Sermon for the Fifth Sunday of Easter, May 18, 2025

Acts 11:1-18+Psalm 148+Revelation 21:1-6+John 13:31-35

Several years ago, I accompanied an alternative spring break pilgrimage to the US-Mexico border with a group of University of Virginia undergraduates who participated in the campus ministry at my church and at the Presbyterian church a stone’s throw away. Thirteen students and five adults, myself included, flew into Tucson and drove the 60-some miles to just across the Mexican border at Nogales, one of the busiest immigration points along the southern border.

The purpose of this trip was not to do anything. It was to see and meet and listen and bear witness to what life was like for those seeking to cross into the US from Mexico and Central America. One group that we met were housed at the San Juan Bosco Migrant Shelter where we spent time with people who had been apprehended after crossing over into Arizona. They were brought back into Mexico, and the San Juan Bosco shelter is where they stayed until they could either appeal for entry into the US or find the means to return home.

Most of the people there had spent all that they had and sold what they owned to get across the border. For many, the steep fees they paid to coyotes – migrant smugglers – were stolen as these desperate people were left to die in the desert. More than once, we heard that a smuggler had promised that, once across the border, Tucson was an hour's walk away when in truth it is over 60 miles through the harsh desert. Many, many people have died trying to cross that desert on foot. Those who leave water stations in the desert for these folks have been prosecuted for their acts of mercy.

At the shelter in Nogales, we broke up into small groups with a few of us pilgrims, including at least one Spanish speaker among us, sitting with a few of the migrants. One of the most gut-wrenching stories we heard was from a young man from the southern Mexico state of Oaxaca. He left his home with three friends because their families could no longer survive working the land. They were desperately poor and hoped to find farm work in the US to send some money home to their families.

So, they raised what money they could, hopped on top of the great train that comes up central Mexico, La Bestia (The Beast), it’s called, and took the dangerous journey north. They managed to scale the 20-foot-high border fence and made their way into the desert. After a couple of days, one of the four ran out of water. They had no idea when they might reach a town or city, and they knew that he could not survive for long, even if they shared what little water they had been able to carry.

They were faced with a choice. Freedom for three of them in exchange for the likely death of one of them.

They found a ranch house out in that desert and turned themselves in and were immediately sent back across the border to the San Juan Bosco Migrant Shelter, where they now sat in from of me.

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)

This "new" commandment that Jesus gave to the disciples at the Last Supper is not exactly new. Loving one's neighbor as oneself pops up all the way back in Leviticus (19:18). What makes this one different is the "as I have loved you" part. Jesus has just washed their feet and sent Judas out to do what he was going to do. In washing their feet ahead of Judas's betrayal and before he tells Peter he's going to betray him, knowing full well what lies ahead, Jesus shows what "as I have loved you" looks like. He gets down on his hands and knees and washes their feet, an act of abject humility.

We tend to sentimentalize this love. We think that loving our neighbor or those who gather here each week is some kind of warm, fuzzy emotion. There was nothing sentimental in the love Jesus invites the disciples - and us - to engage in. It is much more a verb than a noun, calling us to active service of others, whether we like them or not. This kind of love doesn’t just ask something of us, it demands it. Like the migrant in that shelter in Nogales, it demanded a sacrifice of freedom and flourishing to save the life of his friend. In the case of Jesus, it demanded his life to show us just how wrong we could be about what God's mercy and forgiveness look like.

The German theologian and martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer famously wrote about cheap grace.

Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession, absolution without personal confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.[1]

If we define grace as God's unmerited favor, we can substitute the word love in everything Bonhoeffer wrote, because the word spoken here by Jesus is not ἔρως, or romantic love. It is not φιλία, or brotherly love (think Philadelphia). No, three times in one sentence here in our reading from John, he uses forms of ἀγάπη, or unconditional, self-giving love that is broader, and deeper, and more expansive than anything we could conjure on our own. It is God-given love. The kind of love that would drive someone to sacrifice his hopes for freedom. It is the kind of love that would cause a parent to risk it all to save a child. The kind of love that would make an instrument of torture the sign and symbol of salvation for all of humankind.

By the time the author of this gospel is writing down these last words from Jesus, he and his community know what came next. They know what kind of love Jesus was talking about, and maybe they recognized that they had not done a very good job of modeling that kind of love all those years later.

Maybe we don't always do a very good job, either. But the beautiful thing about God is that we are never abandoned to our own devices. We never reach our last chance. We are never beyond the bounds of forgiveness and second or third or hundredth chances. That New Jerusalem is going to come, even if it is in spite of us.

But just remember that God's love is not something we can tame or domesticate. It's going to pour itself out on those we gave up on a long time ago, those we would rather not invite to the table. And just when you think that's too hard for us, just remember, if God isn't going to withhold love and grace and mercy from all those people, God is not going to withhold love and grace and mercy from us either. And that, my friends, is very good news, indeed.

[1] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship (New York: The MacmillanCo., 1967), p. 47.