Sermon preached by Rev. Margie Quinn on Sunday, May 10, 2026
In my final semester of seminary, I felt really far away from my — Daniel, don't be alarmed. You're going to be fine. Um, I felt pretty burnt out from school. I felt far away from my family. I felt anxious about the unknown future. I began to dread waking up. I began to dread going to school. And I was losing joy in the things that had very much been giving me joy in my life. For someone who was studying God, I was asking myself, where is God? How do I feel God's love? So I went to one of my mentors who immediately pulled out her laptop and she opened it up and she asked me to come sit next to her and she showed me the Decorah North Bald Eagle Cam. The Decorah North Bald Eagle Cam, which is a 24/7 live stream of an eagle's nest in Decorah, Iowa. Maybe some of you have seen it too. At all times — like this morning, like six years ago — it shows this nest. And at the time, it showed a mother eagle, a mama eagle, who was sitting on the nest protecting one baby eaglet. She said, "I want you to just look at this with me for a second."
And then she closed her laptop and later she sent me the link to the Decorah North Bald Eagle Cam. In the subject line she sent the link and then she wrote, "Baby eaglet sleeps, comes out to eat, and then is put back to rest once again by her unmovable mother." Her unmovable mother. I became addicted to watching the Decorah North Bald Eagle Cam. I would pull it open when I was in class. I would wake up and immediately look it up. When I couldn't sleep, I would watch the Decorah Bald Eagle Cam. I couldn't stop watching this mama eagle who was vigilant, who was cutting, who was always watching and who was always protecting and caring for this little eaglet — restlessly, relentlessly, day after day. And I had been reading scripture, but sometimes the words of scripture don't necessarily come alive to us, do they? But then I was watching this mama eagle, thinking about the words in Deuteronomy when God is described as this eagle who stirs up its nest and hovers over its young, spreading its wings and taking them up, bearing them aloft on its pinions. An unmovable mother, the embodiment of love.
This is the sixth Sunday of Eastertide — as I know all of you know — and we are coming up on the end of what we know as celebrating the resurrection of our Lord. Celebrating that love wins, after all, does it not? But there is a certain sadness about the sixth Sunday of Eastertide, because today, as FA read to us, Jesus is speaking to his disciples. He's just washed their callous and dirty feet and then he gives what a lot of folks call his final discourse. This is his final discourse. This is his last words. This is his goodbye speech. This is his commencement address to the twelve who have been with him. This is when he gets to decide exactly what he wants to say and impart to them before he leaves them. This is what he says. "I'm with you only a little longer. You will look for me and where I am going, you cannot come. So I'm going to give you one final commandment. Love one another. Just as I have loved you, you should also love one another." And then he says, "Don't let your hearts be troubled. Don't be afraid." And then he says again, "If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And they who have my commandments and those who keep them love me. And those who love me will be loved by my parent, by my Father. And I will love them. And I will reveal myself to them." And then later, "As my parent, as my mother has loved me, I love you. Abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my parent's commandments and abided in his love." And then this: "This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one's life for one's friends." That's his final discourse.
And as I sat in my office on Thursday — actually, I was driving back from a lunch and I got a call from Quinn Mosley, who is a sophomore in high school, and he said, "Why aren't you at the church?" And I said, "Oh, I'm coming back from a lunch." And he said, "Great. Well, I'm on your couch." So I walk into my office and he said, "Hacky Sack Club got cancelled, so I had a couple hours to burn." So I thought I'd come into your office. And like I do with everyone who comes to my office, I said, "Okay, well, I was just about to start writing my sermon, so I'm going to make you read John 14 out loud to me, and we're going to walk through it verse by verse, and we're going to figure this out together." So Quinn takes my little Bible and he starts reading to me Jesus's final discourse. Love me like I love my Father, like my Father loves me, like this commandment, like the commandment I give you to love me. And by the end of it, he goes, "What does it mean?" And I go, "What does it mean?" And we just kept asking each other, "What does it mean?" And then Quinn asked this: What does it mean to love Jesus if he isn't here anymore?
Y'all. What does it mean to love Jesus if he isn't here anymore? Which sounds a lot like something the theologian Caroline Lewis asked of this passage this week. What does it look like to embody God's love when Jesus isn't here anymore? When he has said that he is going somewhere where we cannot come — yet that he's not going to leave us orphaned, that he will come back to us, but for now he's just leaving us with the Paraclete, the advocate, the helper, the Holy Spirit. So I think that's our question today. How do we love God when Jesus has gone somewhere that we can't go? In any way, what is love?
Let's start. There's a great band called The Wild Reeds. And they write, "Love is a choice every day, not some fuzzy feeling in the room." The Apostle Paul said that love is patient and kind. It's not arrogant. It's not rude. It doesn't boast. It doesn't delight in wrongdoing. It never ends. A six-year-old named Emma wrote, "Love is when you're missing some of your teeth, but you're not afraid to smile because you know your friends will still love you even if some of you is missing." Y'all, come on. These young people — I'm just going to go ahead and sit down. And then Jesus — well, Jesus is more of a shower, not a teller, as we know — when he kept asking Simon Peter, "Do you love me? Simon Peter, do you love me? Do you love me?" And Simon Peter kept saying, "Jesus, I love you. I love you. I love you. How many more times do I need to say it?" His response was, "If you love me, just feed my sheep. Feed my lambs. Take care of my sheep." And that sounds like pretty good marching orders for us. Just feed people. Take care of people. And then feed people again. Baby eaglet sleeps, comes out to eat, and then is put back to rest once again by her unmovable mother.
