Residing in Love

SCRIPTURE TEXT:  John 15:9-11, Rev. Monte Marshall, Pastor

For the past five weeks we’ve been on a journey together to discover A Place to Call Home.  While the journey continues for each of us in our daily lives, the sermon series on this theme ends today with a focus on love.  Let’s pray.  PRAYER

In July, 1861, a Civil War soldier from Rhode Island named Sullivan Ballou wrote a letter to his wife, Sarah.  Ballou wrote the letter because he had a premonition that he would soon die.  Ballou wrote: “The indications are very strong that we shall move in a few days, perhaps tomorrow.  Lest I should not be able to write to you again, I feel impelled to write a few lines that may fall under your eyes when I shall be no more…Sarah, my love for you is deathless.  It seems to bind me with mighty cables that nothing but omnipotence could break….The memories of the blissful moments that I have spent with you come creeping over me.  I feel most gratified to God and to you that I have enjoyed them for so long, and hard it is for me to give them up and burn to ashes the hopes of future years when, God willing, we might still have lived and loved together and seen our sons grown up to honorable manhood around us….If I do not [return], my dear Sarah, never forget how much I love you and when my last breath escapes me on the battlefield, it will whisper your name.”  Fourteen days after this letter was written, Sullivan Ballew died from wounds sustained at the First Battle of Bull Run.[1] 

Quite obviously, Sullivan had found a place to call home with Sarah and his sons.  It was a place to call home filled with love.

In this morning’s text from John’s gospel, Jesus also speaks of love.  He’s gathered with his disciples on the night before his death, and his focus is on love: “As my Abba has loved me, so have I loved you.  Live on in my love.”  This last sentence might also be translated “Abide in my love” or “reside in my love.”  Eugene Peterson’s translation in The Message reads “Make yourselves at home in my love.”

So here’s the good news:  Abba God has created a place for us to call home that is filled with love.  John’s testimony is that Jesus was at home in this place.  He lived “on in Abba God’s love.”  He “kept God’s commandments.”  And he found joy by residing in this loving place called home.

And in this home filled with love, there is a place for us.  There is a place for us because we are loved.  Abba God loves us.  Abba God loves us even more passionately and profoundly than Sullivan Ballew loved his wife Sarah.  An old hymn of the church puts it this way: “Love divine, all loves excelling.”[2]  We are loved.

A long time ago, I came across a piecewritten by Robert J. Campbell in a devotional magazine called Alive Now!.  It’s entitled, In a Dream.

“In a dream he came, a figure from the past, a pastor.

“In a dream he came and stood before me.  The face I remembered as discouraged was now contagious with warmth and vitality.  ‘I have found the secret to life,’ he said.  ‘Come, I will show you.’

“And so we went out into the country to a little church, to a barren building with neither music nor decorations, just pulpit and altar and pews.

“He stood in the pulpit, and thirty-seven people sat before him awaiting a message.  Warmth passed from face to face, to the pastor and back.  ‘This is the secret,’ he said, ‘You are loved…. You are loved.’

Then each poured out to the other all the troubles and frustrations and hurts of that week.  And each embraced the other and said, ‘You are loved.’  And I was in the outpouring of each, and in their embraces each embraced me.  ‘You are loved,’ I heard them say, and I answered back, ‘You are loved.’

“In a dream he came, this pastor from the past.  But not all dreams are illusion.  I savor the serenity and challenge of this reality which transforms all old realities.

“’This is the secret:  You are loved.  You are loved.’”[3]

So Abba God has created a place for us to call home that is filled with love.  When we reside in this place, we discover the secret of life.  We come to know that we are loved.

And when we live on in this love—abide in this love—reside in this love—make ourselves at home in this love—we follow in the way of Jesus.  And when we love as he taught us, we love as he loved.

I like the way that David Augsberger summarizes the distinctive characteristics of Jesus’ love revealed in the gospels, that become the distinctive characteristics of our love when we “live on” in that place called home with Abba God:

• “Jesus…demonstrated a reverence for persons in his recognition of their worth and of their mystery as fellow humans, and in a sense of receptive awe in response to the image of God in broken humanity.
• “Jesus…saw the inner purpose of another and called it to be realized and fulfilled.  He cared for this inner potential in persons by attending, observing, listening, inviting, and caring with grace and confronting with truth.
• “Jesus…loved each person for that person’s own sake and for God’s sake, not for his own sake, and he bid the other to grow even if the other grew to be against him or made choices that grieved him.
• “Jesus…loved with a willingness to be hurt by enmity yet stay connected, to be vulnerable to enemies rather than be safe.  He remained willing to forgive even in extremity, open to a future friend or foe even when dying.
• “Jesus…became fully his own person, using all his gifts and strengths, venturing courageously and acting prophetically while knowing that in doing this he courted the disapproval of those he loved most, those whose opinions mattered most to his community, those whose influence was feared most in his society, those who could hurt him most deeply.
• “Jesus…identified so completely with others he embodied love, enfleshed compassion, and expressed this positive regard for others as an equal regard—not as a benevolently superior, compulsively sacrificial, obediently virtuous vertical regard of condescending, magnanimous grace, but as a truly identified equal regard of the fellow sufferer, fellow traveler, fellow human.”[4]

Dearly beloved, Abba God has created a place for us to call home.  In this place, we are loved with a deathless love; we are bound together with God and one another as “with mighty cables.”  In this place, we experience “Love divine, all loves excelling.”[5] 

Today, we are invited to “live on” in this love; to “abide” in this love, to “reside” in this love, to make ourselves “at home” in this love.  In so doing, we follow in the way of Jesus.  We love as he taught us.  We love as he loved.  His joy is our joy, full and  complete!  So why not come on home?  Thanks be to God.  Amen.