St Mary's

Today Talk from Rev'd Laura

18th May 2025

Acts 11.1-18 & John 13:31-35

Our readings today are all about love. An awful lot of things get said about love don’t they?

Culturally love is often linked to big red hearts and flowers.

We’re told…Love makes the World Go Round! All You Need is Love! Love is Blind, Love is Friendship on Fire...I could go on. There are hundreds of songs and poems that try to capture precisely what love is and the important role it has to play in our lives.

It seems to be very difficult to express everything that love is - as if words can’t quiet capture it well enough. This might leave us to wonder what love actually looks like?

Our passages today, paint a beautiful picture of what the love of God looks like and I think it’s one we could all do with taking a closer look at.

Have we got any fans of the Frozen films here today? Those films tell us Love is an Open Door! I think the people who wrote the Frozen soundtrack almost have it right - love does look a bit like an open door. It seems that, with Jesus, love…is as an open table!

Let’s take a look at what’s going on in Acts.

Jesus’ followers have recently begun to tell people about the events of Easter. They’ve been trying to tell everyone how much God loves them.

Many of them had witnessed how Jesus gave up His life on the cross to save the world. I think a good way of remembering God’s love for us is to imagine the cross tipped on its side, so it looks like an X for a kiss. A mark of God’s unstoppable, self-giving love, placed on a broken world and sealing His promise of new life for us, forever.

After seeing what God had done, Jesus’ friends met with the risen Lord and told Him that they loved Him. They said that they wanted to follow Him, so Jesus left them with some instructions about how to walk in His ways. He told them to go and share the Good News, ‘in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria and to the ends of the earth.’

I think Jesus’ first followers were probably excited about sharing their story with people. At this point, they still have a very limited idea of God’s love. They probably thought that love seemed fairly easy and that their hearts were big enough to handle it!

They haven’t really thought about how big the table is going to need to be if it’s going to fit people from all the corners of the world!

Problems start to arise pretty quickly.

Jesus’ disciple, Peter, is seen eating a meal at the house of a Centurion called Cornelius (a non-Jew) – and the other followers are shocked!

Jesus’ first disciples were Jewish. They had been raised to obey the Jewish food laws and even though they had decided to follow Jesus, they still wanted to keep the traditions that had shaped their spiritual lives up until this point.

I imagine they were excited to talk to outsiders, to non-Jews, and tell them all about Jesus, but sharing a meal would have been very uncomfortable – definitely a step too far!

How could a good Jewish boy, like Peter, possibly eat with foreigners?!

When the church leaders ask Peter to explain himself, he has a brilliant answer.

Peter describes how it was hard for him to accept at first, but Jesus had shown him what God’s love really looks like in action.

He describes how the Holy Spirit told him to let go of old boundaries and to open up the table.

Barriers of separation based on culture, race, food or language are obsolete now because of Jesus – in fact, they’re getting in the way of new thing God is doing and need to be broken down.

Peter shows the first disciples, and us, what genuine love looks like. Real love, God’s love, draws us out of ourselves and encourages us to reach out to others in ways that move us beyond our comfort zones.

I love the picture of the open table that Peter describes. I imagine it reminded the disciples of the way Jesus shared meals with them. How he welcomed them - even washed their feet! And commanded them to ‘love one another’ as He had loved them.

Jesus’ command to ‘love one another’ still applies to us today.

Maybe we’re a bit over-confident sometimes, like those first disciples? Maybe we’re certain our hearts are big enough? I wonder if this confidence is there because we only associate with like-minded people? And avoid those who are different from us? This is easy love and it is not big enough for God.

Jesus challenges all of us to make a lot more room in our hearts and to lay more and more places at the table! Budging up and making room means turning from ourselves and towards others. It means giving up things that we want, in order to clear space.

It means asking God to examine our hearts and show us the out-dated barriers that we hold onto. What assumptions do we keep making about other people? What ugly prejudice lives deep inside us? Who is the one person that we could NEVER imagine inviting to dinner?

If you invite that person, I’m not going to promise you a pleasant evening. This kind of Godly loving is hard - it can be frustrating, it can be messy – but it is exactly the kind of love that Jesus showed when He gave up His life to save those who hated Him.

If anyone wants to check-out this kind of messy love in action, can I recommend watching The Decider episode of the kids show, Bluey – it’s only about 7mins long. I’ve taken inspiration from my daughter today, because I’ve realised children are often much better at making room for others than adults. In the story, poor Chucky, is torn between supporting his dad's team and his mum's team in a sports game. There are lots of different expectations and feelings and opinions flying around and trying to reach an understanding is hard work! But the family do the work – they each make sacrifices to find common ground and, in the end, they support one team, together.

If our love is truly to reflect the love of God, it will not be restricted. It will lead us to embrace people who are wildly different from us – maybe even hostile towards us.

Jesus invites each of us to lead lives defined by radical love. The idea of an open table is offensive in a world that loves borders and barriers. Our media seems to take great pleasure in labelling and dividing people.  And often, we are taught to love with a whole host of conditions aren’t we? We tend to look at the world through the lens of capitalism – we’re only supposed to give, so that we can receive something back.

Love with limits or strings or barriers is not how Jesus loves us. On the cross He gave Himself freely and we are called to do the same. The way that the Holy Spirit united people of different ages, races and backgrounds was shocking to the first disciples – but the work of God’s Spirit continues today and Jesus calls to us to join in.

I mentioned at the start that love is hard to define. But I think God’s love can be seen most clearly in a picture of people who have nothing in common, sharing a meal together – just as Jesus welcomes us to come to His table at communion. God’s love can be seen when we, like Peter, open up to the Spirit’s challenge to let go of our fears and ask God to make more space in hearts. If we do that, if we really budge up…I have no doubt that we’ll start to glimpse the height, depth and breadth of God’s love for us and for every single thing He has made.

Amen.