April 28, 2013 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m.

Get Off the Train!

Adam H. Fronczek
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 148
John 13:31–35

Keep us simple and on task,
and we will praise you by our glad obedience.

Walter Brueggemann

Last Tuesday, the Program Staff—the ministers and program directors here at church—sat at our staff meeting and had a conversation about what to do in the wake of the Boston bombing. In times of tragedy, churches respond in a number of ways. Our staff might have been talking about holding a prayer service or reaching out to individuals who had family members in Boston, but on this occasion, we were thinking more about what goes on here at Fourth Church: we were talking about what we should be doing around here in order to keep our congregation safe. It was a long conversation. There were a variety of opinions around the table. Some of us suggested ideas that would make Fourth Church look a little more like O’Hare airport; others suggested that we do nothing at all—that changing our practices in response to Boston is exactly what terrorists want. The outcome was that we made no drastic new plans. We took steps to quietly recommit ourselves to a number of actions we’ve been taking for years in order to keep all of you safe.

I told you about that staff conversation to make the point that fear changes all of us. Fear changes what we think about and the conversations we have, and it has the potential to change the actions we take. When something happens that makes us afraid, we act differently than we do when we feel safe. Fear changes us in situations both public and personal. A bomb goes off in a one public place; all public places think about security. North Korea threatens the use of nuclear weapons; governments respond with heightened military preparation. You walk down a dark street and someone seems to be following you; you’ll speed up or cross to the other side. If you love someone and are too afraid they won’t love you back, you might withdraw communication or hide your faults and mistakes. At work, your boss asks to see you and won’t say what it’s about; you create scenarios in your head and prepare your rebuttal. When we fear that a spouse or a partner or a friend may leave us, we make fewer commitments to them.

That last one—the fear of being left by a loved one—that’s probably the closest to what is happening around the table when Jesus speaks to his disciples in the story I read to you this morning. It’s a story about fear. And Jesus uses it as an opportunity to teach us what to do in the face of fear. Let me tell you the story.

The disciples have been with Jesus for three years. He has taught them and challenged them; he has come to be someone they know they can trust. But by the time of the story we read today, fear was all around them. The religious authorities and the Roman occupiers had begun making plans to kill the young revolutionary leader named Jesus. So in those days when Jesus’ ministry led the disciples closer to Jerusalem, closer to those who they knew threatened their leader, the disciples became afraid. And then Jesus named out loud what they had all been thinking about. He gathered them at supper. He said one of them would betray him. And when that one had left the room, he said to those who were left, “Where I am going, you cannot come.” I am leaving you soon, he said. The disciples were afraid. The one whom they had thought they could trust was leaving them. Of course their most likely response would be to protect themselves, to grow quiet and to turn inward, to act the way people act when they are afraid.

Because he knew them so well, because Jesus knows the human condition so well, it is at this very moment that he shares with them his most important teaching. He tells them how he would have them face their fear. They are afraid because he has said, “Where I am going, you cannot come.” And so he says to them, “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”

There is nothing more fundamental to being a follower of Jesus than to love one another. And there is no better response to fear than love. “I am going where you cannot go,” Jesus says, but do not let this news cause you to become people of fear, do not withdraw from one another. Love one another. Most of us are so used to acting out of fear that Jesus makes it a point to say, “This is what sets my people apart. Fear is common, you can find fear among anyone, but this is how everyone will know that you are my disciples . . . if you have love for one another.”

Acting out of love is what identifies us as Christians. Sometimes we’re surprised that it’s the non-Christians who really understand that the best.

