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The Rev. Frank Logue Abide by Doing Our story begins with a priest on the run. He was being hunted by the emperor’s men for the crime of being a Christian. The year is 304. In Rome, the Emperor Diocletian has imposed the most vicious and systematic persecution of the faith Christianity would endure under the Roman Empire. But our story takes place far from Rome in the land of the Angles and the Saxons, 22 miles north of what is now central London. There the priest on the run found a hiding place in the home of Alban. Alban was a pagan who braved what Bede’s History of the English Speaking Peoples would call the “savage edicts against all Christians” by sheltering the priest whose name has been lost in the mists of time. The priest stayed with Alban for days and the pagan had a chance to see the faith and devotion of the man who remained in prayer. Bede doesn’t tell us exactly how it happened. But we know Alban grew curious about this faith that threatened the great Roman Empire to such a degree that Diocletian sought to erase it from the earth. Bede writes, “Gradually instructed by his teaching of salvation, Alban renounced the darkness of idolatry, and sincerely accepted Christ.” More time passed and word reached the local governor that the priest was hiding in Alban’s home. When the arrest party came out, Alban put on the Amphibulus, the distinctive cloak of the priest and went out surrendering himself as the priest. This allowed the priest to continue of his way as Alban was led off to trial. To Alban it made more sense for the priest to get away to lead others to Christ. The ruse didn’t last long as the judge recognized that they had arrested the wrong man. Bede goes on to recount the judge saying, “Since you have chosen to conceal a sacrilegious rebel rather than surrender him to my soldiers to pay the well-deserved penalty for his blasphemy against our gods you shall undergo the tortures due him if you dare to abandon the practice of our religion.” The choice for Alban was clear—deny Christ and live or claim Jesus Christ as lord and suffer torture and death. Alban openly confessed his faith in Jesus naming himself a Christian and adding, “I worship and adore the living and true God, who created all things.” They tried torture first to get Alban to deny the faith that was in him, but it didn’t work. Bede writes, “he bore the most horrible torments patiently and even gladly, and when the judge saw that no torture could break him or make him renounce the worship of Christ, he ordered his immediate decapitation.” The executioner was so moved by Alban’s faith, that he converted and said he wished to die in Alban’s place. Instead, the two were executed together, the first Christian martyrs in Britain. This pattern has been repeated throughout Christian history. In 1597, in Nagasaki, Japan, two additional victims were added to the group of Christians to die for boldly encouraging the martyrs to stay strong in their faith. In 1896, an African Christian Bernard Mizeki was ordered by his Bishop to remain with those he was teaching in the Christian faith during a persecution of Christianity and was speared to death, but he died boldly staying true to the faith and more converts came to believe in Jesus. And on a hot July day in 1941, the Roman Catholic priest Maximilian Kolbe took the place of another prisoner sentenced to die at Auschwitz. I could go on. Jesus said, “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” Jesus said these words on the night before he died. Jesus had already named to his followers that his love for them was more concerned for the needs of his followers than his own needs. The word in Greek for this is agape. Agape is a self-giving love. Jesus now adds to that with another word for love, phileo. Phileo is brotherly love. This is where we get the name of the city Philadelphia, which means city of brotherly love. Jesus here uses the word phileo to name those who follow him as both his friends and his brothers and sisters. Jesus is teaching what a close, intimate connection he has to those who follow him. Yet, if we read the words a little too quickly, it sounds as if Jesus is putting some very tough conditions on his love. He says, “You are my friends if you do what I command you.” Read out of context, that verse gives the impression that if you break the least little commandment, the whole friendship deal is off. Do what I command and we are friends. Disobey and you are on your own. That’s not what Jesus is saying, but let me show you why I read this passage the way I do. Earlier in our reading, Jesus said, “As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love.” The goal here is to abide in love. Abide is an old-fashioned word that probably doesn’t get much if any use outside of the Bible and discussions of it. The word means to stay, to remain, to dwell, or even to hang out. Jesus teaches that if we abide, remain, stay, live in the love he has for us, then doing as he has commanded will naturally flow from that love. Keeping what he has commanded is how we go about abiding in the love of God. So it is not that if we don’t do everything he commands, he won’t love us anymore. It is that if we do as Jesus has taught by word and example, we will be abide in his love. We abide by doing. To remain in, dwell in, live in the love of God is to live the life Jesus taught us to live. What Jesus commanded is this “love one another.” Or put more fully, “Love one another as I have loved you.” Loving others as Jesus loves them is what made it natural to Alban that he should die so that the priest, who was better prepared to teach the faith could go on doing just that. The Christians in 16th century Japan felt that loving those who were sentenced to die for their faith meant encouraging those going to their deaths, even though it meant they too would have to die. In 19th century Africa, Bernard Mizeki could not abandon those placed in his care even if it meant his death. And for Father Kolbe, it made more sense for the single priest to die than the married man and father whose place he took. For each of these Christians and many thousands of others, laying down their lives for their friends was how they lived into the command to love one another as Christ has loved you. Before the month is out, we will celebrate Memorial Day and remember many others who gave their lives for their friends and for our freedom. Yet, it is unlikely than any of us gathered here this morning will ever face such a moment of truth in which we either renounce our faith or die a martyr’s death. And yet the call to friendship which Jesus offers is for us to die daily to our own desires in order to live more fully into the will of God. It is in the little decisions of daily life that each of us goes about keeping Jesus’ command to love one another. Let me make this real for you with an example of what it looks like to die to your own will to live into Jesus’ command to love others as he loves them. What I am doing is arguing from the greater to the lesser. If these persons can give their lives, how much more should we be willing to be inconvenienced for God’s will. People never need help when it is convenient to lend aid. Folks need help in the middle of the night, or when you are very busy, or when you have a rare free moment to yourself. And the call to be with someone may be to go visit a friend or co-worker in the hospital, when you don’t like hospitals. It may be to go in other places that are outside of your comfort zone. When someone grates on your nerves, do you cut the person out of your life, or do you see the person as a gift from God? As I have said before, irritating people are how God shows us things in our own lives we need to change. So dying to your own will means not cutting out all the irritating people in your life, but learning how to love them. Besides, I have discovered that if you find a way to avoid a difficult person, you will be issued two more difficult people in their place, so it is better to just learn to love the irritating people in your life. Besides you and I are not saints either and we are probably the irritating person in someone else’s life. Better to realize that the co-worker who makes you crazy is no less a gift from God than the person you like to be around. Christ’s call to us is to be a friend to those who others have trouble befriending. Often the very things that drive us crazy in others are things in ourselves. For example, it bothers me when someone plays can you top this, always adding another story to the conversation that shows how they have done something even more amazing than whatever was being discussed. This bothers me no end. But it bothers me precisely because I have this tendency myself, to add my own stories. I have to keep myself in check unless I do that very thing that bothers me in others. The point is that people who drive us crazy offer us a chance to test out our love of God by loving others as he loves them. This is just one example. But anytime, you stop yourself from your own natural reactions to a person or situation and try a different approach because you feel it is how a follower of Christ should act, you are dying to yourself to love others. This is how Jesus’ friends act. I know being a friend to the friendless or friendly to those you would just as soon avoid is not nearly as dramatic as donning a priest’s robe to die in his place. But loving those you don’t just naturally love is way that you can, in the mundane stuff of the day-to-day grind, make real Jesus’ command to love one another. And in living in to this love for others that doesn’t come so easy, you come to abide, remain, live, hang out in God’s love. Amen.
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