Between Betrayal and Denial

John 13:31-35

“I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.”  -John 13:34

In just a few days’ time, I will be on my way to visit my friends in the Morogoro Diocese of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Tanzania.  I will be accompanying four women from the Arkansas-Oklahoma Synod who are going to Tanzania to begin building relationships between women in our synod and women in the diocese.  This is not a “service trip.”  We are not going to “do for…” the people there.  We are going, quite simply, to get to know one another better, so that we might accompany one another in mission and ministry more effectively in the future.  We offer ourselves.  They offer themselves.  We will give and receive.  They will give and receive.  Together, we will learn from one another in a deeper way what Jesus means when he tells us to love one another as he has loved us.  We will celebrate both the ways we are different and the ways we share a common humanity and faith.

It is striking to me that Jesus’ new commandment to love one another as he loved us (which he demonstrated by washing his disciple’s feet – the master serving the student) is sandwiched in between Judas leaving the upper room to betray Jesus and Jesus telling Peter that he will deny him three times.  Between betrayal and denial, Jesus calls his disciples to a servant-love that will bind them to one another in the dark and painful days that lie immediately ahead of them, and on the challenging and often dangerous journey they will take following the Resurrection and Pentecost.

Learning to love like Jesus loves, means doing the hard work of figuring out how to love one another when we find ourselves living in the tension between betrayal and denial.  No easy task.  

What I hope and pray we will all learn during our time in Tanzania is that Jesus’ love is so powerful that it transcends a world that is fractured by factions and fighting.  I hope we will experience how Jesus’ love binds disciples across cultures and languages and nations and anything else that might divide us.  I pray that Jesus’ love will move us beyond platitudes and paternalism, beyond romantic mushiness and sentimental sweetness, to take seriously those things that divide us, embrace the wonder of our diversity and motivate us to work together for the good of all people.  All people.  

In a world where fleeing immigrants are treated as less than human, where people are attacked in subtle and not-so-subtle ways because of the color of their skin, the language they speak, the religion they practice, their orientation or their gender, learning to love in the way of Jesus is a critical step in learning how to walk together as siblings and as friends.

Sometimes, it takes going half way around the world to figure that out.

Peace,

Bishop Mike

Please pray for us as we travel this next week. Look for the next “On the Way” reflection in two weeks.  Thanks for reading!

The Mortality Factor

John 10:22-30

“I give them eternal life, and they will never perish.  No one will snatch them out of my hand.”  --John 10:28

I don’t think I fully appreciated my own mortality until my senior year of High School.  Sure, I knew, intellectually, that one day I would die. But, like most seventeen-year-olds, I figured that was a long, long way off.  But then, one of my peers died.  He was in the class after mine.  He was driving home from out of town late one night when his car left the road and crashed. We weren’t close friends, though I knew him and we talked from time to time.  We had talked just a few days before he died.  I remember how hard it was to get my head around the fact that he was gone.  That death had claimed someone my age.  That my youth did not exempt me from dying.  His death forty years ago had a huge impact on me, and I still think about him from time to time.

Today, in the light of school shootings, kids being gunned down in the streets of our cities and the pervasive reality of violence in our world, the fact that the reality of my mortality didn’t sink in until I was seventeen almost seems quaint.  On the other hand, Americans seem bent on doing everything we can to defy life’s ultimate reality, and to push death back back as much as possible.  But, the truth is, death is coming for all of us, and it is no respecter of age, economic status, privilege, power or place.  Our inevitable mortality is a problem that we, on our own, cannot fix.

Jesus’ promise of eternal life stands out in bold relief against the backdrop of this cold reality. It almost seems too good to be true. And, for some, it is.  But for those who believe it, it has the power to change our whole way of looking at, and living our lives.  Knowing that, though we will all die,  death will not have the last word can give us a bold confidence to be who God created us to be, and the courage to face our mortality head on, not avoid, defy or deny it.   But, even more, knowing that, through Christ, our lives have been given to us, allows us to live with gratitude and thankfulness for how ever many days we have been given.  Knowing that our futures are secure and that no one and no thing can snatch us from God’s hand means we don’t have to live fighting for our own survival all the time.  It frees us to live, not for ourselves, but for the sake of sharing the life we have been given with one another and for joining hands and fighting the pervasive reality of death together.

Eternal life is an amazing gift not just for some point down the road, but right here, right now.

This doesn’t mean that Jesus’ sheep don’t have struggles, get sick, suffer and die.  We do.  It just means that we know that we never have to face the valley of the shadow of death alone and that there is always, always life waiting on the other side.  That’s the hope of the Resurrection.  That’s the hope of Easter.

Peace,

Bishop Mike

Thanks for reading.