“The Chosen” | John 15:9-17
An elderly couple celebrating their fiftieth anniversary had no secrets, except for the shoe box the wife had always kept hidden under the bed. She agreed to let her husband look inside. When he did, he found two crocheted dolls and $50,000 in cash. “Years ago,” she explained, “my mother told me that the secret to a happy marriage was never to argue. Instead, when I got angry, I should keep quiet and crochet a doll.” Her husband was delighted; she’d only been angry at him twice in fifty years! “Honey,” he said, “that explains the dolls, but what about the $50,000?” “Oh,” she replied smiling, “that’s from selling dolls!”
Lewis Grizzard, in his book Chili Dawgs Always Bark at Night told about an English minister who got into trouble for preaching a funeral and saying the departed was mean, never did any good, and “won’t be missed.” Grizzard wrote that he believed that ministers should be honest at funerals. “Why should we pretend a person who has just died was not the rascal he or she was, if that happens to be the case?” One minister tried to sooth the family by saying that “there was good in everybody.” But, Grizzard said “Everybody knew that Virgil Crabtree couldn’t have gone to heaven. He made and ran bad moonshine, got into a fight every Saturday night at the Moose Club, cursed on Sunday, and refused to bathe regularly. The preacher might as well have been honest about it and told the family what they already knew, that Virgil couldn’t have gotten through the Pearly Gates with a gold American Express card and written recommendations from three of the original disciples.”
I mentioned at the funeral this past Monday that this book, the Bible, is the story of God’s love for us and how we are to insert ourselves in the different stories. In one of the books I’m currently reading I was turned on to another book that I read a few years ago, The Furious Longing For God by Brennan Manning. He writes that the genesis of his book originated in 1978 during a thirty-day silent, directed retreat at a spiritual center. The director, a Jesuit priest guided him to a passage in the Song of Solomon: “I belong to my beloved, and his desire is for me” (Song of Songs 7:10 NIV). I’ve adopted this text. I quote it to myself often. I write it every day in my journal entry. We belong to Jesus and His desire is for us! Can it get any better than that?
Because Jesus Christ is our Lord and Master, He has the right to call us servants; instead, He regards us as friends. How comforting and reassuring that He not only chose us but also wants us to be His friends! Because He is our Lord and Master, we owe Him our unqualified obedience and should listen to everything He says; because we are His friends, we should love Him and others the way He loves us.
During the Last Supper, Jesus told His disciples: “I no longer call you my disciples. I now call you my friends.” Many of you have seen the movie “Driving Miss Daisy.” It was the story of a black chauffeur, played by Morgan Freeman, and a rather cantankerous old woman who lived in Atlanta. The story takes place over several years, and toward the end of the movie Miss Daisy says to her chauffeur: “You’re not my chauffeur, you’re the only friend I have.” It was no longer a servant-master relationship, they had grown to be friends.
Sometimes in the contemporary church we forget that we are not simply to love Jesus or even to follow Jesus; we are also to obey Jesus. Obedience isn’t a favorite word in our freedom-loving, independent culture. As Christians, we don’t simply follow Jesus because we have found Him to be a helpful means in getting what we want out of life. Christians are those who follow Jesus in obedience, confident that when we obey Him, we are following what God wants to get out of the world. Being a Christian is more than a way of thinking about things.
Christianity is a way of living, a matter of following Jesus rather than just thinking about Jesus.
We are to love others as He has loved us—not because of anything they can do for us—but because of what Christ has done for us. The world says, “Scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.” Jesus says to do good for people who are incapable of doing anything for you in return. This is what we call agape love—the love of God.
If you study the life and words and parables and sermons and actions of Jesus, you will find an eternity’s worth of things you should do. But there was just one thing which was so vital that Jesus actually went so far as to phrase it as a command, and that was to love each other. We are to love one another, cherish one another, even lay down our lives for one another, if need be, and it is all an extension of being a branch of Jesus, the true vine. Eugene Peterson, in his Message Bible quotes Jesus as saying, “Make yourselves at home in my love,” and then, “That’s what I have done—kept my Father’s commands and made myself at home in His love.”
Apparently, Jesus knew that if we could do just this one commandment, everything else would follow. If you take a child to an ice crème parlor, you won’t need to start issuing rules in which insist the child order a cone, eat it, enjoy it, find it delicious, and generally just have fun! Once the child gets to the parlor, the rest just follows. So it can also be with love: if we can’t do this, nothing else will work either. If we can, the rest will just follow.
Thanks be to God!
Eastman First Methodist Church 