I’m guest preaching this Sunday, the Fifth Sunday of Easter, and the Gospel for the day includes Jesus’ new commandment of love: “Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.” (John 13:34)

This is the second time I’ve preached since my retirement. The first was Maundy Thursday, when the Gospel also includes this new commandment—mandatum nova—which is the root of our name for the day.

I seem to be developing a rather narrow preaching specialty.

But I was thinking about that and wondering if it would be fair to say that this one sentence—love one another as I have loved you—actually contains the entire Gospel.

What do you think?

I think our recent clergy conference speaker would disagree on a number of counts. I can see that “the greatest commandment” contained in the Shema is missing—You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind” (Matthew 22:37, Mark 12:30, Luke 10:27).

But I wonder if there is any other way we mortals are actually able to love God except by loving our neighbor.

And the rain fell like grace upon the earth, and flowers opened like human hearts to love

I’m not saying that I’ve seen everything there is to see in the town where I’ve lived for the past 40 years. Engaging in photography as a spiritual practice does tend to open my eyes to beauty and newness all around—which is, I believe, a glimpse of the holy.

But one of the pleasures of spending more time in the city is finding all kinds of things you’ve never seen before. Like this robot delivery we came across in Center City yesterday. Sure, why not.

Some last photos from our whirlwind tour of Atlanta, Montgomery, and Selma. MLK and John Lewis were everywhere, in words and image, and rightly so. But I found myself moved especially on this visit by the witness of all those “ordinary” people who put themselves on the line for the cause of justice: the Freedom Riders and lunch counter protestors, the working people who walked during the Montgomery bus boycott, the men and women who crossed the bridge at Selma. 

These words of Robert C. Wright, the Episcopal bishop of Atlanta, resonated with me: In addition to those “champions who we knew by name … it boggles the mind to think about the multitude of people who through minuscule militant acts contended with evil and found God mighty to save.” 

In an essay I read on the plane home, Wright wrote that the American South is our Holy Land. It’s “the location where both the personal and the communal experience of God in past days occurred. The place where significance and guidance for present-day activities abound, in addition to the promise of continued relationship, identity, and even prosperity in the future with God. … The land is holy because labor and pain, joy and grief, birth and death, war and peace, prayer to and betrayal of God have happened on this land and therefore it is set apart.”

I also enjoyed much good conversation with my daughter, who is working hard in her professional life to foster a robustly inclusive workplace, and who Has been teaching me a lot.

It was a moving visit, as any visit to the Holy Land should be. And the ongoing question is, how am I changed by it?

*”The American South is Our Holy Land,” in “Living into God’s Dream,” edited by Catherine Meeks.

“Guided by Justice,” sculpture by Dana King honoring “the courage of black women who collectively walked thousands of miles to end racial segregation in public transportation” during the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955. At the National Memorial for Peace and Justice.

Another reminder that ordinary people working together can indeed change the world, but not without paying a price.

Last vacation dinner at the Capitol Oyster Bar in Montgomery, AL. The waitress asks our guy if he wants hushpuppies. What are hushpuppies, he says.

She says, where are you from. I can tell you’re not from around here if you don’t know what hushpuppies are.

And I’m thinking, y’all should have been able to tell he’s not from around here the moment he opened his mouth and started taking.

Heading back tomorrow to where the biscuits aren’t as good, they don’t have hushpuppies, and everybody else talks just like us.

Nkyinkyim Installation (detail) by sculptor Kwame Akoto-Bamfo.

Certainly one would hope that facing our nation’s legacy of treating brown-skinned people as if they weren’t really human would create an awareness that would keep that from ever happening again, but consider that the first section of the museum brings alive the pain suffered when parents and children were torn apart and held in custody in distant places.tagTag PhotopinAdd Loca