I preached the following sermon at St Thomas Episcopal Church in Newark, DE, where I worshiped and was involved in campus ministry when I was at the University of Delaware. The propers are for the Fifth Sunday after Easter C, focusing on the gospel, John 13:31-35.You can watch it here.

“Everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another”

Christ calls us to love and honor all people.  It’s one of the foundational promises of our baptismal covenant and the subject of many a passage of scripture. 1 Corinthians 13 tells us that love is patient and kind and bears and believes all things. It’s a lovely passage. But you don’t have to worry about my preaching on it today.

For me, I know all this talk about love makes it tempting to write today’s gospel off. I know to strive to hold the door for people behind me, to hold my tongue when I’m tired and grumpy, and to hold off on tailgating the car going the incorrect speed for its lane choice.  I mean, I’m trying to be good and to be kind.

Jesus said “Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another”

How does Jesus love his disciples that isn’t covered in 1 Corinthians?

When Jesus first called his disciples, they weren’t wandering around like baby ducks looking for a mother to imprint on and to follow. They were people like you and me, waking up and going out into the world with one or more jobs to do.

Picture it:  you’re waiting tables at a café or checking out customers in a grocery store line. In your frantic, mad rush, you turn to your next customer and there’s JESUS and he says “Hey, I know this is how you put food on the table and a roof over your head and that you’re shifts not ever for another few hours, but you should stop everything you’re doing and follow me.

“Now.”

That’s scary. That’s wild. That’s outside my comfort zone.

That’s Jesus loving his disciples by inviting them into a new way of being, – should they dare to accept such a radical love – and spread wings they might not even know they had.

And that was just the beginning!

Following Jesus around in this new way of being did not guarantee any sort of glamour or social desirability.  I think I can say with confidence that there was no “Disciple of the Month” award that came with a modest Applebee’s gift card. Jesus’ love that called the disciples into a radical new way of being also called them to love everybody. The real everybody. Not just everybody in their neighborhood or where they used to work or who they went to school with. Jesus’ love called the disciples – and still calls us – to love the people we like to pretend we don’t see or only exist in the form of being causes we give our money to.  People who are forced to sell their bodies. People who talk to themselves when they ride the train. People who we can smell when we walk by them, making it harder to pretend they’re not there.

Jesus’ big transformative love doesn’t allow for the big invisible walls our society can put up to keep us separate from people less desirable than we are.

Jesus’ love called the disciples to invite them to dinner. This love believes we should all come to the table together.

This past January, I had the incredible honor of returning to South Africa for 10 days with my ethics professor, Fr. Michael Battle. Towards the end of our trip, we had breakfast with Desmond Tutu and one of my classmates asked him what his greatest passion is. His answer: Freedom. It was at the heart of Tutu’s passionate work to end apartheid in South Africa and still visible in his support of his daughter Mpho’s plans to marry another woman, the center of much discussion in Cape Town around the time of our trip.

“Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another”

Talk about a love that transforms! Tutu’s leadership and passion for freedom helped to transform a nation and break down the barriers established under apartheid and inviting an entire nation into a new way of being.

You never know when the Holy Spirit might come lovingly knocking at your door and inviting you into a new way of being. And while these outrageous acts of Grace are about as easy to predict as finding a door to Narnia (never the same way twice), we do have some control as to how ready we are to welcome such big love. Where might there be invisible walls that keep up from making space within our very own hearts?

A few days ago, I was going for a walk with one of my classmates. We were talking about the good, the bad, and the ugly in the great world of Job Searching in the Episcopal Church.  It’s a pretty big church out there, but in all the pressure to find a job, it can be tempting to force ourselves to fit into a good-enough one. To think the fit is close enough to right. To convince ourselves that we won’t be clipping our wings enough to even notice.

But if we’re contorting ourselves to fit into this new space, it doesn’t sound like we’ll be leaving much room for the Holy Spirit to make a Graceful entrance. I don’t mean to underestimate Her so much as to acknowledge just how distracting that kind of contortionism can be.

This conversation about the church prompted my friend to share a bit of her personal experience from earlier in her life. She told me how she had been tempted many times to make that same mistake in relationships. To force herself to fit. To clip her wings a bit to see if that might turn “good enough” into “good.”

It didn’t.

If you’re clipping the magnificent and unique set of wings God gave you to fly with in the one-of-kind way God is calling you to fly, you’re doing it wrong.

If your love for someone is shaped like a birdcage, contains any sort of latch, or requires wing-clipping; you’re definitely doing it wrong.

And that’s wehn my friend said something else to me that sounded a lot like Bishop Tutu’s passion for freedom from birdcages of inequality and injustice and abuse.

She said: “You know how I knew my husband was the one for me? I didn’t have to even think about clipping my wings. He was already shouting, ‘FLAP HARDER!’”

That’s the kind of image that lines up with Holy Spirit in the form of a dove.

A love that invites you to spread your full wingspan and SOAR requires a lot of space. Those boundless skies have a lot of big, scary, stunningly beautiful room for transformation.

Jesus said “Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another”

 “Just as I have led you with love that transforms you, you should love one another in a way that breaks down barriers”

Flap harder. Tell your friends.