On July 4, 1939
thousands of fans packed into Yankee stadium, but on this day they did not come
to see a baseball game; no they came for a much more somber occasion. They came
because news had spread that one of their beloved Yankees, Lou Gehrig, had been
diagnosed with a new rare disease, one that would later be named after him, and
one that would eventually take his life. Knowing the imminence of his own
death, Gehrig came to give a farewell address to his loyal fans. He was joined
by some of the great Yankees of all time, including Babe Ruth, and when it came
time for him to speak he uttered some of the most famous lines in sports
history. “Today I consider myself, the luckiest man on the face of this Earth.”
Those words have lived on and for as great of a player as he was, for all of
the records that he held, this may have been his defining moment.
Another farewell address in sports that happened a little
more recently also holds such great power. It was 1993 at the ESPY’s a sports
award show much like the Oscars or the Grammy’s. Jim Valvano was the recipient
of a humanitarian award. Valvano had been the head coach of the NC State
basketball and had even lead them to an improbable National Championship in the
early 80’s, and yet much like Gehrig, Valvano’s legacy may be defined by his
farewell address. Jimmy V as he was lovingly referred to as, was diagnosed with
cancer, his body riddled with tumors with nothing the doctors could do. He
teamed up with ESPN to start the Jimmy V foundation to raise money for cancer
research, something that at the time was not as common and as he said in his
speech was ten times less funded than AID’s research. During this speech there
are many classic lines, but two of them have stood out over time to become the
defining lines of this farewell address. First he says, “To me, there are three things we all should do every day.
We should do this every day of our lives. Number one is laugh. You should laugh
every day. Number two is think. You should spend some time in thought. And
number three is, you should have your emotions moved to tears, could be
happiness or joy. But think about it. If you laugh, you think, and you cry,
that's a full day. That's a heck of a day. You do that seven days a week,
you're going to have something special.”
And the second legendary line that has become the motto of the Jimmy V
foundation is, “Don’t give up don’t ever give up.” Jimmy V after giving this
speech was so weak that he had to be helped off the stage by Dick Vitale and
Mike Krzyzewski. Jimmy V died less than two months after that speech. It is
still played in its entirety near the beginning of the college basketball
season to raise money for the Jimmy V foundation.
There is just something
about farewell addresses that gives the words that the person is saying so much
weight, so much gravitas. A person knows they are going to die and these are
the words that they find important to share before they pass away. “Today I
consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the Earth.” “Don’t give up,
Don’t ever give up.” If someone who is dying, someone who has had time to
reflect upon their own life and have come up with what is the most important
things to say tells you something; you take it very seriously. It even becomes
phrase or memory to remember them by.
So why am I spending so
much time on farewell addresses? Well, it is because our scripture for today is
a farewell address of its own. Jesus is talking to his disciples, and he knows
that his time is quickly coming, so he starts to tell the disciples about it.
He starts off by talking about how he is glorified through God, and God’s is
glorified through him, and some other very deep things that I’m sure that the
disciples didn’t understand, and that will be the topic of discussion for us another
day. The mood of the address changes quickly and becomes much more intimate, he
says to the disciples, “Little children, I am with you
only a little longer. You will look for me; and as I said to the Jews so now I
say to you.” This is it, this is the iconic line, the build-up must be
killing the disciples, what is it that Jesus is going to leave for them to
remember? Jesus continues, “'Where I am going, you
cannot come.” Wait, what?! Where
I am going you cannot come. Jesus has
come to the crucial moment of his farewell speech, and what he says is “Where I am going you cannot come.” At
best, this statement seems to be
anti-climactic, a letdown, not what the disciples were expecting. At worst,
this statement may have made the disciples feel as though their faith had been
in vain. That they had been following the Messiah, holding on to the words of
hope of eternal life that he had been sharing, only to hear Jesus say, “where I
am going you cannot come.” We know that Jesus is not saying that we can’t come
to heaven, we know that all who truly believe in Christ have the opportunity
for eternal life, but for the disciples this could have been a shocking
statement. Even we today may be like the
disciples wondering what he means when he says that we cannot go where Christ
is going. If we read the next line of
what Jesus says we may however start to get a better understand of why Jesus
would say such a thing.
