We’ve got some English teachers in the congregation. Jane Graham teaches English; so does Lucy Klein. Roy Brady used to. I was an English major in college. And I wonder what kind of grade I would have gotten if I had turned in a paper with this in it: "Now the Son of Man has been glorified, and God has been glorified in him. If God has been glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself and will glorify him at once."

Maybe Jane and Lucy and Roy would have been more charitable, but in my mind I see that sentence circled in red, with a note in the margin in the handwriting of my old professor, John Evans. The note says, "What in the world is this supposed to mean? Have you gone bonkers?" (Dr. Evans uses words like "bonkers.")

As Jesus prepares to say good-bye to his disciples, as he watches Judas leave and so knows that the die has been cast and this horrible thing is actually about to happen, he does employ a rather dense bit of verbiage to say that Jesus and God are glorified in the coming death and resurrection of Christ. Maybe when you’re trying to say that being arrested and humiliated and having the skin ripped off your back and then dying an excruciating death is part of God’s glorification, you can be excused for a bit of dense verbiage.

But Lord, it’s dense. I know the fog has to do with glory (he keeps using that word), but it reminds me of the fogs we used to have on Sewanee Mountain when I was in seminary. You couldn’t see your hand in front of your face.

Then, suddenly, like a pure beam of light rising out of the fog, Jesus gets crystal clear. "Little children," he says to the disciples like a father giving a farewell speech to his offspring, "I’m leaving you. And 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."

Now we discover that in the fog was actually a chain reaction; it was actually an explosion. God has glorified Jesus by loving him, and Jesus has glorified the disciples by loving them. But, it’s a chain reaction that goes in all directions at once. No wonder it’s so confusing to talk about. God has glorified Jesus, and Jesus has glorified God. Now Jesus tells the disciples that he has glorified them by loving them, and they are to glorify Jesus by loving one another. And the world will know that they are disciples by their love, and the world, which God loves, will be glorified by their love. And God will be glorified by all of it.

Goodness! No wonder it’s hard to get a good grade on this paper. No wonder it’s so confusing. It’s hard to talk about this explosion of love and glory that doubles back on itself and ends up connecting everything instead of blowing everything apart.

But one thing is clear: the charge which sets this explosion off is the love the disciples are to show one another. "Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another." That’s what glorifies Jesus. That’s what glorifies God. That’s what shows God’s glory to the world. And that is a message that is directed especially to us.

When Jesus says, "Love your neighbor as yourself," and tells the parable of the Good Samaritan, we are invited to see everyone as our "neighbor" that we are to love. That’s a powerful message, but this message is different. Here, Jesus gives a commandment to us, his church, as to how we are to love "one another." This is a discussion within the family; this is a discussion for inside this room.

Take a moment and look around. Go ahead. You can turn around or whatever you need to look at all the people in this church. Stand up if you need to. Look like it was the first time you looked at the people here. And then look knowing all you know about them. A lot of you know each other pretty well; think about what you know about these people. I mean really know.

Now, some of you might be newcomers, or you might not know many folks here, so I’m going to tell you what I see when I look out there: you people are a mess. And so am I. We are wonderfully made; we really are. Full of kindness and wisdom and love and grace. And we are terrible screw-ups. We really are. Full of pettiness and hurt and stupidity and turf wars and emotional blindness. And it’s all mixed up—we’re a mess.

What often happens in churches is that we pretend that folks are all of one thing or the other. Some folks long for a place where everybody is nothing but wonderful, and they fantasize that church is that place. (These are usually people who are either new or not very involved!) They are barreling toward a load of disappointment.

Other people come to see church folk as nothing but terrible people, full of hypocrisy and guile. Those folks probably aren’t here this morning. They hear "Christian" and think "hypocrite." They’re in their beds this morning.

What’s more likely to happen with the people who are here is that some people here will view some other people here as nothing but a pain, nothing but a liar, nothing but a hypocrite, nothing but trouble. Those folks, and most of us are one of them at some point, won’t usually talk like that, but they’ll (we’ll) sometimes think like that.

There’s a real temptation in churches to seek a kind of purity that arises out of this fantasy of the church as a place where there is no conflict, and out of the view that some people are nothing but trouble. The temptation is to slowly shape the membership so that everyone agrees with everyone else, and so that everyone gets along because there are few differences; the dissenters are very subtly given the message that this is not the place for them; the really irritating, annoying, high maintenance person (and that’s always someone else) is very subtly shown the door.

Before we shape our church that way, I think we should think about these people Jesus loved, the people Jesus made church. A group of dedicated, wonderful people who would ultimately give their lives to the church. But also group of twelve people who usually didn’t get it. A group of twelve people who argued with each other about who was the greatest. A group which was often well intentioned but utterly incompetent. A group which included not one betrayer, but two. A group which, when the chips were down, ran away. A group of wonderful, awful, insightful, confused, brave, cowardly, loyal, betraying, pleasant, irritating disciples. In short, a mess. A real mess.

It’s easy to love the people with whom you agree and who don’t annoy you. But that’s not church, that’s not the commandment Jesus gave us.

When he was preparing to suffer and die, when it was obvious that the die had been cast, he said, "Love one another as I have loved you." If loving the people in this church isn’t hard, if it doesn’t involve some sacrifice, some suffering, some trying to genuinely love someone who really annoys you, we are not following Jesus’ commandment.

I would imagine that some people will be disappointed by that. Church, they think, should be a place where the loving is easy. Well, I’m sorry, but it is not. We’re a mess. It is hard.

But think of the payoff. Think of a church where messy people, and we all know a few of those (and aren’t we all some of those?) think of a church where those people are not just tolerated, but loved, really loved, painfully loved, sacrificially loved, joyfully loved. What would the world think of that, what would people who view us with suspicion think? Well, I don’t think they would think we’re neat and tidy; we’re not; we’re a mess. But I do think they would know we were Christians, and their understanding of that word might be totally transformed.

When we do that, when we love our annoying selves like Christ loves our annoying selves and change what those folks at home in bed right now think of when they think of "Christian," we set off an explosion, an explosion that looks like a fog of love and glory, an explosion that goes in all directions, an explosion that connects instead of blowing apart. Christ said, "Little children, love one another as I have loved you." My messy brothers and sisters, let us love one another and give God the glory.