I Don't Know Love (John 13: 21-35)

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This sermon was first preached at Augustana Lutheran Church in Portland, OR on Maundy Thursday of Holy Week, April 2, 2026. It was not livestreamed. Video and lyrics  of the song "Judas" which I sang at the end of this sermon are below. Scripture text: John 13:1-17, 31-35

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Good evening, Beloved. I know I say this about all the Holy Days, but Maundy Thursday is my favorite. Partly because it was entirely new to me in 2018 -- in my evangelical tradition, we didn’t mark the Last Supper, the night when Jesus spilled water and love for his disciples before spilling his blood. And partly because at that service, during the stripping of the altar, my friend Dave performed a song he wrote in which the chorus just repeated “If you can’t breathe, I can’t breathe, if you can’t breathe, I can’t breathe.” Amidst all the endless and extreme police violence against our Black siblings, it moved me deeply. 

Which was weird, because at that point in my life, I was faithless. I had lost god altogether, and religion didn’t make a lot of sense to me. But that song, during the coming-apart, the taking-apart of the altar, rang like a bell in my body. I didn’t understand it, but I felt it. And it made me want to write a song, too. A song about grief and betrayal, about what it means to stay with someone during the breaking of their body and remain a witness to it all. About love and its lack.

And believe me, I tried. Many times over the coming years. But songs are tricky. For me, at least, they aren’t so much written as they are born, and like babies, they’re rarely born on time. So I let it go. And I started another chapter because, and this is true, after that same Maundy Thursday service, as Dave and I talked about how powerful his song was, he said, “You should go to seminary.” Like I said -- I didn’t even believe in god, and I told him so! But he was insistent, like Pastor Kelly -- I swear they were in cahoots -- that there were more people like me in the pews than most church leaders wanted to admit, and they deserved pastors too. I told him he was bonkers, that it wasn’t gonna happen, and started seminary the next fall. 

Four years later, I was finishing seminary with my pastoral internship during which I was tasked with designing some kind of project to define my year and my pastoral identity. I stumbled upon what ultimately became mine somewhat accidentally -- or, perhaps a better word would be providentially -- when my supervising pastor Tom, a man who became a friend, confidante, mentor, sage, and father figure of sorts when mine was nowhere to be found; a man who doggedly championed me and made space for all my gifts to find breath and space and life in the congregation, invited me to sing for the first time on my other favorite liturgical Holy Day, All Saints Sunday. As I searched for a song to fit the day, what happened instead was that I wrote one of my own. Not long after that, I wrote another that followed the Baptism of Jesus and his first miracle at Cana, marking the beginning of his ministry. 

It had been a long time since songs came to me like that, more or less writing themselves. After Elijah was born and we moved from Nashville where I’d spent the previous 8 years as a professional recording and touring artist, I thought that part of my life was done. So I was surprised, delighted, and overcome, really, when a few songs of grief, protest, and sacred fury poured out of me in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020. I was two years deep in seminary with that part of my self packed away, but in those long, brutal days when we were in the streets screaming for justice or spending overnights in church basements organizing mounds of clothing and food donations, and re-stocking street medics with necessary gear for the uprising that would and should not sleep, I felt deep kinship with the prophet Jeremiah who said, “God’s word is like a fire in my heart, a fire shut up in my bones, and I cannot hold it in.” Which is not to say I am a prophet; only that when Spirit moves, especially after years of drought, it’s impossible to contain. So I spilled, I sang, I wrote. And it felt for a moment like resurrection.

But after that, songs went quiet again for another year and a half. Words wouldn’t come, and they can’t be forced. So I sang those old songs over and over, and I waited. 

Until November 2021 during my internship when I wrote the first song I ever played here, “Feast of All Saints.” 
And I decided that for my project I would write liturgicalish songs to mark significant moments in Jesus’s life and in the life of the Church. It was my way of saying “Yes” to the movement of the Spirit, to Her permission and Tom’s insistence that I not silo my songwriting self away from my preaching or pastoral self.

So of course, as we approached Holy Week three years after my first Maundy Thursday experience, I was itching to finally write my own song about Jesus’ New Commandment to love as he loves. But my eagerness turned to anxiety as it failed utterly to materialize.

In retrospect, I suspect that’s because, despite my empathic nature and willingness to hurt with those who hurt, it feels impossible most times for me to even imagine loving those who do the hurting. And the reason is this: I don’t have to imagine the pain of Jesus’s betrayal, because I have not only witnessed that kind of betrayal -- the kind we’re still seeing literally today as popular evangelists proclaim during holy week that God’s will according to scripture is that Iran be destroyed, and that God has raised up the current president to do it; Not only am I watching Christ being betrayed and handed over to empire in the name of border control and public safety, over and over by those who claim to love and worship him; Not only have I witnessed such betrayal, I have been betrayed by those closest to me; I have felt the sting of abandonment by those who claimed to love me unconditionally, just as I am, so long as I changed. I have watched, baffled, as every Gospel truth I was taught is burned to ash, to make room for a more expedient politics. I have had my love and my need to be loved weaponized against me, and used as a cudgel to beat me down and make me submit, or at least cry. And I have seen it weaponized endlessly against other Beloved Image Bearers in the same way.

Which is to say: the pain of betrayal isn’t the problem for me; it's the Love. Because all I have in me toward those who betray and batter God’s Beloved is fiery rage. I don’t know how to love them, and, frankly, I don’t always even want to love them. Those who hurt us don’t deserve our love any more than Judas deserved Jesus’s love, any more than we deserve Jesus’s love — 

which is the point …and the impossibility. 

Maybe this is a lot to take in. As a pastor, it shouldn’t be so difficult for me to preach love, right? It’s right here in the Maundy Thursday text: Jesus gives a new commandment to love the way he loves, and the way he loves is to wash the feet of betrayers, to set the table for deniers, to try one last time to rally the abandoners to a purpose he knows is beyond them -- which is why he later promises to send his Spirit to help them. 

Like every law or commandment God ever gave, this new one is simple, and clear, and direct: He says, “Love each other like I do: selflessly and sacrificially with everyday things like water and bread and wine, because communal love is The thing, the only thing, that will sustain you in my absence, carry you through what is coming, and keep you from becoming like those you despise.” He tells them, “where I’m going you cannot follow: You will remain in this world, and in order to survive here, your love for others must be as audacious, resolute, and foolish as my love is for you.” 

In his book, ‘A History of My Brief Body,’ Queer Indigenous poet and author Billy Ray Belcourt puts it like this: “To love someone is to firstly confess: I am prepared to be devastated by you.” 

”To love someone is to firstly confess: I am prepared to be devastated by you.” 

This is the love of Jesus for us, the love to which Jesus calls us.

My friends, I will tell you the true truth: I hate this. I am tired of devastation! But if, as a pastor and leader, I am called to model the way of Jesus, then the first thing I must do is confess that I don’t know how to do it. Sometimes I don’t even know how to think it.

Which brings me back to songs.
The kind that aren’t born when or how I want. 
Sometimes I can’t find the words, and sometimes the words I try aren’t true. And so I wait for the words — and the Word, the Living One, the Spirit of Christ — to find me in the mess and devastation.

And beloved, She did. As I pondered this scene in the Upper Room and considered this New Commandment, and the people… and the pain …and the Christ, what I finally birthed was not a proclamation, but a confession. And that, not of love, but of its lack. 

And so I want to share it with you now, because even though I know we must, I still have no answers or advice on how to love; I only have my humanity, and some faith -- more than before -- that confessions are seeds in Spirit’s garden, and She always, only grows love.