So often I talk about — we talk about — God's love for us. Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so. But this week it really struck me that while I think about and talk about and pontificate on Jesus's love for me, I don't often think about my love for him. When he commands me to love him, what does he want me to do? What is it? Something about a choice and not a feeling? Something about an unmovable eagle? Something about missing a tooth and letting people see you when you're missing things? What is it? What is it, Jesus? So this week that's what was — as I say — rolling around upstairs. That's what I was thinking about. How to take care of sheep and how to embody God's love when I don't really have Jesus to hold my hand all the time and lead me around and show me exactly how to do that and point to the people that I should be paying attention to and wave his hands at me when he wants me to be a little bit more compassionate than I'm being.
So I tried a few things. I wrote a thank you note to a family whose house I stayed in in South Carolina. I left my retainers there. And if you've been to the orthodontist, you know how expensive retainers are and also how quickly your teeth can move when you don't wear your retainers. Okay? So they went to a Walmart to send them back to me. The Walmart was closed. They went to a post office. They went to a FedEx. The fourth place they went, they were able to put my retainers in the mail. So I wrote them a thank you note. I took my niece out to dinner. I drove around praying for you — yes, you. I drove a friend to the airport. Not during rush hour, so it wasn't the most loving thing that I could do. So I tried some ways to love and wondered, is this loving you? Is this what you mean? If I'm loving them, am I loving you? Sometimes you write about it in a really convoluted way.
But I also just witnessed love, and I think that's part of it too. I've witnessed people show up at the Capitol, reminding me that love is a verb, reminding me that that mama eagle will stop at nothing to protect her babies. I watched my best friend breastfeed, holding her baby and rocking her and complimenting her and whispering to her while I just painted my living room. I asked my friend, "Is she hungry? I've got pretzels."
She said, "She's going to need another ten months before she can have your pretzels."
It's just — it's all love. It's all love. I witnessed the concern and care of one of your voices this week when you called me to tell me how your mom's doing, who just had surgery. And I heard the hurt and the grief when I had lunch with one of you this week who lost your mom nine years ago, for whom this day is complicated. And I grinned as you gushed about how good of a mom your sister is. And in all of it — all of it — love, love. This ultimate commandment, this number one marching order, the thing that activates us and comforts us and nourishes us and challenges us and convicts us, that's always waiting for us to come back to it. Love is the whole thing. It's the commandment in the final discourse. It's the last sentence in the commencement address. Just love one another like I've loved you. And that's loving me. It's the beginning and the end. God so loved the world that God gave us Godself in Jesus to show up and love the world too, right up until the end. And then left us with something that scripture calls the Paraclete, or the advocate, that we think of as the Holy Spirit.
And I wonder if you have felt it too — that even if we're trying to embody God's love and we feel like Jesus isn't too near us, sometimes we get that holy nudge. Margie, pick up the pen and write the thank you note. Margie, go grab the car door for them. Margie, go give that person a hug. Call your mom. Call your mom. That Holy Spirit that reminds us, that urges us to feed each other, lay down our lives for each other, just like Jesus did.
I miss seeing those bracelets that were big in the early 2000s — the WWJD bracelets. Y'all remember those? What would Jesus do? Well, this week I want someone to make me one that says — let me get this right — HDJJL. How did Jesus love? Because that might make my Grinch heart grow three sizes. If I could just hold it, have it around me, try to think about that as I go about my day. How did Jesus love? He loved in a lot of ways. And he did a lot of things, didn't he? He gave us the road map. He really did. He fed the hungry — he fed the hungry not because it was the right thing to do, not because he'd get his picture taken for the paper, but because he loved the hungry. He touched lepers not because it was glorifying him, but because he loved the lepers. He turned tables because he loved the church so much he was willing to be a little angry at it. He healed people because he loved them. He partied at people's weddings because he loved them. He wept over friends' graves because he loved them. He washed dirty feet because he loved them. He came back for us because he loved us. He prayed on mountain sides for people because he loved them. He shared a lot of meals with all kinds of kinds because he loved them.
I don't know. What if we really believe? What if we really believe that Jesus is among us when we practice that commandment of love? What if we really believe he shows up smiling and nodding his head, or shaking his head, or looking at the retainer case like, "How did you leave it again?" Just says, "Ah, you got it right, man. I love you."
This morning I checked the Decorah North Bald Eagle Cam — I know you were waiting just to see. It's been years since I've looked at it. And the mama eagle was gone. There was nothing in the nest. Where is that unmovable mother? I wonder. I don't know. I think she's taken flight. I think her wings have carried her somewhere else. She's on the move, just like Jesus always is, ushering us to keep up and to keep trying and to do our best at that final commandment.
Take flight, church, and just love.
Let's try it.