Love One Another: John 15: 9-17

No! The reason that most of these people would stay home on a Sunday morning - ordinary, beer-drinking, Australian people (OK, there were some wild and woolly ones in that crowd too, but for the most part ordinary Aussies) ... the reason most of those people stay away from church is because they think the church does not love them. And they are right (aren’t they?)

I swear it is the most significant thing that I have ever learnt about Christian Mission in all my years as a Christian. Why is it that people stay away from the church? Because they don’t feel the church loves them or wants them.

Far from it! My many dialogues with the boys at the local would suggest that most people in most pubs in most cities in this country, if you ask them what they think of church people, will tell you that church people think that they are better than they are!

Such people don’t feel loved. They feel looked down upon.

That’s why it was so important that we spent that night at the Sly Fox, just sitting down and chatting and having the odd drink with the locals there. OK, after one night they still might not feel enormously loved by us, but at least they would not feel what so many people in that environment do feel in relation to the church - namely, rejected!

‘Love one another!’, says Jesus. ‘Love one another!’ ‘By this shall all men know that you are my disciples - that you love one another’.

And just in case we were tempted to water down the full impact of the love Jesus exhorts us to give, He defines it for us: “Greater love has no one than this, that someone lays down his life for his friends.” This isn’t ‘love’ in terms of having the warm fuzzies for someone. This is love defined in terms of self-sacrifice - costly love!

This is why we find it so hard to love, because it costs us so much. It’s just too much effort!

Thinking about the missionary battle of the church, I was reminded of that story about the guy who has dropped his wallet and is searching for it, looking all around his kitchen. When his wife asks, ‘are you sure you dropped it in the kitchen?’ he says, ‘No. I think I dropped it on the porch, but the light is so much better in here!’

Do you get the point? It’s so much easier to do my investigating in here where the light is good, even though I know it’s the wrong place to look!

Doesn’t that sound like so much Christian mission? We know that the real problems people have with Jesus are not intellectual, but we’d rather fight the battle at that level because it’s so much easier than having to go out and sacrifice ourselves in the real world!

‘Love one another!’, says Jesus. ‘Love one another!’

Father Ken spoke about love last week too if you remember. Indeed, you may remember that he told us that there were lots of different sorts of love spoken of within the Bible itself.

There’s the warm fuzzy sort of love, but that’s not the sort of love that Jesus exhorts us to.

There’s the erotic and romantic type of love, but that’s not it either.

Christian love is a very particular kind of love that is defined by Jesus in terms of self-sacrifice, and that’s why I wonder whether, in the Christian sense of the word, the opposite of love might not be hate, but perhaps fear?