Sixth Sunday of Easter

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/051312.cfm

Jesus said to his disciples:
"As the Father loves me, so I also love you.
Remain in my love.
If you keep my commandments, you will remain in my love,
just as I have kept my Father’s commandments
and remain in his love."

“Something you said really struck me, Father!” The Veteran said.

“What was that?” I asked.

“You said I don’t belong to myself. I belong to other people, and they belong to me.”

It seemed the Veteran had never heard that thought. It’s so alien to our language of freedom, rights, success and individual accomplishment. To the Veteran’s amazed remark I couldn’t help but add, “Just look at your belly button. Where do you think it came from?”

We are all bound to one another and the more sophisticated our technological society becomes, the more tightly the bonds grow. A single person can sabotage a vital system, paralyze a city or terrorize a nation with very little effort. Even your private little castle, your little house on the prairie depends on communication, electrical, sewer and water lines. It is approached by highways, roads and a driveway. There may be a few heroic individuals living in splendid isolation with the grizzly bears in the ranges of Alaska but the rest of us depend on one another. And we need more than ever to hear Jesus’ word: Remain in my love.

A nation that fled European history and its continual wars dreamed of liberty. They wanted to be freed of the old world to create a new kind of independence. That dream of sovereign national freedom trickled down to churches, like the Latter Day Saints who composed their own scriptures and created a new religious mythology, only tangentially connected to their Christian tradition. 

Within another century freedom would isolate the individual, especially the middle class, landowning voter. He was personified in GI Joe, the Marlboro Man, the Lone Ranger, and Philip Marlowe; a loner, disconnected from people, feelings and sensibilities. He is still out there on the prairie fighting the crabgrass on his front lawn and complaining about the neighbors who don't poison their own dandelions. 

At the VA I took a phone call from a former patient who complained that the VA would not let him change his name. I explained to him that he would have to go to the courthouse and undertake a long, arduous process to change his name. "But I've got a right to be called what I want to be called!" he said. Why can't a person rewrite his identity, his past, his future, his debts and obligations? 

That way of freedom is not where God is leading us. C.S.Lewis once described a busload of tourists who arrive in heaven from hell. Most of them are too frightened to get out of the bus. Those who do cannot walk on heaven's grass. As soft and luxuriant as it is, it is too real for their tender feet. After living in a world of their own making, they cannot bear the intense clarity of reality. Lewis went on to say heaven might be no bigger than a drop of water, a tiny space where we live in intense proximity to one another. There every person will depend upon the rest, and every person will be dependable to the rest. 

I have been reading Timothy Luke Johnson's recent book, Prophetic Jesus, Prophetic Church, about the Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles. He shows how Saint Luke challenges our current ways of reading the Scriptures. The Holy Spirit, especially in Acts, speaks to the Church. Discovering the will of the Spirit is the work of the Church, not the individual. We pray, we listen and we act. We heal, preach and gather to Christ as a Body, not as individuals. Salvation is found among us, not in one's private fantasies. 

In the Gospel of Saint John we hear that same blessed invitation.  Remain in my love. My Veteran friend, as he exhausts his search for sobriety on every lonely road he can find -- he spoke of his disappointment with the televangelists who promised salvation to their isolated viewers -- will join an Alcoholics Anonymous group. He will listen to others and learn to care about someone other than himself when he attends meetings; he will allow others to care for him. And in the binding discipline of that group he will discover his freedom. He will encounter Our Higher Power as we surrender our life and will to the One who loves Us.