Revelation 21:1-6

Rev. Richard R. Wohlschlaeger

Swarthmore Presbyterian Church

May 2, 2010

We are nearing the end of the season of Eastertide – only two more Sundays to go before Pentecost.  But then there’s a new beginning: the gift of the Spirit that gives birth to the church.  And in these Sundays between a season’s ending and a new season’s beginning our Gospel readings have drawn us back again and again to words Jesus spoke to his disciples before his death, words he hoped they would remember to sustain them in the days when he would no longer be with them in the flesh. 

Of such are the words we heard a few minutes ago from John’s Gospel, especially these: “I give you a new commandment,” Jesus said, “that you love one another.  Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.  By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”

Don’t these words remind us of the popular hymn most of us have sung along the way?  We are one in the Spirit, we are one in the Lord/We are one in the Spirit, we are one in the Lord/And we pray that all unity may one day be restored/And they’ll know we are Christians by our love, by our love/Yes, they’ll know we are Christians by our love.

According to sociologist Rodney Stark of the University of Washington, these words as we hear them from Jesus and as they have been re-framed in our hymnody may be even more important than we might have thought to our survival as a living faith among other faiths in human religious expression.

In his book The Rise of Christianity, Stark offers a theory of how the small sect that began on the fringes of Judaism some two thousand years ago grew into a major world religion.  For us on the inside the answer to that implied question may be quite simply expressed: the Holy Spirit came upon us.  And that is quite true.  It’s what we believe and how we move from day to day as a community and in our individual lives.  The Holy Spirit of God enables and equips and upholds us.

But it can be interesting to consider the views of someone who stands apart from the church and looks at it and us in some amazement as to how we came to be.  That is, how did this small sect on the fringes of Judaism grow to be – even within 400 years of its existence – the foremost religion of Western civilization?

Was it that Christian preachers were simply that persuasive?  Or that Christian healers were that successful?  Or that Christian teachers were that intriguing?  Christian worship that compelling?  Well, all of those things were important and to some extent true, I’m sure, and still are.  But Stark offers an interesting theory.  He says that religious conversion in general – and Christian conversion in particular – “tends to proceed along social networks formed by interpersonal attachments.”  That is, early Christianity spread, he says, through family and friendship networks.

And as much as the Gospel appeals to the economic “underclass,” offering hope to those oppressed by the world’s injustice, early Christianity attracted many if not most of its converts from the privileged classes.  At the same time, most early Christians in the Roman Empire were women.  Why?  Because “Christianity promoted liberating social relations between the sexes and within the family.”  Thus women enjoyed a greater status in Christianity than they experienced in Roman society – a society in which they were regarded by men as property.

In fact, the early church encouraged Christian women to marry pagan husbands – even senators and other government officials – as a way for Christianity to spread throughout Roman society by the conversion of spouses and children.  In this manner, a community with just a few hundred believers could grow to a critical mass of ten percent of the population by the year 300 CE, in spite of the lions and other less dramatic methods of persecution.

However, aside from all these strictly sociological theories, Stark presents a predominant theory that comes close to our own Gospel message.  Christianity, Stark suggests, spread the “old fashioned way,” by providing a “better, happier, more secure way of life.”  When epidemics struck, Christians, unlike those in the pagan culture, would care for the sick and the dying.  Whereas the gods of the pagans were indifferent – and impotent – the Christians proclaimed a God who cares.  And then Christians lived this faith in God by loving one another.  In this way, Stark says, Christians “revitalized” the Roman Empire and grew their own faith.  And this revitalizing power came from the mouth of Jesus himself.

“I give you a new commandment,” Jesus said, “that you love one another.  Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.”

And we sing:  We will work with each other, we will work side by side/We will work with each other, we will work side by side/And we’ll guard each one’s dignity and save each one’s pride/And they’ll know we are Christians by our love, by our love/Yes, they’ll know we are Christians by our love.

Oh, that they will still know us in that way!  By our love for one another.  By our solidarity with all human beings.  By our love expressed to others in the same ways Christ showed his love for us.  The sacrificial love of God in Jesus shown throughout his time on earth, reaching its apex in his death on the cross on behalf of all he loved, “converted” the ancient world.  This love came to be cherished by his followers as the greatest of all spiritual gifts:  And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.

It came to be called agape love, a new kind of love, an unmotivated, objectless love, a sort of fragrance or “atmosphere” in which the Christian community was built.  More than any other Christian attribute, agape-love became the sign of Jesus discipleship.  Through the Holy Spirit, the believer entered into the sacred union between God and Jesus.  This is how it all came about and how we are won over to Christ as well.  We love because God first loved us.

And so this morning we recognize beginnings among endings.  Along with Gospel readings recalling Jesus’ words of encouragement to his disciples after his death, we have been called in these days of Eastertide to the last book of the Bible, the revelation to an early Christian prophet named John on the island of Patmos, located some 60 miles off the coast of Asia Minor, now modern Turkey.  From that dot on the map comes a vision encouraging early Christians to recognize in the redemptive life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, the culmination of all that Scripture has promised, providing a stunning picture of the loving God dwelling among us through the Spirit’s power.

While the story of the Bible begins with a garden, it ends in a city, a Holy City, the new Jerusalem, which is illumined by the glory of the Lord who is surrounded by the praise and adoration of redeemed humanity.  For those of us who live somewhere in the middle of this story, between the beginning and the end – between God as both Alpha and Omega – we take heart in the promise of a glorious destiny brought on by the mystery of grace pressing in upon us.

Friends, we live within a story authored by the God who is both Alpha and Omega, the beginning and end of all that is.  Individually we are mere dots on the landscape of history, but God cares even for the dots.  God cares especially for the dots.  God cares for each of us.  God loves us.  And God will not let us go, not to the very end.  For even the end to us is a beginning for God.  And we are caught up in this creative act in which all things are made new.  We are blessed with imaginations to envision the reconciliation of earth and heaven, the coming together again of God’s love for us and our love for God that holds all things, past, present, and future, in the care of God for the world God created and called good. 

Jesus said, “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another.  Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.  By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”

And we sing:  We will walk with each other, we will walk hand in hand/We will walk with each other, we will walk hand in hand/And together we’ll spread the news that God is in our land/And they’ll know we are Christians by our love, by our love/Yes, they’ll know we are Christians by our love.

Indeed, my friends may it be so.  Now, as in the beginning, and even into all eternity.  Amen.