Many of you know that I spent my childhood in Oklahoma and Texas. In this environment, it was impossible not to be engaged in the culture of the Wild West. Living in the former Indian Territory and watching those western TV shows Bonanza and the real Gunsmoke on TV, it isn’t surprising that we played cowboys and Indians often. It is amazing how easily a swing set can be transformed into an imaginary stagecoach.  Visions of a stagecoach being chased by outlaws or Indians quite naturally appealed to our imagination.

 

I was surprised in my teen years to discover that in reality a stagecoach trip was extremely slow, very uncomfortable and quite boring. They seldom were attacked by Indians. The average speed was about 5 miles an hour. Often the trips were very hot or cold. The dust and mud were intolerable, depending upon the season. Even though the Concord stagecoach was described by Mark Twain as cradles on wheels, travel by stagecoach was rugged.[1]

What I didn’t know until recently was the practice of ticketing that took place on stagecoaches. There were three level of tickets, first, second, and third class, with the price, of course, descending with each category. The distinction wasn’t where you set. Stagecoaches typically held nine inside and six on the roof but depending on the time of year and who you were traveling with, sitting on top of the stagecoach was preferable. The distinction of class had to do with how you acted; or maybe a better way would be to say, how you were required to act.

 

In the 19th century, roads weren’t paved. Many of the trails were primitive; some so difficult to negotiate that even a team of six strong horses was challenged to pull a full coach. Thus, there were frequent occasions when the stagecoach would get bogged down, either by a steep incline or by mud. Depending on your class of ticket, you might be required to act in a particular way when the stagecoach got stuck. If you had a first class ticket you got to stay on board the stagecoach. If you had a second class ticket, you had to get off and walk around the mud or up the hill to lighten the load. If you had a third class ticket which was the lowest of the categories, you were obliged to get out and help the stagecoach driver either push the vehicle through the mud or up the hill. This meant that if you were a third class passenger, somewhere along the long trip, you were going to humble yourself and serve others. It meant you were going to get dirty.”[2]

When I heard this story, I thought of our lesson today, a story about how Jesus teaches us to act, about learning to love like Jesus. Our theme verse is “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.” (John 10: 34) He gives the commandment just a few hours before he dies on the cross. John calls this Jesus’ glorification.

 

Again, it seems odd that after Easter, we are studying a passage of scripture from Holy Week. But that’s only from our perspective. It isn’t odd when you stop and think about how people grieve and mourn and move on to live lives that honor those who we give up. When the shock of the death is past, when the funeral is over, we spend weeks and in some cases, a lifetime remembering what loved ones have said to us. This is what we are doing and this is what the church did.  In light of Easter, they looked back at what Jesus taught them. They had those moments of saying, “Now I understand what he meant.”

 

For instance, our passage begins, “When he had gone out”. This is a reference to Judas Iscariot’s departure to set up the betrayal of Jesus. Of course, the disciples may have been unaware of why Judas left the room. Remember, the Garden betrayal hasn’t taken place. “When he had gone out, Jesus said, ‘Now the Son of Man has been glorified’” (John 13:31a.) When the disciples heard this, they likely interpreted it in a very different way before Easter than after. They understood what it meant to glorify a Roman emperor. It was done all the time. They were familiar with the practice of giving titles to Roman emperors like maximus or optimus, meaning greatest or best. They knew the chants required for affirmation and the creation of statuary and art pieces to glorify the Roman leaders.  This is likely what they heard and it is similar to how we use glory today. We say that Peyton Manning finally got his glory, winning the Super Bowl. Some people even are calling him optimus or the best quarterback ever. We say Joseph Chirlee and Janet Cherobon, the winners of the mini-marathon this weekend were in their glory.  

 

Many years after Jesus spoke that he was about to be glorified, the church, now on the other side of Easter, said, ‘This wasn’t the type of glory Jesus was talking about. He wasn’t being glorified like a hero.” They said, “He is glorified sitting at the right hand of God and we will be too. They developed what we call the doctrine of glorification as a description of what will happen to us. When the world is finished and we are in heaven, it will be glorious.  The apostle Paul said “that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed to us. …” (Rom 8:18-19). It is that moment when “in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet; for the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed" (1 Corinthians 15:51-52) This incredible transformation takes place at Christ's Second Coming. For Jesus the process of glorification begins when he is lifted up on the cross. Or, to place it with my opening metaphor, when Jesus gets out of the stagecoach and pushes it through the mud of sin up the hill of Golgotha, he is glorified.

 

The disciples don’t understand this. They don’t know what we know. Jesus hasn’t gone to the cross.  When Jesus looks at them and says, “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.”  (John 13:34) There is no context of death and resurrection. On this side of Easter, we can point to the cross and say, “This is what he means.” But when he says this at his last supper, without the cross as a context, the disciples are clueless. But they shouldn’t have been. Jesus had just demonstrated what he meant.

 

If we go back to the stagecoach metaphor, just before he said this, Jesus left the safety of first class passage and became third class, getting down and getting dirty. Remember, first century roads, like 19^th century trails for stagecoaches, were unpaved. Most people wore open sandals, which meant before you could eat a meal in comfort, dirty feet had to be cleaned. You didn’t want dirty feet in your face, lounging as you did on throw pillows around a table. In rich families, slaves did this task. But because they weren’t rich, one of the disciples had to take on the job. But John reports that the disciples were too busy arguing who was most important, who had the most privilege, who was first class.  So Jesus got up from the table, laid aside his garment, wrapped himself in a towel, and stooped over and did the work of a slave: he washed all of the feet of the disciples. This is the context in which he says, “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.”

