Acts 14:21-27
Rev 21:1-5a
Jn 13:31-33a, 34-35

Let us Dare to Love
During the past week, I officiated at four funerals of patients with whom I have walked. Each person had a unique story quite different from the other. Some I knew very well and others were new gifts in my life.

Yet, each person’s life spoke to others of the God spark with which each of us is endowed. In this post Easter season it is good for me to experience the ways in which people jump, slide, and wait their way into being. Each had a very different way of holding the bigness of God and their strongest remnants came in the stories that their loved ones shared about them.

I think it is that spark of God, that remnant that Jesus was talking about in the Gospel of John 13, in the gospel of May 6th. Jesus gave to his disciples the most powerful tool for witnessing his presence in our world, love. This love makes the difference between surviving and thriving. It is the power to change one life at a time or to change the course of history.

Jesus simply said, “My children, I will be with you only a little while longer.
I give you a new commandment: love one another.
As I have loved you, so you also should love one another.
This is how all will know that you are my disciples,
if you have love for one another.”

Funerals often make us stop to think about the ways in which a person has touched our lives with the spark of God. However, Jesus commandment to us was to take love and let it be our trademark in the here and now. Let us open our eyes to those who fill our daily life with love, take it in and allow our love in turn to enrich the lives of others. May others be moved in the ordinary by the ways in which our lives give voice to Risen Christ.