Today marks, roughly, the second half of the fifth month of 2025. For those of us who are connected to the service industry, especially those in community-facing sectors, engaged in social relief work, policymaking, and community-building, it already feels like a whole year. The past four and a half months have been a combination of heavy, busy, fast-changing, shape-shifting, downright disorienting. And I think it feels that way because many of us have come to expect that if we have good plans, clear strategic goals, sustainable business plans, and reasonable arguments that shake as few power and financial structures as possible, we can have a predictable and linear course of action with estimable and achievable outcomes.
This heaviness, fast-paced, and disorientation we are feeling is related to our doing.
When confused or obfuscated, the thing to do is to find space to gain perspective, opportunities for reflection and discernment, sources of knowledge or information that point us to other frameworks that could guide us through these challenges.
Finding these spaces, opportunities, and sources takes time. Finding time is an issue in and of itself.
It also takes trust that the spaces, opportunities, and sources we find are reliable, well-informed, and, dare I say, true.
I was recently trying to catch up with my podcasts. It had been a while since I tuned in to On Being - a podcast on spirituality, wisdom, and social engagement. Earlier this month, Krista Tippet, the facilitator of the podcast, published a conversation she had with David Bornstein, the Quebecois journalist who wrote for the New York Times and co-founded of the Solutions Journalism Network. Ms. Tippet and Mr. Bornstein are clearly acquaintances, perhaps even friends. Tippet’s curiosity for spirituality and the possibilities it has to impact social innovation and change couples well with Mr. Bornstein’s commitment to journalism as more than a source of information - a discipline that can articulate what is possible in a good society.
Their conversation was part criticism, part dreaming about how journalism can be an important source for information for the citizenry, especially in a time when misinformation (not to call it lies) and the quickly changing news cycle add to our collective sense of confusion and obfuscation.
Bornstein argued that the theory of change in journalism of the late 20th century is to shine a light on what is wrong, corrupt, or defective in order to encourage citizen activism and involvement to correct it. Bornstein suggests that the idea that this is the purpose of journalism might have crystallized during the Watergate investigation - investigative journalism uncovering the story - and the rise of detective shows. In either case, what drew (and perhaps still) draws people to the news is to see the problem exposed for what it is. The suggestion during the rest of the interview is that this focus on what is wrong and corrupt has fed the social, cultural, and political divide the country (and the world) is living now, and deepened the echo chambers many of us our found that only confirm our biases and expectations and has left us, as a society, ill equiped to interact and to live with, among, and for difference.
We are scared of the different because it is increasingly difficult to find reliable sources of information and knowledge that encourage us to open our minds beyond our biases and assumptions. And as people of faith, this difficulty is affecting our capacity - as individuals and as a community - to have our hearts and our spirits challenged and strengthened beyond our biases and assumptions.
John was writing to such a community in the latter part of the first century. For far too long, a people had lived under the abuse and harassment of the empire. Political and economic measure were strangulating their capacity to be free and to live. Their daily lives had been reduced to a struggle to survive.
Once anyone had figured out how to stay afloat in response to the socioeconomic onslaught of the moment, something changed that made that plan, at best, ineffective. And what leaders - social, political, economic, even religious - seemed to be saying was that if they kept their heads just low enough, and did not bring attention from the economic and political bureaucrats of the empire, they might be able to survive that, and all of it might just go away.
In the year 70, after years of confrontations between the Jewish people and Roman forces occupying Judea, the unthinkable happened. It didn’t matter how low they kept their heads. It didn’t matter how good their plans were in ruffling as few political feathers and how logical their ideas were for a sustainable and focused action. The Roman army besieged the city of Jerusalem, desecrated and destroyed the Jewish Temple, and the process of expelling Jews from Jerusalem began.
This was the social, economic, political, and faith environment John wrote his gospel, three letters, and apocalyptic treatise. The people of the communities he served were under a barrage of contradicting information, the symbols of their identity literally destroyed, the institutions of political and social stability weakened.
There seems to be parallels between how some of us are feeling regarding the capacity of our institutions to face and confront the economic and political threats of today to what we know happened in the decades before the destruction of the temple of Jerusalem.
And this is, sometimes, the opportunity we have as followers of Jesus. There are times in the life of the church when we can find some connection between our historical moment and the historical moment of the people these writings were originally meant for.
It still amazes me to think that John was writing this gospel for a people confused and obfuscated, heavy-ladened and downright disoriented in the late first century. A congregation, twenty-one centuries later, considering his pastoral and biblical leadership was nowhere in his mind or spirit.
