Disciples of Jesus are "commanded" to build grace-based communities of joy, forgiveness and love.

The ability of Madison Avenue to make the profound seem trivial while transforming the trivial into the profound is wickedly wondrous. Of course, that really is the whole goal of advertising to make whatever you are selling, no matter how trivial, appear at that moment to be the most important consideration consumers are facing.

One of the hottest ad campaigns last year succeeded in elevating the age-old practice of bumming a beer from a friend to a new art form. You've surely seen the shots of a bunch of fishing buddies sitting around the campfire "bonding" over their experience. Suddenly one of the guys grows tearful and confessional. Coming close to one of his friends around the fire, he throws his arms around him and reveals in a tough-guy but choky voice, "I love you, man!" But instead of being touched, his friend sees right through the flood of tears. "That's great, man," he agrees, "but you still aren't getting my Budweiser!" The only reason for the first guy's confession of love was a pitifully transparent ploy to filch the last remaining beer from his buddy.

Love as a way to get a free beer that is the Madison Avenue pitch. While it seems like bald-faced idiocy, this ad campaign has obviously struck a funny bone with the public. The fastest selling gift items in the new "Budweiser" catalog a catalog devoted entirely to selling beer-branded merchandise is the whole line of "I love you, man!" T-shirts, shorts, hats and signs.

Could this be a male backlash to a couple of decades of being told men need to be more "sensitive," more "emotionally demonstrative"? "Okay," this ad campaign counters, "I'll bawl my guts out and express 'real' love to my friends . . . if it will also get me something I really want. Like a free beer."

Have you ever noticed how often the media's depiction of "churchgoers," of apparently confessional Christians, isn't much different. These Christians bawl and blubber over others only when it suits their agenda. For the most part, boob-tube images of a religious person are rarely of someone declaring with great sincerity, "I love you, man!" Instead, the most prevalent image is of a narrow-minded, self-righteous soul proclaiming, "I judge you, man!" or "I condemn you, man!"

How tragically different is that vision from the view presented by Jesus in today's gospel text. Caught up in itemizing our brother's faults or our sister's sins, the church has become best known as a "toe-the-line" community. Instead of being defined by love, we have become defined by law.

The greatest decision facing the 21st-century church is whether it will function as a law-based community of faith or as a grace-based community of love. Will we be defined by some carefully articulated, theologically sophisticated, logically delineated "Articles of Faith?" Or will the church welcome its role as a living, breathing, healing, helping organism known for its "Acts of Love?"

The fact is: If we are genuinely to be the church; if we are to be a true Christbody community of witnesses, we have no choice in this matter. Jesus did not command us to live a life of faith defined by legalistic particulars. Jesus offered us only one great commandment "Love one another as I have loved you." Instead of a series of laws, Jesus declared we are to live according to the mandate of love.

This means we "get off easy" and we get to live the most demanding life that can be imagined. Law-based faithfulness can be "finessed" in a number of ways. Fitting the actual experiences of life into the code of a written law always calls for interpretation and extrapolation. At times it seems the only reason we erect laws is so that we have something we can "go around." But the mandate of love is fluid, never set in stone, and is always applicable to every situation. A grace-based community of love is eternally on the spot. We are called to be there, to come through, to care deeply, no matter who or what the circumstances.

In our law-based, secular society, we are outraged when the legal barriers we have so carefully constructed are thrown down by human sinfulness through greed, evil, lust, decay. We are righteously indignant that our laws, our safeguards, have been so callously disregarded. A law-based community's reaction to the failure of its laws is to grow angry, defensive, frustrated and vengeful.

The church cannot count itself as one with these legislatively directed reactions. We must act differently because the church is grace-based. Our community exists solely as a result of Christ's loving sacrifice for our sake and for our salvation. As disciples of Christ, we know that all Jesus required of his followers was one thing, and that one thing was everything that they love one another. When any of us falls short of that goal, as each and every one of us will time and time again, the only appropriate reaction on the part of the church is not judgment, not condemnation, but tears.

"LifeLines" is the latest CD by Peter, Paul and Mary (yes, they're still around). Today, the three of them have gone down separate paths, but Paul Stookey is an evangelical. His song on this album, "For the Love of It All," is a masterpiece. Joined in the lead vocals by Susan Werner, he sings: "Long ago on a hilltop where now the curious crawl/A man on a cross paid the ultimate cost/ For the Love of it all/ For the Love of it all/ We are gathered by grace/...It is still not too late to come celebrate/ The Love of it all/ 'Eli, eli, lema sabachthani/ The Love of it all."

Listen to the words of this song as the story of redemption is told from the Big Bang to the Bit Bang (play on the sound system).

[End the sermon with an interactive time with people exchanging the peace with one another saying: "I love you, man" and/or "I love you, sister" and "I love you, brother" followed by either, "And I don't want your beer" or the words, "God loves you, brother. God loves you, sister."]

Now that we've hugged one another with the love of Christ, let us go out into this world and hug it with these words: "I love you, world. God loves you, world . . . with "The Love of It All."