NRS John 13
31 When he had gone out, Jesus said, "Now the Son of Man has been glorified, and God has been glorified in him. 32 If God has been glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself and will glorify him at once. 33 Little children, I am with you only a little longer. You will look for me; and as I said to the Jews so now I say to you, 'Where I am going, you cannot come.' 34 I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. 35 By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another."

Dear Friends in Christ, may the salvation of our Lord be ever with us; for the sake of Jesus the Messiah. Amen.

I get a big kick out of looking over old photographs and family pictures. Of course, it's fun just going down memory lane and trying to remember when was this, or where was that, or who is this. Sometimes, though, those old pictures can really make you wince. I look back at some my old photos from the '60's and '70's and I think, "Oh my gosh! That hair! Those clothes! What was I thinking?"

I get the same feeling when I listen to some of the music from way back when. Every once in a while I'll hear on the radio a song like The Beatles' "All You Need Is Love," or Stephen Stills' "Love the One You're With," or Jesse Colin Young and the Youngbloods, "Come on people now, smile on your brother, everybody get together, try to love one another right now." I loved those songs. That was the sound of my generation. But to hear that music now makes me wince, no less than my old haircut from 1974. It all sounds so terribly, painfully, hopelessly naïve. Did we really believe that love is all you need? Did we think that the world's problems could be resolved just by loving the one you're with? Would Baghdad today be any safer or more secure if only we could get Sunni and Shia to smile on their brother and love one another right now?

In today's gospel Jesus gives his disciples a new and final commandment to love one another, and it's tempting to hear Jesus in the tones of that bygone idealism. Without question, many of the poets and prophets of the '60's took their inspiration from Jesus. Some of them even dressed and wore their hair like Jesus. They looked for a world without war. They preached a message of peace and racial harmony. And they saw love as the key to universal bliss and well-being. Or as the Beatles sang, "Love, love, love, all you need is love, love, love." Except that Jesus didn't command his disciples just to love, but much more specifically, to love "just as I have loved you."

That's a very different thing from what most people normally think of as love. For many people love is, to quote another old song, like being "hooked on a feeling." From what I gather off those e-harmony commercials, love is passion, emotion, chemistry. Ironically, I've sat with lots of people in deep, chronic conflict, who've done terrible things to each other, and yet still say that they love one another in exactly those words. And I believe them. They feel deeply about one another, they're passionate about their relationship, but they just can't live together: Because something else is missing.

When Jesus commanded his disciples that they should love one another as he loved them, he had much more in mind than just how they should feel toward each other. Although I'm sure Jesus loved his disciples with every fiber of his being, the way Jesus showed that love was in his unwavering, unqualified commitment to them. Jesus prayed to his Father, "I did not lose a single one of those you gave me" (John 18: 9). But rather than lose even one, he interposed his own life, for their lives and the life of the whole world. In the commitment and caring he showed toward his disciples, Jesus embodied God's care for and commitment to all creation, for this is the God who "so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life" (3:16).

According to God's definition, commitment is at the heart of love. On the one hand, commitment is simply refusing to give up. Throughout the Old Testament we see over and over again how sorely Israel tempted God to give up on their relationship. In both the Law and the Prophets we repeatedly see and hear God just on the verge of tossing in the towel and calling it quits on this faithless, stiff-necked people. But God persists, and in the New Testament we see that God's commitment goes well beyond just not giving up, but also includes a willingness to risk everything, to give everything, to sacrifice everything in order to raise up a people of faith and hope and love.

Now that kind of love is really, truly all you need. With that kind of love you can change the world. With that kind of love you can end war, make peace, and usher in the kingdom of God. Unfortunately, it's exactly that kind of love of which we're totally incapable. We make every promise with our fingers crossed. We tie strings to every commitment. We don't enter into even the simplest agreement without all sorts of escape clauses. Sometimes we get tired, sometimes we get hurt, sometimes we just get bored, but sooner or later, we want out. God's unconditional love stands in judgment of all our half-hearted, half-baked commitments, but it's also God's unconditional love, embodied in Jesus, that redeems us, that calls us back into relationship and returns us to the community we need so desperately but run away from so shamefully.

One August day in 1969 I talked my parents into letting me go with my older brother to the New Orleans Pop Festival. It was a major rock concert held over three days at a race car track about 50 miles outside of New Orleans, a kind of swampland Woodstock thing. How I got my parents to agree to my going I still don't know. I guess they hadn't read that the Hell's Angels were doing festival security, and they might have been surprised to learn that the 25,000 or so young people attending were not exactly the bobby sox crowd. But what the festival lacked in shade, toilet facilities, and mature adult supervision, it made up for in a fantastic musical line up. Practically every cutting edge band of the day was playing, including Canned Heat, the Grateful Dead, a new band headed by a guy named Carlos Santana, and a sad little girl with a big voice from Port Arthur, Texas, Janis Joplin. On Sunday evening The Youngbloods took the stage, and when they launched into "Get Together," well, everybody got real groovy. Arm in arm, we were singing along. People were flicking their Bic lighters and swaying to the music. Love was in the air, and I don't think it was just the spiritual kind.

Four years later and that all seemed like a dream. There was still war, and racial violence, and the Age of Aquarius had pretty much gone with the wind. The love that had been so palpable that night in '69 was nowhere to be found, and the campus revolutionaries who had wrapped themselves in the flag of the Woodstock nation were either drugged out of their minds or going to work at their daddy's Cadillac dealership. That's when it began to dawn on me that for love to stick, for love to work, for love to make a difference, it would require more than cool music, long hair, and tie-dyed t-shirts. It would take a cross.

In the Name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.