The
Bible book we call 1 John is one of three letters, pieces of correspondence, that
the same author most likely penned and that are tucked away near the end of the
New Testament part of the Bible. 1 John was most likely written to a specific
Christian community in Ephesus in the late first century. It was penned in response to an emerging
belief, later officially declared heretical, called Docetism.
This Christology
proposed that Jesus only seemed to be human and so his human form was but an
illusion. Broadly speaking, Docetism proposed
that, if Jesus was divine, then he could not possibly have had a real human
body. The writer of these three letters argued that the person of Jesus was very
real and, in fact, offered the only true and human example of what God’s love
for the world looked like.
These three letters
are some of those books of the Bible that, unless you know specifically where
to find them, you can often overlook them completely. You can easily thumb through the Holy
Scriptures and never come across them. They
are that short!
Now,
that remark may sound downright sacrilegious, but really, the author of these
three letters pretty much said it all in 1 John, summarizing the essence of the
Gospel in the verses we just read. To
give him full credit though, he summarized what God is all about in three
words: God is love.
God is the source
and definition of love. It all begins
with God’s love – going back to the moment of creation itself. That is the essential fact of our faith. Love is who God is. Therefore, if you are wondering what God is like,
imagine what love is like - not a passing attraction or moments of lust, but
real love.
Episcopal priest
Rick Morley describes God’s definition of love when he describes being a new
father. Listen to his story: “I have very clear memories of holding each of my daughters,
just moments after their births (Morley says).
Both
times a nurse handed me those little swaddled bundles and then left the room to
care for my wife, just recovering from the c-section.
I
remember experiencing a flood of emotion, and an overwhelming sense of wonder.
Looking into their little squinting eyes and running my fingers through their
little wisps of hair, I was convinced that I’d never love anyone else ever as
much.
But,
why? Why did I love them so much then? They hadn’t done anything yet. They
hadn’t even eaten, or had reason for a diaper change. They hadn’t accomplished
some great feat, and they hadn’t done anything for me at all. They hadn’t even
fetched the remote control for me.
But, I
didn’t love them because of what they had done, or what they could do. I loved
them for who they were: they were mine. My children. And in those moments, and
every moment since, I have loved them. On days when they make me proud. On days
when they get on my last nerve. On every day in-between.
That is the love that the author
of 1 John is talking about. The
corollary flows easily from it, and we have referred to it throughout this
worship series on Creation Spirituality.
The corollary is this: Because we are made in the image of God and
because we, like everything in all of creation, from the very beginning, God
called good, very good, and because God is love, so we are made to love as
well. As former Archbishop of Canterbury
Rowan Williams wrote, “God
is not the name of a person, a limited being, but the name of a kind of life, a
nature, or essence…in which there is always a ‘giving place’ to each other,
each standing back so that the other may act.”
The
writer of 1 John takes love very seriously – as well he should. In the fifteen verses of our reading, the
author uses the word for love twenty-eight times. There is no doubt about it. We are to love one another, and we are to do
so because God loved us first: “Just as God is, so are we in this world.” As
Episcopal priest Judith Jones notes, “because God lives in us, we embody God’s love for
the world. We are not gods (with a small “g”), but we are God’s (with a capital
“G”). God’s love is incarnate (embodied) in us.”
And
if we want to know how God challenges us to live out such love, we who call
ourselves Christians turn to the life and ministry of Jesus. In the person of Jesus, love is
concretized. Love is enfleshed. Love is embodied. Love is revealed and let loose in the world.
This kind of love
is anything but abstract and theoretical.
This kind of love is not a concept, an ideal, or a principal founded on
some airy fairy philosophical notion. This
kind of love is not for discussion purposes only. This kind of love is not relegated solely to
times of worship in churches that wall themselves off from the world.
This kind of love
is grounded firmly in action. This kind
of love is very specific. In Jesus’ life
and years of ministry, we find countless examples, time and time again, of
radical hospitality (Think of all those meals Jesus ate with the riffraff),
inclusiveness (Remember the story of the Samaritan woman at the well),
non-violence (Think of the Beatitudes – blessed are the peacemakers),
forgiveness (Remember the Prodigal Son), all of which challenge us to lives grounded
in faith in action rather than fearful isolation and protectionism. In Jesus, we discover love in action. In Jesus, we who call ourselves Christian
find our role model.
His is the love to which we are both called
and challenged. As Presbyterian pastor
Philip McLarty notes, “this is the way we’re called to love one another, not with
gushy feelings, but with deeds of loving kindness.”
You see, the aim of God’s love is to
bring forth life. What I mean is that
where we witness God’s love, we will see evidence of life. Look around you. What do you see? Is it life-giving – or
death-dealing? Are you life-giving – or death-dealing?
There was once a sage who
asked his followers, “How can we know when the darkness is leaving and the dawn
is coming?”
“When we can see a tree in
the distance and know that it is a coconut tree and not a palm tree,” one
student responded.