And that, perhaps, is one of the pieces of good news for us here in Glens Falls today - that words written almost 2000 years ago, written to inspire another people then can inspire us today because the God that inspired those words and guided the actions of that people 2000 years ago is with us today and wants to inspire and guide our actions.
And I think that John was in a somewhat similar predicament to ours today. In the middle of so much noise that little amounts to useful information, after some decades of doing church in a particular way, and the circumstances in our city, our country and the world perhaps requiring something different, where will we find inspiration and guidance to remain faithful, steadfast, effective, and passionate disciples of Jesus?
Much like the first in the first century, we have worked out structures, curriculum, theological frameworks, and social analysis tools to guide our doing. It wasn’t that different in the first-century church, I believe. Take the first three gospels in our Bible - Mark, Matthew, and Luke. They are called the synoptics because they have much in common, for their purpose was to provide a synopsis - an account, perhaps a summary - of the life of Jesus in order to guide the doing of each of the congregations they were written for.
Each of the gospels ends with a mandate based on its content:
In Matthew, the mandate is to go out and make disciples of all nations because Jesus, in his synopsis, is proven to be the messiah of the Jewish scriptures.
In Mark, the mandate is to go out and proclaim the good news because and in spite of the doubt of the original followers of Jesus.
For Luke, the mandate is to go out and be witnesses to what Jesus said and did
You see, there was a lot of focus on doing in the synoptics. And I think John was concerned that there was something else the church needed to see them through.
And I am concerned with John. And I think that many of us are concerned about being inspired and empowered to be a faithful people for this time. And what John does with his writings in the New Testament is both an invitation and good news to us. John cuts through the noise that confuses and wants to keep people guessing what the next difficult thing to come will be, and places the command of Jesus in the middle of his Gospel.
At the height of chapter 13, Jesus knew the passion was coming. Jesus is trying to be with his disciples - many of whom had turned into friends. The noise of anxiety in Jesus’ mind must have been loud. Right before the lesson we read, Jesus tells Judas to go on and perform his deed of betrayal. Right after the lesson, we read, Jesus foretells Peter’s denial.
And instead of focusing his time teaching his disciples about the mechanics of overcoming what we know to be the difficult and trying time of the passion of Jesus, in the Gospel of John, on love:
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.
Right there is the good news for us today! Right there is the source of good information that can shift our pursuit of solutions for everything that is wrong into a commitment to build and celebrate upon that which is good. Right there is good news, good information, and good inspiration to shift our focus from figuring out what we need to do to stay busy in the business of being good Christians, and into being a community with Jesus and with one another.
Love!
And this good news comes with simple instructions, and I dare say with a promise. We are to love one another the way Jesus loved us. And how did Jesus love:
by being present with and for people (Nicodemus at night, the Samaritan woman alone in broad daylight)
by speaking truth to those in power (restoring the dignity of the temple, keeping avenues of conversation open with the Pharisees)
by restoring the dignity of people (even if healing on the Sabbath)
by taking time to explain the simplicity of love and the complexity of sin and fear
by taking time to pray for and with his disciples (through four chapters!), but not that they would not suffer, but that they would know that the power of God is in love, and that being a community of love is the power of God in the world
And right there, the other piece of good news - that the call to love one another is not a call to act alone, but an act of being a community. That is how John cuts through the noise of his time and encourages his congregation through their most trying time in a generation.
And that is how we cut through the noise of our time, by knowing that responding to the call of being a community of love means that God is with us.
Dear friends, let’s love each other, because love is from God, and everyone who loves is born from God and knows God. The person who doesn’t love does not know God, because God is love. This is how the love of God is revealed to us: God has sent his only Son into the world so that we can live through him. This is love: it is not that we loved God but that he loved us…
Dear friends, if God loved us this way, we also ought to love each other. No one has ever seen God. If we love each other, God remains in us and his love is made perfect in us. This is how we know we remain in him and he remains in us, because he has given us a measure of his Spirit.
God is love, and those who remain in love remain in God and God remains in them.
(I John 4.7ff)
Love will win! Because God is love. And we are a community of followers of God. And we are called to be a community of love. And God is in us, with us, and through us. And God is love.
Love will win! We can cut through the noise of our time and overcome it because of love - committed to love by being present, returning dignity to everyone, pursuing truth and peace, overcoming fear, embracing difference, praying together for each other.
God is love! Love will win! We are in this together. Amen.
These words were shared with the congregation of the First Presbyterian Church of Glens Falls on Sunday, May 18, 2025, based on John 13:31-35