Love One Another

By Rev. Ethan Brown

From Desert Wisdom by Yushi Nomura

Pastor and Minister of Care & Discipleship

We began our Lenten journey on Ash Wednesday with the call to “remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” This reminder of our need for God in the face of our own mortality and frailty has never been more real to me than this week as I participated in the funeral of a young child—youthful vitality and joyful energy gone in a moment. With Good Friday looming before us, it is easy to believe that all of Lent is just one reminder of death after another until we finally get to escape the season with Easter. Yet we all know that the rude cruelty of death intrudes across the entire calendar year. We do not get to bask in the resurrection simply because we drape the altar in white. We live in the tension of these two seasons—the already present reality of Christ’s resurrection and freedom infusing our lives and the not-yet-abandoned dust of our mortality lingering on us all.
 There is an honesty to the season of Lent that reminds us that the most important aspect of life is not that it will end, but how we live it. Perhaps Christ on the cross is not simply about his death, but about his faithfulness every step of the way leading up to it. Tonight we celebrate Maundy Thursday. Maundy comes from the Latin “mandatum” which means “command” or “commandment” and refers to the words of Jesus to his disciples in John 13:34-35, “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.” Loving one another is hard, yet it is the mark of faithfulness in the disciples of Jesus.
 In this in-between time, it is the love of God that transforms us and invites us into the life of God. As we begin and begin again to love one another, we join God in planting the seeds of life in this dusty ground until death is swallowed up once and for all.