A Sermon Based Upon John 14: 23-29 , NRSV
By Rev. Dr. Charles J. Tomlin, DMin.
Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership
Fifth Sunday of Easter, May 1st, 2016
“THOSE WHO LOVE ME ….” These first four words of today’s Bible text, remind us that the Christian faith is not mere ritualistic religion, -- doing just what it’s supposed to do, but faith is a relationship with the living and loving God as revealed to us in Jesus Christ. True Faith should be reduced to wanting to be with Jesus.
This ‘relational’ aspect of reality is true of anything that really matters to us. Recently, the once, well-known school atheist of my High School days posted on Facebook, “Cast away all our fancy electronic gadgets and then all we’ll have left is each other.”
It is not only relationships that matter most to us in life, but relationships make us who are. As a child, like all children, I would often test the limits of my mother’s instruction. I listened to Sammy Campbell, who wanted me to go play at a construction site, even when my mom explained it was too dangerous. When I fell into the hole and Sammy couldn't pull me out, my mother proved to be right. Through my failure to listen, I realized I needed to relate more closely to my mother who cared about me, than to Sammy Campbell who didn't. Likewise, I tested these limits again in high school, when once I forgot to tell mom I was staying late and working on a school project. Dad explained later, not just how I had made a bad decision, but how I hurt and frightened her. I apologized, not just for making a mistake, but to her. Also, when I came to try to inform mom of my call to ministry, I realized I needed to calm her fears. It was the relationship that kept us working out the details of being together. I was becoming ‘my own man’, but she was still my mother.
Understanding Faith as relational is also essential to having a vital, ‘living’ faith. When Jesus began this text with, “those who love me,” he is appealing to what is most basic in us all. Jesus does not simply say believe in this, or do this, neither does demand that we always agree with him. No, Jesus makes the whole issue of faith personal, very personal, basically saying to us, ‘if you love me and want to stay close, you will take seriously what I'm saying and asking.’ You take it seriously because this is what people who love will do.’
Everything in the Christian Faith eventually comes down to one question: Do you love Jesus? I don't ever recall Buddha, Vishnu, Mohammed, Joseph Smith, Gandhi, or even Moses, or any other founder or leader ever requesting that ‘faith’ rest on loving ‘him’. Buddha enlightens, Mohammed demands surrender, Vishnu preserves and protects, Moses leads and delivers, but Jesus launches his followers (in John) by asking Simon Peter: “Do you love me more than these?” This is all consistent with what Jesus answered the rich, young, ruler, about the greatest commandment. The core of all true faith is personal and relational, but it is never solitary nor private. The core of true faith is “to love God, just as you love others and yourself” and for the true Christian everything that matters to you must be reducible to one relational truth: Jesus matters.
In our world, sacred or secular, we certainly do not need mere religion. What we need is healthier, more holy and more helpful relationships: living and being what is most important. Having a more relational ‘faith’ connects us with our greatest need: having faith in ourselves, having faith in each other, and most of all, it all begins with having faith in God. We need this kind of faith in this God who loves and commands love because we all need love. On our own terms, even when we name ourselves Christian, we can still become loveless people who lose the meaning, message or method of love. We’ve all seen how inhumane, even the human person can become. If it were not for a renewal to a revelation of a loving and forgiving God, who saves, redeems, and reconciles us to what matters most, faith, hope and love could have been lost.
The mission of Jesus Christ is a mission to love: “God so love the world, so that whosoever believes in him (Jesus), shall not perish, but have everlasting life” (Jn. 3:16). This is the most quoted Bible verse for good reason. It is the greatest human need in each and every generation, to ‘cast away’ whatever prevents us from discovering this ‘love’ that can keep us from destroying ourselves. We desperately need this love when hate and evil threatens.
How do we find and keep this quality of relational love revealed in Jesus Christ? The answer is quite surprising. Essentially, we seldom find love, but love finds us. As that ‘neckless’ commercial cleverly advertises, “Keep your heart open, and love will always find its way in.’ In the gospel of Jesus Christ, love seeks to find us, yes relationally, and personally, in this Jesus who says: “Come to me, all who are weary from bearing heavy burdens” (My translation of Matt. 11:28), or as the great King James translates at the conclusion of the whole Bible in the Revelation of Jesus Christ: “Whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely (Rev. 21:17)!”. By receiving and reciprocating such a free giving, forgiving, but also commanding love--- love revealed and modeled in Christ--- when we relate to this love, then love finds, redeem, restores and reconciles, as we receive and reciprocate this love. The question Jesus answers in our text today is ‘how?’ How do we receive and reciprocate God’s love revealed in Jesus Christ?
