Do you remember the very first Sunday School song you ever learned?  Or the first hymn that grabbed hold of you?  I do.  The Sunday school song I remember I learned when I was a wee thing.  Maybe four.  Maybe three.  Not older than four.  I remember singing it often.  Sometimes when I was afraid.  Sometimes when I was unsure.  And sometimes when I needed to feel on top of the world.  Even to this day I find myself singing that song.  It goes like this:

            Jesus loves me this I know

            For the Bible tells me so

            Little ones to him belong

            They are weak but he is strong.

Jesus loves me.  That’s what I needed to hear—especially in the moments when I felt most unlovable. 

I think those first followers of Jesus needed to hear that too.  Theirs were not easy lives.  They were the ones others thought weak.  They were the ones others pushed aside.  They needed to hear, they needed to feel, they needed to know that Jesus—that God—loved them. 

I can imagine that when Jesus died on the Cross they began to wonder.  I can imagine they had their doubts.  No wonder they turned to each other.

Filled with fear, they huddled together in an upper room, talking only to one another.  But the Spirit of God eventually blew them out of that room.  They found themselves out on the streets of Jerusalem telling others the story of God’s love.  Telling others the story of Jesus.  But still they believed God’s love was just for them –just for the Jews.  They might well have sung to themselves,

            Jesus loves us this we know

            For the Bible tells us so.

            Little ones (like us) to him belong

            (We) are weak but he is strong.

Then Peter, the leader of those early followers of Jesus, found himself on a rooftop in Joppa.  And everything changed.  First for Peter and then for the others.  Peter had a vision—a vision of God showing him and telling him that he should “kill and eat”—not only things that were kosher but also things that weren’t.  Then Peter heard the Spirit of God sending him to folks quite different from him.  Folks that weren’t even Jewish.  Then he saw the Spirit of God descend on a Gentile household.  Imagine that—God loves us and them!

We hear this story against the backdrop of our lives.  We think about folks that get excluded—the suspect categories our courts look at when it comes to discrimination. 

We hear this story and, in place of the Gentiles God was calling Peter to serve and to include, and we plug in people who have been overlooked, pushed aside, told they are unclean.  People like long-term committed lesbian and gay couples who want to be married in the eyes of the law and in the eyes of the church.  People like the garment workers in Bangladesh who want to work in safe conditions.  Sometimes people who share our lives.  Often people who live at arms length from us.  People we would include in the song:

            Jesus loves me (and those I too should love) this I know

            For the Bible tells me so

            Little ones (like me and them) to him belong

            (We) are weak but he is strong.

But then we hear Jesus’ new commandment, “Love one another.”  He was talking to his followers.  To Peter and to those anglers and connivers the Zebedee brothers James and John—people who got on other people’s nerves.  To Judas—the one who betrayed him—and to the people at the table with Judas.  To Mary Magdalene, to his mother, to the other women who stood with him—women whose very presence at the table threatened others sharing the meal. 

“Love one another.”  “What?” we say to Jesus.  Or maybe we say, “Who?”  The neighbor whose tree encroaches on our space?  The colleague who drives us nuts?  The brother or sister or aunt or uncle who make family gatherings a chore?  The weird kid who lives next door?  “Love one another”—that’s a tall order. 

To the early followers of Jesus, a man name John wrote, “Little children, love one another for love is from God.  Love is God.”

We don’t love on our own.  We open ourselves up to God’s love.  Sometimes when we step aside, that love flows through us and changes everything.

            Jesus loves us—all of us--

            Those we love and those we don’t

            For to Him we all belong

            Both the weak and the strong.

            Yes, Jesus loves us all.

            Yes, Jesus loves us all.

            Yes, Jesus loves us all.

            The Bible tells us so.

We're sorry, but the text for this sermon is not available at this time.

We're sorry, but the text to this sermon is not available at this time.

Google’s Doodle:
A Sermon Preached by the Rev. Susan Allison-Hatch

Did you hear all the sound and fury that erupted this week over a doodle by Google? Or did all that escape you as it did me? It was only yesterday that I heard about Google’s great offense—their placing a picture of Cesar Chavez in the center of the second “o” in their name—a “doodle” they call it—and sending that doodle out on Easter Sunday no less—out for all the twitter sphere to see. Imagine it! The response was swift. Folks throughout the twitter world tweeted away:

“Damn Google....No Easter wishes from these atheists,” tweeted one voice from the Christian right.

Another tweeted, “Google uses Cesar Chavez on Easter instead of something Easter related. Okay. I’m switching to Bing.”

My favorite—“Congrats Google, you’ve managed to alienate Christians in America today: instead of celebrating Christ, all they celebrate is Cesar Chavez.”

Really? All of us? I think not. I suspect most Christians in America had no idea that Google had doodled Cesar Chavez on Easter morn.

If we had known, would we have been offended? Should we have been offended? Have we missed an opportunity to proclaim our faith boldly as our brothers and sisters did so long ago when they stood before the temple council?

I wonder. I wonder if there’s not another way to look at all of this. I wonder if in tweeting that picture of Cesar Chavez on Easter morn, Google didn’t stumble inadvertently into proclaiming the core of the Easter message—the resurrected Body of Christ present in the here and now. I wonder if those of us who missed this big brouhaha over Google’s doodle missed a window into the very heart of the Easter promise—the promise that “He lives. He lives. My savior lives today.”

Do you think Google had any idea about the depth and the breadth of the man whose image graced their doodle on Easter Sunday. Do you suppose they knew about the faith that both sustained and guided Cesar Chavez in his fight for justice for the poorest of the poor?

The man whose image Google doodled on Easter Sunday dedicated his life to seeking justice with and for those who took the jobs no else wanted, with and for those did the work others scorned—farm workers who moved from job to job following the harvest. Folks that worked bent over in the fields tilling the soil with a short-handled hoe and breathing in the fumes of deadly pesticides.

Like Martin Luther King, Jr., Cesar Chavez pursued a course of non-violence.

Like Jesus he lived and shared the poverty of those he served.

Like the apostles in the aftermath of Easter, Cesar Chavez worked to heal the world in which he lived.

To the apostles standing before the Council the high priest says, “We gave you strict orders not to teach in this name, yet here you have filled Jerusalem with your teaching and you are determined to bring this man’s blood on us.” There gate-keepers were afraid—afraid of Christ’s blood washing over them. Maybe changing them. Maybe healing them. There they were—religious authorities reigning in the Spirit of God at work in the world.

It wasn’t a new thing then. It’s not an old thing now either. Temple authorities. Angry tweets. Variations on a theme. The apostles knew it well. So did Cesar Chavez.

In the late 1960’s, Cesar Chavez, took up what he called a Fast for Life. He was protesting the deadly pesticides that were taking their toll not only on farm workers but also on their children. Each evening, a mass of solidarity was held. At first he walked to mass. Later they carried him into mass. One evening a young girl whose body was pock-marked with tumors prayed, “You, Cesar Chavez, have given us a helping hand and have listened to our crying souls. Someday, I hope to march with you and tell the world how much you love us and care for us like our Lord, Jesus Christ....”1 Sounds like an Easter message to me.

Teresa of Avila once wrote,

Christ has no body but yours,

No hands, no feet on earth but yours,

Yours are the eyes with which he looks with compassion on this world,

Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good,

Yours are the hands, with which he blesses all the world.


Those are words she could have written to Cesar Chavez. Those are words she could have tweeted to Google. Those are words she speaks to you and me and to the part of the Body of Christ we call Live at Five.

Perhaps we should all tweet, “He lives, he lives. Our Savior lives today. He lives in you. He lives in me. He lives in all who follow on his way.”