Embracing the Center, May 18, 2025
I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. The readings for this Easter season are all about the church becoming the church. Even before the church was church, the church was arguing about change and inclusion. I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Most of the Book of Acts is about the church arguing about what is meant by “one another.” Does “one another” include people who are uncircumcised? Does “one another” include people who eat food offered to idols? In some ways, we still ask these questions today.
We read this bit of Jesus’ farewell discourse now in Easter because our Easter readings are all about what we do after Jesus is gone. We read Acts in Easter because Acts is the story of the earliest followers of Jesus figuring out how to be a community in his name. Most of the stories in Acts center on one of two major themes: either the power of the Holy Spirit, which we’ll talk more about in a few weeks on Pentecost, or this question of who’s in and who’s out. Who gets a seat at the table? We know, of course, that the answer is...everybody.
The commandment to love is not new; it is as old as Moses on Mt. Sinai. What is new is that the commandment to love God and neighbor in the context of Jesus’ ministry creates a new community. This gospel passage calls the followers of Jesus, scattered and confused after the resurrection, into being. Andrew McGowan, a scholar of the early church from Yale Divinity School, has said that this new commandment is the “Formation of a new form of community that imitates Jesus as servant, and also constitutes and guarantees Jesus’ continuing presence.” In other words, the commandment to love is the commandment to form a new, Jesus-centered community, and in that new community, Jesus will always be present.
Neither this new community that Jesus inspires when he says “love one another,” nor the new community we read about in Acts is a “close-knit” community like a small congregation.
Communities that have being “close-knit” as one of their values actually get smaller, and, like most organisms that shrink, they eventually die. Jesus’ commandment to love is not the commandment to become close or to become alike, but to model servant love to the world. This servant love, and the tension of becoming an ever-expanding community of servants, is what the Book of Acts is all about. It’s not a bad idea to read it through some time in the next few weeks.
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As many of you know, Hope & Bread City Mission meets in a city park. There are many disadvantages to this, like having to schlep equipment from a storage unit each week and setting up in cold rain in the winter months. We talk a lot about leasing a storefront somewhere along the 82nd Avenue corridor and we’ve looked at a couple of places. Every time they fall through, I’m always a little bit relieved. It has something to do with the openness of being in the park. It says to everyone that everyone belongs equally.
I recently came across the mathematical concept of Bounded Set vs. Centered Set, applied to churches. In a bounded set, people are either inside or outside of some boundary. Maybe the boundary is practices of faith, maybe it’s respectability, maybe it’s familiarity. Maybe it is simply a building. In a centered set, there is not border separating who is in or who is out; God is in the center, and everyone connects freely with one another, informed by the center.
At Hope & Bread, this works in a very physical way because we are in the park. There is no entry point, either physically or figuratively. At the center is the meal we provide and the Eucharist, the opportunity for people to connect in ways that they don’t in other spaces.
I mention all of this because when we really unpack Jesus’ words about loving one another, sometimes it is easy to have some unconscious borders, or boundaries about who is included in the love that Jesus calls us to practice. As we grow here at St. Aidan’s in loving servanthood as a community of Jesus-followers, we will grow in how we welcome folks into our spaces and into our gathered community.
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I recently heard someone say that we should not go to church because we love each other but because we love God. Of course, it is both. But when we hear Jesus say “love one another just as I have loved you,” let’s pause and think about how he has loved us.
· He loved his followers by gathering together a motley crew who didn’t have much in common with each other.
· He loved his first disciples—loves us—by pushing them—and us—out into the world to make more disciples.
· He loved his followers by challenging the rigid rules that actually keep us separate from one another.
· He loved his followers by preaching detachment from people, places, and things.
· He loved his followers by loving God. He never let us forget—especially in these chapters of John—who he was and whose he was.
For many people, church is where we go to see our friends. That’s lovely if you have that kind of church and those kinds of friends. But my longing, always, is for communities like ours to be a place, for each person here, that draws us closer to God and opens our hearts to God’s servant ministry in Christ. May it ever be.