With Charity for All
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WITH CHARITY FOR ALL
The Rev. J. Donald Waring
Grace Church in New York
The Sixth Sunday of Easter
May 5, 2024
Jesus said, “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. (John 15:12)
Today’s readings from the First Epistle of John and the Gospel of John have me thinking about Abraham Lincoln. Why? Well, if you hang with me for a moment I’ll tell you why. Most everyone knows that Lincoln was the 16th and, by most estimates, the greatest President of the United States. Serving just one term in the White House before an assassin’s bullet cut him down, Lincoln freed the slaves, won the Civil War, and saved the Union. He was a towering statesman, whose speeches, though generally brief, were so profound that they almost immediately entered the American lexicon. We still quote them today.
Lincoln was complex. Not only was he a statesman and a politician, also he was a theologian of sorts. He infused his speeches with Biblical words and images. He thought deeply about the will of God, and how Providence was working its purpose out through the Civil War. His insights were, and remain, refreshingly astute and accessible, even applicable to our own day of division and discord. Historians and biographers never tire in the effort to describe the greatness of Lincoln. To those who would chronicle his life, the depth of his character seems inexhaustible, the breadth of his legacy expansive beyond reach.
As an example of the endless quest to understand Lincoln, one has only to go to Ford’s Theatre in Washington, DC, where he was assassinated on April 14, 1865. The site, including the house where Lincoln was taken after the shooting, is now a museum as well as an active theatre and center for education. In one of the buildings is an art installation representing many of the recent books about Lincoln, stacked atop each other. It is a 34-foot tall, three-story tower of books, depicting nearly 7,000 volumes which, in fact, is just a fraction of the scholarly efforts. The tower has a spiral staircase wrapped around it that you can climb. As you ascend and descend you see book after book after book examining some new angle on Lincoln’s life and legacy. I am not sure if they are still adding new volumes to the top of the tower, but if so you’ll find a very good one by Grace Church parishioner John Avlon.[1] The books about Lincoln just keep on coming. Soon they are going to need a bigger building.
Let’s return now to the question of why today’s readings from the First Epistle of John (5:1-6) and the Gospel of John (15:9-17) started me thinking about Abraham Lincoln. The answer is, quite simply, that these readings are like a tower of the word love. It all began last Sunday when we heard from the lectern a portion of 1st John (4:17-21) that occurs immediately before today’s passage. In just 14 verses, the reader pronounced the word love twenty-seven times. Today’s readings continue the theme, and add to the tower of love. In just five verses of 1st John we hear the word love five times. In today’s eight verses of John’s Gospel we encounter the word love nine times.
Clearly, we are meant to learn something about love. But immediately, we must admit that we are delving into a topic that is more complex than Lincoln himself. If you were to create a tower of all the books that have been written about love, I suspect you would need to hollow out a midtown skyscraper in order to contain them all. A quick scan of my own bookshelves reveals such titles as Works of Love by Soren Kierkegaard, All About Love by bell hooks, The Four Loves by C.S. Lewis, and Love Wins by Rob Bell. I’m sure I could find more if I looked. Have owning and reading all these books about love made me a more loving person? Perhaps that will be another sermon for another day. Let’s just say, I’m a work in progress.
In the meantime, what can we learn about love? What can we learn about the love we’ve encountered forty-one times in the past two Sundays? First, we might look at the word itself that we translate from the original New Testament Greek into the English word love. New Testament Greek is actually better than English at expressing the complexity of love. The Greek includes four different words for our one word, love. The word in question today is agape (pronounced “ah-gah⸍-pay”). In the King James Version of the Bible, translators often rendered agape as charity. When Abraham Lincoln delivered his Second Inaugural Address, and said “with malice to none, with charity for all,” it is likely that he had the New Testament concept of agape in mind.
What sort of love is agape? Well, agape, or charity, has little or nothing to do with “that loving feeling.” It’s not about the love you would feel for a family member, for a friend, or for a lover. So when Jesus commands us to love one another, he is not expecting us to conjure up warm, affectionate feelings for people we find rude or disagreeable. Initially I take it as a relief that I don’t have to manufacture false feelings and put up a phony front. But what, then, does Jesus mean when he commands us to have agape for one another? What did Lincoln mean when he said “with charity for all?” What I take them both to mean is this: to have agape for another person is to wish for, to pray for, and if the opportunity presents itself, to work for the well-being of that person, regardless of how you feel. It is a willful commitment, not an emotional experience.
Wish for, pray for, work for the flourishing of all people. Live with charity for all. How can you do it? Do you even want to do it? I’m not sure I always do. Even if how we feel is not the point, still the command to have agape for every brother or sister is mentally and spiritually exhausting. So here it might be helpful to learn a second characteristic of love that we find in today’s readings. The authors of John’s Epistles and Gospel in particular write about agape love as if it were shaped like a cross. It is cruciform. As you know a cross is formed by two beams: one large vertical beam, and a second smaller horizontal beam. When Jesus said, “this is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you,” he touched on the two dimensions of love that the beams of the cross represent. Love one another is the horizontal beam of the cross. As I have loved you is the vertical beam. Perhaps a close examination of both beams will help us enter more deeply into God’s life and love.
