How Love Makes Us Brave
A Little Hymn History And The Greatest Commandment
Dear Friends
In the Sunday School where I grew up, you graduated from the basement “little kids’” programming in the basement to the main program in second grade. That meant the end of simple, paperless music with finger plays, being read to, stickers and arts and crafts, and the beginning of reading from your own Bible, memory verses, and the main music program with the special navy blue folders and sometimes the weird paperback hymnal with the marbled cover print.
The Sunday School music choices were, from the beginning, a bit peculiar to me. A song or two from the younger children’s program might sneak into the pages with more words but so might a hymn I recognized easily from worship. Most of the songs seemed to split the difference – more upbeat, a bit simpler, less plodding – than what we typically sang. I adored the useful Books of the Bible song we sang for the offertory (one with unclear origins that I’ve never been able to find on the internet) and enjoyed the jauntiness of God Loves a Cheerful Giver, and I disliked Pass It On, which mysteriously-to-me involved all of the 2nd-6th graders in attendance standing up shouting “Hey World!” when the song said, “I’ll shout it from the mountain tops…”
Besides the Books of the Bible, perhaps my favorite song in our repertoire was They’ll Know We Are Christians By Our Love for its aforementioned plodding pace of the hymns we sang in service and it wasn’t trying to be silly or appeal to children. (Can you tell what kind of child I was?) But as much as I liked those aspects of the song, I think I liked it because it felt true and important. Shouldn’t the way we live out Christ-like love be precisely what made us distinctive?
A Little History
They’ll Know We Are Christians By Our Love was written by Fr. Peter Scholtes for a youth choir he was leading at a Catholic Church in Chicago during the 1960s after looking for an appropriately ecumenical tune for interracial events. Scholarly writing on the tune helps locate it in the post-Vatican II folk-liturgy tradition and notes its present-participle phrasing. It’s not a song about who Christians are historically or who will we will in the future coming of heaven, but a song about the work we must do and are doing now.
Learning this, particularly in light of how we talk about the Baptismal Covenant’s emphasis on human dignity – a word that makes a key appearance in this tune – I can imagine this song’s revival for this time, some gentle inclusive-language tweaks shifting “and guard each man’s dignity” to something more gender-neutral, etc. Described as a song written for young people who were disillusioned with contemporary American culture – well, we might just be on to something here.
A New Commandment
By the time Jesus issues what he deems to be “a new commandment” in John 13, it feels as though he’s been preempted. Of course, John is unlucky to be the last of the four Gospels and Jesus has been going on about love for a while now, even if perhaps he’s just had a little less room for that in the peculiar language of John’s Gospel. The fact is that for us receiving the message, it perhaps doesn’t feel so new.
What might be more interesting about Jesus’s message of love here is that it isn’t just about love being the right way to live. Compare this passage from John 13 with Jesus’s words in Matthew 22 when he is asked what commandment is most important.
In Matthew, Jesus tells answers this question by saying, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’” This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”
In John, though, his message – notably delivered after Judas departs – is one that hangs specifically on his own ending. While he is alive, Jesus’s disciples are known literally by their proximity to him. But something is about to happen and Jesus means to both warn them and to provide them with a new path to identity. And so he says, “‘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, 'Where I am going, you cannot come.' 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.’”
This is how they will be known as Jesus’s followers to others: through their love for one another. It’s a reminder of some of the times I’ve previously written about Christian distinctiveness and eccentricity – the Keep Christianity Weird of it all – and also of how our churches should be places where we model conflict resolution and problem-solving, rather than places known for drama, triangulation, and difficult personalities. How’s that going for your parish?
Stories That Show Love
The Parable of the Good Samaritan is such an excellent story for exploring what love looks like in action but it is hardly the only one that lets us explore the shape of this theme.
Instead, we might find some real advantages to looking just beyond the Gospels to Paul’s conversion (check out Paul’s Travels & Letters here) – how he went from being a persecutor of Christians to a leader who fostered a widespread community despite the many hardships he faced. Paul wrote often to his followers of the importance of living out Christ’s love (reimagined in Chris Raschka’s delightful book Paul Writes (a Letter)) and he worked hard to model that life.
In parallel, while Peter does not feature such a dramatic backstory, Peter’s Journey helps us see both how love first fails to give Peter courage, but goes on to grow within him, leading him to preach and lead and to extend Christ’s love beyond the boundaries that he understood when he baptizes the gentile Cornelius and his family.
Love doesn’t just set us apart, making us distinctive. It can, as Peter demonstrates – and, as I think the original context of this song’s use also points us to – help make us brave. Love made Ruth brave enough to follow Naomi, strengthened Moses to confront the Pharaoh for the sake of his people, and emboldened Esther to confront the king. Love doesn’t always make us as brave as we would like to be, but it goes a long way.
Resource Round-Up
What’s new this week? Let’s start with Pentecost –
The PC(USA) Pentecost Offering includes a full suite of activities, coloring pages, liturgy, and other materials, making it something of a one-stop (free) shop for your Pentecost Sunday needs. (Note: the Pentecost Offering does refer to the financial commitment of that day’s giving, which serves programs for at-risk children, youth, and young adults so if you’re not in a PC(USA) context obviously some of the points here won’t apply – though maybe you want to make a similar commitment at your parish or area level!)
Practical Resource for Churches has a great Pentecost Pinterest board full of inspiration and it hits a lot of my annual highlights: red and orange decorations, doves, red snacks for coffee hour. Kites, doves, and bubbles all have some real creative potential for Pentecost.
The Uniting Church in Australia is *aces* at intergenerational practice – seem to always have some of their materials pulled up. For Pentecost, they offer “Day 50 and Counting,” “RED: a Really Exciting Day,” and “Happy Birthday Church”, all of which are complete packets outlining practices for supporting intergenerational worship and celebration.
Other non-Pentecost highlights:
Union Presbyterian Seminary’s Children’s Spirituality Hub is hosting Introduction to Holy Listening webinars for free once a month through the rest of the year. You can find the sign-up here and all participants will receive a free Holy Listening Kit to begin using this practice in their own context.
I’m really on the Presbyterian train this week, I guess, because there’s a great webinar on the Sacred Practice of Play being hosted by the Presbyterian Outlook on May 21st (7pm EST), led by Dr. Lakisha R. Lockhart-Rush.
This ReFocus Ministry post about Developmentally Appropriate Worship offers some useful frameworks for how children learn and how thinking about faith develops, making the wise case for both intergenerational and age-sensitive spaces.
And, appropriately following from that, the last few episodes of the Center for Faith and Children’s podcast have really gotten at those sticky worship questions. You know the ones: what if my kid just draws the whole time or thinks church is boring or don’t follow along with the hymns? Lots of people have these anxieties, but the heart of the matter is children’s presence – because they’re picking up way more than you realize.
We’ll call it here for now!
Peace,
Bird