May 10, 2026
I don’t know how she does it.
A couple months ago, Tammy and I started watching a documentary on Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour. Unsurprisingly, I’m not a Swiftie, but I was amazed watching her make all of these wardrobe changes.
They said she sometimes had 38 seconds to get under the stage, race down a hallway filled with scaffolding, get into a room, get changed, and pop back up on a different part of the stage. They had it all timed just so.
This morning, I literally just had to change out of my bathing suit and into my robe in 10 minutes. And I’m fairly certain people might have been getting nervous that they’d have to cover for me if I didn’t get there.
I don’t know how she does it.
But I know, watching that, that she does it so her fans can have a certain experience. She does it because she has set expectations for what you’re going to get.
Would I pay to go see Taylor Swift in concert? Not those prices. Absolutely not.
But if people are going to pay that much, she says they deserve to have the show they expect to have.
And so everything is choreographed. Every little moment, every little second is going to go exactly as it is planned. They’re going to make it happen.
That is a way to produce something that is absolutely incredible. I got goosebumps watching it. I don’t know the songs. I was watching it on TV. But it’s an incredible thing that they are able to put together because they have rules. They have set guidelines and expectations of who is going to be where, and when, at every single second for three hours.
That is one way to create something incredible. Something special.
And I will never knock it, because it is not something that I have in my repertoire.
But this morning, as I read the opening of that scripture — “If you love me, you will keep my commandments” — I’m thinking about Taylor Swift and following every single step, and how hard that is, and how much of a burden it is.
But Jesus does not leave us burdened.
Jesus does not give us commandments with the expectation that we just meet them on our own.
Jesus says, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments, but I will not leave you to do it on your own.”
When I was looking for Mother’s Day cards this week, I saw a couple that had right there on the cover: “Because I said so.”
As though mothers somehow say that more than fathers.
But this idea that the way we tell our kids what to do is, “Because I said so” — when we think about mothers and their love, rarely is a mother’s love “because I said so.”
It is:
Let me help you.
Let me show you.
Let me teach you.
Let me talk with you.
Let me assist you.
Let me help you.
When Jesus says, “I will leave you a helper,” it is that kind of love that Jesus promises us. The kind of love that will be present with us, that will show us the way, that will explain things to us.
And sometimes, when we can’t do it, when we can’t get that cookie up off the top shelf, will lift us up so that we can get the cookie.
When Jesus says, “If you love me, you will follow my commandments,” he is not putting a burden upon us.
He is saying it will be easy and natural because if you love me, you will live in me, and I will live in you, and the Spirit will guide you to do the things that I have told you to do.
Now there’s a little bit of a “but what if” there.
What if we don’t live by the Spirit?
What if we just assume we are living by the Spirit?
That is why Jesus gives us the commandments, so that we can know when we are and when we are not.
It is not to tell us, “You have to do this all on your own.”
Instead, it is Jesus saying, “This is how you’ll know if you are living in me. This is how you will know if you are living by the Spirit.”
You know what his commandment is?
Love one another.
If we are living by love, if our lives are living out love for each other, then we are guided by the Spirit.
And if they are not — if instead we are marked by division, by anger, by jealousy, by ridicule, by hatred — if we are marked by those things, then we are not living by the Spirit.
Jesus does not tell us this so that we may go around and tell everybody else, “You’re not living by the Spirit.”
But so that we can know our own fruit, and know who we are called to trust and to follow. How we are called to measure ourselves and our church.
Jesus gives us a different way.
He doesn’t say, “Okay, here’s a list of 481 rules, and you’ve got to get them all right all the time. Best of luck.”
So for the parents who are currently going through those, it’s not the SATs.
It’s an open-book test, y’all.
Because the Spirit is with us.
The Spirit resides within us, and it guides us, and it helps us. And when we don’t think we can do it, the Spirit is there to help us do it anyway.
When we think, “I don’t want to forgive that person,” when we think, “That person doesn’t deserve goodness,” the Spirit is there to say, “It’s okay to think that, but you can’t live it.”
You have to acknowledge that thought. You have to acknowledge that feeling. You have to name it. And then you have to say, “This is not the way I will choose to go.”
And the Spirit will help you to do that.
It will give you strength to do things you cannot imagine you are capable of.
We have all seen fruit of this in someone’s life, where we have seen someone be changed as they have sought to follow Jesus.
It doesn’t mean that we’re always going to get it right or we’re always going to be perfect.
What it means is that when we are messing up, when we are starting to stray from the way of Jesus, we have a way to guide us back, to turn us away from our wandering and back toward the way that Jesus teaches us and leads us.
The way of love, of compassion, of grace, and of mercy.
Because this is the way that will lead toward God’s kingdom.
Jesus says, “I live; therefore, you also may live.”
When we live lives where we give ourselves over to jealousy, to anger, to hatred, to division, we are not really living.
We are not living the full life that God has given us.
And I can tell you, I know it for a fact because I’ve driven down I-81, and that ain’t living.
We are invited to abundant life. To a life that is so much fuller than the cheap knockoff version that we so often are willing to accept.
We are invited to live a life that is abundant with God’s love for us and from us.
Everywhere we go, we see it and we notice it in the midst of the chaos of our lives. We notice it again and again because so often we
want — maybe y’all don’t, but I think we all do — a certain kind of order for things.
We don’t want the chaos.
We want things to be the way we want them to be.
And we cannot find the goodness when things aren’t that way.
And so we want the orchestrated version.
We want the, “If you love me, you’ll follow my commandments. Now everybody do as I say,” version.
But the way of Jesus teaches us how to live in a world that is not under our control.
It teaches us how to receive grace in a world that is not the way we always want it to be.
It teaches us to release the anger, and the frustration, and the disappointment so that we can find something different. Something maybe more.
We have an idea about the way things are supposed to be.
But how do we live by God’s grace and mercy when they aren’t like that?
When they don’t go the way we intended or planned, whether by someone else’s fault or by our own fault?
This morning, on Mother’s Day, I have long prayed a prayer called “A Prayer for Mother’s Day.” It’s a beautiful prayer that acknowledges all of the messiness of this day.
We celebrate those mothers who have been there as best they can, showing us love.
We recognize that there are those of us whose mothers were not there.
We recognize, for many of us, that our mothers are no longer there.
We deal with all of that and recognize it. And this prayer does that.
And I forgot to print it off this morning.
But just because I don’t have those exact beautiful words doesn’t mean we can’t take a moment and say, “It’s a complicated thing.”
We know what a mother’s love can and should look like.
But it doesn’t always look like that.
We know that for many — I was reminded on Monday — when Jesus says, “I will not leave you orphaned,” there are many who have been left orphaned.
But God’s love remains with us.
Even in the face of things not being the way we want them to be, not the way even that they should be, we are reminded that God is a mother.
That God, in the process of baptism, gives us new birth and new life.
That God, in the process of creation, has given birth again and again and again.
And God nourishes us, and cares for us, and nurtures us.
And so we can know that no matter what this day might mean to you as an individual, God is here.
That in whatever it is that you might be feeling, God is present, loving you, caring for you, acknowledging your specific needs.
In the same way we don’t have favorite children, God knows each and every one of us in the specific needs that we have because we have been promised that we will not be left as orphans.
Instead, the Spirit will be with us to care for us like a gentle mother, like a loving, nurturing mother.
And that is what it is like to remember how to live in Jesus: to remember that that love is with us.
Amen.