25 young people are being confirmed and becoming the newest members of Glenview Community Church. Since the day of their baptisms – regardless of how old they were or where they were when they were baptized -- whether they were carried forward as an infant wearing the family christening gown or whether they stood at the font on their own two feet, or whether they were immersed in a baptistery as I was - this is the moment they've been waiting for: confirmation. 
           
Okay, so their parents made them go to confirmation class. Good for them. That only means they already know about self-denial. They wanted to stay home and sleep in on Sunday mornings, but had to get up and go to confirmation class instead.
           
The Confirmands may have missed a party Friday evening because they had to be on retreat with their class as part of preparation for today.  They can wear their "My-parents-made-me-do-it" badge with honor.

But along the way, something happened. They’ve learned some things.  They’ve learned some things about other faiths; about the United Church of Christ; about the Bible; about serving others; and about worship.  They've learned that the things that are really important, whether the prom, hanging out with friends, parties, or even confirmation, usually involve intention, planning and commitment.
These Confirmands already know something about planning and commitment.  They had to commit themselves to be part of Confirmation class and plan and budget their time to learn about the importance of caring for others, to fit in service projects and worship reflection papers into their schedules in order to arrive at today ready to be confirmed.  

While others are following trends, the Confirmands have been exploring what it means to be a follower of Jesus. While others have been working on a social life, the Confirmands have also been working on a spiritual life.

Well, maybe they have and maybe they haven’t.  Maybe they’re simply glad it's over. I certainly sense their parents are.  What are we doing here?  What are we raising here? 

I enjoy this story that Harmon Kilebrew told.  Kilebrew is a member of the Baseball Hall of Fame.  He told about a time when his dad was playing ball with him and his brother in the backyard.  His mother yelled out the window to his dad and said, “You guys are killing the grass playing ball out there.”  Kilebrew’s dad responded, “We’re not raising grass here.  We’re raising boys.” 
           
From a distance many of you may have thought that our confirmation program is just a nice little something to keep the seventh and eighth graders occupied on Sunday mornings.  We’re not raising a program here.  We’re raising disciples, followers of Jesus, people who will take on the name Christian and wear it with distinction. 
          
So what is happening today is 25 people are confirming their commitment to be disciples, confirming that they are committing themselves to be followers of Jesus, committing themselves to be identified as Christians.       
           
Confirmation marks the Confirmands as adults in the church. The perks include voting in meetings and serving as leaders, but most of all they now belong to a community of people who have chosen to be in ministry together.  They’ve been participating in the events and activities of this congregation for a long time, but now their involvement has more personal intention and purpose to it.   
           
For two years Confirmands have participated in class, completed assignments, and carried out service projects.  They thought by arriving at Confirmation Sunday that you had all their assignments completed.  Actually, there is just one more but it is the most important one.  Confirmands, here is your assignment, should you decide to accept it, is to love one another.  Actually, this is the assignment for all of us.  There are plenty who will claim that this is mission impossible but Jesus would never give anyone an assignment that is impossible. 
           
Doesn’t it seem strange to be commanded to love?  Jesus orders us to love? How can that be? If love is only a momentary feeling, something that we fall into and out of, then Jesus' command to love is absurd.  Apparently, here we are working with a countercultural definition of love.
           
While Jesus has mentioned love before according to John’s Gospel, from the point of today’s text forward, love becomes a central theme of John's gospel. Moving from Jesus' linking of love and obedience in 14:15, 21, we get a fresh definition of love as Jesus expresses it here. Jesus puts some muscle into our rather limp definitions of love. He takes our rather vague and emotional love of God and links it to himself and his way.
           
The concept of love as a command flies in the face of just about everything we think about love! For us, love is a feeling. We speak of falling in love, as if love is something we stumble upon. We can't command a feeling. We can't say, "Be happy!" and make a person happy.   But in the strange logic of the gospel, we can say, "Love!" and love can happen because love is action taken in the best interest of another person.
           
Jesus obediently followed the commands of God (12:49-50; 15:10). Now he commands us to love. Commandments suggest that there are numerous commands of Jesus, but here we are given only one, the command to love.
           
Our keeping of the commandments of Jesus is the result, the fruit of our love for him. This linking of love and command offers us a fruitful opportunity for reflection on the peculiar shape of the Christian moral life.
           