YOU WILL KEEP MY WORD
In John, Jesus makes it clear to his disciples that God’s love in fully known through Jesus’s own word. This not only means the ‘words’ Jesus spoke, but God speaks his love for the world through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus as ‘the Word’ which ‘became flesh and lived among us’ (John 1:14). As Johns gospel begins, we are told that this ‘word’ ‘in the beginning’ was ‘with God’ and “was God” (Jn. 1:1). It all sounds so deeply philosophical, but it means that from the very ‘mind’ or heart of God came this most practical and relational ‘Word’ who ‘became flesh’ ‘lived among us’ (1:14) whose glory was ‘seen’ as ‘the glory of a father’s only son’ which was ‘full of grace and truth’ (Jn. 1:14). This all means that God’s love was revealed in Jesus in a real, historical, and particular loving person who was loved fully by the Father so he could become the source of love for all who will love him in return.
Furthermore, this perfect love, resourced by God’s love, is what all love should and must be, because it was, and is filled with both ‘grace and truth’. There is no true ‘grace’ without ‘truth’ and there is no truth worth having without also having grace. Right after John 3:16, comes John 3:17: ‘indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world’ (Jn. 3:17). That’s grace. But this grace also bears truth, ‘those who do not believe are condemned already’ (Jn. 3:18). Don’t take this to mean that those who don’t yet know Jesus stand condemned, but it means when the ‘light’ of love comes to who ‘hate the light’ and still ‘loved darkness rather than light’, they stand ‘condemned’ ‘because their deeds are evil’. They ‘hate the light’ because they are afraid of having false loves ‘exposed’ by God’s perfect light (Jn. 3:20). “But those who do what is true come to the light” (Jn: 3:21), says John. They love this ‘light’ because they want their loving deeds to be ‘clearly seen’. God’s love in Jesus, will be just what they were longing and looking for.
So, now, with this, when Jesus says ‘Those who love me will keep my word’ (14:23), this is the particular word about the light of love which Jesus’ disciples are to keep. We too, as Jesus’ disciples today, keep this word by encountering when gospel that is read, preached, heard, understood and also when we live it in doing deeds of compassion and love in the world. In the gospel, the single moment when truth and grace and ‘light’ unite are in the love that lays down on the cross that was ‘pure love’. Particularly here in John’s gospel, Jesus told Nicodemus, that “just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man (the Human One, CEB), be lifted up, so that whoever believes in him may have eternal life’ (3:14). Only through the sacrificial giving of a life of love, does God display what love means; by the death of this crucified Christ.
Strangely, the ‘word’ we are also to keep, is this love being revealed through the death of Jesus. Even when the cross only looks like the epitome of human hate, it is being the revelation of God’s love. No other religion and no other faith event in history ever dared to suggest that God ‘was in Christ’ crucified ‘for us’ (2 Cor. 5:20). No other story dares what our gospel tells in all four gospels. There is nothing like them written anywhere else at any other time or written in any other way. The closest to it comes from the prophet Isaiah in Isaiah 53, who prophetically spoke of a suffering servant who would be despised and beaten, yet by his ‘stripes’ people could find healing and hope (Isaiah 53: 1-12). It this Biblical, Scriptural Word of serving, sacrificial, selfless love, Jesus says, ‘speak of (him)’ (Jn 5:39) as they were fulfilled in his own ministry of suffering and death as ‘the lamb who takes away the worlds sin (Jn. 1:29) and as the servant who gives life as a ransom to free his people from sin (Mk 10:45). This is the ‘word’ of the cross, that is being given to the disciples, then and now, to keep.
When I or you ‘promise’ to a spouse, child, parent or pledge to a fellow believer, that we will love, and keep that promise to love, no matter what, we bear the cross and keep Christ’s word. Our faith becomes ‘relational’ when we keep, bear, and love, no matter what comes. Like the former President of Columbia Seminary in South Carolina, Robert McQuilkin, who gave up his life’s work and ministry to care for his wife with Alzheimer’s. When people came to him saying the school had money to pay someone to care for his wife, he said: No, I promised. Money will not replace “ME” in keeping my word.” And he is right, love is relational because it puts us, all of us, our whole selves, into keeping the word we promise (http://www.ciu.edu/robertson-mcquilkin).
THE HOLY SPIRIT WILL TEACH YOU
How do we keep a living relationship with the word of love revealed through Jesus on the cross? I’m not just asking a theological question, but I’m trying to make this a very personal and practical question about your own relationship with this God who loves. I’m even asking the hard question of how we should keep this ‘word of love’ we will never fully comprehend, nor completely copy or mimic. How do we relate a rejected, hated, crucified Messiah who loved in a way we can never fully repeat? How do you and I keep the ‘Word’ of one who was the Word?