Karen Blixen wrote the great novel Out of Africa about her midlife move to Kenya. In Kenya she married, bought a coffee plantation, and struck out on her own out in the bush, hiring local tribesmen and women to work the plantation. One morning a young man named Kitau came to the door and asked if he might be given a job working in the house. Karen spoke with him and agreed, and he became the best employee she could imagine, a hard worker, diligent, honest, dependable. At the end of three months, Kitau came to Karen and asked if he could be released from his job. He asked for a letter of recommendation to Sheik Ali bin Salim, a Muslim who lived in a nearby town. Karen, deeply disappointed to lose him, asked, “Is there some kind of problem? How can I keep you from going? May I offer you a raise?” Kitau replied that he was not interested in money. He had been trying to decide whether to become a Christian or a Muslim, so he had come to work for Karen, a Christian, and now he would go work for the Sheik, a Muslim, and then he would make his choice. And Karen was in disbelief, for she knew how differently she might have acted had she known that Kitau was watching her to see what Christians do.

Jesus said, “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” There is nothing more fundamental to what it means to be a Christian. There is also perhaps nothing more challenging, because of another connection between love and fear. Love is closely tied to fear not only because they are opposite responses, but because both fear and love cause us to be different, to change who we are and how we behave. Fear changes us, often in ways that are not good for us. Love has the power to change us as well.

Religions have a variety of ways of expressing this kind of change. Karen Armstrong is a former Catholic nun who has become a world-renowned scholar of many religions. Armstrong says that in most religious traditions, faith is not about belief but practice. Religion, Armstrong writes, is not about having to believe or accept certain difficult propositions; instead, religion is “about doing things that change you” (Karen Armstrong, The Spiritual Staircase, p. 270). Muslims don’t sign on for a particular creed. They have things they are supposed to do, ritual actions: the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca, the fast of Ramadan, prayer five times daily, required alms to the poor. These acts are not just rules; they are meant to lead to personal transformation.

The Christian religion is similar, but with a different kind of challenge. We have no set list of things we must do. Jesus made lots of suggestions, but in terms of commandments, he gave this one: “Love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.” The real task of our faith is to figure out what that means for each one of us in every place and time. What you are challenged to do is to daily ask yourself, “If love is how people will know that I am a Christian, how am I doing?”

Today we will ordain new officers of this church, new Elders and Deacons and Trustees. It will be incumbent upon them to answer a set of questions, to commit to a given set of beliefs, but mark my words that these verbal commitments do not amount to a thing unless we learn what is beneath them: Jesus’ command that we should love one another. It makes little difference what you claim to believe if it does not cause you to change your life, to learn more fully what it means to love one another.

Neither does it matter what I say. In a casual conversation with last week’s guest preacher, he made a comment I won’t soon forget. “Preachers are like train conductors,” Randall O’Brien said in his Southern drawl. It’s true. A preacher stands in the pulpit like a train conductor announcing the stops. “Memphis! Memphis is the next stop!” On the train people think to themselves, “Memphis, huh? I bet the conductor knows all about it. He probably knows the good places to eat, directions around town. I bet that conductor knows all about Memphis.” They think that because he’s announcing the stops. But it’s not true. It’s not true because every single time the train goes by Memphis, the conductor stays on board. He never goes into the city, so he doesn’t know where to get a good rack of ribs or a clean hotel room at a fair price. Much less does he know the story of why the man on the street corner hasn’t had a bath and is there asking for money. He doesn’t know the hurt of the man who is anxious because his marriage is failing. He doesn’t know the anxiety of the woman who is afraid she is going to get fired. He doesn’t know the fear of the fourth grader from a bad neighborhood who wonders if he will get home safely from school. The only people who know Memphis that way—or St. Louis, or Chicago, or anyplace you may be—are the passengers, because when the stop comes, they get off the train. It makes precious little difference what I say in here unless you go out there and love one another.

What you believe in is important, and coming to church is a good idea. But when Jesus found his disciples in the commonest of human situations, in a place of fear, he said to his disciples, “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”

I say to you today, followers of Jesus Christ: Get off the train! Arise and go out into the world and love one another. Ask what it means for us to love one another, in our homes and in our jobs, strangers and also our parents and children and friends, in our political discourse and our military posturing and our policy making, and in the face of fear of every kind—ask yourself every day what it means for us to love one another. Arise, and get off the train. For Jesus said, “By this everyone will know you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”

Amen.