The Way You Know

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

04.24.2016; Rev. Dr. David Williams

Scripture Lesson: John 13: 31-35

What makes a person Christian?  What is the thing that renders an individual or a community legitimately part of this peculiar movement that we claim to be participating in?

I found myself wrassling with that question this last week, as I dug my way into the first round copyedits on my novel.   It’s been nearly three years since I researched and wrote the manuscript that is, as the familiar opening to my elevator speech goes, the best work of literary postapocalyptic Amish fiction you’ll ever read.

And so that research and that reading into the dynamics of Amish communities is three years old now, and I remember it as well as I remember anything that I set aside and leave for a while.  Like my keys.  Or my phone.

It’s a little weird, because it’s been so long that it feels like I’m reading someone else’s novel.  Did I really write these words?  Huh.

Getting back into it surfaces some peculiar things about the Amish, bits of strangeness that are a little hard for we Presbyterians to process.  It’s not the bonnets and the buggies.  It’s not the clothing or the tendency not to purchase Apple products.  

It goes deeper, to the essence of what it means to be a follower of Jesus.  Like, say, the whole “church” thing.   You’re a Christian, or so we tend to think, because you go to church.  But the Amish don’t have churches, not in the way we tend to think of church.  And sure, they don’t have projectors and presentation software, none of the trappings of industrial scale American Christianity.   But they also have no stained glass, no steeples, no big tall pulpits, none of it, because they have no church buildings at all.

They have barns or large rooms, which are used as barns most of the time, and churches whenever you drag a bunch of chairs or wooden benches into them.

So one can be an Amish person, and never ever technically set foot within the doors of a church.  I probably shouldn’t bring that up on a beautiful spring morning, but it is the truth.  So they’re Christian, but with no churches.  The Amish also don’t go to church every week.  Their faith so interpenetrates their community and family lives that it’s not necessary.

Perhaps even more intimidating, from my perspective: there are no Amish pastors.  There’s not a single trained and paid professional guiding them through their church lives with a batch of seminary degrees in their pocket.  They do have a preacher, though.  That preacher gets picked by lot, in many communities, meaning it’d be like if at our annual meeting we just pulled a name out of a hat, and whoever came up would have to preach that year.

I’m not sure how well that would be received if we tried it here, other than to make most folks stay as far away from annual meeting as possible.

And there are rules, part of the Amish Ordnung, rules that define almost every aspect of life.  The hats you wear.  The clothes you wear.  What you may use.  How you may work.  How you must worship.  So many rules, with every action considered and reconsidered and discussed.  The Amish being human, there are disagreements, and when they disagree, they divide.  That means there are almost as many variations of Amish as there are of we Presbyterians.

They are, without question, radically different, so far removed culturally and materially from the life of every Christian community I’ve ever stood in encounter with that they seem more like a different faith altogether.

What is it that defines Christian community?  In the face of all that difference, what is it that constitutes a genuine Christian gathering?

A clue, a frustratingly simple yet opaque hint of a clue, can be found in the passage from John’s Gospel this morning.  

John’s Gospel, the record of the Beloved Disciple, is a paradox.  On the one hand, it’s remarkably, strikingly simple.  It’s also, in its simplicity, more than a tiny bit hard to figure out.  The way that John tells us about Jesus is different from the way that the other three Gospels pitch out that message.  If it’s Mark, Matthew, or Luke...particularly Matthew and Luke...the stories come one after another.  

The three synoptic gospels, the three that are “seeing-together,” they offer up the storytelling of Jesus of Nazareth, as he forces us to use our imaginations about the nature of the Reign of God, meaning what the world looks like when we all are living according to the love of God.  Those stories make us use our brains as we try to grasp the message that Jesus came into the world to deliver.

But John’s story of Jesus doesn’t roll like that.  Instead, this much more intimate Gospel tends to record challenging conversations, the kinds of exchanges you have with someone that define and shape your relationship with them.  It’s that late night talk with someone you’ve just met, that deep sharing moment with someone who you’ve known for years.  It’s the  prayers and peculiarly subtle sayings that play with language in odd mystic ways.  Unlike Mark and Matthew and Luke, the focus of those conversations is not God’s Kingdom here on earth, but Jesus talking about how he personally is living that out.  This is who I am, Jesus says.  

And more significantly, this is how you can be, if you are part of that reality that I’m bringing into being.

That’s the potent reality manifested in this little passage, the peculiarly taut and challenging metric that Jesus offers up to us when he sets it in front of us.  It’s at the time of the Passover festival, and in the face of the demands of that season Jesus places before the disciples the One Commandment, the single rule that defines the entirety of the Christian faith.

Agapate ellelous, the writer of John conveys.  Love one another.  This is the single law of the new covenant, the one primary instruction, the single governing value for all Christian life.  John’s Gospel may be an outlier, different in tone and form from the other three, but all of them sing this truth out together.

And that, to be honest, is a frustrating truth.

It is frustrating because it defies our ability to grasp it, to measure it, to make the critical comparisons of the relative merits of one community versus another.  We want metrics and measures, we want to be able to cleanly describe and define and deliniate.

But Jesus says, this is how everyone will know: that you love one another.

That’s a quality, not a quantity.  That most essential characteristic of Christian life together cannot be broken down neatly.  It exists, but it cannot be grasped.  It must be lived.  It must be the thing that defines whatever community it stands in encounter with.

That was perhaps the most frustrating thing about my doctoral work, which looked at healthy small communities.  People want to know, when they ask me, how can you tell.  And though I wrote several hundred pages, I could probably have just written agapate ellelous over and over again.  That might have made me seem a little crazy, like a less-menacing Jack Torrance in the Shining, but it wouldn’t have been technically wrong.

Which is why, though I’m the farthest thing from being Amish, I can see the faith so strongly in them.  I’m too anarcholibertarian to want a community with so many rules and strictures.  I’m too progressive.  I find science fascinating and delightful.  I like motorcycles, which are generally a no-go in Lancaster County.  

But for all of that difference, I can recognize in so many of their communities the fundamental essence, that ineffable reality: they love one another.  It’s true in congregations of every size, and of every flavor, just as it’s true among each of us in all of our glorious variety.

That’s how you know.

Let that be so, for you and for me, AMEN.