixth Sunday of Easter

Transcribed from a sermon given

On May 9, 2010

By Rev. Valerie Ann Hart

At St. Barnabas Episcopal Church

Arroyo Grande, CA

John 14:23-29

It’s Mother’s Day.  You know, there is no more difficult job than being a parent.  There’s also no more rewarding job.  Let’s think about this impossible mission that we take on as parents.  We are presented with an infant, a child that is totally uncivilized.  In fact, it’s not even housebroken when we bring it home. We are confront with this helpless child that we want to raise to become a happy, productive, loving member of society.  How do you go about making this transformation in this child?  How do you get it to do and be what you want?

Well, one of the things you might call it is obedience.  Obedience is doing what you are told.  And certainly a parent does want their child to be obedient about a few things – like don’t run out in the street in front of a car, because for the safety of the child, obedience is important.  And then, of course, for the sanity of the parent sometimes obedience is appreciated.  There are several different ways to get obedience from children, or other animals, but we’ll just talk about children right now.

One way to get obedience is out of fear. That’s where a person – whether a child or an adult – does or doesn’t do certain behaviors because they are afraid of the consequences.  They are afraid of the punishment.  They are afraid they’ll get hurt.  And this can work; you can get an obedient child by fear of punishment – but it may not be the person you want that child to become, because obedience based on punishment means as soon as the one who might punish them is out of sight, when the person perceives there is no chance of getting caught, there is no reason to continue in the desired behavior..

Then there is obedience because of positive reinforcement.  I studied psychology; I know all about positive reinforcement.  If you reinforce something in a positive way, that behavior is more likely to happen again.  If you don’t reinforce the behavior, it’s less likely to happen.  I also learned all about this trying to get obedience out of my dog.  I’m not always very successful with that.  How I did with my children, you’ll have to ask them.

The idea when training a do is if the dog does what you want it to do and you give it a treat, it’s more likely to do what you ask it to do again, because something good happened.  And that happens with all of us – we all respond to not just treats, but to attention and affection and someone saying ‘good job’ and gold stars and raises in our salary.  There’s lots of different positive reinforcements that increase the likelihood of behavior.  Now as a parent, most of us parents are aware of this, but we also know it’s a little more complex than that, because it’s hard to be consistent in what you reward.

Sometimes children have certain behaviors that are annoying to the parent – let’s say a 3-year-old screaming at the top of their lungs at a high pitch.  And you don’t want to reinforce that behavior, because you don’t want that behavior to continue, so you try to ignore it.  But there’s only so long that our nervous systems can ignore such behavior, and then finally we will do something to try and stop it.  So the child then gets attention – even if it’s negative attention – which is rewarding, so they’re more likely to do it again.  It’s very complicated.

Now there is a problem with reinforcing certain behaviors and getting obedience from children. It is it’s a great way to work dogs, because you want the dog to do what you want and not think about it.  And there are certain clear behaviors you want the dog to do and not to do.  But for a human being, for a child, it’s much more complicated than that.  You really don’t want your children to grow up to be perfectly obedient.  You want them to be able to disagree with someone who tells them to do something that’s not good for them, or not good for someone else.  You want them to be able to think for themselves.

What we really want as parents is for our children to grow up with a good character; with compassion and love and joy and the ability to be selfless, and all those wonderful things that we call love.  But love is not a specific set of behaviors.  The same behavior in one situation can be loving, but in another situation, not be.  Let’s take a little child that’s learning to walk; it stumbles along and it falls down.  The parent is right there and helps it back up again, and it takes a few steps, it falls down. The parent is right there and helps it back up.

Well, that’s fine.  That is very loving on the part of the parent.  But if it becomes to the point where the child takes a couple steps, looks at the parent, smiles, falls down, raises its hands up and goes, “Pick me up,” you begin to realize that you’re reinforcing the wrong kind of behavior.  You’re getting manipulated by the child, and at some point that child has to learn to stand up on their own.  At some point that child has to figure out how to get from being on the floor to being on its feet, and do that on its own.

So there becomes a time when the child falls down that it’s not the loving thing to do to pick it up.  There is a fine line between being loving and being codependent and it’s often hard to know which side of that line you might be on.  So love is not about a specific set of behaviors that you teach people.  You do not want your children to just be robots that have been programmed to do certain things; you want them to think for themselves.  You want them to care. 

