A Dream Projected

John 13:31-35

Excerpts from Jesus and the Disinherited by Howard Thurman

May 18, 2025

Nicole M. Lamarche

Welcome again, however you are connecting, in whatever shape you are

in, with whatever you are holding or bringing or feeling! We give ourselves

the gift of being in present, tuning into deeper things. So come as you are,

with whatever you are bringing today.

I invite you now to take some deeper breaths as you are moved, letting

ourselves arrive, tuning into whatever word God has for us today…

As you are moved, I invite you to join me in a spirit of prayer from Psalm

19.

The winds came whooshing down off the Flatirons this week with such

ferociousness that the metal lawn furniture in our back yard was tossed all

over the place, the cover over the barbeque was thrown over to the other

side of the yard and the tablecloth overturned and moved, planters spilled

out and over, branches broken, leaves scattered. And because it was also

garbage and recycling day our street looked to me hilariously similarly to

the Hill after a long weekend.

On our front yard, in addition to as I shared earlier (in the story for all ages)

there was Math homework from Leah, a postcard meant for our neighbor

Arlene and a million other random things from the neighborhood. So I have

been pondering the power of wind, pondering its force and invisibility,

presence and ability to move things around on this material plain.

Scientists would you like to chime in? Winds tend to blow from high-

pressure areas to low-pressure areas and the space between them, the

boundary between these two areas is called a front and the complex

relationships between fronts cause different types of wind and weather

patterns. It is differences in pressure in the atmosphere that generate wind.

One science writer called wind, “the great equalizer of the atmosphere,

transporting heat, moisture, pollutants, and dust great distances around the

globe.”

And while wind can do a lot and change a lot and shape a lot, while wind

can bend and break and remake, it can move vessels and uproot root even

deep and networked systems below ground, we can’t hold it. I remember

trying as a kid. And we cannot see it. We can’t control it.

But we can feel it.

And we know when it is there.

And we know when it has gone.

And so I guess I have been wondering if there are ways in which hate and

love are like this too.

In the sense that we can’t really grasp either of them, but we can feel the

force of them. And we know when they are here.

And we know when they are not.

A couple of years ago in the Atlantic magazine there was article exploring

how America got mean and as he often does David Brooks, wrote in length.

He said we were meaner two years ago but now it is even truer. His latest

phrase in a recent essay, “There is a callous tolerance of cruelty.”

It turns out that many agree that Americans and American culture overall

has outwardly and openly become more mean-spirited group,

unapologetically rude and in the worst cases our policy and our

common life is also cruel and violent too. It was really clear to me

this summer when traveling in Europe when people would ask

about things like mass gun violence in schools, on the list goes of

the cruelty and violence and meanness that we have become

accustomed to. It is just normal for us.

And even now for people in esteemed positions it seems the way

we talk to each other, certain speech and behaviors have been

elevated as okay, what to strive for, what it takes to win, what is

condonable.

And I suspect that some of what we are seeing is a great

unveiling, a full display of what was already there, but what has

now intersected with the full flowering of the desire for money and

power, which requires separation to work. Because you need

people to fear, people to dislike, people to blame for the debt and

the grifts and the schemes and the games. Notice when we are

talking about debt and Medicaid we don’t talk about the $300

million a day we spent on Iraq.

But we know that it is only love that produces the fruit that we

want in the world. It is only love that is generative, restorative and

unlike hate, only love will last.

As we heard from Howard Thurman, hatred “guarantees a final

isolation from one’s fellows…” and it “bears deadly and bitter fruit.”

Hate can’t last because separation can’t last forever. Nature

shows us again and again of our interconnectedness, our in this

togetherness. From the grasses to the creek to the peaks and

winds, everything, all of our systems, our patterns, our network of

life is all connected. So I know only love that will prevail, I know

that, expansive love can never be caught or really even seen fully

or held down, which means it can never be held back or hidden

away. And while love cannot be grasped, it’s force can be felt! And we

know when it is here! We know when a room like this is infused with it,

when a person has been moved by it, when things have been tossed about

by it!

And that is the core purpose of what we are about. It’s Love. I am

sorry on behalf of the Church Universal that many expressions of

Christianity have gotten so far from that, but it feels important to

say again that was Jesus’ whole point, was love, a love so

expansive and complicated we spend our lives striving for it.

As we heard in the Gospel of John chapter 13, Jesus goes out of

his way to let his followers that love is the most important thing

and this is in John, his words before he dies. He says it’s a new

commandment.  “I give you a new commandment, that you love one

another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this

everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one

another."

And he meant for this to be the way that others would know whether or not

it was a group gathering in his name. Love was supposed to be the world

would know we are Christians. As scholar Lewis Donelson writes,

“obedience to this command (was) the public mark of the new community,

comprising John’s version of the new covenant that the Synoptics place at

the Lord’s Supper. The love command is both the organizing force and the

sign of the Jesus community.” “Having Jesus as the model undoes all the

limits. Whatever love might mean in a given moment, it as for everything.

Love does not calculate the costs.”

The love command is our organizer and our sign! It is and was the

organizing force of our gathering together, the underlying principle of all of

our program, the signs of the Jesus community. And I love that it was

command was a dream of love projected into now.

As Howard Thurman wrote, Jesus “knew that the goals of religion as he

understood them could never be worked out within the then-established

order. Deep from within that order he projected a dream...”

One that we get to live inside of right now!

Even from within this current order, there is a dream of a love projected and

we get to live inside of Jesus’ dream!

Sometimes people tell me that we are right now living in the imagination of

a certain group and I say well I am living in someone else’s vision, it’s

Jesus’ vision.

Just like those who gathered in the First Century, we are called to obey this

mysterious and magnificent command. It is for me at least both intriguing

and overwhelming.

This is impossible. Which is why many reduce this teaching to being nice.

Or being polite.

Given that he was willing to die for what he said, I am confident that he

meant mere neighborliness. I think he meant something that most of us will

spend our life seeking, a love Divine that exceeds our understanding, but it

is a dream we get to live inside of here and now, for ourselves and with and

for each other. It is vision beyond domination and exploitation, a

re-humanizing dream, where there is room for all.

What a gift to live in Jesus’s dream and I am so grateful to live inside that

dream with all of you. Right now just like the First Century Jesus’ followers

we gather as Empire closes in all around us telling us who is worthy, they

gathered in secret sometimes whispering to one another, “Peace be with

you.” Maybe we need to do that too. Love is the great equalizer. And what

a gift to live in Jesus’s dream of love projected into now.

Communal Reflection

How are you living this new commandment in a time when it is

countercultural?

Beloved of God, what a gift to live inside Jesus’s dream of love projected

into now.

May it be so. Amen.