Easter 6 Yr B 2021

After thirteen long months, we are now racing towards the easing of lockdown.
According to the government roadmap, it is time to reopen the economy and lift social restrictions - of course, with an eye to the science (if not the experts).

So, it's a wrap on the disciplines that have been imposed on society for the past year and one month.

For extensive periods, we have been required to: STAY AT HOME • STAY APART and, of course, to sanitise our hands.

STAY AT HOME • STAY APART.

Those two phrases (and the action of washing our hands) have indelibly marked our imagination as well as shaped our lives.

For the past 13 months, the two mantras: STAY AT HOME • STAY APART have required discipline on our part.

Discipline that has sometimes had to be enforced by police and other government agencies.

Discipline, the breach of which involved significant risks, mortal risks, not just to ourselves, but also to others in our communities

STAY AT HOME.

This has allowed most of us to come to know our homes intimately.

We have learnt how limited or limiting they are.

It's either we have rearranged things around our homes or are planning to. We are better informed about what works around the house, what needs fixing or must be thrown away!

Undeniably, such intimate knowledge of our homes and serious decisions we have or will take is because we have had to STAY AT HOME.

To be fair, there have been some lighter moments too. Moments in which we have been advised: "Don't go out! Don't go out - Except when you go out to eat out to help out!"

However, there is no loss of gravity or mixed messaging in today's gospel directive. Jesus was entirely earnest when he says to us: ABIDE IN MY LOVE.

This charge is the central and repeated focus of the 15th chapter of John's Gospel that we started considering last week.

It is the anchor of Jesus's efforts to prepare his disciples for life without him. Jesus was anticipating when he would no longer be around on earth. He gave them one of many charges on how they were to go about their lives after his ascension to God the father. Earlier in John 14, Jesus charged them not to be discouraged to believe in Him and God. He assured them too of his enduring Peace.

His concern was to prepare the disciples on how to maintain the movement, the cause to which he had recruited/called them. And he does so by repeatedly saying: ABIDE IN MY LOVE.

Our thirteen-month-long pandemic experience helps us to appreciate why Jesus repeatedly turns the disciples' attention to their need to ABIDE in God's LOVE. We can see that Jesus was pointing them towards intimacy with God the Father as the basis of the relationship that would sustain the movement to which he had called them.

Jesus was instructing them on the framework essential for building the Kingdom of God.

By saying 'Abide in my love', Jesus was telling them (and us) to make LOVE the house, the tent, the shelter in which we stay, live and function.

In other words, Jesus is insistent that we make Love our home and to STAY there!
He is telling us that LOVE is the framework, or tent, or home, essential for building the kingdom of God.

Whilst we have learnt to know what works or not in the spaces we call home, there's also been a further, even more profound lesson that I trust we have all learnt by staying at home.

I trust we have all come to understand that everyone needs a loving space to flourish.

The STAY AT HOME mandate has highlighted the severe dangers of an abusive home environment.

Staying at home has taught us just how vital it is to create and sustain a loving space to meet people's needs.

At home, we have appreciated that the joys and challenges of sharing a house with family require Love - God's self-pouring kind of Love.

In today's gospel, Jesus says to us that God's kingdom demands the same kind of Love - the Love that builds and sustains a home.
From what our gospel tells us, a homely kind of Love is a love that is not distant. Instead, it is a Love that mirrors God's Deep Love for the world. A Love, described as so much, made him send his only Son to live in it and die for it (John 3.16).

What does this mean for us today?

It means that as we come out of lockdown, the Church can not allow herself to think that we have heard the last of the mantra: STAY AT HOME. Our task is to keep up the struggle for a world shaped into a space built by Love.

To describe it, we don't have to go far. 1 Corinthians 13 illustrates it well: "A Love that bears all things believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. A that Love never ends."

That, my friends, are the essence of God's kingdom. It's a place, anywhere, any space built by all the instincts of a home called Love.

And if you would believe it, these are the instincts that have been behind all the efforts and disciplines that have kept us worshipping together online these past 13 months.
They have informed the space we call the Foodbank with all the devotion and commitment of the volunteers to confront the challenge of food poverty blighting our neighbours.

These instincts must now see us through another return to in-person services in Church and the resumption of many other aspects of daily living.

So, let us resolve to replace the mantra: STAY AT HOME, with ABIDE IN MY LOVE.
By it, we will transform our world into a kingdom of LOVE.



©️The Rev’d. Bunmi Fagbemi (7th May 2021)