Cause and Effect


Sunday, May 21st, 2006
Easter 6B
Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton
John 15:9-17

9 As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love. 10 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. 11 I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete. 12 “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. 13 No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. 14 You are my friends if you do what I command you. 15 I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father. 16 You did not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask him in my name. 17 I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another.

Another image seared into our collective memories: January 13th, 1982, an icy river, a snowstorm covering the nation’s capital, and an airplane struggling to take off with an impossible amount of ice on its wings slams into the 14th street bridge crossing the Potomac River into Washington DC, killing all but six of the people on board, and four people on the ground, trying to make their way home from work. Of the six survivors of the crash, only five made it out of the water alive. Of the sixth passenger, the Washington Post reported the next day,

"He was about 50 years old, one of half a dozen survivors clinging to twisted wreckage bobbing in the icy Potomac when the first helicopter arrived. To the copter's two-man Park Police crew he seemed the most alert. Life vests were dropped, then a flotation ball. The man passed them to the others. On two occasions, the crew recalled last night, he handed away a life line from the hovering machine that could have dragged him to safety. The helicopter crew - who rescued five people, the only persons who survived from the jetliner - lifted a woman to the riverbank, then dragged three more persons across the ice to safety. Then the life line saved a woman who was trying to swim away from the sinking wreckage, and the helicopter pilot, Donald W. Usher, returned to the scene, but the man was gone," ("A Hero - Passenger Aids Others, Then Dies." Washington Post. January 14, 1982.)

The "sixth passenger", who had survived the crash and had repeatedly given up the rescue lines to other survivors before drowning, was later identified as 46-year-old bank examiner Arland D. Williams Jr. The repaired span of the 14th Street Bridge complex over the Potomac River at the crash site, which had been officially named the "Rochambeau Bridge", was renamed the "Arland D. Williams Jr. Memorial Bridge" in his honor. The Citadel in South Carolina, from which he graduated in 1957, has several memorials to him. In 2003, the new Arland D. Williams Jr. Elementary School was dedicated in his hometown of Mattoon in Coles County, Illinois.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_90#_note-0)

Isn’t it odd that an event that occurred twenty-four years ago carries so much more impact than one that carried a global, to not say universal impact just under two thousand years ago? It doesn’t seem in the least surprising, since we have pictures and video footage of what happened on that freezing cold day just a couple of hours north of here. You might think that if we had video or still shots from the crucifixion of Jesus it might carry the same emotional weight, but I suspect even if we did, it wouldn’t.

We would probably be distracted by his appearance. We all have an image in our minds of what Jesus looked like, and if we had an actual PICTURE of him, I suspect that the bulk of our time for a good long time would be taken up with getting OVER the fact that “he doesn’t look anything like what I pictured him!”

But the point is this: when we see the reality of what it means for someone to give their life for a friend, or in the case of Arland D. Williams Jr., giving your life up for a small group of basically, strangers – there is a lasting impact on us simply as humans – a mark on our psyche that creates a lasting impression on us for what it means to be human, the frailty of life, and the heights to which heroism can take us.

If you’ve not had a chance to yet, I strongly urge you to visit The Moving Wall – the replica of the Vietnam War Memorial that is currently set up on the grounds of Rappahannock Community College. Whatever differences there might be in our nation about that war, there is an awareness on the part of visitors to both the original monument in Washington DC or to the replica of the fact that to one degree or another, any number of the soldiers whose names appear on the wall died in the act of defending or protecting their fellow soldiers, committing acts of bravery that were at least equal to those of Arland Williams.

Now, imagine yourself telling either one of those stories – either of someone you knew who died in Vietnam under those circumstances or of your friend and co-worker Arland Williams, just a few years after it had happened, only the story you are telling is of Jesus of Nazareth, whom you’d come to know intimately after following him around Galilee, Nazareth, and Judea for three years prior to his execution, and you realize with full clarity that what he did he did by choice. He did it not only for you, but for anyone and everyone you happen to tell the story to.

He did it for the Roman guard who is holding you prisoner, he did it for the local synagogue’s priest who agitated the crowd to the point of creating the disturbance that landed you in jail for supposedly inciting it, he did it for your cellmate, who has been telling you his history of insurgency against the Roman occupying army over the last fifteen years. He did it not just to prove a point, but to make a way where there was none before.

You remember with unusual clarity those last few days before he was taken prisoner in Jerusalem, when it seemed that all he did (aside from clearing the temple) was talk and talk and talk … and you couldn’t turn away, and you couldn’t quite understand what it was he was saying at the time – it wasn’t until just a few days later that things started to click for you … and the clicking became a thundering hammer in your head as the pieces fell into place and you realized just who it was you’d been hanging out with, and what he meant when he said “blessed are you when men persecute you for my sake …”

And you’ve been thinking about that whole ‘abide’ idea … and you want to get across what JESUS meant when he told you to abide in him … he wasn’t telling you to get lost in his being, he was telling you that if you abide in him, he will abide in YOU – you wouldn’t stop being YOU – and HE wouldn’t stop being HIM. You’d be a part of each other – because part of what he treasured about being with you was that – BEING with YOU -- it still catches you by surprise – when you’re just sitting and thinking about those days – yeah, there was a lot of walking around, and a lot of the things he said were confusing at the time, but even in the middle of his sometimes oh-too-frequent exasperated sighs and shakes of his head, he was still smiling at you – he was still looking at you with all the love in the world in his eyes – laughing at your jokes, singing along with you as you sang the old songs around the campfire, praying beside you in the synagogues you visited before they started kicking you out … it still surprises you that he genuinely ENJOYED spending time with you, even if it was just sitting on a rock chewing on sunflower seeds and talking about life, God, and humanity.

And you remember the last and the lasting things. His asking you to take care of his mother, and her to take care of you like the son you had become to her… and that time when he said “this is my command, that you love one another as I have loved you.” And you begin to realize that that was where it all started. That’s where it all gets its beginning. This whole business of the good news you’ve been telling for the last umpteen years.

He wasn’t telling you to abide in him to gain some kind of secret communion with him, he was telling you to abide in him so that you could see what it is like to love your neighbor – your fellow human being – no matter what rank they hold, no matter where they are from, no matter what language they speak, how much money they make or don’t make, no matter if they are clean or dirty in whatever way you want to think of those terms – whether physical or emotional or spiritual – he made that perfectly clear sitting by the well and talking to that Samaritan woman that one time, or when he told that story about the Pharisee and the tax collector praying … it was never about how you appeared in man’s eye, but in God’s eyes, because you see, he wasn’t looking at you with just a man’s eyes, but with God’s holy ones.

So you lock onto some memories, but that is the most treasured of all. The way he looked at you. And in being beheld, you KNEW, just KNEW, that you were also being loved and accepted, and challenged, and called all at the same time.

You never really get over something like that. And what is amazing to you is that you are able to share the experience with others, because in being known, in being loved, you find that now, with God’s Holy Spirit guiding you, you are able to know, to love, to share. You are the one being the catalyst of God’s Kingdom that Jesus spoke about so much.

But it’s hard sometimes. When you are spit on, when you are yelled at, or worse, when you are simply not noticed, not heard, ignored. That is when it is hardest because while you do all you can, beyond a certain point it’s not up to you because it’s not ABOUT you.

It’s about Jesus.

Let’s pray.