Learn Something, Love Somebody, Have a Good Time

Sermon for May 9, 2021 (Mother's Day)
John 15:9-17

It may not shock you to know that, as a boy, I couldn’t wait to get out of the house and go play.  I can see myself one evening in particular, when I was about 9 years old, running to the sliding glass door leading to our backyard, about to make my break to meet up with friends in the twilight.  I was already later than I wanted to be because I’d had to do the dishes before dashing outside.  But as I reached the door, my mother called out and said, “Wait a minute.”  She always did this when I would leave.  Impatient, with my hand already on the door handle, I said, “What?”  And she said, “You know:  Learn something; love somebody; have a good time.”  I rolled my eyes and, finally, I was free.

You may have heard me share that line before.  It was my mother’s favorite line; she said it to my sisters and me all the time.  It drove me crazy, too, and I know my mother enjoyed that.  But she wasn’t just fiddling with me.  She was taking the opportunity to reinforce her prime directive, the mission statement she’d created for the four of us kids:  “Learn something; love somebody; have a good time.”

That line isn’t exactly what Jesus is saying to his friends here in today’s Gospel reading.  But I think my mother was onto something that Jesus was teaching, too. 

 Now, my parents were both educators, so “learn something” was always going to be part of their deepest desire for their children.  In their eyes, everything was a learning opportunity, and especially so for my mother.  Whether it was a big family trip, or a Saturday outing to the zoo, or an afternoon in the backyard watching ants walking in a line, every moment was a teaching moment. She just couldn’t help herself.    

I don’t necessarily hear Jesus saying “learn something” in today’s reading.  But the other two imperatives in my mother’s prime directive I think are pretty much right on point with Jesus’ message to his friends. 

Now, let’s hit “pause” just a minute.  Sometimes in Scripture, what Jesus is trying say gets a little hazy.  I think that’s especially true in John’s Gospel.  The book’s flow feels like it was written by a committee, and Jesus seems chronically unwilling to give a straight answer to any question, even from his friends.  So, sometimes you hear a reading from John, and it leaves you thinking, “Well, that was beautiful.  I wonder what it meant.” 

Not so much today.  Today, Jesus cuts to the chase.  He says, “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you” (15:12).  And how has he loved them?  By laying down his life for them, for his “friends” (15:13) – or, as the Greek says literally, by laying down his life for his “loved ones.”¹  By this point in the story, that’s who his disciples have become to him, and him to them – “loved ones.”  They share the same kind of relationship as Jesus and the Father share.  His followers are no longer servants, or students, or disciples, or whatever word we might feel more comfortable using for them and for us.  Instead – as they experienced earlier that night at the Last Supper, when Jesus took off his robe and stooped down and washed their feet – these men and women around him have become his friends, sharing with him nothing less than divine love.  You are my friends, Jesus tells them, and I lay down my life for you.

I don’t know how that sounds to you, but to me, that’s both the best and the least comfortable thing in the world to hear – that God befriends us.  One of the hallmarks of Christianity is this crazy claim that God stooped down to us and stoops down to us still, taking on humanity fully in the person of Jesus and continuing to take on our nature, dwelling with us and among us, as well as reigning supreme as the Lord of all creation.  I encounter Jesus in you, and you, and you.  Together, we comprise the Body of Christ in this place, filled by him in the Eucharist so we might be him with one another and for this broken world.  “The fullness of God was pleased to dwell” among us in Jesus (Colossians 1:19), and he’s still here, day by day.  “You did not choose me, but I chose you,” he says (John 15:16).  That’s tremendously empowering – and deeply humbling.  The sovereign of the universe knows your name and is calling you to walk along, side by side, promising to be there with you regardless how rough the path becomes.  That’s an offer we’d best not ignore. 

And neither should we ignore the call that comes from it.  “I appointed you to go and bear fruit,” Jesus says – “fruit that will last” (John 15:16).  I’ve washed your feet, Jesus says, so you’ll know how to wash the feet of others.  This is less rocket science and more Nike swoosh:  Love one another – just do it.

Well, it’s Mother’s Day.  So, if we’re looking for an example of the kind of love that washes feet, the kind of love that gives itself away, many of us have been blessed to find it in our relationships with mothers by biology or mothers by choice – women who’ve shown us what it looks like to lay down their lives for the people they love.

I was blessed to grow up with a mom like that.  Of course, on Mother’s Day, it’s tempting to turn your mother into someone who nearly walks on water.  That’s not my mother, and she’d be the first to say it; she’s much more real than that.  But still, she earned a bachelor’s degree and a master’s, and taught English and speech, all the while also raising four kids.  But more significant than the endurance of her parenting was its quality.  She was there for us.  And with the same intention that she put into bandaging skinned knees and reading bedtime stories, she also trained us to wash feet – to deflate our egos, to put others first, and to live in the joy that comes from service.  One time, my sister and I nearly burned the house down; but even then, I didn’t get in as much trouble as when I sought the spotlight for myself. 

We see this love that stoops down from heaven in a million other normal, everyday, run-of-the-mill stories of sacrifice – love so deep, so broad, so high that it can only be divine.  I think of the mothers of kids at Banneker School, working more than one job and still getting their children to class, or on the Zoom call, every day.  I think of the mothers of kids at our partner school in Haiti, spending resources they barely have to send their kids to class in the dignity of perfectly washed uniforms.  I think of mothers here, in this crazy time, showing up for their kids through the emotional and educational roller coaster of COVID, coping with family stress that the parenting guides never imagined.  And I think of mothers in their later years who, like Jesus, can call their children “friends,” still showing up as sources of the holy Wisdom that Scripture names with feminine pronouns.  It turns out, at least in the books of Wisdom and Proverbs, that holy Wisdom is a “she.”²

God still speaks that wisdom and love to us, just as Jesus spoke it to his friends.  So, I want to leave you with a question, something to chew on this week:  When you’re blessed to hear the voice of God, what voice is it? 

Of course, there’s no right answer to that question.  But for me, when I hear God’s voice through the chaos or the fog of daily life, it’s basically my mother’s voice I’m hearing.  And the message is often some facet of her own trinity of hope for her kids: “Learn something; love somebody; have a good time.” 

Now, that last one may seem an odd instruction to hear from God – to “have a good time.”  But I think, deep down, my mother wished that her kids would “have a good time” in much the same way Jesus expresses his desire for us in today’s reading:  “I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete” (John 15:11).  God wants us to know joy – not just happiness, for we all know how fleeting that is, like candy that just leaves you hungry a few minutes later.  Instead, God’s deep desire for us is the joy that springs from loving people– the counterintuitive richness and satisfaction that comes only from washing other people’s feet, from laying down your life in love for others.  That’s what I heard my mother calling us to find, as she sent us out the back door on our life’s mission.

So, as you think about the voice of God that you hear, let me end with a prayer: that the voice we too often ascribe to God, the voice of an angry, dissatisfied taskmaster – the dismissive, scolding voice of our own worst judgments – that this voice might finally fall quiet; and that instead we might hear the still, small voice of God whispering, “You are my beloved.  Learn something, love somebody, and live in the joy that only love can bring.”  

1.      The New Interpreter’s Study Bible: New Revised Standard Version with Apocrypha. Nashville, Abingdon, 2003. 1939 (note).
2.      See, for example, Proverbs 8:1–9:12, as well as the Wisdom of Solomon 7:22-8:1 in the Apocrypha.