Year A
 Acts 17:22-31
 Psalm 66:7-18
 1 Peter 3:13-22
 John 14:15-21

May the words of my mouth O God…  speak your truth…

From today’s Psalm…  Blessed be God…  who has not rejected my prayer…  and whose love has not been withheld from me…

We live lives of holding on and letting go…  sometimes the letting go is easy and the holding on is difficult…  sometimes the letting go is difficult and the holding on is easy… 

We hold on to life-giving traditions…  but let go of empty things which do not feed us… . we let go of brief fads…  but hold on to timeless-values…  like loyalty…  hope…  faith…  forgiveness…  we hold on to ideas or concepts that ground and anchor us…  and sometimes let go of how we interpret them…  so that new life…  or more abundant life can be made manifest for us…  through them… 

We want our toddlers to hold on…  just until we can get them to the bathroom…  and then let go…  sometimes we’re able to let go of relationships which have ceased to be a blessing…  even when we’re afraid that we’ll never find anyone else…  sometimes we hold on to dead-end jobs when it would be better to let go… 

We hold on to our children…  but then have to cross the sometimes painful threshold of letting go of them –– and hoping they’ll let go of us –– so that they can grow into the healthy adults we wish them to be…  we let go of others… so they can move on in their lives…  sometimes we have to let go of what we want…  so we can hold on to what we need…  sometimes we need to let go of dying parents so that perpetual light can shine on them…

And as we remember Rogation Days…  which begin tomorrow…  we recall our dominion over the land given in our care…  and pray for the wisdom and guidance to let go of the ways in which we damage it and the environment…  and hold on to the ways that we can protect it…  so it can thrive and prosper…

At times we can see clearly what we need to let go of…  but if we can’t see what will replace it… if we can’t trust enough that God will replace it… when we look into that dark abyss of uncertainty and see nothing…  as we sometimes do… we can hold on with white knuckles to what we have…  or what we know…  or what we believe…  and actually keep God’s blessing from coming to us… ] and sometimes we’re able to take a leap of faith…  and let go…  and create that void as a way of showing God that we do trust…  and God will fill that void with promise and opportunity and blessing…  I’ve been across the wilderness on a journey with God…  and know what it is to let go of just about everything so that God could lead me to where I needed to be…  some of you have too…

I talked before about how Jesus’ resurrection was not simply a singular event…  but an eternal state of being which reverberates throughout creation and into which we’re invited –– that the overcoming of death and the embrace of new life in Christ is available to us in every moment — that resurrection exists in every moment…  and in the Gospel two weeks ago, we were reminded about Jesus’ promise when he said…  I am the gate…  whoever enters by me will be saved…  I came that they may have life…  and have it abundantly… 

As the gate through which we enter this abundant life…  Jesus asks for discipleship…  but also authenticity…  and part of having abundant life is learning to let go…  it’s moving from the boundaries of judgment to the boundlessness of love…  from the boundaries of holding on to hurt to the boundlessness of forgiveness…  from the boundaries of selfishness to the boundlessness of selflessness…  from the boundaries of any closet we may be in to the boundlessness of authenticity…

In Mark 12:28…  one of the scribes asked Jesus…  Which commandment is the first of all…  and Jesus answered…

Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one… you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart…  and with all your soul…  and with all your strength…

The second…  he said…  is this…  You shall love your neighbor as yourself…  there are no other commandments greater than these…  then the scribe said to Jesus…  You are right Teacher…  these are much more important than burnt offerings and sacrifices…  to which Jesus acknowledged…  You are not far from the kingdom of God… 

In today’s Gospel…  Jesus said…  If you love me… you will keep my commandments…  and loving our neighbors as ourselves can be hard work…  it means putting people before things…

When we love things above God, we make them into idols…  in this morning’s reading from Acts…  Paul wrote…  As I went through the city and looked carefully at the objects of your worship, I found among them an altar with the inscription “to an unknown god.”  But Paul claims that this unknown God can be known…  and is the One who made the world and everything in it…  and he encourages them to let go of shrines made by human hands and to hold on to Jesus who said…  If you have seen me…  then you have also seen the Father… 

But this letting go can be foreign and feel unfamiliar…  too many of us still think that we can control each other…  and that we’re not simply stewards of creation…  but are here to dominate it…  we like to think that the increasing number of severe storms…  tornadoes…  and hurricanes…  of arctic glaciers calving and alpine glaciers melting at an increasingly rapid rates…  of devastating fires…  have nothing to do with global warming…  but instead of praying to God that a tornado avoids your home…  and hits another…  it’d be better to do all we can reduce the factors which contribute to them in the first place… 

In today’s Gospel…  Jesus explains his departure…  he points his disciples toward the life that they’ll lead after his hour…  ]  now we usually interpret something after it happens…  but here…  Jesus interprets this event beforehand…  he says…  If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever…

Jesus knew it wouldn’t be easy for us to love our neighbors as ourselves or to keep his commandments…  but the Advocate he sent –– the same one we invoke at baptism and in our birthday prayer –– is the Holy Spirit who lifts us up when we fall…  invites us into one mid-course correction after another…  and places wake-up calls here and there to help keep us on the path…

Author Annie Dillard wrote about one of these wake-up calls in an in-your-face kind of way…  Why do people in churches seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute? Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one really believe a word of it? We should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us so far out, we can never return…

The medieval mystic Julian of Norwich expressed this same idea in a more comforting way…  If there be anywhere on earth where a lover of God is always kept safe from falling…  I know nothing of it…  for it was not shown me…  but this was shown…  that in falling and rising again we are always kept in the same precious love…

As we walk along…  we may stumble and fall… but let’s remember that in our baptisms we were marked as Christ’s own forever…  and Jesus said…  I will not leave you orphaned…

And so God may just draw us out far enough that we can’t return to who we were before we knew…  to what we believed before our eyes were opened…  to the boundaries that have kept us in our comfort zones but which also kept us imprisoned…  but God has redeemed us…  and God will help us hold on to what blesses and let go of what does not…  until God brings us lovingly and gently…  into greater love…  into greater awareness…  into greater forgiveness…  and into wholeness…  and for this we say…  Thanks be to God…