First, the vertical beam of the cross. The strong verticality of God’s love is unmistakable in John’s Gospel and First Epistle. Love starts with God in the very act of creation. Then God sent his only Son into the world, and Jesus offered himself back to God, an atoning sacrifice. No one has greater love than this. God’s love descends and ascends to form the strong, supporting vertical beam of the cross. In the Collect of the Day we pray that God will pour his love into our hearts so that we can offer it back again. In last week’s Epistle John wrote that the only reason we love at all is because God first loved us. God is the source of all love. Theologians call God’s initial love “prevenient grace.” Based on what John has written, we might go so far as to say that the presence of love in the world is a clue to the existence of God. If someone asks you, please, to prove the existence of God, whom no one can see, you can point to the phenomenon of love as evidence – not proof, but evidence – of divine activity above and beyond natural processes. God is love, and where true love is, God himself is there. Understanding – believing – that God is love and that God loves you changes everything.
Allow me to anticipate the objections you may encounter. You will hear from a disappointed and disbelieving world that the presence of love is no clue to the existence of God. In The New York Times this week was the obituary of a scientist who claimed to have isolated a love gene in prairie voles.[2] Thus, he concluded, love is merely the product of firing neurons and brain chemicals that have resulted from the long, winding road of natural selection. As such, whatever love is, we manufacture it in our heads. It is an imaginary human construct. But if the authors of John’s Epistles and John’s Gospel have it correct, love comes from beyond ourselves. Love comes from God. As a radio does not manufacture, but receives its signal from another source, so also have we tuned into the business of heaven when we wish for, pray for, and work for the flourishing of another. Of course, the hard wiring of the brain is all essential to the process – but as the receiver, before being a transmitter. Sometimes we are poor receivers, indeed. Human sin can distort God’s signal beyond all recognition. But God’s broadcasts never cease. This is the strong, supporting vertical beam of God’s love, evident when Jesus said, “You did not choose me, but I chose you.”
Second, the horizontal beam of the cross. “This is my commandment, that you love one another.” “Greater love has no one than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” If such love, practiced among us mortals, sounds unsustainable, if not unattainable, you’re right. The horizontal dimension of love that Jesus commands is neither attainable nor sustainable by our own strength. It is beyond human ability. If your experience of love is that it falls apart, think about it this way: the horizontal beam of the cross cannot levitate in mid-air. It needs an anchor. It needs to be fixed to the vertical beam or else it falls to the ground. In this light we might say that human aspirations and attempts to love, not fixed to God’s prevenient love, eventually die. They exhaust our natural strength. Even the marriage vow is qualified by the sobering final clause: until we are parted by death. But when we can envision our love for one another to be in the shape of a cross, with the horizontal beam firmly fixed to the vertical beam, then we can begin to see how the fulfilling of Christ’s command to love is possible. When our smaller attempts to love are grafted onto and extend from God’s prior love for us, then we abide in him and he in us. Then we can begin to fulfill the command to live with charity for all.
I remember one of the first times I took seriously the command of Jesus to love one another. When I was in the 9th grade my family moved to a new city. For me the move meant leaving the top of the heap in my old school, and becoming virtually a nobody in a new, much larger school. To make matters worse, a popular student went strangely out of his way to make my entrance into that place as difficult as possible. He availed himself of every opportunity for a snub or a put-down. We had several classes together in which I sat a few rows behind him. Thus, I spent hours every week glaring with malice at the back of his head. One day I even prayed a prayer that went like this: O God, don’t you just hate that kid as much as I do? I wanted to hear God agree that I was firmly in the right, as God had given me to see the right, and say, Yes, Don, I really do hate that kid as much as you do. You know me, Don, I’m all about the hate. But God said no such thing.
I am not a mystic. I am not given to frequent visions. Sometimes the Word of the Lord is rare for me. But never before had I experienced the rapid and clear answer to prayer I did on that day. Deep within my soul I discerned the Spirit of the Lord to say, No, I don’t hate that kid. In fact I love that kid as much as I love you. Imagine that: I love that kid as much as I love you. I believe I truly heard the Spirit speaking to me, because such a thought was certainly not the product of my own brain chemistry. My neural network could not have manufactured the idea. It was the Spirit of truth who testified. I did not choose love. Love had chosen me. Love had tuned me into the business of heaven. The effect on me was startling, so much so that I’m telling you about it all these years later.
What was the result? The other student and I never became friends. I don’t even remember his name. But from then on, never again could I look at him with the same old eyes of hatred. Never could I see him without remembering that God loved him as much as God loved me. Never again could I see him as a foe, no matter what he said or did. God had chosen me to leave malice behind, and walk in the way of charity.
Jesus said, “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.
[1] John Avlon, Lincoln and the Fight for Peace. Simon &Shuster, 2022.
[2] Michael S. Rosenwald, Larry Young, Who Studied the Chemistry of Love, Dies at 56. May 2, 2024.