ACTS 13:44-52

PSALM 145:1-9

REVELATION 19:1,4-9

JOHN 13:31-35

Sermon – May 9, 2004

It was the night before Jesus would die, the night before he would be betrayed, abandoned, derived, tortured and brutally put to death. Yet in this morning’s Gospel passage, from his words to his disciples at the Last Supper, Jesus focuses not on suffering, not on self-defense, not on himself or how they are to take care of themselves, but how they, his followers, are to behave towards others.

His “new commandment” was and is as simple as it was and is hard. He said, “Love one another as I have loved you.”

This, clearly, is not sentimental, “Hallmark cards love.” This is the powerful and over-the-top love of the mother bear defending her cubs – except that the commandment applies not just to mothers and not just to defending one’s own against danger, but loving others with the same self-sacrificing zeal that, well, Jesus did.

It means not asking “What’s in it for me” but “What can I do to serve others above and beyond the call of duty.”

“Living a life of love just as Christ loved us,” means overcoming hurdles, hurdles which could be barriers to living out Christ’s commandment. This morning I want to mention five people who are examples of doing this, examples who can lift our spirits and inspire us to serve Christ with our own individual gifts and love empowering us in our day. As is fitting for Mother’s Day, four out of the five are women. I include one man because – well, you’ll see.

We’ll start with him. The hurdles this man had to overcome in order to have self-giving love take over his life are hurdles which are common to educated, prosperous people with no obvious disabilities and who are members of majority groups which are in power in their own societies. In order to have self-giving love take over his life he had to overcome the hurdles of indifference, of potential lack of empathy, of laziness, and of self-absorption. These are hurdles many people in our country, as well as his, face.

The turning point in this man’s life came in a conversation around a campfire in Nepal in 1960, between Western mountaineers like this man, and their Sherpa guides. (“Sherpa”, by the way, refers to an ethnic group, not to a job.)

“’Tell us, Urkien’, the man said, ‘If there were one thing we could do for your village, what should it be?’”

“’We would like our children to go to school, sahib!’ he said. “Of all the things you have, learning is the one we most desire for our children.’”

Urkien’s listener could have just smiled and nodded and thought to himself, “Well, wouldn’t that be nice,” and done nothing. Or he could have made a promise and then blown it off when he got home – what could Urkien have done about it? The listener, who had overcome so many physical hurdles, could have left the spiritual hurdles of indifference, lack of empathy, laziness and self-absorption unsurmounted.

Instead Urkien’s listener later wrote, “His words hit home.” And what the listener did in response is what he wants to be remembered for – rather than the achievement for which we know his name.

Since that conversation with Urkien in 1960, Sir Edmund Hillary has, in his words, “At the request of Sherpa residents, helped establish 27 schools, two hospitals, and a dozen medical clinics – plus quite a few bridges over wild rivers. We constructed several airfields and rebuilt Buddhist monasteries and cultural centers. We planted a million seedlings in Sagarmatha National Park ...”

You can read the whole story in the May 2003 issue of National Geographic, from which these quotations are taken. Hillary goes on to say that “The most worthwhile things I have done” have not been becoming one of the first two people to climb Mt. Everest, or reaching both the North and South Poles as well, but these works on behalf of others.

What do you want your legacy to be? What hurdles are you willing to leap across, empowered by Christ’s love?

Let’s journey next to the late 19^th century, and to an infamous poorhouse in Tewksbury, Massachusetts where the half-blind 10-year-old daughter of poor Irish immigrants was sent to live. That she survived her Dickensian childhood at all was a testament to her strength and spirit; that she had the determination to get an education when most women didn’t, shows her determination and inner resources; that she wanted to be trained to teach those who suffered more than she, showed the self-giving love (with a back bone of steel) which took over her life.

After having overcome so many hurdles, she could have been forgiven if she had opted for an easier job than the one she took. After all, teaching children with one major disability is challenging enough. Instead, she took a job in Tuscumbia, Alabama, hundreds of miles away from her mentors and support system as the sole teacher to a child who was both deaf and blind, and had been so from such a young age that she did not really know language existed, and had no knowledge of words with which to even think thoughts, never mind express them.