In our cultural context, whenever Jesus mentions the word "love," we are right to be careful. Love has been emptied of much substance or meaning. Love, which in a Christian context means a life turned outward to the other, has been corrupted in the modern merchandizing world to mean just another means of turning even more inward on ourselves.
           
Christian love is no mere feeling or evanescent emotion. Jesus gives content and substance to the word love. Jesus commands us to love. Love is an action, a specific action that is directed toward another that when you think about it, may be one of the toughest things to ask of people like us who are constantly encouraged to turn inward on ourselves.
           
Yet in loving others we are not summonsing up the creativity and courage to do some heroic, personal act. In loving, we are simply following a precedent that we can see most clearly in Jesus.
           
We came here this morning to worship.  We have gathered in the sanctuary and closed the doors.  At the end of this service we are going to open up the doors to this church and send you back out into the world as Jesus' disciples. We are commanded to love.  
           
Our assignment, if we accept it, is to love. We will therefore leave this church only to be engaged in a struggle. Discipline is required; a dogged determination to learn from Jesus and to walk in his loving way, no matter what nine out of ten average people do. That will take discipline.
           
So we get you in here and we are commanded to love.  Love is an action.  We do certain tasks, hard tasks that are against our natural inclination like, "Love God with all your heart, mind and soul and love your neighbor as much as you love yourself,” or “Confess our sins, times when we have not loved" or "Forgive our enemies." See? We're being trained here in the safe confines of church to be disciplined and to follow the order to love so that when we get out into life, the discipline of learning from Jesus and loving as Jesus did will be like second nature to us.
           
And if walking out of here and praising God in all that we do or say, or being honest about our limitations, or forgiving those who persecute and wrong us seems like an impossible task for a person like you, well, take heart.  The promise of God is that we are not left alone to our own resources.  God is with us, promising never to abandon us.  We are not being sent on an impossible mission.
           
The great philosopher, Aristotle, said that a human being is a political animal. We are created, taught Aristotle, to live in groups, communities. For Aristotle, the solitary individual, living, thinking, acting alone, is something less than a human being is meant to be.
           
For instance, Aristotle taught that a "bad person," that is, an immoral person, is a person without friends. Only friends make us moral by telling us that truth about ourselves that no one else cares enough about us to say. Only friends know how to hurt us in the right way and truth, by its nature, is often painful. Pity the person without friends, says Aristotle, that is a dangerous person who has no one to tell him anything.
           
This Aristotelian view clashes with our modern notion that politics is mainly about a voluntary association in which we temporarily join with others in order to get what we want as individuals. The modern view of a human being is not that we are dependent upon others, but rather that we are essentially self-created, self-made through our free and autonomous choices.
           
Through our heroic individual choices, we literally make ourselves stand alone by ourselves without reference to the needs or claims of others. The sad results of such a view of human nature are all around us in our broken families, our abuse and neglect of children, the fragmentation and dissolution of our society, and all the rest.
           
The Christian view of a person is closer to that of Aristotle than the modern, secular, capitalist conception of persons. We believe that God has created us and Christ has commanded us to lean on one another.
           
We say that we want to be free, that we want to be independent. Yet it is one of the ironies of contemporary life that, in trying so hard to free ourselves of any dependencies and attachments, we end up enslaving ourselves to a host of masters and being destroyed.
           
I can't think of anybody who was killed because he or she tried too hard to live as Jesus instructed.  I have known people who have destroyed their health and killed themselves because of overwork, over acquisition of material things, the treadmill of getting and grabbing that characterizes our economy. I take it back.  There have been people killed because they sought to love and live as Jesus did.
           
There are people who worked all their lives, "one day to be retired and free." Yet when they finally finished their life work and got to their long-awaited retirement, to their sadness they discovered that they didn't know how to do anything but work. They died soon after retirement because now they had complete "freedom" but had nothing interesting to do with that freedom.  Saint Augustine concluded that much of the world's "freedom" is merely the rattling of the chains of the happily enslaved.
           
What is amazing is the one thing that will set us free is love.  Love gets us outside ourselves.  Love gets the focus off us.  Love enables us to see a person who needs a friend and to be a friend.  Love causes us to see that there are people who are hungry.  We can take them food and work for the justice of fair food distribution.  Love causes us to see people who are locked up by prejudice, being treated unfairly and unkindly.  Love causes us to treat them differently, accept them as equals.  This is what love does.  Our assignment, if we decide to accept it, is to love.