“When we can see an animal
and know it is a fox and not a wolf,” replied another.
“No,” said the teacher.
Puzzled, the students asked
for the answer.
The sage replied quietly, “We
know the darkness is leaving and the dawn is coming when we can see another
person and know that it is our brother or sister; otherwise no matter what time
it is, it’s still dark.”
Being able to see another
person (especially another person who is different than we are in race,
ethnicity, sexual preference, economic prosperity, religion) and knowing that,
in spite of our differences, he or she is our brother or sister: That is our litmus test as Christians. That is love in the image of the God who is
love. That is where the rubber meets the
road.
In other words, as the Dean
of Duke Divinity School, Luke Powery, wrote, “How can I
say that I love the Lord whom I’ve never ever seen before and forget to say
that I love the one that I walk beside each and every day, how can I look upon
your face and ignore God’s love, you I must embrace, You’re my brother, you’re
my sister, and I love you with the love of the Lord.”
When
we began this worship series on Creation Spirituality five weeks ago, we began
with what seemed so obvious – the first creation story in Genesis when God
pronounced all of humanity as good and blessed and created in the image of
creativity itself. And now we end with
something that seems equally obvious – that God is love, that we are called to
love one another as God first loved us, that we are created in the image of
love itself.
This
seemingly obvious theology will express itself in our lives in a whole host of
random acts of kindness. However, I
would like to look at it for just a moment through the lens of healing – and
healing relationships.
Love lies at the
root of healing, and so, if we love, then we heal. And if we heal, we mend brokenness, building
bridges rather than walls. If we heal,
we affirm a sacred web that binds us together rather than separates us because
you cannot heal in isolation. We cannot heal ourselves. We can only heal each other. And so, if we heal, we intuitively understand
that we are more powerful together than we can ever be apart. If we heal, then we love.
Jimmy
Durante, the entertainer, was asked to be a part of a show for World War II
veterans. He told the organizer that his schedule was very busy, so he could
only do one short monologue. Then he
would immediately leave.
However, when Durante
got on stage, he performed his monologue as expected, but then he stayed. Fifteen, twenty, thirty minutes passed before
he took his last bow and left the stage.
Someone backstage
stopped him and said, "I thought you had to go after a few minutes. What
happened?"
Durante answered,
"I did have to go, but I can show you the reason I stayed. You can see for
yourself if you'll look down on the front row."
In the front row
were two men, each of whom had lost an arm in the war. One had lost his right
arm and the other had lost his left. Alone, they were silent, but together,
they could clap, and that is just what they were doing. Together, in a poignant way, they had healed
one another. We can only heal
each other. We can only love one another.
Therein lies our power as Christians, as human beings.
There was once a congregation
who had called a new minister. Everyone was excited about hearing the new
pastor preach. Come Sunday morning, the sanctuary was packed. The congregation
sat on the edge of their pews in anticipation of his first sermon.
Sure enough, it was a doozy. He selected as
his text, 1 John 4:11 (same as us this morning), “Beloved, if God loved us in
this way, we also ought to love one another.” As the sermon ended, heads
nodded, and the Search Committee breathed a huge sigh of relief. He was a
keeper.
However, the next Sunday, as
the new minister read the text for the day, a few parishioners raised their
eyebrows because it was the same text as the Sunday before: “Beloved, if God
loved us in this way, we also ought to love one another.” They had never heard
two consecutive sermons on the same text before but gave the new preacher the
benefit of the doubt and listened carefully, trying to be open-minded. However, as the preacher began his sermon, lo
and behold, it was the exact same sermon they had heard the week before, word
for word.
“Was this some sort of joke?”
they wondered. “Were they supposed to get some deeper meaning the second time
around?” “Was the pastor even aware that he was repeating himself?”
Out of courtesy, they did not
say anything. They listened politely and, when the service was over, shook
hands at the door and said something like, “That was a mighty interesting
sermon you had for us today, Reverend.”
The next Sunday, when the new
minister read the text, the congregation began squirming in their seats, for,
once again, he read from 1 John 4:11,
“Beloved, if God loved us in
this way, we also ought to love one another.” And, to their dismay, he began
the sermon with the same exact words as the two Sundays before.
Before he could get past the
introduction, one old man in the back row jumped up and said, “Preacher, we
have heard this sermon twice now. What gives?”
The minister replied, “Why,
nothing, really. Do this – love one another - and I’ll give you another sermon next week!”
Well, regardless of what you do
this week, I will not give you the same sermon next week because I am going on
vacation. However, I suspect that the
sermon will be some variant on this central idea that the author 1 John
emphasized.
You see, when you strip away
all the non-essential elements of our faith - from the style of worship we like
to who ladles gravy at the pot roast suppers - what is left is our call to
affirm that God is love, our challenge to live like we really are made in the
image of such love, and our realization that love’s true expression lies in how
we heal one another as we seek to become all that God dreams for us to be.