After telling the disciples that the cannot go where he is going, Jesus
says to them, “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.” Jesus tells the
disciples to love one another. Sure this is something that we have heard from
Jesus multiple times, but here Jesus put an emphasis on this point, he says, “I
give you a new commandment” This is our new commandment, our new charge, our
new responsibility, to love each other. Jesus tells the disciples that when
they show the same love for each other that Jesus showed for them, then
everyone will know that they are disciples of Christ, or as the hymn states
it, “they will know we are Christians by
our love.”
When we hear this new
commandment from Christ to love one another so that all will know that we are
disciples of Christ, and when we hear it right after Jesus telling the
disciples that where he is going they cannot come, it starts to become a little
clearer about what Jesus is saying. He isn’t saying that we don’t have the
opportunity to get to heaven, he isn’t saying “Nanny nanny boo boo, I’m going
to heaven but you can’t come. He is
saying to the disciples, I have my work here on Earth, to die and rise again
for the forgiveness of sins, and to ascend into heaven to sit at the right hand
of God the Father almighty. You also have work to do; that you should love each
other so that all may know me through your love; that others may see my love
working through you and want to follow as well. You see, the reason that Jesus
says that we cannot come where he is going, is because we have been called to
join in with God’s mission to the world, by showing God’s love to one another.
So when Jesus tells us to
love each other, we can read it as a command to first and foremost love the
other followers of Christ. That there should not be backstabbing, hatred, and malice between those who claim to be
followers of Christ, because after all that is not how Christ loved us. The
Bible says a house divided against itself cannot stand, so how can we be truly
followers of Christ, living out God’s mission for the world, if we are in
constant conflict with ourselves. We can’t. I think this commandment to love
each other goes much deeper than not fighting with each other however. If we
are to love each other as Jesus love the disciples, then we must love each
other, brokenness and all. We must realize that the disciples that Jesus called
were not the perfect, clean, respectable members of society; they were fisherman,
tax collectors, those that society saw as unclean, or even as morally
corrupt. Jesus however called these men
and used them in extraordinary ways for ministry. And yet sadly, in most
churches today there is this concept that those who follow Christ have no
blemishes; and if they (which they do, then it is something that we must
hide). Countless Christians sit in
their pews week after week battling with addictions, struggling in their
marriage, fighting depression, fighting eating disorders; and they have no idea
that their neighbor sitting next to them is going through difficult trials of
their own, maybe even the same circumstance.
When Jesus is calling us to love each other as he loves us, he is
calling us to embrace each other’s pains and weaknesses; to embrace each
other’s faults. Not that we embrace the faults themselves, but that we do not
create a culture of shame, but instead create a safe sanctuary where children
of God feel safe to wrestle with their difficulties, knowing that those around
them are there to love them. This is truly loving each other as Christ loved
us.
Loving each other is not
contained only in the walls of this building, Love each other does not only
mean loving other Christians, but if we are to truly love in the way that
Christ loves, then we know that we must all of God’s creation. Jesus was in
ministry to the sick, the poor, those in prison, those oppressed by race, or
nationality, or economic standings. If we are to love each other as Christ
loves us, then we must love in a similar manner. We should be visiting the
hospitals, nursing homes and the shut-in. In our culture today there is a
unspoken belief that once a person is no longer “useful” to society then we
should put them out of sight and out of mind. As Christians however we know
that all life is sacred, that all life serves a purpose on Earth and if we are
not there to affirm and treasure that life who will be? The same goes for
prison; society see criminals as those who have lost all rights, all
privileges, in essence have lost their humanity, but we as Christians know that
through Christ there is hope for all, that through Christ there is forgiveness.
We have all probably heard of the wonderful works that prison chaplains have
done, bringing prisoners to repentance. For some of us this is hard to accept
that someone could commit a crime and still reap the benefits of eternal life,
but this is what is so wonderful about our savior’s love, is that nothing can
separate us from the love of God. Prisoners still face their sentence on Earth,
but like all of us have the opportunity for eternal life; therefore we as
Christians should not hesitate to show our love to those in prison through
visitations or simply cards expressing our love. These are just a few ways that
we as Christians can show Christ’s love to the world, but there are so many
more ways. It is the call that Christ has placed upon us; to love each other as
he loves us. That we cannot yet go where he is going, because we are called to
be in ministry to each other and to the world. It may at first sound like a
burden, but when it is all said and done, when we have spent our lives in love,
we like Gehrig may be able to say, “Today I consider myself the luckiest man on
the face of this Earth.”
No comments:
Post a Comment