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In the summer following my second year of seminary, I was going through my second unit of Clinical Pastoral Education, or CPE. Now most CPE programs are done in the hospital. I was working in a program in Atlanta called the Training and Counseling Center, TACC for short. Instead of hospital work, they had seminarians serve at various non-profit sites throughout the city.
I ended up serving at a church, an Episcopal church in fact, called Holy Comforter. Their program was called the Friendship Center. The Center works with various individuals living with different mental illnesses and disabilities. These folks also made up the bulk of the population of the church.
As part of our CPE program, we were asked to give a couple of sermons during the summer. The Vicar of Holy Comforter, The Rev. Alexis Chase, was kind enough to allow me to preach at one of the Wednesday services.
At this point I had gotten used to how the Wednesday services went and how Alexis typically went about preaching. A lot of times she would get interrupted by various members, though she always did a great job of answering them and using those answers to continue on with her sermon.
Because of what I’d seen, I was prepared at various points in my sermon for someone to interrupt by having an answer that would bring us back to the word at hand. When I got up there though, it was absolute silence from the time I started to the time I ended.
Afterwards, I asked Alexis about this. She told me that they knew I was a seminarian. They knew I was still learning. They wanted me to do well and not mess up. Basically, she told me, this was an act of love.
This was a marginalized community I was serving. The people there were some of those our society looks down upon. Many, I would learn, are taking advantage of while they live in some of the worst conditions you can put another human being through. Often times, the world around us struggles to see these members as possessing full-humanity with us.
Yet these were the people who were reaching out to me. Yeah, I wasn’t fully trained or even a priest yet, but that was okay for the members at Holy Comforter in Atlanta. They were willing to show me love anyways.
That’s a powerful thing, to see love from a group of people that often goes unloved. It’s the same power we see God working in our readings today.
In Acts, we see the Deacon Philip approaching a eunuch as he was reading from the Prophet Isaiah. If the passage he was reading sounds familiar, it is because it was part of our Good Friday reading this year. It lays out what the Suffering Servant had to endure in this world. Yet the Eunuch has no idea what this passage from Isaiah is actually saying.
Another thing to note is that we’re told this eunuch is coming from worship in Jerusalem. We are not told, however, that the Eunuch was worshipping at the Temple. At this point in time, if you had any physical issue or deformity you were not considered whole or perfect as a person. Therefore you would not have been seen as fit for Temple worship. This would impact may of us here today, even from something small like an artificial joint in your body. In other words, the Temple society would have looked at the Eunuch in the way many today look at those living with mental illness, like the members of Holy Comforter in Atlanta.
Philip doesn’t view the Eunuch this way. What he sees is someone who needs his help understanding that the Suffering Servant in Isaiah is our Lord Jesus Christ. After Philip lays all this out and the Eunuch expresses the desire to be Baptized, Philip doesn’t hesitate to answer his request in the affirmative. He doesn’t see the Eunuch as less-than. Philip sees him as someone God wishes to show Love to.
Philip is living into the same love 1 John points us to. The love we show each other, as 1 John tells us, is the same love God first showed us. What we’re seeing in this letter is what we see in the Two Great Commandments Jesus reminds us from Torah: “Love God with all your heart, and all your soul, and all your mind. And love your neighbor as yourself.”
These two are inseparably woven together. We show that we possess God’s love by showing that love to those around us. Even when those around us are imperfect, we are still called to love them, for we too are imperfect. I’ve often found, as I did in Atlanta, that those who are most aware of their imperfection are those who can show us they love us in our brokenness the best.
As always, though, Scripture gives us a warning. This is seen throughout the 1st Epistle of John and it is summed up in our reading from the Gospel according to John today. If we cannot live into this love and show what God has shown us to others, then we are not abiding in Jesus the Great Vine. If we cannot abide and show forth God’s Love in the world, then we will be cut off.
In this it is helpful to remember that Love does not equal total acceptance or carte blanche to do as we please. God often gets angry in Scripture at those the Lord loves. We see Jesus get angry too, enough to over turn the money changers tables in the Temple as we saw back in Lent. Yet this anger doesn’t come because God hates us. God’s anger is a sign of just how much God cares. It is frustration because we are failing to listen and neglecting to take God’s hand out-stretched to help us when we so desperately need it.
The question for us is the same as it is for the rest of the church: are we going to listen to the Lord? Will we take the time to love one another because God first loved us, even though that love can be difficult and we need God’s help to do it? Or instead will we wither away as we are pruned to make room for the branches that will keep reaching out to do God’s will in this world?