Yet inside this child was an energy like a force of nature which, before she discovered education, had no outlet but mischief and anger. Almost the first thing the child did with her new teacher was lock her teacher in the teacher’s room and hide the key, making it necessary for the child’s father to rescue the teacher with a ladder to the window.

The teacher did not give up. Trained in finger-spelling into the hands of pupils, she tried again and again to spell words into the hand of the child, a child who did not know what words were. The child was just short of her seventh birthday when these efforts began, almost the same age as Ashley and Megan. Let me describe the pivotal moment using the words the child herself wrote years later in her autobiography, published before this deaf and blind lady graduated cum laude from Radcliffe College.

“We walked down the path to the well-house, attracted by the fragrance of the honeysuckle with which it was covered. Some one was drawing water and my teacher placed my hand under the spout. As the cool stream gushed over one hand she spelled into the other the word water, first slowly, then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten – a thrill of returning thought, and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that “w-a-t-e-r” meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free! There were barriers still, it is true, but barriers could in time be swept away.”

The soon-to-be legendary teacher was Anne Mansfield Sullivan, and her even more legendary pupil was Helen Keller. Both had to leap over some hurdles. But there are no hurdles that this kind of love cannot help a person leap – including merely being satisfied with success. In later years, Helen Keller traveled all over the world as an advocate for those with disabilities and an example to people of what someone could do. You can read her books, including “The Story of My Life”, from which this is taken, or you can watch the movie about her and Anne Sullivan, appropriately titled The Miracle Worker.

The last two heroines are also spiritual “Hall of Famers” from the nineteenth century, people who had to leap across different hurdles than those crossed by Anne Sullivan and Helen Keller. They had no trouble hearing, seeing and speaking: it was getting heard, getting people to listen, and getting people to see that were their hurdles. For they lived at a time when it was controversial for any woman to speak in public about anything, never mind political issues, never mind life-or-death political issues.

And for a black woman to speak in public in America in their time was almost unheard of, and for black former slave women to become nationally famous figures who helped to change history – well, these two basically created that category.

One was born a slave in 1797 in upstate New York – yes, the North had slavery then, too. She was emancipated in 1827, but did not find her calling until June 1, 1843, when she had a profound religious experience and received a calling from God to be an itinerant lecturer for the abolition of slavery. With her conversion she received a new name: Sojourner Truth.

For more than 40 years she walked across America teaching, preaching and witnessing. As Lenore Bennett, Jr. writes of her in Before the Mayflower: A History of Black America, “Though illiterate, she had power and an incisive mind that reduced things to their essentials. On one occasion, a pro slavery heckler told her, ‘Old woman, do you think your talk about slavery does any good? Do you suppose that people care what you say? ... Why I don’t care anymore for your talk than I do for the bite of a flea.’ Sojourner Truth smiled and replied, ‘perhaps not, but the good Lord willing, I’ll keep you scratching.’”

The other heroine was a woman who also was not content merely to be free herself, though being alive, free, black and female itself was an achievement. This woman escaped from slavery in the South – and then returned to slave states “nineteen times and brought out more than three hundred slaves. [Emphasis added.] Rewards for her capture mounted to $40,000” – a fortune in that age. She put her life on the line every trip South.

She was Harriet Tubman. She leapt a few hurdles too – and then helped others leap them. There is nothing that this powerful love that Jesus talks about cannot help people do.

“How did freedom feel?” she was asked. “I looked at my hands to see if I was the same person now I was free. There was such a glory over everything, the sun comes like gold through the trees.”

We, too, have hands, hands like those that helped liberate slaves, liberate minds, and liberate spirits from New York to Nepal to Alabama. What is our Lord calling us to use our hands for, empowered by his love? What hurdles must each of us overcome to do so? How can each of us obey Jesus’ commandment to “love one another as I have loved you”?

(The Rev.) Francis A. Hubbard

St. Barnabas Episcopal Church