I met the sweetest, young couple on the plane to Atlanta. I don’t normally strike up conversations on the plane, because this is sacred time to be without phone service, internet, or screen time. I just read or sleep and it’s wonderful! However, I did get to talking with these folks a bit and I learned that they just moved to a rural part of Alabama from Riverside County in southern California. If you don’t know Riverside County, think sprawling concrete jungle, inland from the beach towns with people from everywhere in the world. And then they moved to rural Alabama is. I’ve never been to Alabama, so all I know are a couple of facts about Alabama and I think maybe there was a Reese Witherspoon movie set there. That said, I’m pretty sure whatever rural Alabama is really like, there’s no way that there’s not significant culture shock for these folks.

A complicating factor, no doubt, is the young man in this cute couple had tattoos everywhere I could see. His skull under super short hair and cap had tattoos, along with his hands, knuckles, and even his neck, if I remember correctly. So, in my imagined version of rural Alabama, I was guessing their transition into their new community was rough. When I asked about how they liked their new home, they smiled and said they liked it even if it was very different. But the look in their eyes showed me more complexity than their words and smiles did. In them, I saw sadness and weariness.

Small towns are already notorious for being closed to newcomers, but I had to wonder if this young man’s tattoos and the tiny whiff of a Mexican accent had made him too strange, too “other” for the folks of their new Alabama town to feel comfortable with him, even if his demeanor with me was kind, gentle, and open-hearted. Now, I’m prim enough, I suppose, to not understand tattoos like that, but it’s not my body. I don’t get to make other people’s choices. But what I can tell you is that I enjoyed chatting with them both a great deal and I found myself worrying. I worried they were isolated and lonely. I worried about people’s assumptions and judgements. I worried they were alone on one side of a divide with the rest of the town, for the most part, on the other.

I met them on the way to a conference in Atlanta that was all about how we preach in this time of division in our culture. Political, cultural, and even economic division and polarization makes it so we have a harder and harder time understanding each other. These cultural forces can even erode our desire to connect with folks who are different than “us,” however we define that “us.” One of our speakers noted that all forms of voluntary association are breaking down, meaning fewer people going to church, but also fewer going to the Lion’s Club, Boy Scouts, unions, PTAs, bowling leagues, and all the rest. The ways we historically knew our neighbors across cultural, religious, and political differences are dwindling.

While this is a distinctive moment in history, this is hardly the first time that we have struggled to heal our divisions. In the first reading today, Peter tells has a vision of God telling him to not follow the laws defining what was acceptable food for the Jewish people and to reach out to people well outside normal divisions. Peter obeyed and the Holy Spirit did her divine work of creating new disciples, reaching beyond society’s normal barriers and gathering us all in.

Peter was told in his dream specifically how to love people as God wanted him to love. He didn’t have to wonder but only obey. Sadly, we don’t often get these sorts of specific dreams. And if we do, we may not share them or follow them explicitly, right? That’s not culturally normal for us to break societal taboos because we had a dream. We don’t call into work because we had a dream that told us we need to be skiing or fishing or in the garden or whatever. The boss may not take kindly to such proclamations.

But that doesn’t mean we can’t or don’t listen to what God is saying in our lives. We pray, journal, share our hearts with trusted people, or just pay attention to our lives and ourselves to get a sense of God’s intentions for us. We can feel desire grow in us to do certain work, make changes, or speak up. So, we listen with all our senses. We grow to know God’s call, but it still might be a bit vague.

So, even if we are not yet clear on exactly how we are to love each other, we know that we are called to love. The gospel today is unambiguous. However, what Jesus doesn’t say is the particularity of what that love looks like for us. He just says love one another as I have loved you, but even if we focus on patience and compassion, that doesn’t tell us exactly how we are to be compassionate or patient. Even if we know we need to focus on caring for the lost, poor, and rejected, the details of what that actually looks like can still be fuzzy.

Jesus loved people in his specific ways and this does indeed inform us about how to love now. But if we say that we are called to love the broken, wounded, and sinful…well, ultimately that includes us all. And this is beautiful! We are to love one another in the woundedness of our lives and world, which inherently decimates our make-believe divisions. We are all gathered in. We are all children of God who are precious and whole in God’s sight.

And yet, if we don’t get specific about how we love, who we love, and when we love, then we don’t really love anyone at all, right? Our action, our time, our capacities are all inherently limited and specific even as we are called to love in ways that are universal.

So, if we say we love all people because Jesus calls us to, that we welcome all people because Jesus calls us to, without being specific in our action to love in ways that heal divisions, then we aren’t following Jesus’ command to love as he loves us. Love must become specific and yet inclusive to love as Jesus loves, like Peter’s story in Joppa.

These outsiders, these Gentiles felt God’s presence and love so clearly in Peter’s presence with them, eating with them that they were converted and chose to get baptized. Just Peter’s sense or even belief in God’s inclusive love for all people did not do this. His specific acts of inclusive love and relationship did.

This kind of specificity is an answer to the question, “What do we do? What do I do?” We can have very big ideas about love, justice, freedom, and all the moral goodness in our lives. But we can’t act on the level of big idea. We can’t act on the level intention. It must get specific. It must also be grounded in our abilities and in the needs of the ones to be loved, which could be ourselves, other people, animals, or the ecosystems around us. God’s love can and does move through us, but it moves through us in ways that are specific, like lightning striking the ground.

The particularity of how we are called to love matters. Not all people or even Christians are called to love in the same way. So, I wonder if understanding our particularities as a congregation here at Celebration more clearly may indeed help us to follow Jesus’ commandment to love as he loves us by helping us get specific. I wonder if this specificity will enliven us with more of the Holy Spirit’s electric sizzle than we’ve known before.

We have not just been commanded, but entrusted to love one another. We get to be a part of that wonderous circuit that connects God, his beloved people, and all of Creation. What a marvelous invitation! But just how we best fit, best plug ourselves in is a real question. What is God asking of you and of us? How do we get to share the love that connects us regardless of whatever divisions we have put in place? This is both a commandment and a promise to us for the sake of the world. So, let’s keep asking the questions, listening for the answers, and following through!

AMEN