Scripture can be found here…
In this passage from John’s gospel, Jesus talks a lot about love—which, as you know, is some of my very favorite bible stuff. “As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you.” “Abide in my love.” “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.” “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” Some of Jesus’ absolutely best material, all packed into this relatively short reading.
But in addition to all this lovely love, Jesus also says something pretty startling. ‘You did not choose me; I chose you.”
That statement pushes pretty hard against a lot of what we believe—the fundamentals of modern American life. It’s all about choice. We choose where to live and who to marry—or not. We choose what we want to do for a living, and if we’re lucky we may even get to do that. We choose the books we read and the shows we watch and the politicians for whom we cast our ballots. American society is so very immersed in this idea of choice, we push back—hard—when we are told we do not have a choice about something.
If we are not members of a church but are wondering whether that might be what we need, sometimes we do what some call, “church shopping.” We go to a few different places, and try to decide whether or not they are a good fit. Sometimes, even after a long time, we may come to the conclusion that, as in other kinds of relationships, we and the church have grown apart, and must go our separate ways.
In all this, we are convinced that we are choosing. That we are in charge. That we get to do what feels right to us.
But here, in this passage most certainly mean for an audience beyond Jesus’ disciples, meant for the likes of us, Jesus is telling us something different: our faith in Christ, our faith in God, is not a matter of choice, at least not for us. We didn’t choose. God did.
That’s the kind of statement that can give you the feeling the wind is blowing through your hair. That’s the experience the writer Kathleen Norris had when she joined her prairie Presbyterian church some years ago. She was grumpy that morning, as she walked through sub-zero temperatures to a church she wasn’t really sure she should be joining, but for some reason felt compelled to, anyway. As she entered the building, she saw the other new members, gathered together with some of the elders. She writes,
One was a man I’d never liked much. I’ll call him Ed. He’d always seemed ill-tempered to me, and also a terrible gossip, epitomizing the small-mindedness that can make small-town life such a trial. The minister had asked him to formally greet the new members. Standing awkwardly before our small group, Ed cleared his throat, and mumbled, “I’d like to welcome you to the body of Christ.” The minister’s mouth dropped open, as did mine—neither of us had ever heard words remotely like this come from Ed’s mouth. Like distant thunder, the words made me more alert, attuned to further disruptions in the atmosphere. What had I gotten myself into? I was astonished to realize, as that service began, that while I may never like Ed very much, I’d just been commanded to love him. My own small mind had just been jolted, and the world seemed larger, opened in a new way.[i]
Norris’ story nudges us towards considering what the notion of being “chosen” for the life of faith may mean for us. As she points out elsewhere in that same essay, once we begin making a list of the biblical figures who are chosen for particular roles—prophet, priest or king are the ones we tend to think of, but others include mother and father, sister and brother, daughter-in-law and son-in-law, teacher, healer, and feeder—we notice something. Being chosen by God is not all magnificent thrones and oodles of yummy power. When we consider Abraham and Sarah, Jacob and Ruth, Elijah and Esther, Moses and Mary, we start to notice that being chosen for something actually starts to look a little more like being enlisted for a job, and what’s more, one we might not necessarily have chosen for ourselves.
Norris writes, “being God’s chosen does not mean doing well. It does not grant access to all the answers, but means contending with hard questions, thankless tasks, and usually a harrowing journey…”
Also, love. Jesus tells us in this passage, in almost every way he can think of, that we are chosen for love. The first way we are chosen for love is the one that makes all the others possible. “Abide in my love,” Jesus says. He wants us to dwell in love, revel in love, let it wash over us and infuse us with the sense of how precious we are to God.
This next part is where it gets hard. “Love one another as I have loved you.”
Well, who can do that? Honestly. It’s not reasonable. Jesus is asking us mere mortals to live in a love that can bridge the gap between humanity and God?
And yet. We are chosen for an unreasonable kind of love, a love that breaks down barriers and builds bridges across impossible, gaping caverns. We are even chosen for a love that will lay down its life that others may live.
But we don’t have to start with the greatest love. We can start with Ed. We can start where we are, with tiny lessons of acceptance, of embracing one another in all our glorious and even annoying differences. We can start by recognizing where our own minds may have shrunken just a bit, by softening our hearts towards someone we know we have hardened them against. We can start by abiding, and begin to get a feel—a deep in the gut, wind-blowing-through-our-hair, distant-thunder feel of what the love of God truly is. And then, we begin.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
[i] Kathleen Norris, Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith (New York: Riverhead Books, 1999), 142.