Jesus’ own answer is still our answer: ‘The Advocate, the Holy Spirit, who the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and will remind you of all that I have said to you” (14:26). In other words, you don’t simply keep the word, but the word keeps you. The word keeps you as the Spirit of love is ‘sent’ (v. 26) as our ‘Advocate’ (Jn. 16:26) and Guide (Hn. 16:13) to ‘remind’ and ‘teach’ us how we must keep God’s word of love. ‘The Spirit of truth’ guides into all truth’ and ‘will glorify’ Jesus (16:14) not speaking ‘on his own.’ (16:13). But the ‘truth’ the Spirit teaches goes deeper and further because Jesus ‘was going to the Father’ (Jn. 16:10) and because ‘they (nor we) can bear’ all the truth at once (Jn. 16:12). Only the Spirit ‘declares the things to come’ (16:13) after the earthly Jesus. The Spirit ‘takes what is mine’ (16:15) Jesus says, and he ‘declares what he hears’ (16:13) ‘to you’ (16: 14). This Spirit, is Jesus returning in Spirit to continue to reveal God’s love as the story continues to unfold in us, as we live into this story by following Jesus’ example as we are led by the Spirit to live and bear ‘our’ cross of love.
“When he comes” (the Spirit), Jesus told his disciples, ‘he will prove the world wrong about sin, righteousness, and judgement…’ (John 16:8). The Spirit can prove what is wrong in the world because through Jesus’ own life and death ‘the ruler of this world has been condemned’ (John 16:11). What it means to be taught ‘by the Spirit’ was made clear in Vera Brittian’s biographic story, “A Testament to Youth”, where this young Oxford bound woman’s life and hope was interrupted by the horrors of World War I, which took the life of her fiancé, her brother, and most of her childhood friends. Vera herself, follows the Spirit, to leave her studies to support the war effort, as a nurse, where she actually goes to France and ends up caring for her own dying brother on the battlefield. At the close of the story, at least the movie version I saw, Vera is trying to rebuild her life after the war. She is listening to a young man, making a ‘stump speech’ against hate, war, and even the desire of many Brits to retaliate against the Germans after the war was over. Even when World War II, approached, Vera was not against the necessity of war, but she did speak out the ‘fire-bombing’ of German cities. Many British people thought she was being a traitor to speak out against the “spirit” of winning a war at any cost. But Vera was vindicated, when among German Nazi leaders, a list was found of the 3,000 people in England to assassinate if the Germans had won. Among those names was Vera Brittian, a woman whose voice from another world, threatened the Nazi’s to the core. “When the Spirit comes, he (always) proves the world wrong…..” (John 16:8).
But some will say that if the Spirit has proven the world wrong about what is sin, what is righteous, and what should be judged, and if the ruler of this world has already been condemned, why is the world still filled with so much sin, evil, and hate? It’s a good question, but it has real, gospel answer: “He (Jesus) was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him.” This Jesus, who came in the baptism of this Holy Spirit, ‘came to his own, and his own people did not accept him” (1:10-11). The message of love has not changed, nor has it changed everyone, namely, because everyone does not want to be changed. The message of love that we ‘keep’ is not kept by everyone, and the Spirit who still teaches is not believed nor trusted by everyone, because, as John testifies: ‘people loved darkness, rather than light’ because their ‘deeds are evil’. Those who only seek power, wealth, or work only for themselves are still now, as they were then. What has changed in this world, is that now, ‘all who received him, who believed in his name’ through the Holy Spirit, have ‘the power to become children of God---being ‘born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God’ (1: 12-13). This transforming, life-changing personal power is the relational power the Spirit still ‘teaches’ and ‘accomplishes’ in us, when Christ’s love succeeds in us ( 2 Tim. 1:7).
MY PEACE I GIVE TO YOU
The greatest ‘power’ or ‘success’ of our relationship with Jesus the Christ, is not that the world changes, but that we change in relationship to the world: Again, when we keep Christ’s Word, and when we allow the Holy Spirit to keep teaching us, the word will keep us as Christ gives us his ‘peace’: “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid (Jn. 14:27 NRS).
Back in 1991, an Air Canada Flight, started sputtering and losing power and had to glide to a quick landing, or all lives would have been lost. Fortunately they were able to find a place to land quickly. After inspections were made, it was realized that the plane ran out of fuel in mid-flight due to human error. While refueling, someone mistakenly read kilograms, when it should have been pounds. The planed has been given half a tank of fuel, instead of the full amount (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider).
Without God’s peace, we too try to ‘make our flight through life’ on half a tank’, but sometime, someday, on our own, we will run out of fuel. When we understand that only God’s peace can give us a ‘full tank’ of love, hope and peace, we’ve come full circle to what to ‘keep the word’ and be ‘kept by the word’ as Christ’s disciples today. God’s love is revealed to us for the sake of giving and granting us God’s peace. This is not a peace ‘as the world gives’, but it’s a peace only people can keep giving and receiving as they love, as Christ loved. Love gives us a ‘peace’ of heart and mind, no matter what happens in life. “If you loved me, (Jesus told his disciples), you would rejoice that I am going to the Father, because the Father is greater than I “ (14:28). In other words, God’s peace goes with us everywhere God goes---and God is goes everywhere. Loving the eternal God gives eternal, unlimited, unbounded ‘peace’ to anyone of us, anywhere we are, and everywhere we go, as we love through this Jesus who ‘loved the Father’ as was ‘loved by the Father’ because ‘God so loved the world’. This is the relational faith based upon God’s love that can also give you peace, now, and forever, through Jesus Christ. Amen.
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