At our Vestry meeting this week, we reflected on Jesus’ threefold question to Peter in John 21:
Jesus: Do you love me? – Peter: Yes! – Jesus: Feed my lambs.
Do you love me? – Yes! – Take care of my sheep.
Do you love me? – (a spicy) Yes!! – Feed my sheep.
This is a powerful exchange, and it’s easy to overlook the order. Jesus doesn't begin with service–which is often our emphasis–but with love.
When Jesus first called Peter, the invitation was simple: “Follow me.”(Matthew 4.19) After three years of walking with Jesus, and Peter’s painful denials, Jesus returns to that same invitation. He first asks the deeper question: Do you love me? Only then comes the instruction to Feed my sheep, and a familiar invitation: Follow me!
Holy Week gave us a shared opportunity to live inside that question. As we walked through confession, the cross, silence, waiting, and resurrection joy, we were offering our loves again to Jesus—the one who first loved us and gave himself for us.
This Sunday’s Instructed Liturgy will pause throughout to explain how The Vine’s Anglican worship seeks to intentionally shape our loves. Our worship pattern is similar to that of the earliest Christians who also wrestled with how to love Jesus well when He was not bodily present. Every Sunday, we rely on these intentional patterns, inherited through centuries and enlivened by God’s grace. This is how we give ourselves, and our desires, as an ongoing offering, learning to love what Christ loves and love Christ Himself.
Jesus still asks his people the same question: Do you love me?
For my part: No, not as I wish I did.
But by God’s grace–and uniquely through our worship together–I am learning to love him better with my church family where love is not taken for granted.
Two simple invitations this week grow directly out of that calling:
Join a Spring Small Group.
Sunday worship shapes love corporately; small groups shape our love relationally through shared conversation and life together. Will you devote yourself to this 8-week school of love?
Come this Sunday for our Instructed Liturgy.
We’ll walk through the meaning behind what we do each week, and how these ancient practices continue to shape our loves and desires. Our service will not go longer than usual, and this is an especially appropriate Sunday to invite a friend to join you.