You want a model, because that is where a child learns most.  It’s not by their reinforcements, because that all goes into the unconscious.  It’s not by being told to be obedient.  Children learn to be loving, good people by the model of the people around them.  They learn love by being loved.  They learn how to care for others by having been cared for.  A wise person once said – and I don’t remember who it was – said, “Love is self-communicating.”  Love can’t be taught; it can only be caught. 

When we’re loved, we catch love – it’s contagious.  And so if we’re raising our children to be loving the most important thing is to model being loving, to model all those character traits you want to see in your child. 

This brings us to the gospel, where Jesus says to his disciples, “If you love me” – how many parents have said that to their children?  I hate to think of how many times I said that to my kids – but even Jesus said it.  “If you love me, then you will do what I’ve told you.”  What did he tell them to do?  “Love one another as I have loved you.”

That’s the commandment.  That’s how we show our love for Jesus - “Love one another as I have loved you.”  He modeled what he wanted his disciples to become.  It’s a very different relationship with God.   It’s a very different way of knowing God.  Previous to this, in the Jewish tradition, much of obedience came out of fear.  If we don’t follow the rules, God’s going to punish us, either individually or collectively, and that was the general understanding of most of the spiritual traditions of Jesus’ time.

Now of course there were the prophets who had a whole different understanding of God, so it wasn’t that simple, but basically in the old covenant, there was a set of rules that you followed out of fear. This is not what Jesus was talking about.  He was bringing something new. 

Let’s think about God as a parent – we think about God as the Father, but it’s Mother’s Day, so let’s call God the parent.  God as parent wants us as human beings to be the loving, caring beings we were designed to be. 

Well, as we were evolving and growing and learning, there were some rules set down, and people were obedient out of fear.  But that’s not all God wanted from us.  God designed us not to be automatons that follow all the rules.  He wanted us to be able to love one another, so he sent someone to model that.  He sent Christ to come into the world and to love us and to model what it means to be loving and self-sacrificing and in right relationship with God.

And he said, “If you love me, then do what I say – if you love one another – then I and my Father will dwell with you.”  Think of that!  Dwelling with God; tenting with God; living with God.  Sharing a life with God – God in Christ, God as Father, God as the Advocate Holy Spirit.  Wow!

That relationship, that right relationship with God, is what the New Jerusalem is about.  Revelation can be a very confusing book in the Bible; it’s all metaphor and image and poetic, and it’s hard to just read.

But the New Jerusalem is the new way of relating to God.  Jerusalem was seen as God’s holy city, and in the middle of Jerusalem was the temple, and the temple was the home of God.  You went to the temple to be close to God.  And there was a specific point in the temple behind all the curtains that was the locus of God’s presence on earth.  And in Revelation it says there will be a New Jerusalem that won’t have a temple. 

God will not be limited to a specific place.  The whole place is going to be suffused with God’s light and God’s love, and the people there will have an intimate relationship with God. God will be their light – they won’t need the sun, they won’t need the moon, they won’t need anything, because God will provide it all.  God will be their light – their inner light.  It is about that mystical experience of oneness with Christ and with God where we dwell together in right relationship.

Right relationship with God – that’s what peace is.  Jesus offers this peace.  He said that, “Peace be with you, not as the world offers, but I offer you my peace.”  Peace is about being in right relationship.

We sometimes think of peace as a cessation of warfare, but it’s not.  We’re not at peace with North Korea.  We are not at war with North Korea, but we certainly aren’t at peace with North Korea.  There’s nothing peaceful about the relationship. 

We are at peace with Canada.  We are in right relationship with Canada.  They come down here when they get too cold.  We go up there when we get too hot.  We play hockey and baseball with one another.  We are in right relationship with one another; we support one another; we are at peace.  To be at peace with another human being doesn’t mean that you are not fighting with them.  It means that you are in right relationship with them.  And to be at peace with God is to be in right relationship with God – to live in unity and love.

So Christ came and we have the incarnation of Christ as a human being to love us and to show us, to model for us, how God wants us to be in the world.  Not being obedient out of fear, but being loving because we have been loved. We are invited to follow the model of Christ.  “If you love me, you will do what I tell you.”  And what Christ told us is, “Love one another as I have loved you.”  Amen.