John 13:31-35
Excerpts from Jesus and the Disinherited by Howard Thurman
May 18, 2025
Nicole M. Lamarche
Welcome again, however you are connecting, in whatever shape you are in, with whatever you are holding or bringing or feeling! We give ourselves the gift of being in present, tuning into deeper things. So come as you are, with whatever you are bringing today.
I invite you now to take some deeper breaths as you are moved, letting ourselves arrive, tuning into whatever word God has for us today…
As you are moved, I invite you to join me in a spirit of prayer from Psalm 19.
The winds came whooshing down off the Flatirons this week with such ferociousness that the metal lawn furniture in our back yard was tossed all over the place, the cover over the barbeque was thrown over to the other side of the yard and the tablecloth overturned and moved, planters spilled out and over, branches broken, leaves scattered. And because it was also garbage and recycling day our street looked to me hilariously similarly to the Hill after a long weekend.
On our front yard, in addition to as I shared earlier (in the story for all ages) there was Math homework from Leah, a postcard meant for our neighbor Arlene and a million other random things from the neighborhood. So I have been pondering the power of wind, pondering its force and invisibility, presence and ability to move things around on this material plain.
Scientists would you like to chime in? Winds tend to blow from high-pressure areas to low-pressure areas and the space between them, the boundary between these two areas is called a front and the complex relationships between fronts cause different types of wind and weather patterns. It is differences in pressure in the atmosphere that generate wind.
One science writer called wind, “the great equalizer of the atmosphere, transporting heat, moisture, pollutants, and dust great distances around the globe.”
And while wind can do a lot and change a lot and shape a lot, while wind can bend and break and remake, it can move vessels and uproot root even deep and networked systems below ground, we can’t hold it. I remember trying as a kid. And we cannot see it. We can’t control it.
But we can feel it.
And we know when it is there.
And we know when it has gone.
And so I guess I have been wondering if there are ways in which hate and love are like this too.
And we know when they are not.
A couple of years ago in the Atlantic magazine there was article exploring how America got mean and as he often does David Brooks, wrote in length.
He said we were meaner two years ago but now it is even truer. His latest phrase in a recent essay, “There is a callous tolerance of cruelty.”
It turns out that many agree that Americans and American culture overall has outwardly and openly become more mean-spirited group, unapologetically rude and in the worst cases our policy and our common life is also cruel and violent too. It was really clear to me this summer when traveling in Europe when people would ask about things like mass gun violence in schools, on the list goes of the cruelty and violence and meanness that we have become accustomed to. It is just normal for us.
And even now for people in esteemed positions it seems the way we talk to each other, certain speech and behaviors have been elevated as okay, what to strive for, what it takes to win, what is condonable.
And I suspect that some of what we are seeing is a great unveiling, a full display of what was already there, but what has now intersected with the full flowering of the desire for money and power, which requires separation to work. Because you need people to fear, people to dislike, people to blame for the debt and the grifts and the schemes and the games. Notice when we are talking about debt and Medicaid we don’t talk about the $300 million a day we spent on Iraq.
As we heard from Howard Thurman, hatred “guarantees a final isolation from one’s fellows…” and it “bears deadly and bitter fruit.”
Hate can’t last because separation can’t last forever. Nature shows us again and again of our interconnectedness, our in this togetherness. From the grasses to the creek to the peaks and winds, everything, all of our systems, our patterns, our network of life is all connected. So I know only love that will prevail, I know that, expansive love can never be caught or really even seen fully or held down, which means it can never be held back or hidden away. And while love cannot be grasped, its force can be felt! And we know when it is here! We know when a room like this is infused with it, when a person has been moved by it, when things have been tossed about by it!
And he meant for this to be the way that others would know whether or not it was a group gathering in his name. Love was supposed to be the world would know we are Christians. As scholar Lewis Donelson writes, “obedience to this command (was) the public mark of the new community, comprising John’s version of the new covenant that the Synoptics place at the Lord’s Supper. The love command is both the organizing force and the sign of the Jesus community.” “Having Jesus as the model undoes all the limits. Whatever love might mean in a given moment, it as for everything.
Love does not calculate the costs.”
The love command is our organizer and our sign! It is and was the organizing force of our gathering together, the underlying principle of all of our program, the signs of the Jesus community. And I love that it was command was a dream of love projected into now.
As Howard Thurman wrote, Jesus “knew that the goals of religion as he understood them could never be worked out within the then-established order. Deep from within that order he projected a dream…”
One that we get to live inside of right now! Even from within this current order, there is a dream of a love projected and we get to live inside of Jesus’ dream!
Sometimes people tell me that we are right now living in the imagination of a certain group and I say well I am living in someone else’s vision, it’s Jesus’ vision.
Just like those who gathered in the First Century, we are called to obey this mysterious and magnificent command. It is for me at least both intriguing and overwhelming.
This is impossible. Which is why many reduce this teaching to being nice.
Or being polite.
Given that he was willing to die for what he said, I am confident that he meant mere neighborliness. I think he meant something that most of us will spend our life seeking, a love Divine that exceeds our understanding, but it is a dream we get to live inside of here and now, for ourselves and with and for each other. It is vision beyond domination and exploitation, are-humanizing dream, where there is room for all.
What a gift to live in Jesus’s dream and I am so grateful to live inside that dream with all of you. Right now just like the First Century Jesus’ followers we gather as Empire closes in all around us telling us who is worthy, they gathered in secret sometimes whispering to one another, “Peace be with you.” Maybe we need to do that too. Love is the great equalizer. And what a gift to live in Jesus’s dream of love projected into now.
Communal Reflection
How are you living this new commandment in a time when it is countercultural?
Beloved of God, what a gift to live inside Jesus’s dream of love projected into now.
May it be so. Amen.