 

Do you realize what Jesus is saying?  Loving like Jesus means that you serve one another, that you step down from first class and find third class.  Jesus changes the hierarchy of values. Our world believes that the greatest value is getting ahead, striving for the privilege of first class, finding the luxuries of life.  Climb the ladder. Discover privileges. Get ahead of your neighbor.  Jesus is saying, “If you love like me, you step down and serve.”

 

Few of us learn to love like Jesus; so few, in fact, that it is rare to see. When you see such love, experience such love, it changes you. It changed the late Langdon Gilkey, a theologian who taught at the University of Chicago. He wrote about loving like Jesus in his most popular book titled, “In Shantung Compound: The Story of Men and Women Under Pressure (1968).  Gilkey tells about graduating from Harvard and going on a mission in China. He was a young, liberal idealistic man that believed if you simply taught people the right thing, they’d do the right thing. In China, he discovered the difference between knowing how Jesus loved and loving like Jesus.

 

At the outbreak break of WWII, all of the foreigners were rounded up and sent to a prison camp, the Shantung Compound.  Fifteen hundred American, British, Canadian, Dutch, French, and Australian citizens were suddenly thrust together in very crowded circumstances. The food supply was uncertain; insecurity was in the air. And young Gilkey was amazed that people who had gone to China for humanitarian purposes - missionaries, teachers, social workers -- when their security was threatened, they reverted to being utterly savage in their dealings with each other. It became every person for himself. He saw missionaries stealing food and hoarding it for their children, so that other people couldn't have it. In other words, fear had cast out love.

 

There was one exception to this. There was a group of Dutch Roman Catholic monks who had gone to China to run a school. These were individuals who were deeply rooted in Jesus. They were the ones who loved like Jesus.  If there was extra help needed in the kitchen, it was a Dutch monk who volunteered. If some repairs needed to be made to places where they lived, they offered to do it. In other words, they were willing to do what had to be done. They understood what Jesus meant when he said, love like me; by it is the willingness to serve, to do what has to be done.[3]

I’ve thought a lot about loving like Jesus and the experience of the disciples in that upper room. On the one hand, Jesus wasn’t saying anything that they hadn’t grown up hearing. Love God and love neighbor are the two core tenets of Judaic law.  But on the other hand, Jesus was demonstrating something dramatically different than charity that defined first century loving of strangers or the needy. They were to love each other as he had loved them.

 

In my years of ministry, I have come to believe that it is often easier to fulfill the obligation of loving, compassionate care of the stranger than it is to love those with whom you live. I not simply talking about those who reside in your home even though it can apply.  I’m also talking about those within your most intimate circle and in particular, those within a church. Sometimes we do a poorer job loving each other than we do loving a stranger halfway around the globe. We are willing to reach out to the hungry, to the poor, or the displaced with compassion and charity, but fail to show the same compassion to those with whom we interact daily. We ask more often, “What’s in it for me” than “What I can do for them.” We wonder, “How can I benefit by this personally” rather than, “how can I serve?”   In fact, I believe this individualism in our community may be nearing an epidemic proportion. I see it in our neighborhoods, in our schools, in our community, in our government and even, unfortunately here in this place. It is really infecting all of us to some degree, this idea that my rights come first versus loving like Jesus.

 

Loving like Jesus became very important to the first Christians on this side of Easter. They realized that Jesus had “laid down his life for us and we ought to lay down our lives for one another.” (1 John 3: 16b)  So they claimed something of a motto: “Let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action.” (1 John 3:18)  Like Jesus, they took on a servant’s posture, relinquishing any claim on first class rights. It wasn’t just a few. It was everyone and it was noticed. The 2^nd century Roman scholar Tertulian, who had been an outspoken opponent of Christianity and eventually converted, wrote their “deeds of a love so noble that lead many [outside the church] to put a brand upon them. See, they say, how they love one another, how they are ready even to die for one another. ...”  I wonder if the way we cared for each other, the way someone might see you acting in your world, the quality of your loving…would it cause someone to convert? Or would it t cause them to respond like Gandhi. Do you remember what he said: “I like your Christ,” he said, but “I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.” [4]

It stings to hear that comment, doesn’t it? But the two comments are laid side by side, the positions are helpful in their extreme. You might ask yourself, in a moment of private devotion, “Which am I more like? When people look at me, do they see someone who loves like Jesus? Or am I perceived to be unlike Christ?”

 

A few weeks ago, I sat next to a man at Starbucks. I was aware that he was asking himself something like these questions. He was waiting for an acquaintance as was I. Both of our parties were delayed. We made eye contact several times. Finally he broke the silence saying, “You are wondering why I am doing this.” Indeed I was. He had one of those rubber bracelets on, like the pink breast cancer bracelet or the yellow Lance Armstrong. It was red and I found out that it was one of those old WWJD bracelets. “I’m meeting someone who I have to confront about something he did and I’m trying to figure out what Jesus would do. But I don’t know what he would do.”

 

Just about that time, my appointment arrived so I started my meeting and he went back to popping that rubber band on his wrist. But it pointed out the problem with WWJD. Sometimes you don’t know what Jesus would do. What would Jesus do about global warming? What would Jesus do about terrorism and suicide bombers? We don’t know what he’d do. But we do know how he’d act. He’d love.

 

There’s a new bracelet idea. LLJ, love like Jesus. It would remind us how we are to act. It might be worth printing up a number of them and passing them out to the church. Love like Jesus. LLJ. 

 

Join me, won’t you, around here, in your circle, to love, “not in word or speech, but in truth and action” (1 John 3:18). Join me in trying to love like Jesus.

 

 

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