New Commanment: Love One Another

A Reflection for the 5th Sunday of Easter May 18, 2025 St. Luke and St Anne’s, Roper, Grace Plymouth Thomas E Wilson, Guest "New Commandment; Love One Another” Acts 11:1-18 Revelation 21:1-6 John 13:31-35 Psalm 148 From the Gospel of John for today: “'Where I am going, you cannot come.' I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another." I had an older brother when I was growing up. He was a year and four days older than me and athletic and handsome as all get out. As we were growing up, he was always going to be taller than me. We got into a lot of fights with each other; most of which I lost. My mother, who had been an only child growing up, longed to have a brother or sister and could never understand why we were wasting our energies competing against each other. As we grew older, he was held back a year in High School and he and I graduated together. I went to Chapel Hill to college and he went into the Marine Corps. We got into heated discussions over the War in Vietnam, but that Christmas, as we were both on leave, he took me out for my first legal beer the day I turned 18. We had missed each other and we learned how to disagree. Two years later, when our father died, we realized how much we loved each other and life was too short. When he got out of the Corps and I graduated from college, he asked me to be the best man at his wedding. We both had many flaws, and over 20 years later he died. My mother asked me to say a few words at his funeral, and I spoke of how much time we lose letting differences get in the way of love. Life is too short not to love. The lessons for today are about needing to remember to love. Love is not meant to be restricted to people with whom we agree, but to go way beyond approval and about loving the neighbor, even loving the stranger, and even attempting with divine help, to love the enemy. The writer of the Book of Revelation reminds us God does not look down from a far off heaven: "See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them as their God; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their eyes. In the Book of Acts, Peter is relating about his trying to show how pure he is; so pure that he will not associate with the uncircumcised, meaning Gentiles, or 99% of the Roman Empire. This is the reality in which he lives, choosing rigid conformity instead of open love for neighbor. These are the people who are beyond his compassion. But the new vision of Grace that Peter is given is of a radical expansion of what family means. Our brothers and sisters are those in the much larger human family. In my senior year in High School, sixty one years ago, I was a confirmed member of St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Upstate New York. I had been confirmed by Bishop Peabody and one day, two months before graduation, we gort news that Mrs Peabody, the Bishop’s wife, was arrested for being with a group of black and white people who were attempting to integrate a restaurant in St. Augustine, Florida, after attempting to integrate the local Episcopal Church whose ushers had refused to admit her and her friends. It was considered scandalous that she acted out of a love that went beyond accepted social, and even legal, boundaries. When I graduated from High School that year and went to college in North Carolina, I stopped going to church, because I had felt that the Episcopal Church had become a clique rather than a church. It was more a fit of pique, a disappointment that the church I loved had let me down. In my second summer, in 1966, I took a job working in an Outdoor Drama in St. Augustine, “The Cross and Sword”. One Sunday morning that summer, I stopped in front of that church and in my bitterness, I refused to go in. The next year in March of 1967 my father died while he and my mother were visiting my mother’s parents in Daytona Beach. After I graduated in 1968, she moved down to Daytona Beach to help take care of her father. She placed my father’s ashes in the Veterans Cemetery in St. Augustine. Every year I visited my mother, I would always stop by St. Augustine, visiting his grave, but it took me almost two decades to stop at that church. It was only after I graduated from Seminary that I had enough faith to forgive. Forgiveness is not given to people and institutions to forgive because the offenders deserve it, but forgiveness is a gift we give ourselves to let go of our hate and pain. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in 1967 in his last book, Where Do We Go From Here, is about hope in the midst of disappointment and bitterness; “These reactions poison the soul and scar the personality, always harming the person who harbors them more than anyone else. The only healthy answer lies in one’s honest recognition of disappointment even as he still clings to hope, one’s acceptance of finite disappointment even while clinging to infinite hope.” We end with the words of the Psalmist for today, where we end up praising God in the middle of the lives which we live: Young men and maidens, *old and young together. Let them praise the Name of the Lord, *for his Name only is exalted, his splendor is over earth and heaven. He has raised up strength for his people and praise for all his loyal servants, * the children of Israel, a people who are near him. Hallelujah!