Sermons

The Banality of Love 

My seminary dean, a feminist theologian and biblical scholar named Cynthia Briggs Kittredge, is a woman of much grace and wisdom. Throughout my time as a student of hers, she peppered us with pieces of advice. Here’s one I’ll always remember: The sermon should only be about love if love is in the text. And so I would like to point out that love, in fact, is in the reading here.

In the season of Easter, we have been hearing some of the greatest hits in the Gospel of John, hopping around in the story. Last week, we heard about the call of the good shepherd in chapter 10. This week, we get the great commandment, that we should love one another, in chapter 13.

If the Gospel that Thom just read sounded familiar, then it may be because the reading we get today is the tail end of the reading we had just a month ago as we celebrated Maundy Thursday together. In the context of the gospel of John, Jesus washing the feet of the disciples has occurred just before he says this.

The last time I was preaching about love, it was in the context of love of enemies, back in February. That is a hard gospel and was particularly challenging to preach (and I think to hear) in this community that felt under siege by the brand-new presidential administration.

But, the reason I bring up that sermon is because I want to contrast love of enemies, or outsiders, with the commandment we receive from Jesus here, that we are to love one another. The focus of this text is clearly on the Christian community and how we are to treat each other. In the broader narrative of the gospel, Jesus is about to be betrayed, setting off the Passion narrative of death and resurrection. That means this community is about to be without a leader, and so Jesus is telling them how to get along without him. He gives them this commandment: that they must love each other, that love will be the mark that they indeed are followers of Jesus.

It’s a warm and fuzzy idea; it really feels good. “Love one another” fits nicely in a greeting card, or better yet, on a sign at an Airbnb in the curlicue “live, laugh, love” type. There’s a lot to love about love. Although I would guess that all of us here would agree that we should treat each other with love, it has been my experience that churches can be places where we fall short of that call in spectacular fashion.

The church, like all human institutions, is deeply flawed. Although we preach a gospel of radical equality, our churches reflect the divides of race, class, and privilege that we see in our broader culture. And although we preach “speaking the truth in love,” we can also be mean, cutting, vindictive, and snarky. Although we preach safety and respect, too often has the church disavowed that some human beings are made in the image of God, whether they be women, people of color, or our queer and trans siblings. At the church’s very worst, it has been a site of abuse and neglect.

Just because we’re the church, it doesn’t mean that we have escaped these realities. But because we’re the church, it does mean that we are called to work to transcend them. We cannot simply accept these as our circumstances, shrug our shoulders, and move on. We are called to love, to repent, to repair, to work to be better. That makes it all the harder when we fail, but working in cooperation with the Holy Spirit, we have the chance to succeed.

This week, one of the things I’ve been doing is re-certifying my Safe Church training, which is required of church employees and certain volunteers. This is training on the policies and protocols to keep both children and adults safe in the Episcopal Church. I was struck by the fact that the first unit I had to complete was actually about the theological underpinnings of why we do this work. Safe Church is not just a legal requirement or about liability. There is a call of Jesus embedded in it.

The training features our former Presiding Bishop Michael Curry. He asks anyone taking it to “see this not as simply volunteering [or working] for a church, … but to begin to see this as one way I can follow in the footsteps of Jesus and help God to realize what God wants to accomplish in this world and in our lives.” Sometimes love looks like taking long trainings about how to have appropriate boundaries and treat each other with care.

Hannah Arendt, a German-American historian and philosopher, coined the phrase the “banality of evil” to talk about the ways that evil can flourish in ordinary actions. But I would like to counter that there is also a banality of love. It’s in the everyday actions that we do to care for one another. Love is in the gluten-free wafers that we offer at every service to make sure that everyone can receive from the table. It’s in the Morning Prayer group praying for the names on the parish prayer list every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. It’s in the choir member or acolyte showing up on a Sunday morning, even when they don’t really want to, because they don’t want to let down the team. These actions are the threads that make up the fabric of love in this place. It is the mundane, the everyday, the banal that creates Christian community. That’s also hard work, because each action seems so small. It is only when taken as a whole that we can see the beautiful tapestry.

Finally, I want to offer one caveat. As I mentioned at the top, I do think this reading in particular is about Christian community, how to treat our siblings in Christ, the people with whom we stand shoulder to shoulder around the circle. But, taken in conversation with other teachings of Jesus, I don’t think the intention is to create an insular community where we have love for each other but not anyone else. The church is a place to practice love and, in so doing, create a place where love flows out from our walls and into our lives. The nature of love is that it cannot be contained or bottled up. As we practice love here, we see that love flows through all parts of our lives. In so doing, my hope is that those who observe and interact with us will indeed know we are Christians by our love.