Sixth Sunday of Easter, May 9, 2021 – Acts 10:25-26, 34-35, 44-48; 1 John 4:7-10; John 15:9-17

All of you here this morning who are parents, especially on this lovely Mother’s Day, all of you who are Moms, here’s a question for you. Would you die for your children? It’s almost a rhetorical question. Almost everybody will automatically say, “Yes.”

Now here’s another question, a little more awkward. Do you have a favorite? I know you do. We’d all like to say “I love all my children, equally.” Well, yes you do, but someplace way back here, there’s a favorite.

In the forty-ninth chapter of Isaiah, Isaiah pictures God as saying to the Israelites, “I will never forget you, my people. I’ve carved you on the palm of my hand. Can a mother forget her children, a child within her womb? Yet even if she should forget, I will not forget.” It’s one of the few places in the Old Testament - and there are some - where God has pictured as mother rather than father.

There’s a great song from the 1970s by Sly and the Family Stone, it begins like this, “One child grows up to be someone that just loves to learn, and another child grows up to be somebody you just love to burn. Mom loves both of them. You see it’s in the blood.”

 So now I have another question for you. Would you kill your favorite child in order to save one of the other children? That’s provocative isn’t it? And yet, that’s what God did. In the first letter of John, that we just read, it says, “The love of God consists in this. Not that we have loved God, but that God has loved us, and given his only son for our salvation.” And that just echoes what it says in the gospel of John. That very famous quote we dealt with a week or two ago, in the scriptures, John 3:16, that’s plastered all over bumper stickers. “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son.” That’s what God did. Last week we argued that we are all children of God. And so God gave his favorite child, to save his other children.

That’s what we mean when we talk about sanctifying grace. In the letter of John it says, “God is love, and he who abides in love, abides in God, and God in him.” Those of you who are at least as old as I am, and maybe those who are up to ten years younger than me, may remember, in your childhood catechism, how sanctifying grace was pictured. There were three milk bottles. One was full of milk, and so it was bright white. And one was filled with milk, but there were black dots floating in it like mold. And then the third bottle was completely black, so either the mold had taken over, or else the bottle was empty, one or the other. We were told that’s what it’s like. You get sanctifying grace at Baptism, and at Confirmation, and every time you receive Communion, and when you go to confession. Then all the little dots appear when you start committing sins. And finally when you’ve committed a lot of sins, or you commit a mortal sin, all of a sudden the bottle is black. The doctrine may have been correct, but the image turned sanctifying grace into a commodity. It’s not a thing. It’s a relationship. God welcomes us as his beloved children. He sets up a relationship with us, because we cannot love God unless God gives us the power to love Him. He sets up an intimate relationship with Him. And that relationship continues, as long as we continue in relationship with Him. That’s why there are qualifiers. I said, “Look for the contradictions in the first reading.” We’re going to talk about another one of them later on. But the first contradiction is this. First Peter says, “I have come to realize that God does not make distinctions (God does not make distinctions) … anyone who fears God and is righteous.” Well there’s a distinction right there. There’s a qualifier, there’s a contradiction. Yes, God does not play favorites, but, on the other hand, he favors those who are righteous and fear God. We find the same thing in the gospel of John today. “If you keep my commandments, I will remain in you.” If you keep my commandments.” And the first letter of John, “Whoever does not love is not of God.”

So now we have to talk about something else. Now we have to talk about mortal sin - the completely black milk bottle. And, if sanctifying grace is not a thing, but a relationship, then so is mortal sin not a thing, but a relationship. A relationship that we choose to end when we place ourselves into the center of our lives, rather than God. Now, you know, we are always doing things that are selfish, but not all of them amount to the displacement of God. For example, the old conundrum, “Do these pants make me look fat?” There’s only one answer for that question. Most of the time the answer is a lie. But it’s not the kind of lie that breaks relationship with God. As a matter of fact, it might be an act of charity. But sometimes, seeing clearly that there’s a right choice, and a wrong choice, that has serious consequences for myself or somebody else, we make that wrong choice anyway. And we were taught that then sanctifying grace goes away. Well, if you look at it as a commodity, then, yes it does. If you look at it as a relationship, what’s happened is that the relationship has changed. Now God is not the intimate that he desires to be, but he is the father of the prodigal, who looks out the windows anxiously every day, hoping that there’ll be a turnabout. And when he sees the least inclination that someone longs to be back in intimate relationship, runs to greet us. That’s the way, really, we need to look at it.

But Jesus says, “Love one another as I have loved you,” and we’ve been told, in all the scriptures, that the way He loved us is to enter into a  sacrificial relationship on our behalf, because His Father wanted to do that. So what do we learn from that? We learn that love needs to be sacrificial. If we’re going to love one another as Jesus loves us, then our love needs to be sacrificial. That sounds pretty grim, except it’s extremely common. Love, to be true love, is sacrificial. Spouses have sacrificial love for one another. The longer their marriage endures, the more evidently sacrificial that love becomes. Parents love sacrificially, placing their children’s needs ahead of their own. Police personnel take an oath of office to serve and protect. Some of them don’t really mean it when they say it. But for those who do, they leave the house at the beginning of every shift, knowing that it might be their task, that day, to die in order to protect someone else, even if that someone else is not innocent.

Same thing with fire personnel. Think back to that terrible day on 9-11. When firefighters were running up the stairs, when everybody else was running down. Health workers we saw in the last year, loved sacrificially. They went into those hospitals knowing that they were going to treat dying patients, and knowing that they could very well catch the same dread disease themselves in the process of loving someone else whom they only knew as a name on a chart.

And yet, when we look at a whole host of people, according to the church, some, if not many, of those people are living at a remove from God. They did something or chose something that the church has always taught is a grave sin. That’s a real conundrum, isn’t it? But, if their lives are sacrificial, then there must be love in their lives, because John began his paragraph by saying that God is Love. So if there’s love in their sacrificial lives, then God must be a part of their lives.

So what are we left with? Three things. First is that lovely statement by Peter, as he stands before Cornelius, and Cornelius kneels down in front of him, and Peter says, “Get up. I am just a man myself.” That’s something the church needs to learn to say more often to its own people. “I am just a human being myself.”

Then there’s that other contradiction I told you about, in the first reading. Did you notice that first the Holy Spirit comes down upon the people In Cornelius’s house. The room shakes, just like it did on the first Pentecost. And then Peter says, “Well the Spirit has already come, I guess we ought to baptize these folks.” That’s not the way we were taught to think about Baptism, is it? We were taught that when we were baptized, that’s when we receive the Holy Spirit. It comes through the sacrament. But it looks like sometimes the action of the Holy Spirit precedes the work of the official church.

So we’re left with these three things. We need to learn to say, more often, I’m just a person like you.” We need to recognize that sometimes the work of God’s Holy Spirit, what we call sanctifying grace, comes before the church’s official action in regard to people. And finally that God has said “I will never, never forget you.”